People were making up lists, just as Hal was doing, by asking questions of others. These lists were subject to revision—sometimes under dramatic circumstances. You saw a woman weeping, with her apron to her eyes; suddenly she would look up, give a piercing cry, and fling her arms about the neck of some man. As for Hal, he felt as if he were encountering a ghost when suddenly he recognised Patrick Burke, standing in the midst of a group of people. He went over and heard the old man's story—how there was a Dago fellow who had stolen his timbers, and he had come up to the surface for more; so his life had been saved, while the timber-thief was down there still—a judgment of Providence upon mine-miscreants!
Presently Hal asked if Burke had been to tell his family. He had run home, he said, but there was nobody there. So Hal began pushing his way through the throngs, looking for Mary, or her sister Jennie, or her brother Tommie. He persisted in this search, although it occurred to him to wonder whether the family of a hopeless drunkard would appreciate the interposition of Providence in his behalf.
He encountered Olson, who had had a narrow escape, being employed as a surface-man near the hoist. All this was an old story to the organiser, who had worked in mines since he was eight years old, and had seen many kinds of disaster. He began to explain things to Hal, in a matter of fact way. The law required a certain number of openings to every mine, also an escape-way with ladders by which men could come out; but it cost good money to dig holes in the ground.
At this time the immediate cause of the explosion was unknown, but they could tell it was a “dust explosion” by the clouds of coke-dust, and no one who had been into the mine and seen its dry condition would doubt what they would find when they went down and traced out the “force” and its effects. They were supposed to do regular sprinkling, but in such matters the bosses used their own judgment.
Hal was only half listening to these explanations. The thing was too raw and too horrible to him. What difference did it make whose fault it was? The accident had happened, and the question was now how to meet the emergency! Underneath Olson's sentences he heard the cry of men and boys being asphyxiated in dark dungeons—he heard the wailing of women, like a surf beating on a distant shore, or the faint, persistent accompaniment of muted strings: “O, mein Mann! O, mein Mann!”
They came upon Jeff Cotton again. With half a dozen men to help him, he was pushing back the crowd from the pit-mouth, and stretching barbed wired to hold them back. He was none too gentle about it, Hal thought; but doubtless women are provoking when they are hysterical. He was answering their frenzied questions, “Yes, yes! We're getting a new fan. We're doing everything we can, I tell you. We'll get them out. Go home and wait.”
But of course no one would go home. How could a woman sit in her house, or go about her ordinary tasks of cooking or washing, while her man might be suffering asphyxiation under the ground? The least she could do was to stand at the pit-mouth—as near to him as she could get! Some of them stood motionless, hour after hour, while others wandered through the village streets, asking the same people, over and over again, if they had seen their loved ones. Several had turned up, like Patrick Burke; there seemed always a chance for one more.
SECTION 27.
In the course of the afternoon Hal came upon Mary Burke on the street. She had long ago found her father, and seen him off to O'Callahan's to celebrate the favours of Providence. Now Mary was concerned with a graver matter. Number Two Mine was in danger! The explosion in Number One had been so violent that the gearing of the fan of the other mine, nearly a mile up the canyon, had been thrown out of order. So the fan had stopped; and when some one had gone to Alec Stone, asking that he bring out the men, Stone had refused. “What do ye think he said?” cried Mary. “What do ye think? 'Damn the men! Save the mules!'”
Hal had all but lost sight of the fact that there was a second mine in the village, in which hundreds of men and boys were still at work. “Wouldn't they know about the explosion?” he asked.