And yet the talk of Solomon Coe was well worth listening to. He told of the great war which is always being waged by man beneath the earth against the powers of Water, and Fire, and Foul Air, and of the daring deeds he had seen wrought against them. He told of coal-pits that had been on fire from time immemorial, above which no snow would lie, by reason of the heat beneath, and where the grass of the meadows was always green. He told of others which had been suddenly inundated by a neighboring river, or by the waters from old workings, let in by a single unlucky blow, whereby scores and scores of strong men were overwhelmed, whose corpses floated about for months in the dark drowned pit before their fellows above-ground could get at them.
His speech was somewhat sullen and hesitating, and what he said was interrupted by whiffs of smoke and sips of liquor; but the nature of the subject was so absorbing that it needed no gifts of eloquence. It interested Richard in spite of himself; and Solomon was not indifferent to the flattery which the young artist's attention conveyed, and scarcely needed the entreaties of Trevethick to persuade him to throw off his native reticence. What he forgot, and had mentioned in former narrations, the landlord supplemented; and when "Sol" became technical and obscure the other performed the part of chorus or explainer. If the former had been some gifted animal, and the latter its proprietor, he could not have taken a greater pride in the exhibition of its talent than did the landlord in these narrations. Now he would look at Richard, and nod and wink, as though to bespeak his special attention to what was coming; and now he would wave his pipe, like a dumb orchestra playing slow music, to express the tremendous nature of a situation. Perhaps he was genuinely impressed by these thrice-told tales—perhaps he was endeavoring, by a feigned admiration for Sol's experiences and exploits, to justify his choice of a son-in-law not altogether suited to his Harry. To do the raconteur justice, he was by no means so egotistic as his aider and abettor, and Trevethick would express his regrets to Richard that it was so hard to get Sol to dismiss generalities and talk about himself. "It's on account of Harry being here, you see," explained he behind his horny hand, but in a tone perfectly audible to the other tenants of the bar parlor; "or else he would tell you how the timbering of the pit once fell upon him, so as nothing was free but his head and his left hand; and yet he never lost his wits in all his agony, but told the men where to saw and what to do; but he don't like to boast before the 'gal.'"
Then Richard, taking the hint, inquired of Solomon whether any incident particularly striking had ever happened to himself during his underground experience; and Solomon replied, with affected carelessness; "No, not as I know on; nothing particular."
Then Trevethick broke in with, "What! not when you was shut up in the seam at Dunston?"
"Oh yes, to be sure," said Sol, as though the recollection of the circumstance had only just occurred to him; "there was that, certainly; but it was when I was quite a boy. I was not quite seventeen when Dunston Colliery was drowned. The Gatton poured right in upon it, and they have not got the water out of it in places to this day. It was always said that the pit was being worked too near the river; but that was little thought about by those as was most concerned, and it never disturbed the head of a lad like me, of course. It was in the afternoon of the 12th of December, a date as I am not likely to forget, when the thing happened. Two mates—one old man and a middle-aged one—and myself were at work in a heading together, when suddenly we heard a noise like thunder. 'That's never blasting,' says one. 'The Lord have mercy on us,' cries the other; 'it's the river come in at last!' For, as I say, the risk was quite well known, though it was considered small, and made a frequent jest of. Nothing that ever I heard was equal to that noise; the waves in Gethin caverns here, during storm, are a whisper to it; the whole pit seemed to be roaring in upon us. We all ran up the gallery, which, fortunately for us, had a great slope, and crouched down at the end of it. We heard the water pouring in and filling all the workings beneath us, and then pouring in and filling ours. It reached our feet, and left us but a very limited space, in which the air was compressed, when the noise of the inundation ceased. There was a singing in our ears, so that we could scarcely hear one another speak. We knew that the whole mine had become a lake by that time, and that it would take months to drain her, if she was ever drained. We knew that we were buried alive hundreds of feet beneath the earth; and yet we did not quite lose heart. There was this gleam of hope: supposing that the next gallery, which was on a higher level than our own, was not also flooded, we could be got at through the seam. We did not know the fact that it was more than sixty feet of solid coal, and would have taken under ordinary circumstances at least four weeks to dig through; we only knew that, if a door of escape was to open any where, it must open there. We kept tapping with the heels of our boots at equal intervals against this wall."
"The miner's signal," explained the landlord, with a wave of his pipe.
"We felt that if we were once heard, and if hard work could do it, that our mates would save us yet; and we encouraged one another as well as we could. But presently the oil in our lamps gave out, and we were left in darkness; and then our hope grew faint indeed. We had knocked for four-and-twenty hours unintermittingly without any reply. We did not cease, however, to discuss the possibilities of escape. We knew that all was being done for us above-ground that could be done; that the surveys of the mine were well executed; and that it was known exactly where we were, if we were alive at all. There were more than a hundred men employed in the lower workings, and it was a certainty that not one of them could have escaped death; the attention, therefore, of the engineers would be concentrated upon those parts of the mine that might possibly be left above water."
"On the second night of our imprisonment we heard a distinct reply to our signal; the old man who was of our company began to weep for joy, though he was doomed, as it turned out, poor soul! never to see the light. 'We shall be saved,' he said; 'do not fear.' We knocked again, and again the reply was heard—they had found us out, and would never relax their efforts to save us. 'God bless them!' said we all. We laid our ears close to the rock, and presently heard the strokes of the pick, but not very distinctly. When the other said he was afraid the rock was thick, the old man cried out: 'No, it was not that; it was because we were dull of hearing.' The fact was, that the seam was not only thick, but very hard. It was strange, indeed, though sounds are easily transmitted through rocks of considerable thickness, how our feeble taps had been heard at all. Day after day, and each day a black night, went on; every hour was to be the last of our captivity, according to the old man; as for me, I was almost worn out, and heavy with sleep, but he was in constant motion, knocking and listening. Then suddenly we heard a splash in the water beneath us—he had lost his balance, slid down the inclined plane, and been drowned. He never stirred a limb nor uttered a cry. His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly. If help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time. We dug into the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make our position more secure. We did not venture to speak of our late companion's fate to one another. Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had we become through famine and fatigue. We had devoured our leather belts, and even crumbled the rotten wood of the timber-props in water, and eaten that; but we were now consumed by thirst, which we dared no longer quench. We were afraid to venture down as before for the water in which the old man had sunk to death; and it was that which had kept us alive."
"Don't forget about how you made a bucket of your boots, Sol," suggested
Trevethick, gravely.
"Yes, at last we tied a string to a boot, and got the water up that way," continued Solomon; "but our stomachs turned against it."