I did not ask him, but I suspect that he mistook our house for the Methodist parsonage, since the church and our house are painted the same colors. I went to the door myself, and when he asked, “Could you give a hungry man something to eat?” I replied by inviting him inside and giving him a chair.
“Traveling?” I inquired, not from idle curiosity, but to start a conversation and make the stranger feel that I took an interest in him.
“A little,” he replied, “I came down from Erie last night on a freight train, and I ’most froze to death. No work up that way, except in the coke regions, and there they have Poles and Slavs and Finlanders and Hitalians and niggers.”
I knew he was English by the way he pronounced Italian.
“Did you use to work at the coke ovens?” I asked.
“No, but I use to work in the hard coal mines—at Nanticoke and Shamokin; knocked off thirteen years ago, when the foreigners cut down wages. It was at Nanticoke I had the narrow escape with my life. I’ll tell you while I’m getting warmed up. It was all the mistake of the engineer. We were putting a tunnel from the new drifts up into the old abandoned workings, in order to drain the old workings down into the lower level, and then pump it out through the great pump that was pumping out the lower level.
“The engineer calculated to strike the old drift several feet above the great body of water lying there, and then pump it up into the tunnel and let it flow down to the lower level. The engineer made a grave error in his calculations, for instead of entering the old drift above the water, the tunnel was almost on a level with the bottom of the old drift. There was a large quantity of water in the drift. When the men put in the last blast it tore the intervening wall down and the river of water came bursting into the tunnel. There were eleven men working there besides Ed Evans and me. We had gone back to the shaft to get some powder and were back as far as the big slope when we heard the mighty roar of the rushing waters.
“We could not tell at first what the noise meant, but we felt there was danger in the pitchy darkness. Ed and I ran up the slope, calling to big Billy Beck to follow us, who was then working at something near the foot of the slope. He waited to learn what the cause of the noise was. We looked back and saw him start in our direction. We could see the light waving rapidly up the slope behind us. Suddenly his light went out. We soon learned why, for a moment later the water came rushing up the slope and soon submerged our legs up to our knees.
“Luckily we had reached an elevation on the slope almost as high as the flood could ascend when the level was filled, and we soon found ourselves on dry ground. This slope had not been worked for over a year, and no one else was penned up in the horrible trap but Ed and me.
“We felt confident that all the men who were cutting the tunnel into the old drift had been drowned. The terrific flood came in so suddenly that none could escape. Then we began to think of our own situation. It would require months to pump all the water out of the level. In the meantime we would starve. We had even lost our dinner pails. We looked into each other’s eyes through the dim light, and Ed said, ‘We’re in a hell of a fix now, old man! I wonder if the people outside will still think we poor miners demand too much pay? Will they be good to my wife and the babies?’