“I’m sorry, Jean,” he answered humbly. “I want you to be happy—and him.”
He bade her good-bye, and moved away dejectedly through the night. Jean went to the house of the friends with whom she had been staying, and the next morning left for New York.
Joe was at work in a dark cavern of the Florence colliery at the hour of her departure. With his butty and their two labourers he had gone to a far corner of the mine. There is no night of the outer world like that of the pit beneath, and no atmosphere like that of the moist air of a coal mine. The very silences have their own profundity, as though heightened by the weight of darkness. Sounds of blasting, the rumbling of mine cars in the gangways, the click of tools along the coal measures—these and kindred sounds have an eerie and phantasmal quality in the great dark. Voices are choked and muffled when men speak, and speech in the coal world is limited to essential directions and conferences; laughter is rarely heard. Indeed, a particular gravity marks the coal miner, and he does not always lose it when he emerges into sunlight. The hazard of his trade and the gloom in which he labours under the crust of the spinning globe numb any joy he might take in his own skill.
This life in the earth was not to Joe’s liking, and he had never expected to return to it. Love of Wayne Craighill alone had brought him back to the pit; otherwise the pitcher’s box or a chauffeur’s seat would have claimed him. And to-day, with Jean vanishing into an unknown world and Wayne in Pittsburg, whence—there was no telling—he might not return, Joe’s outlook on life partook of the surrounding gloom, and he was disposed to deal severely with his labourer, a clumsy Austrian who was forever getting in the way and mislaying tools. Joe was a skilled hand, which is to say that he knew the hundred and one things that expert miners know, and the trick of clean, expeditious and safe mining. His “shots” were lucky this morning, and by noon he had shaken down his required tonnage.
As he waited for his butty to finish, Joe lounged down the gangway. He was a social being and he found solace in watching the twinkling lamps of other workmen along the black corridor.
Craig, the engineer, and the fire boss passed on a round of inspection and asked him if he had seen any fresh traces of squeezing or of gas. Both had been observed lately in the colliery, and it had even been said that a general subsidence was in progress throughout the wide, honeycombed acreage of the Florence property. In every great colliery there are frequent disquieting rumours, and a collapse rarely comes without intimations familiar to the sophisticated eye and ear, and Joe was not alarmed.
He confirmed the fears of the engineer to-day by his own testimony. The “working” of the pillars in his own neighbourhood had increased within twenty-four hours, as marked by chipping. The vein above, which was mined simultaneously, was crowding the supports of the lower vein; in remoter places there had been complete subsidence. A car-load of timbers roared by, sent forward to prop the roof at points where the danger had become acute. The explosion of his butty’s last shot boomed dully behind, and Joe continued on a little farther. There was a feeling of panic in the air. Men hurried by in the gloom, talking excitedly, but he felt no fear; his experience of a larger world had made him impatient of the ignorance of many of the men who spent their time delving underground. Most of their accidents were due, he knew, to their own carelessness. He would himself take a look at the farther workings where the squeeze had become critical. A trip of cars bearing a timber gang rumbled by. He hugged the wall to allow it to pass, and yelled at the retreating workmen derisively. His curiosity was now piqued, and he went on, in the conceit of his own superior wisdom, toward the centre of the disturbed area.
A foreman with a crowd of men at his heels went by at a run, but he chaffed them on their alarm. They had been ordered out, he had learned, by the engineer.
“There’s some men working in the new gangway back there!” one of the panic-stricken miners shouted.