Selecting and examining each cartridge, the shooters charged the drill-holes. Two cartridges of black powder, tamped in with a long copper-headed rod; then dummies of clay for wads, leaving hanging like a great white cord from each charged drill-hole a yard of the long, white fuse.
We turned and tramped down the tunnel and squatted on the track a safe fifty yards away. Down at the end of the tunnel we had just deserted, bobbed the tiny flames of the lights in the shooters' pit-caps. There was a faint glow of sparks. 'Coming!' they yelled out through the darkness, and we heard them running as we saw their lights grow larger.
For a minute we silently waited. Then, from the far end of the tunnel, muffled and booming like the breaking of a great wave in some vast cave, came a singing roar, now like the screech of metal hurled through the air, and the black end of the tunnel flamed suddenly defiant; a solid square of crimson flames, like the window of a burning house; and a roar of flying air drove past us, putting out our lights and throwing us back against the rails.
'It’s a windy one,' yelled Wild. 'Look out for the rib-shots.'
Like a final curtain in a darkened theatre, a slow pall of heavy smoke sank down from the roof, and as it touched the floor, a second burst of flame tore it suddenly upward, and far down the entry, the trappers' door banged noisily in the darkness. Then we crept back slowly, breathing hard in an air thick with dust and the smell of the burnt black powder, to the end of the tunnel, where the whole face had been torn loose—a great pile of broken coal against the end of the entry.
Often, bits of paper from the cartridges, lighted by the blast, will start a fire in the piles of coal-dust left by the machine-men; and before the shooters leave a room that has been blasted, an examination must be made in order to prevent the possibility of fire.
All night long we moved from one entry to another, blasting down in each six feet more of the tunnel, which would be loaded out on the following day; and it was four in the morning before the work was finished.
It was usually between four and five in the morning when we left the mine. As we stepped from the hoist and left behind us the confining darkness, the smoky air, and the sense of oppression and silence of the mine below, the soft, fresh morning air in the early dawn, or sometimes the cool rain, seemed never more refreshing. One does not notice the silence of a mine so much upon leaving the noise of the outer world and entering the maze of tunnels on the day’s work, as when stepping off the hoist in the early morning hours, when the world is almost still: the sudden sense of sound and of living things emphasizes, by contrast, the silence of the underworld. There is a noise of life, and the very motion of the air seems to carry sounds. A dog barking half a mile away in the sleeping town sounds loud and friendly, and there seems to be a sudden clamor that is almost bewildering.
IV
It is natural that a mine should have its superstitions. The darkness of the underworld, the silence, the long hours of solitary work, are all conditions ideal to the birth of superstition; and when the workmen are drawn from many nationalities, it is again but natural that the same should be true of their superstitions.