In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

The seven looked at him and he crawled to a room; sticking his head in he found it murky. He tried another. The third room was fresh and cool, and he called the men in.

Then all nine dragged one after another of the limp bodies into the room and they began walling the door into the passage. There were two lights on a dozen caps. Grant put out one lamp and they worked by the glimmer of a single lamp. Gradually, but with a speed–slow as it had to be–inspired by deadly terror, the wall went up. They daubed it with mud that seemed to refresh itself from a pool that was hollowed in the floor. After what seemed an age of swiftly accurate work, the wall was waist high; the smoke bellied in, in a gust, and was suddenly sucked out by an air current, and the men at the wall tapping some spring of unknown energy bent frantically to their task. Three of the six men were coming to life. They tried to rise and help. Two crawled forward, and patted the mud in the bottom crevices. The fierce race with death called out every man’s reserves of body and soul.

Then, when the wall was breast high, some one heard a choking cry in the passage. Grant was in the rear of the room, wrestling with a great rock, and did not hear the cry; but Chopini was over the wall, and Dooley followed him, and Evans followed him in an instant. They disappeared down the passage, and when Grant returned, carrying the huge rock to the speeding work at the wall, he heard a voice outside call:

“We’ve got ’em.”

And then, after a silence, as the workmen hurried with the wall, there came a call for help. Williams and Dennis Hogan followed Grant through the hole now nearing the roof of the room, out into the passage. The air was scorching. Some current was moving it rapidly. The second party came upon the first struggling weakly with Dick Bowman and his son. Father and son were unconscious and one of the rescuing party had fainted. Again the vise 174gripped Grant’s abdomen, and he put his face upon the damp earth and panted. Slowly the three men in the darkness bellied along until they felt the wall, then in an agony of effort raised themselves and their burden. Up the wall they climbed to their knees, to their feet, and met the hands of those inside who took the burden from them. One, two, three whiffs of clean air as they stuck their heads in the room, and they were gone–and another two men from the room followed them. They came upon the first party working their gasping, fainting course back to the wall, with their load, rolling a man before them. And they all pulled and tugged and pushed and some leaned heavily upon others and all looked death squarely in the face and no man whimpered. The panic was gone; the divine spark that rests in every human soul was burning, and life was little and cheap in their eyes, compared with the chance they had to give it for others.

Flicks of fire were swirling down the passage, and the roar of the flames came nearer and Grant fancied he could hear the crackle of it. Chopini was on his knees clutching at the crevices in the wall; Hogan and Dooley dug with their hands into the chinks, then four men were on their feet, with the burden, and in the blackness, hands within the wall reached out and took the man from those outside. The hands reached out and felt other hands and pulled them up, and five, six men stood upon their feet and were pulled, scrambling and trembling and reeling, into the room. The blackness outside became a lurid glare. The flickering lamp inside showed them that one man was outside. Grant Adams stood faint and trembling, leaning against a wall of the room; the room and the men whirled about him and he grew sick at the stomach. But with a powerful effort he gathered himself, and lunged to the hole in the rising wall. He was trying to pull himself up when Dooley pulled him down, and went through the hole like a cat. Hogan followed Dooley and Evans followed Hogan. “Here he is, right at the bottom,” called Hogan, and in an instant the feet of Casper Herdicker, then the sprawling legs, then the body and then the head with the closed eyes and gaping mouth came in, and then three men slowly followed him. Grant, 175revived by the water from the puddle under him, stood and saw the last man–Dennis Hogan–crawl in. Then Grant, seeing Hogan’s coat was afire, looked out and saw flames dancing along the timbers, and a spark with a gust of smoke was sucked into the room by some eddy of the current outside. In a last spurt of terrible effort the hole in the wall was closed and plastered with mud and the men were sealed in their tomb.

It was but a matter of minutes before the furnace was raging outside. The men in the room could hear it crackle and roar, and the mud in the chinks steamed. The men daubed the chinks again and again.

As the fire roared outside, the men within the room fancied–and perhaps it was the sheer horror of their situation that prompted their fancy–that they could hear the screams of men and mules down the passage toward the main bottom. After an hour, when the roar ceased, they were in a great silence. And as the day grew old and the silence grew deep and the immediate danger past, they began to wait. As they waited they talked. At times they heard a roaring and a crash and they knew that the timbers having burned away, the passages and courses were caving in. By their watches they knew that the night was upon them. And they sat talking nervously through the night, fearing to sleep, dreading what each moment might bring. Lamp after lamp burned out in turn. And still they sat and talked. Here one would drowse–there another lose consciousness and sink to the ground, but always men were talking. The talk never ceased. They were ashamed to talk of women while they were facing death, so they kept upon the only other subjects that will hold men long–God and politics. The talk droned on into morning, through the forenoon, into the night, past midnight, with the thread taken from one man sinking to sleep by another waking up, but it never stopped. The water that seeped into the puddle on the floor moistened their lips as they talked. There was no food save in two lunch buckets that had been left in the room by fleeing miners, and thus went the first day.

The second day the Welsh tried to sing–perhaps to stop the continual talk of the Irish. Then the Italian sang something, 176Casper Herdicker sang the “Marseillaise” and the men clapped their hands, in the twilight of the last flickering lamp that they had. After that Grant called the roll at times and those who were awake felt of those who were asleep and answered for them, and a second day wore into a third.

By the feeling of the stem of Grant Adams’s watch as he wound it, he judged that they had lived nearly four days in the tomb. Little Mugs Bowman was crying for food, and his father was trying to comfort him, by giving him his shoe leather to chew. Others rolled and moaned in their sleep, and the talk grew unstable and flighty.