Part 34 (2/2)
”But what makes so vast a difference?” asked Ed.
”The railroad,” answered the Doctor. ”A year ago this coal would have been worthless, simply because there was no market for it anywhere within reach. Now the railroad brings the market to the mouth of the mine, as it were. But come, let's get to work. If you want me to talk about King Coal, I'll do it to-night after supper. Just now we must dig for his majesty.” Then he grabbed a pick and broke out again singing--
”Old King Coal Was a jolly old soul,” etc.
The boys dug with a will and by nightfall they had dug away three or four feet of the face of the cliff. Every now and then the Doctor would take a bit of the exposed coal and examine it critically under a strong magnifying gla.s.s. Every time he did so, he broke out again into the song about ”Old King Coal.” The boys had never seen him so jubilant.
When they quitted the work and began to prepare supper, the Doctor went into the shaft they had started, broke out a bushel or two of the deepest coal yet reached, and placed it on the fire. He watched it intently as it burned, and just as supper was ready he said:
”We've got it, boys, and no mistake. This is a great mine of the very best coal in the world for making gas, steam and c.o.ke, and as these hills are full of iron ore, the mine is precisely where it ought to be.
When we dig a little further into that bank we shall come to coal that can be shovelled into a furnace with iron ore on top of it, and used to smelt iron without the trouble or expense of c.o.king. Or we can make as good c.o.ke of it as there is in the world, and the vein is eight or nine feet thick, which means a lot, and it has a perfect rock roof, which means a lot more, and the volcanic upheaval which shoved it up here has kindly so placed it that it trends upward, so that in mining it we shall not have to do any pumping. All we've got to do is to dig trenches on each side of our coal car tracks and let the water run out by force of gravitation. I tell you boys, we've discovered the most valuable coal mine in all this region, and as if to make matters still better, it lies just high enough up the mountain to enable us to chute its product down to the railroad without any expense whatever for hauling.”
”Well now,” said Jack, ”all that is good news. But we boys don't understand the thing the least bit. So you are to explain it to us after supper. You are to stop singing 'Old King Coal' and explain to us upon what grounds his majesty's authority rests.”
”All right,” said the Doctor, with truly boyish enthusiasm. ”After supper I'll tell you all about my liege lord Old King Coal. Meantime won't somebody give me another cup of coffee and about a dozen more rashers of that paper-thin bacon? I'm hungry.”
Jack replenished the Doctor's cup, and Ed cut for him a dozen or twenty very thin slices of bacon, leaving him to broil them for himself on the end of a stick and devour them as fast as they were broiled. Tom divided a pone of corn bread with him and the supper proceeded to its conclusion.
”Now then,” called Tom, when the tin plates and tin cups had been washed and set up on the wall shelf which the Doctor had made for them, ”we're ready to hear all about 'Old King Coal' and his claims upon our allegiance.”
”Oh, no you're not,” said the Doctor. ”It would take me weeks to tell you the little I know on that subject and something like a lifetime for anybody who knows more to tell you 'all about' King Coal. But I'll tell you a little any how.”
”First of all tell us why you call it 'King Coal,'” said Ed.
”Because in our age it is king,” quickly answered the Doctor. ”Without it every one of our industries would come to an end; every factory would stop; every steams.h.i.+p would be laid up forever; every electric light would go out; every railroad would become 'two streaks of rust and a right of way'; in short the whole fabric of modern civilization would tumble to the ground. You see every age has its key note. When men had no better implements than rough stones those people who had most stones were the easy conquerors of the rest. When they began to fas.h.i.+on stones into arrowheads, axes and the like, the people who lived in stony countries had a still greater advantage. When men learned to work metals--well you see the way it went. In the pastoral ages the man whose land produced most gra.s.s was the 'king pin' of his community and owned more cattle than anybody else. In the military ages the people who fought best were the supreme ones, and the rest were their dependants.
In ecclesiastical ages the great prelates dominated, and so on through a long catalogue. Now ours is an industrial age and coal lies at the very root of productive industry. Without it we can't make steam or get power enough for any of the vast enterprises of modern civilization. It smelts iron out of rocks that would not give it up without King Coal's command. It enables us to make steel and to fas.h.i.+on metals to answer our requirements in a thousand ways. It runs our steams.h.i.+ps, our factories, our railroads and pretty much everything else that we depend upon to make life easy, to enable us to interchange our products with people at a distance and generally to make ourselves comfortable. In short our whole civilization depends upon coal. That's why I call coal 'king.' If there ever was a monarch in this world whose authority could not be questioned without destruction to those revolting against it, that monarch is 'Old King Coal.'”
”But if we had no coal, why couldn't we do all these things with wood?”
asked Jim.
”First, because we haven't enough wood,” answered the Doctor. ”We are using up our supply of wood much too rapidly already, and there coal is rendering us another important service. It is enabling us to use iron and steel for building materials, and a thousand other purposes for which we once used wood, and thus to spare our wood.”
”What is your 'secondly,' Doctor?” asked Ed.
”Why secondly, wood cannot do the work.”
”Why not?”
”Because it hasn't enough suns.h.i.+ne in it.”
”How do you mean?”
”Why you know, don't you, that all the heat we get out of burning fuel of any kind, is simply so much suns.h.i.+ne stored up for us and released by burning?”
”I confess I didn't know that,” said Tom. ”Or at any rate I never thought of it. Now that I do think of it, I see how it is with wood. But what has suns.h.i.+ne to do with coal, buried as it is deep under rocks and earth?”
<script>