Francis Rolt-Wheeler

“ Miners—hundreds of them—were brought from neighboring mines, and they worked night and day on two-hour shifts, clinging to the sides of the shaft as thick as bees in a hive. Others, risking their lives with every stroke of the pick, dug away at the earth and rock that had fallen on the big chunk of machinery. With all the speed that human effort could compass, it was six days and nights before a hole had been made through the obstruction big enough for a man to pass. ”

“ Coal, iron, silver, copper, and above all—gold, opened up the continent with passionate swiftness and hurled the United States into the position of one of the great powers of the modern world.
So Owens sat a-thinking in his library and racking his brain about Jim. There, not a stone's throw away, lay a sick man, possibly possessed of a secret that might change the face of history anew. ”

“ So you see, Anton, every coal mine is different, with its layers or seams of coal of different thicknesses and at varying distances apart. Some pits are near the surface, some are very deep; some coal is full of gas, other has very little; some coal is so hard that every bit of it has to be blasted, in other mines the coal is so soft that the hewer spends half his time spragging the face so that the coal doesn't fall on him when he's undercutting or holing. Don't you make the mistake of thinking that all a miner has to do is to use his pick! ”

“ You're plumb crazy about danger, Clem!" Anton declared impatiently.
The older lad gestured to the big building of the pit-mouth before them, above which the spider-like legs of the headgear soared high, surmounted by the huge double winding-wheels which give so characteristic a note to a modern colliery.
"Any one who forgets that a coal-mine is dangerous is a fool," he retorted sharply, "and keep that in your head, Anton, my lad. Not that danger would ever stop me from mining. I like it. I like to feel that I'm running a risk every time I go into an entry and every time there's a blast. ”

“ It isn't like what I smelt last time I visited your dirty old coal mine!" he retorted. "Every dog to its own kennel, Owens! After all, you wanted to come here."
Jim felt much the same way. Standing on the foc's'le head, the raw air, with its sudden hot spells when the sun gleamed dully through the fog, brought him welcome memories. It seemed homelike, after his brief experience in a coal mine. As he had said himself, he was a "sour-dough." The uncanny fascination that the Far North exerts on those who have once lived there, gripped him hard.
"Ain't no crowd here to worry a man!" ”

“ A prospector, or 'fossicker' as they call them back there, had been panning all along a small creek, finding hardly enough color to pay him for his day's work. He was walking on the very edge of the bank, scanning every stone he came to, but seeing no prospects. Suddenly the bank caved in under him, throwing him into the water. He came up, spluttering, and there, right in front of him, the water was washing off the dirt, was one of the purest nuggets that Australia ever produced. That was probably the most profitable bath in history."
"Some men are born lucky!" declared Jim, enviously. ”

“ One of the oldest of all the tales of high adventure was the Quest of the Golden Fleece, and the fifty heroes who set out on that quest in the oared ship Argo—and hence called the Argonauts—have given their name to gold-seekers for hundreds of generations. Few tales in all the world are so wonderful as the old Greek legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, a quest of daring, of magic, and of peril. ”

“ No walk of life is more wild and adventurous than that of the questing miner, whom neither Arctic cold nor tropic heat can bar in his mad race for the buried treasures of the Earth; no profession is more hazardous than that of the working miner, whose every step underground is full of peril. ”

“ Three-quarters of the gold-mines of to-day would shut tight like a clam, if gold were to drop in price even a dollar or two. What a capitalist wants to-day is ore, and he is not interested in free gold. What a prospector looks for, is free gold, and he ignores the rock. I'm telling you all this, now, Jim, because it's what will be the important thing when we get to talking, later, over your find. ”

“ What makes the finding of gold seem so much a matter of luck is not because we don't know how the gold came to be where it is, but because we can't know the whole history of the Earth before Man came, and we can't read everything from the rocks which crop out on the surface. But we have some clues, and if you studied out the big money-making gold-mines of to-day, you would find that chance has played but a small part in their discovery and no part at all in their working. ”

“ His small knowledge of geology—though it was mainly of coal seams—was of service, and the young fellow was quick to learn. But the principal attraction to him, on the island, was "Bull's little gal."
Jim was the life and soul of the mine. He was here, there, and everywhere. The workmen, especially those who were "sour-doughs" themselves, found a keen pleasure in the thought that a man like themselves had thus made good. It fed the fuel of hope which flames so brilliantly in the Frozen North.
A typical gold prospector, all the complicated machinery of his own mine meant little to him. ”

“ In the gloomy world of below ground, where the dusty wall of sooty black is the only landscape to be seen, one day is very much like another. Reaching his room, Clem stood his tools in order along the rib, hung his safety lamp on a nail which he drove into a prop supporting the roof, and, reaching up so as to put one hand on the roof, tapped it with the flat side of his pick to make sure that there was no loose slate overhead. He then examined the coal face, as it had been left by the hewer who had been working on the night shift, to make sure that it had been properly spragged or timbered. ”

“ Snow-white quartz is often lucky. Purple porphyry sometimes has veins that work up rich. An' I've seen gold come out o' pink sandstone, yellow sandstone, all shades o' granite, an' even coal!"
Clem turned an incredulous glance at Owens, but the mine-owner nodded agreement.
"Jim's right," he said, "color isn't any clue. Gold can be found in any kind of rock. So far as that goes, it shows up in strata of any geological age. There's gold everywhere. There isn't a range of hills in any country of the world which may not contain gold. There isn't a bed of sand or gravel that may not be auriferous. ”

“ Why, as the cold air from above passes through the galleries of a mine, it gets warmed up. As it warms up, it draws out from the roofs, the ribs, and the floors all the water that there is to draw, and makes the mine dead dry. When coal dust is absolutely dry, it crumbles into finer and finer dust, until at last the particles are so small that they float in the air. ”

“ The growling rumble of the underground disaster came rolling upward in throbbing volumes of sound.
The ground trembled, the buildings shook, the lofty skeleton of the pit-head gear wavered as though about to let fall the huge revolving wheels overhead.
From the engine-house, from the pumping-room, from the ventilation building, from the screeners and washers, from the picking-belts, from the loading-yards, from the coking-ovens, from every corner of the vast above-ground works of a modern colliery, the men came running. ”

“ If Chukalook doesn't pan out, there's the quartz at Ingalook. I've never seen the gold deposit yet—no matter how poor—that I couldn't turn into money, so long as I could get enough capital behind me to exploit it."
"Mr. Owens will give that," asserted Jameine confidently.
The "Wizard" shook a warning finger.
"Not just for sentiment, he won't," he said, "not if I read him right. He's generous enough, and he'd see that you and Jim didn't suffer. But he's too keen a business man to invest his money unless he sees a fair chance of return. We've got to show him!" ”

“ At least not so as to be worked at a profit. Suppose a seam of coal is only a few inches thick, how is a miner going to dig it out? He couldn't crawl in such a seam, let alone using his tools there."
"He could cut out enough rock at the top and bottom to give him a chance to get in."
"A miner is paid for digging coal, not digging rock," was the answer. "What's more, according to your scheme, so much shale or sandstone would be mixed with the coal that it would be useless for burning. ”

“ There aren't any door-boys in a modern mine. Most of the States in this country have passed laws requiring that all doors through which coal cars pass must be operated automatically. The United States Bureau of Mines keeps a sharp lookout, too. There aren't any donkeys, either, not in up-to-date mines; endless-chain conveyors take the coal from the face where the miner has dug it clear to the mouth of the shaft, and load it into the buckets by a self-tipping device. As for small boys in a mine, as you said yourself, there aren't any, not in the United States, anyhow. ”

“ A high-grade ore, in which there is a large proportion of gold, may be worth a good deal less, if it is more difficult to work and less easy of access. The richest gold-field in the world, that of the Rand, in South Africa, which gives one-third of the total gold output of the world, is of an ore so poor that a forty-niner would have turned up his nose at it, and the machinery, even of thirty years ago, could have done nothing with [Pg 200] it. Nearly all the big mines of to-day are winning wealth out of low-grade ore. ”

“ Owing to Anton's hatred for coal mining—born of the entombment—Clem had used his position as Jim's "pardner" to bring the boy along. Otto, having taken what might be termed a paternal and prophetic interest in the imprisoned men, wanted to join the party.
Owens made no objection. He knew laborers would be wanted, and he preferred men who would not be likely to betray the secret of the gold. He knew the miner's unswerving loyalty, and was well aware that loyalty is the one quality which is beyond all price. ”

“ Placers are bound to peter out quickly. They are Nature's purses, and a purse hasn't any more money in it than you put in. Even the Klondyke, that astounding pocket of riches, lasted only three years and then dwindled down.
"Some of these days, all the available places of the earth will have been worked over by the casual prospector, and then his day will be done. The ever-hoping rover of the pick, shovel, and pan is becoming extinct. Even now, the only spots which hold out any chance of pockets of gold are in the almost inaccessible section of the globe. ”

“ The cyanide liked the gold better than the potassium, but it has the bad taste to prefer zinc even to gold. It releases the gold and flies to the embrace of the zinc. The gold, suddenly deserted of the friendship of the cyanide, powders down to the bottom of the tank, in absolutely pure form, ready to be melted down into bars. By other processes, which I won't bother you by describing now, the zinc is released from the cyanide, and the cyanide is led to its old friend the potassium, ready to begin work anew. ”

“ The coal seam jumps upwards fifty feet. That's why the cars, after rolling down nearly a quarter of a mile, by gravity, have to be pulled up fifty feet by an endless chain, to rejoin the same seam and then to go rolling on down by themselves."
"Just what are faults?"
"H'm, that's a bit hard to explain to you, Anton, because you don't know anything about geology, but maybe I can get you to see. Faults are breaks in the layers of rock, or in the stratification, as it is called. All coal seams and the rocks above and below them have been laid down by water. ”

“ That's why, nowadays, the miners who get out the coal seldom or never fire the shots. Experienced men, trained especially for that work, are used. After a miner has undercut the coal, [Pg 38] the shot-firer comes. He tests for gas before he begins work, bores a deep hole in the coal with a drill, tests for gas again in case he should have tapped a leak in the seam, cleans out the hole, sends the miner for the box of explosive—which is kept thirty or forty yards away from the face where the coal is being cut—and prepares the charge with a detonater which he carries in a box over his shoulder. ”

“ Now, when pure air comes down a coal shaft, a lot of changes happen to it. Some of the oxygen is consumed by the breathing of the men and animals in the mine—if there are any donkeys or such—some is taken up by the burning of lamps, some more by the explosion of blasting powder, a little is lost by the rusting of iron pyrites—which is found in many coal mines—and a lot of it is taken up by the coal, just how, we don't quite know. ”

“ The only real danger in stink damp is when there's water in the mine, for example when, after a fire, a lot of water has been pumped down into the workings to put the fire out. Water absorbs stink damp very easily and gives it up equally easily when stirred. So, if a member of a rescue party puts his foot in a puddle of water where there has been stink damp around, so much of the gas may suddenly come up in his face as to topple him over. ”

“ The electric lamp burns on, just the same, because the light is in a vacuum. Black damp isn't so dangerous as fire damp, though. It only causes distress and hard breathing because it shows that there's too big a proportion of nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the air and not enough oxygen. It's oxygen that a man misses."
"But black damp'll explode, too," put in Otto.
"No," the other corrected, "it won't. But it often happens that there's fire-damp around when black damp is present and the black damp makes a test for gas difficult. It's the gas that explodes, not the black damp. ”

“ As you know, most of the metals have chums or affinities with other substances, just as gold has with mercury. These chums of the metals were also in that molten ocean, but not always in the same proportions, nor yet distributed regularly. So metallic compounds were formed at different times and in diverse places. These compounds had varying densities, with the result that in later ages they behaved in a way quite different from the pure metal. You see, Jim, long before the crust of the earth was even formed, gold was scattered far and wide, and already was in different forms. ”