Part 13 (2/2)

”She'll learn your gold mine sooner than she'll learn my compa.s.s.”

Then they both laughed. They laughed quite a while, and my disagreeable friend laughed with them. For myself, I could not see anything funny anywhere.

I finally learned, however, that a station is a place cut out for a stable or for the pa.s.sage of cars, or other things requiring s.p.a.ce; while a stope is a room carried to the level of the top of the main crosscut. It is called a stope because the ore is ”stoped” out of it.

But winzes! What winzes are is still a secret of the ten-hundred-and-eighty-foot level of the Treadwell mine.

Tram-cars filled with ore, each drawn by a single horse, pa.s.sed us in every drift--or was it in crosscuts and levels? One horse had been in the mine seven years without once seeing sunlight or fields of green gra.s.s; without once sipping cool water from a mountain creek with quivering, sensitive lips; without once stretching his aching limbs upon the soft sod of a meadow, or racing with his fellows upon a hard road.

But every man pa.s.sing one of these horses gave him an affectionate pat, which was returned by a low, pathetic whinny of recognition and pleasure.

”One old fellow is a regular fool about these horses,” said the manager, observing our interest. ”He's always carrying them down armfuls of green gra.s.s, apples, sugar, and everything a horse will eat. You'd ought to hear them nicker at sight of him. If they pa.s.s him in a drift, when he hasn't got a thing for them, they'll nicker and nicker, and keep turning their heads to look after him. Sometimes it makes me feel queer in my throat.”

No one can by any chance know what noise is until he has stood at the head of a drift and heard three Ingersoll-Sergeant drills beating with lightning-like rapidity into the walls of solid quartz for the purpose of blasting.

Standing between these drills and within three feet of them, one suddenly is possessed of the feeling that his sense of hearing has broken loose and is floating around in his head in waves. This feeling is followed by one of suffocation. Shock succeeds shock until one's very mind seems to go vibrating away.

At a sign from the manager the silence is so sudden and so intense that it hurts almost as much as the noise.

There is a fascination in walking through these high-ceiled, brilliantly lighted stopes, and these low-ceiled, shadowy drifts. Walls and ceilings are gray quartz, glittering with gold. One is constantly compelled to turn aside for cars of ore on their way to the dumping-places, where their burdens go thundering to the levels below.

At last the manager paused.

”I suppose,” said he, sighing, ”you wouldn't care to see the--”

I did not catch the last word, and had no notion what it was, but I instantly a.s.sured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine.

His face fell.

”Really--” he began.

”Of course we'll see it,” said the captain; ”we want to see everything.”

The manager's face fell lower.

”All right,” said he, briefly, ”come on!”

We had gone about twenty steps when I, who was close behind him, suddenly missed him. He was gone.

Had he fallen into a dump hole? Had he gone to atoms in a blast? I blinked into the shadows, standing motionless, but could see no sign of him.

Then his voice shouted from above me--”Come on!”

I looked up. In front of me a narrow iron ladder led upward as straight as any flag-pole, and almost as high. Where it went, and why it went, mattered not. The only thing that impressed me was that the manager, halfway up this ladder, had commanded me to ”come on.”

_I?_ to ”come on!” up that perpendicular ladder whose upper end was not in sight!

But whatever might be at the top of that ladder, I had a.s.sured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine. It was not for me to quail. I took firm hold of the cold and unclean rungs, and started.

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