'You won't be around to pay Slim the fifty quid you'll owe him,' I said.
'Gawd!' he breathed, and I could see his face was a shade paler. He wasn't a miner and I don't think he enjoyed working underground, anyway. But give him his due — he wasn't a coward. Only at the very end did he let his fear get the better of him.
By the time we'd rigged the clamp for the drill, screwing it like a bar horizontally across the face of the shaft, I had worked out where I was going to put my drill holes and the size of the blast I was going to use. I had forgotten about the rich lode that began in the pit below us, about Cripples' Ease and all that lay above ground. My whole mind was concentrated on the task before us.
By this you mustn't imagine that I hold with the idea of smuggling or wanted any part of the working and profits of the scheme. Mining is like any other job. Give a good miner a problem to work out and he'll become enthusiastic because of the job itself. And I figured I was a pretty good miner, even though I had been out of the game for six years.
Captain Manack came down shortly after four. We were drilling our third charge hole then. It was some time before we noticed him, for we were both of us right up in the roof of the shaft and the roar of the compressor and the clatter of the pneumatic drill and the sizzle of compressed air and water was shatteringly loud in that confined space. He clambered up the ladders beside us and when I saw the light of his lamp I turned off the juice. My ears were deafened. I could hardly hear what he said, though the only sound was the muffled roar of the compressor's engine and the hiss of escaping air. 'How are you getting on?' he shouted in my ear.
'Okay,' I said, and shone my lamp on the holes we had already drilled. 'We'll make about a dozen holes and put in light charges,' I shouted. 'It's more than usual for a face as small as this, but it'll be safer that way.'
He nodded, 'When will you be ready to blow?' he asked.
I looked at my watch. 'About seven, maybe eight o'clock,' I replied.
Again he nodded. 'I brought some tea down,' he said. He'd placed a canvas bag on the platform below. Out of the neck of it protruded the top of a Thermos flask. We knocked off then and the three of us had our tea seated on the platform of the scaffolding.
'I've just been going over my figures,' Manack said as he munched a jam sandwich. 'I reckon you've eighteen feet to go. How much headway will you make with each blasting?'