“Well, if the roof doesn’t fall on you, and if the mine doesn’t catch fire, and if the gas doesn’t choke you, or explode and blow you up, it isn’t dangerous; it is perfectly safe.”
“But how did it get hurt—your shoulder, I mean?” asked Wallace.
“Oh, that! I’ll tell you. One day we were getting out coal at the far end of a tunnel. Suddenly, before we had time to run, the roof came tumbling down and buried us. When they pulled us out, my helper was dead, and my back was as you see it now.”
“What makes mining so dangerous?” asked Wallace, in surprise.
“Well, you see, it’s this way. When you step into the cage, that is the elevator, you leave the sunlight behind. The cage sinks down, down into pitch darkness, sometimes hundreds of feet. At the bottom of the shaft it is like an under-ground city. Street-like tunnels, with car tracks laid on them, run out in every direction. The coal cars are drawn by mules or by electricity.
“As you go up the tracks you see cross tunnels and the miners’ little lamps shining in dark holes that look like black caves. Here the miners work, blasting out the coal, and loading it on cars to be drawn to the mouth of the mine and hoisted up into daylight.
“Sometimes the walls and roof are not properly braced. Then they cave in and great lumps of coal fall down on the men. Sometimes gas or fire-damp collects. Then there is danger of choking or of being blown up. Sometimes, in blasting, the coal catches fire, so that the whole mine burns.”
Can you tell a story about the journey of a ton of coal from the time the miner digs it out of the mine, and boys sort out the slate, until it is put into the furnace in a house?