Loring caught her and held her back against the side wall as a “mucker” ran past, wheeling a heavy ore car towards the shaft and whistling as warning to clear the track. She began to feel the effects of the powder fumes in the air, and it made her head heavy and drowsy. She felt that she had come into a new, supernatural universe, where all was noisy, dark, and strange.
At last the drift broadened out into a large, irregular-shaped chamber.
“Esperanza stope,” said Loring to Miss Cameron. “Here is where they have struck the contact vein, where the porphyry changes to limestone.” He held his candle close to the dark wall of rock, and she could see the green crusting betokening the copper.
“This will assay pretty close to ten per cent, won’t it, Burns?” asked Loring.
“It ran to twelve, yesterday,” answered the foreman.
They stood still for a moment. All about them, as in the crypt of some vast cathedral, were specks of light, showing through the dense air, the candles of the miners. Now and then in the blur there appeared a distorted shape, as some one moved before a candle. Through all, loud, insistent, steady, rang the clink-clang, clink-clang, clink-clang of the drills and hammers, as a dozen miners drove home the holes into the breast of the stope, the tapping of the cleaning rods, as they spooned out the mud, and the rattle of shovels on rock, as the “muckers” loaded the ore cars. Mixed with these sounds was a sharp hissing, as the miners drew in their breath, swaying back for the driving blow on the heads of the drills. As she grew accustomed to the dim light, Jean could make out the miners who were nearest to her, as, in teams of two, stripped to the waist, their bodies shiny with sweat, they battered on the walls. Faintly the lines of grim archways began to grow out of the dark, where rough pillars had been left to support the roofing. Far off, up a cross-cut, she could see more candles swaying. Two men near her were toiling at a windlass, raising the water from a new winze. She leaned against the wall, and something rattled tinnily. It was a pile of canteens, all warm with the heat of the air.
Jean gasped with the very wonder of the scene. To the others it was merely the commonplace of their work.
Burns called out to Loring: “We are going to take Mr. Cameron through to the new stope. It is pretty hard climbing getting through to there. I guess the lady had better wait here with you, Mr. Loring.”
The voices of the rest of the party sounded faint and far away. Jean watched the light of their candles sway and dip, as they walked off down a tunnel, then disappear as a supporting pillar hid them from view.
Loring led her to one side of the stope, and drove the spike of his candle stick into a niche in the soft rock wall. He pointed to a pile of loose ore.