Chapter I

It was half-past six on a July morning when the day-shift began streaming out of the wash-house: some four hundred men,--white, black, and of perhaps twenty-eight nationalities,--dressed in their tattered, black, and greasy mine-clothes. The long stream wound out of the wash-house door, past the power-house where the two big generators that feed the arteries of the great mine all day long with its motive power were screaming in a high, shrill rhythm of sound,--past the tall skeleton structure of the tipple-tower, from which the light morning breeze blew black clouds of coal-dust as it eddied around the skeleton of structural iron-work,--to a small house at the mine-mouth, sheathed in corrugated iron, where the broken line formed a column, and the men, one by one, passed through a gate by a small window and gave their numbers to a red-faced man, who checked down in a great book the men who were entering the mine.

From the window we passed along to a little inclosure directly above the mouth of the main hoisting-shaft. Sheer above it the black tower of the tipple pointed up into the hot, blue morning sky; and the dull, dry heat of the flat Illinois country seemed to sink down around it. But from the square, black mouth of the shaft a strong, steady blast of cool air struck the faces of the men who stood at the head of the little column waiting for the next hoist. On the one side of the shaft-mouth, long lines of empty railroad cars stretched out beyond into the flat country, each waiting its turn to be filled some time during the day with coal that would come pouring down over the great screens in the tipple; and on the other side of the shaft-mouth, under the seamed roof of the building where the checker wrote down the numbers of the day-shift, sat the hoisting engineer--a scrawny, hard-faced man with a mine-cap pushed back from his forehead.

Beside him was the great drum on which the long steel cables that lifted and lowered the hoisting-cage were rapidly unwinding, and in his hand he held a lever by which he controlled the ascent or descent of the 'cage.' The first cage had been lowered, and as I watched him and the dial before him, I saw his hand follow his eye, and as the white arrow passed the 300-foot level, the hand drew back a notch and the long, lithe wire began to uncoil more slowly. Three hundred and fifty feet,--and another notch,--and as the arrow reached near the 400-foot mark, his foot came down hard on the brake, and a minute later a bell at his elbow sounded the signal of the safe arrival of the hoist. A minute, and another signal; and then, releasing his foot from the brake, and pulling another lever toward him, the drums, reversed, began to rewind; and as the arrow flew backwards, I realized that the cage was nearing the top--the cage on which a minute later I was to make my descent as a 'loader' into one of the largest, and perhaps most famous, of the vast soft-coal mines that lie in our Middle States.

As the thin cables streamed upward and over the sheave-wheels above the shaft and down to the reeling-drums, I looked at the men about me and felt a sudden mortification at the clean blue of my overalls, and the bright polish on my pick and shovel. A roar at the shaft-mouth, the grind of the drums as the brakes shot in, and the cage lifted itself suddenly from the shaft.

The cage, or elevator, in which the men were lowered into the mine, was a great steel box divided into four superimposed compartments, each holding ten men; and I stood, with nine others, crowded on the first or lowest deck. As the last man pushed into his place and we stood shoulder to shoulder, the hoisting engineer slowly slipped his lever again toward him, and as slowly the cage sank. Then, in an instant, the white-blue of the sky was gone, except for a thin crack below the deck above us, through which a sheet of white light sliced in and hung heavily in the dusty air of our compartment. The high song of the generators in the power-house, the choking puffs of the switch-engine in the yards, and the noise of men and work which I had not noticed before, I now suddenly missed in the absence of sound.

There was a shuffling of feet on the deck above, and again we sank, and this time all was darkness, while we paused for the third deck to fill. Once more--and again for the fourth. Then, as the cage started and the roar of the shoes on the guide-rails struck my ears, I looked at the men about me. They were talking in a whirr of foreign words; and in the greasy yellow light of their pit-lamps, which hung like miniature coffee-pots in the brims of their caps, the strong, hard lines of their faces deepened. The working day was begun.

As the cage shot down, the wall of the shaft seemed to slip up, and from its wet, slimy surface an occasional spatter of mud shot in on the faces of the miners. Strong smells of garlic, of sweat, and of burning oil filled the compartment, and the air, which sucked up through the cracks beneath our feet as though under the force of a piston, fanned and pulled the yellow flames in the men’s caps into smoking streaks. Then I felt the speed of the 'hoist' diminish. A pressure came in my ears and I swallowed hard; and a second later, a soft yet abrupt pause in our descent brought me down on my heels. The black wall of the shaft before me suddenly gave way, and we came to a stop on the bottom of the mine.

It was cool, and after the heat of a July morning, the damp freshness of the air chilled me. With dinner-pails banging against our knees, we pushed out of the hoist; and as the men crowded past, I stood with my back against a great timber and looked around me. Behind, the hoist had already sunk into the 'sump' or pit, at the bottom of the shaft, in order that the men on the second compartment might pass out into the mine; and a second later they swarmed by me--and still I stood, half-dazed by the roar of unknown sounds, my eyes blanketed by the absence of light, and my whole mind smothered and crushed.

I was standing just off the main entry or tunnel of the mine, which began on my left hand out of blackness and passed again, on my right, into a seeming wall of darkness. The low, black roof, closely beamed with great timbers, was held by long lines of great whitewashed tree-trunks. A few electric lights shone dimly through their dust-coated globes, and the yellow flames from the men’s pit-lamps, which had flared so bright in the compartment of the hoisting-cage, seemed now but thin tongues of flame that marked rather than disclosed the men.

Out of the blackness on the left, two tracks passed over a great pit and stretched on into the blackness on the right, as though into the wall of the coal itself. Then, far off, a red signal-light winked out and made distance visible; and beyond it came the sound of grinding wheels; there was the gleam of a headlight on the steel rails. The ray grew larger and two yellow sparks above it flamed out into pit-lights. A train was coming out of the entry and I waited until it should pass. With a grind of brakes it suddenly loomed out of the blackness and into the dull haze of light at the shaft-bottom. With a roar it passed by. The locomotive, a great iron box, was built like a battering-ram, the headlight set in its armor-plated bow, and behind, on two low seats, as in a racing automobile, sat the motorman and the 'trip-rider' or helper, the motorman with one hand on the great iron brake-wheel, the other on his controller, and the trip-rider swinging on his low seat, half on the motor and half over the coupling of the rocking car behind, clinging to the pole of the trolley. Their faces were black with the coal-dust,--black as the motor and their clothing,--and from their pit-lamps the flames bent back in the wind and streamed out straight along their cap-tops.

Low above the head of the trip-rider, the wheel on the trolley streaked out sudden bursts of greenish-white sparks along the wire; and as the train passed by, the roar of the locomotive gave place to the clattering of the couplings of the long string of stocky cars, each heaped high with its black load of coal. Some one seized me by the elbow.

'What’s yer number?' he asked.

'419.'

'Loader? New man?'

I nodded.

'Then come along with me.'

He was a tall, thin man, who walked with his head thrown forward and his chin against his chest as if in constant fear of striking the low beams overhead. I followed him, stumbling rather clumsily over the broken coal beside the track. The train had come to a stop over the pit between the rails, and men with iron bars were beating loose the frogs and releasing the hopper-bottoms of the cars. Heavy clouds of fine coal-dust poured up from the cars as the coal roared down into the bins; and the clanking of metal, the crash of falling coal, and the unintelligible shouting of the foreigners, filled the entry with a dull tumult of sounds.

Dodging the low trolley-wire which hung about five feet above the rails, we crawled across the coupling between two of the cars to the other side of the entry, and walked to the left, past the locomotive where the motorman was still sitting in his low seat, waiting to pull out his train of empty cars into the sudden darkness of the tunnel beyond. Then, for the first time, I learned that mines are echoless, and that sound--like light--is absorbed by the blotter-like walls of the tunnels.

We walked down the entry between the rails, and after a hundred yards turned with the switch in the track sharply to the right, and again on. Sense of direction or angles was lost, and, like the faces in a foreign race of people, where one can see little or no individuality, so here, each corner seemed the same, and in a hundred yards I was utterly lost. Above was the smooth, black roof; below, the ties and the rails; and on either side, behind the two long rows of props, the face of the coal-seam, which glittered and sparkled in the light from our pit-lamps like a dull diamond.

We talked a little. My companion asked me where I had worked before, how much I knew of mines, and a few other questions; and still we walked on, dodging the low wire that comes level with one’s ear, and stumbling over the layer of broken coal that lay strewn here and there between the rails.

The silence was like the darkness--a total absence of sound, rather than stillness, as my first impression of the mine had been that of an absence of light, rather than of darkness. The smoking lights in our caps seemed to press out through the blackness twenty feet around us, where the light disappeared and was gone. And always in front of us, out of the black darkness, the two long lines of props on either side of the track stepped one by one into the yellow haze of light and sank again into darkness behind us as we walked.

The air was cool and damp, but as we turned the last corner, the dampness seemed suddenly gone from it. It was warmer and closer. Here the track swerved up from one of the main tunnels into a 'room'; and at the end, or 'heading' of this room, which we reached a few minutes later, empty and waiting for its first load, stood one of the square cars which I had seen before at the mine-bottom and which we passed several times on sidings by the track. The car was pushed up to the end of the track and its wheels 'spragged' by two blocks of coal. Here the tunnel suddenly ended, and from the blank back 'face' a rough, broken pile of coal streamed down on both sides of the car and reared up before it against the roof.

'Just shovel 'er full, then wait till the motor takes her out and sends in an empty, and fill that one. I’ll look in on you once in a while and see how you’re getting along.'

Then he turned and walked down the track and left me in the dim light of my single pit-lamp.