Part 13 (1/2)

Our captain obtained permission to take us down into the mine. This was not so difficult as it was to elude the other pa.s.sengers. At last, however, we found ourselves shut into a small room, lined with jumpers, slickers, and caps.

Shades of the things we put on to go under Niagara Falls!

”Get into this!” commanded the captain, holding a sticky and unclean slicker for me. ”And make haste! There's no time to waste for you to examine it. Finicky ladies don't get two invitations into the Treadwell.

Put in your arm.”

My arm went in. When an Alaskan sea captain speaks, it is to obey. Who last wore that slicker, far be it from me to discover. Chinaman, leper, j.a.p, or Auk--it mattered not. I was in it, then, and curiosity was sternly stifled.

”Now put on this cap.” Then beheld mine eyes a cap that would make a Kolos.h.i.+an ill.

”Must I put _that_ on?”

I whispered it, so the manager would not hear.

”You must put this on. Take off your hat.”

My hat came off, and the cap went on. It was pushed down well over my hair; down to my eyebrows in the front and down to the nape of my neck in the back.

”There!” said the captain, cheerfully. ”You needn't be afraid of anything down in the mine now.”

Alas! there was nothing in any mine, in any world, that I dreaded as I did what might be in that cap.

There were four of us, with the manager, and there was barely room on the rather dirty ”lift” for us.

We stood very close together. It was as dark as a dungeon.

”Now--look out!” said the manager.

As we started, I clutched somebody--it did not matter whom. I also drew one wild and amazed breath; before I could possibly let go of that one--to say nothing of drawing another--there was a b.u.mp, and we were in a level one thousand and eighty feet below the surface of the earth.

We stepped out into a brilliantly lighted station, with a high, glittering quartz ceiling. The swift descent had so affected my hearing that I could not understand a word that was spoken for fully five minutes. None of my companions, however, complained of the same trouble.

It has been the custom to open a level at every hundred and ten feet; but hereafter the distance between levels in the Treadwell mine will be one hundred and fifty feet.

At each level a station, or chamber, is cut out, as wide as the shaft, from forty to sixty feet in length, and having an average height of eight feet. A drift is run from the shaft for a distance of twenty-five feet, varying in height from fifteen feet in front to seven at the back.

The main crosscut is then started at right angles to the station drift.

From east and west the ”drifts” run into this crosscut, like little creeks into a larger stream.

No one has ever accused me of being shy in the matter of asking questions. It was the first time I had been down in one of the famous gold mines of the world, and I asked as many questions as a woman trying to rent a forty-dollar house for twenty dollars. Between shafts, stations, ore bins, crosscuts, stopes, drifts, levels, and _winzes_, it was less than fifteen minutes before I felt the cold moisture of despair breaking out upon my brow. Winzes proved to be the last straw. I could get a glimmering of what the other things were; but _winzes_!

The manager had been polite in a forced, friend-of-the-captain kind of way. He was evidently willing to answer every question once, but whenever I forgot and asked the same question twice, he balked instantly. Exerting every particle of intelligence I possessed, I could not make out the difference between a stope and a station, except that a stope had the higher ceiling.

”I have told you the difference _three times_ already,” cried the manager, irritably.

The captain, back in the shadow, grinned sympathetically.

”Nor'-nor'-west, nor'-by-west, a-quarter-nor',” said he, sighing.