“Well,” said Dad, at last, “what are you doin’? Jigglin’ a hook up and down in there? You’ll never get him up that way. You’ll have to put down a three-pronged grab.”
“I thought that would tear him so—” explained Dave Murgins, hesitatingly.
“I know,” said Dad; “but you’ve got it to do. It ain’t as if he might have any life in him. Bend the prongs so they fit the hole, and force them past the body. Go ahead and get it over with, and let’s hope it’ll teach the rest of you something.”
Dad got out of the car, and told Bunny to take their things down to the Rascum place, and break the news to Ruth; she’d be upset, especially if she knew the fellow. Bunny understood that Dad didn’t want him around when that torn body came out of the hole; and since he couldn’t do any good, he turned the car in silence, and drove away. In his mind he saw the men screwing the “grab” onto the drill-stem—a tool which was built to go over obstacles that fell into the hole, and to catch hold of them with sharp hooks. They might get Joe Gundha by the legs and they might get him by the face—ugh, the less you thought about a thing like that, the better for your enjoyment of the oil-game!
Dad came to the cabin after a couple of hours, and lay down for a while to rest. They had got the body out, he said, and had telephoned for the coroner; he would swear in several of the men as a jury, and hear the testimony of others, and look at the body, and then give a burial permit. Paul had been to the dead man’s bunk and looked over his things, and put them all into a box to be shipped to his wife; Dad had in his pocket half a dozen letters that had been found among the things, and because he didn’t want Bunny to think that money came easy, or that life was all play, he gave him these letters, and Bunny sat off in a corner and read them: pitiful little messages, scrawled in a childish hand, telling how the doctor said that Susie’s heart would be weak for a long time after the flu, and the baby was getting two more teeth and was awful cross, and Aunt Mary had just been in to see her, and said that Willie was in Chicago and doing good; there were cross-marks and circles that were kisses from mamma, and from Susie and from the baby. One sentence there was to cheer up Dad and Bunny: “I am glad you got such a good boss.”
Well, it made a melancholy Thanksgiving evening for them; they ate a little of the feast which Ruth had prepared, but without real enjoyment. They talked about accidents, and Dad told of something which had happened in the first well he had drilled—they were down only thirty feet, when a baby had crawled down into the cellar and slid into the hole. It had taken a couple of able-bodied men to hold the mother back, while the rest of them tried to get the child out. They fished for it with a big hook on the end of a rope, and got the hook under the baby’s body and lifted it gently a few feet, but then the body got wedged somehow, and they were helpless. The child had hung there, not screaming, just making a low, moaning sound all the time, “U-u-u-” like that, never stopping; they could hear it plainly. They started twenty feet from the well and dug a shaft, big enough for two men to work in, breaking the ground with crow-bars, scraping it into buckets with big hoes, and the men on top hauling the buckets out with ropes. When they got below the baby, they ran in sideways, and got the baby out all right. The hook had sunk into the flesh of the thigh, but without breaking the skin; the bruise had healed, and in a few days the child was all right.
A strange thing was life! If Bunny had stayed home that day, he’d have taken Rosie Taintor to the football game, and at the moment when poor Joe Gundha had plunged to his doom, Bunny would have been yelling his head off over a few yards gained by his team. And now, in the evening, he’d have been at a dance; yes, Bertie actually was at a dance, at the home of one of her fashionable friends, or at some fancy hotel where they were giving a party. Bunny could see, in his mind’s eye, her gleaming shoulders and bosom, her dress of soft shimmering stuff, her bright cheeks and vivid face; she would be sipping champagne, or gliding about the room in the arms of Ashleigh Mathews, the young fellow she was in love with just now. Aunt Emma would be all dressed up, playing at a card-party; and grandmother was painting a picture of a young lord, or duke, or somebody, in short pants and silk stockings, kissing the hand of his lady love!
Yes, life was strange—and cruel. You lived in the little narrow circle of your own consciousness, and, as people said, what you didn’t know didn’t hurt you. Your Thanksgiving dinner was spoiled, because one poor laborer had slid down into a well which you happened to own; but dozens and perhaps hundreds of men had been hurt in other wells all over the country, and that didn’t trouble you a bit. For that matter, think of all the men who were dying over there in Europe! All the way from Flanders to Switzerland the armies were hiding in trenches, bombarding each other day and night, and thousands were being mangled just as horribly as by a grab in the bottom of a well; but you hadn’t intended to let that spoil your Thanksgiving dinner, not a bit! Those men didn’t mean as much to you as the quail you were going to kill the next day!
Well, the coroner came, and they buried the body of Joe Gundha, on a hill-top a little way back out of sight, and with a wooden cross to mark the spot. It was a job for Mr. Shrubbs, the preacher at Eli’s church; and Eli came along, and old Mr. Watkins and his wife, and other old ladies and gentlemen of the church who liked to go to funerals. It was curious—Dad seemed glad to have them come and tell him what to do; they knew, and he didn’t! Obviously, it didn’t really do the poor devil any good to preach and pray over his mangled corpse; but at least it was something, and there were people who came and did it, and all you had to do was jist to stand bare-headed in the sun for a while, and hand the preacher a ten-dollar bill afterwards. Yes, that was the procedure—in death, as in life; you wanted something done, and there was a person whose business it was to do that thing, and you paid him. To Bunny it seemed a natural phenomenon—and all the same, whether it was Mr. Shrubbs, who prayed over your dead roughneck, or the man at the filling station who supplied the gas and oil and water and air for your car, or the public officials who supplied the road over which you drove the car.
Dad had sent a telegram to Mrs. Gundha, telling her the sad news, and adding that he was sending a check for a hundred dollars to cover her immediate expenses. Now Dad wrote a letter, explaining what they had done, and how they were sending her dead husband’s things in a box by express. Dad carried insurance to cover his liability for accidents, and Mrs. Gundha would be paid by the insurance company; she must present her claim to the industrial accident commission. They would probably allow her five thousand dollars, and Dad hoped she would invest the money in government bonds, and not let anybody swindle her, with oil stocks or other get rich quick schemes.