CHAPTER V
THE "MISSED HOLE"
ON the seventeenth sub-level of the Cousin Jack Mine the Spooner contract gang was working at high pressure. Two diamond drills were banging away like a battery of Gatling guns; men were rushing here and there, some were pushing small cars of red ore out through the drift to the level, where the electric trams would pick up the cars and rush them to the ore chutes. The pick men were breaking off the loosened pieces of ore dislodged by the last blast, while others were shoveling the ore into cars as if their very existence depended upon keeping up the pace.
Spooner himself, clad in a suit of oilskins, was shouting at his men, nagging, urging, threatening and directing in a perfect volley of explosive words.
A car had just been pushed out from the end of the drift where the drillers were working. It had reached a point directly underneath the rise and there it stuck, held fast by a piece of rock that had dropped to the track.
Spooner leaped forward with an angry roar.
"Out with it! I'll fire you both, you lazy, good for nothings!" he bellowed. "You ain't fit even to be swampers behind a pair of lazy mules. Push, I tell you! Push! Something will be doing here in a jiffy if you don't get that car out of the way!"
His words were prophetic in a measure, for something did happen a few seconds later, though Spooner was not the author of it. Rather was he the victim.
With a crash the trap door at the bottom of the rise burst open with a sound like a dynamite explosion in a new drift. A dark object was hurled out into the level, landing squirming on the soft ore in the car.
"What—what——"