Part 17 (1/2)
Twenty-five went through the trapdoor into the unknown h.e.l.l raging above. Again and again the ladder emptied itself, as the flames in the shaft grew longer, and the circle of fire above grew broader. The men pa.s.sed through the trapdoor with scorching clothes.
The ladder was filling for the last time. The last man was on the first rung. Grant reached under the ladder, caught Dooley about the waist and started up with him. On the ladder Dooley regained consciousness, and Grant shoved him ahead and saw Dooley slip through the trapdoor and then stop in the smoke and fire and stand holding up the door for Grant. The two men smiled through the smoke, and as Grant came through with his clothes afire, he and Dooley looked quickly about them. Their lights were out; but the burning timbers above gave them their directions. They headed down the south pa.s.sage, but even as they entered it the flames barred them there. Then they turned to go up the pa.s.sage, and could hear men calling and yelling far down in the dark alley. The torches were gone. Far ahead through the stifling smoke that swirled about the damp timbers overhead, they could see the flickering lights of men running.
They started to follow the lamps. Dooley, who was a little man, slowly dropped back. Grant caught his hand and dragged him. Soon they came up to the others, who paused to give them lights. Then they all started to run again, hoping to come out of that pa.s.sage into the main bottom by the main shaft in another quarter of a mile. Occasionally a man would begin to lag, but some one always stopped to give him a hand. Once Grant pa.s.sed two men, Tom Williams and Evan Davis, leaning against a timber, Davis f.a.gged, Williams fanning his companion with his cap.
From some cross pa.s.sage a group of men who worked on the second level came rus.h.i.+ng to them. They had no lights and were lost. Down the pa.s.sage they all ran together, and at the end they saw something cluttering it up. The opening seemed to be closed. The front man tumbled and fell; a dozen men fell over him. Three score men were trapped there, struggling in a pile of pipes and refuse timber that all but filled the pa.s.sage into the main bottom. Five minutes were lost there. Then by twos they crawled into the main bottom. There men were working with hose, trying to put out the fire in the air course leading to the mule stables. They did not realize that the other end of the mine was in flames.
Coal was still going up in the cages. The men in the east and west pa.s.sages were still at work. Smoke thickened the air. The entrance to the air course was charred, and puffing smoke. The fans relaxed for a moment upon a signal to cease until the course was explored. A hose was playing in the course, but no man had ventured down it. When Grant came out he called to the men with the cage boss: ”Where's Kinnehan--where's the pit boss?” No one knew. Some little boys--trimmers and drivers--were begging to go up with the coal. Finally the cage boss let them ride up.
While they were wrangling, Grant said: ”Lookee here--this is a real fire, men; stop spitting on that air course with the hose and go turn out the men.”
The men from the third level were clamoring at the cage boss to go up.
Grant stopped them: ”Now, here--let's divide off, five in a squad and go after the men on this level, and five in a squad go up to the next level and call the men out there. There's time if we hurry to save the whole s.h.i.+ft.” He tolled them off and they went down the glimmering pa.s.sages, that were beginning to grow dim with smoke. As he left the main bottom he saw by his watch under a torch that it was nearly eleven o'clock. He ran with his squad down the pa.s.sage, calling out the men from their little rooms. Three hundred yards down the smoke grew denser. And he met men coming along the pa.s.sage.
”Are they all out back of you?” he called to the men as they pa.s.sed.
”Yes,” they cried, ”except the last three or four rooms.”
Grant and his men pushed forward to these rooms. As they went they stumbled over an unconscious form in the pa.s.sage. The men behind Grant--Dooley, Hogan, Casper Herd.i.c.ker, Williams, Davis, Chopini--joined him. Their work was done. They had been in all the rooms. They picked up the limp form, and staggered slowly back down the pa.s.sage. The smoke gripped Grant about the belly like a vise. He could not breathe. He stopped, then crawled a few feet, then leaned against a timber. Finally he rose and came upon the swaying group with the unconscious man.
Another man was down, and three men were dragging two.
The smoke kept rolling along behind them. It blackened the pa.s.sage ahead of them. Most of the lights the men carried were out. Grant lent a hand, and the swaying procession crawled under the smoke. They went so slowly that one man, then two on their hands and knees, then three more caught up with them and they were too exhausted to drag the senseless man with them. At a puddle in the way they soused the face of the prostrated man in the water. That revived him. They could hear and feel another man across the pa.s.sage calling feebly for help. Grant and Chopini, speaking different languages, understood the universal call of distress, and together crawled in the dark and felt their way to the feeble voice.
Chopini reached the voice first. Grant could just distinguish in the darkness the powerful movement of the Italian, with his head upon the ground like a nosing dog's as he wormed under the fallen body and got it on his back and bellied over to the group that was slowly moving down the pa.s.sage toward the glimmering light. As they pa.s.sed the rooms vacated by the miners, sometimes they put their heads in and got refres.h.i.+ng air, for the smoke moved in a slow, murky current down the pa.s.sage and did not back into the rooms at first.
Grant and Chopini crawled on all fours into a room, and found the air fresh. They rose, holding each other's hands. They leaned together against the dark walls and breathed slowly, and finally their diaphragms seemed to be released and they breathed more deeply. By a hand signal they agreed to start out. At the door they crouched and crawled. A few yards further they found the little group of a dozen men feebly pus.h.i.+ng on. Seven were trying to drag five. Further down the pa.s.sage they could hear the shrill cries of the men in the main bottom, as they came hurrying from the other runways, and far back up the dark pa.s.sage behind them they could hear the roar of flames. They saw that they were trapped. Behind them was the fire. Before them was the long, impossible stretch to the main bottom, with the smoke thickening and falling lower every second. So thick was the smoke that the light ahead winked out.
Death stood before them and behind them.
”Boys--” gasped Grant, ”in here--let's get in one of these rooms and wall it up.”
The seven looked at him and he crawled to a room; sticking his head in he found it murky. He tried another. The third room was fresh and cool, and he called the men in.
Then all nine dragged one after another of the limp bodies into the room and they began walling the door into the pa.s.sage. There were two lights on a dozen caps. Grant put out one lamp and they worked by the glimmer of a single lamp. Gradually, but with a speed--slow as it had to be--inspired by deadly terror, the wall went up. They daubed it with mud that seemed to refresh itself from a pool that was hollowed in the floor. After what seemed an age of swiftly accurate work, the wall was waist high; the smoke bellied in, in a gust, and was suddenly sucked out by an air current, and the men at the wall tapping some spring of unknown energy bent frantically to their task. Three of the six men were coming to life. They tried to rise and help. Two crawled forward, and patted the mud in the bottom crevices. The fierce race with death called out every man's reserves of body and soul.
Then, when the wall was breast high, some one heard a choking cry in the pa.s.sage. Grant was in the rear of the room, wrestling with a great rock, and did not hear the cry; but Chopini was over the wall, and Dooley followed him, and Evans followed him in an instant. They disappeared down the pa.s.sage, and when Grant returned, carrying the huge rock to the speeding work at the wall, he heard a voice outside call:
”We've got 'em.”
And then, after a silence, as the workmen hurried with the wall, there came a call for help. Williams and Dennis Hogan followed Grant through the hole now nearing the roof of the room, out into the pa.s.sage. The air was scorching. Some current was moving it rapidly. The second party came upon the first struggling weakly with d.i.c.k Bowman and his son. Father and son were unconscious and one of the rescuing party had fainted.
Again the vise gripped Grant's abdomen, and he put his face upon the damp earth and panted. Slowly the three men in the darkness bellied along until they felt the wall, then in an agony of effort raised themselves and their burden. Up the wall they climbed to their knees, to their feet, and met the hands of those inside who took the burden from them. One, two, three whiffs of clean air as they stuck their heads in the room, and they were gone--and another two men from the room followed them. They came upon the first party working their gasping, fainting course back to the wall, with their load, rolling a man before them. And they all pulled and tugged and pushed and some leaned heavily upon others and all looked death squarely in the face and no man whimpered.
The panic was gone; the divine spark that rests in every human soul was burning, and life was little and cheap in their eyes, compared with the chance they had to give it for others.
Flicks of fire were swirling down the pa.s.sage, and the roar of the flames came nearer and Grant fancied he could hear the crackle of it.
Chopini was on his knees clutching at the crevices in the wall; Hogan and Dooley dug with their hands into the c.h.i.n.ks, then four men were on their feet, with the burden, and in the blackness, hands within the wall reached out and took the man from those outside. The hands reached out and felt other hands and pulled them up, and five, six men stood upon their feet and were pulled, scrambling and trembling and reeling, into the room. The blackness outside became a lurid glare. The flickering lamp inside showed them that one man was outside. Grant Adams stood faint and trembling, leaning against a wall of the room; the room and the men whirled about him and he grew sick at the stomach. But with a powerful effort he gathered himself, and lunged to the hole in the rising wall. He was trying to pull himself up when Dooley pulled him down, and went through the hole like a cat. Hogan followed Dooley and Evans followed Hogan. ”Here he is, right at the bottom,” called Hogan, and in an instant the feet of Casper Herd.i.c.ker, then the sprawling legs, then the body and then the head with the closed eyes and gaping mouth came in, and then three men slowly followed him. Grant, revived by the water from the puddle under him, stood and saw the last man--Dennis Hogan--crawl in. Then Grant, seeing Hogan's coat was afire, looked out and saw flames dancing along the timbers, and a spark with a gust of smoke was sucked into the room by some eddy of the current outside. In a last spurt of terrible effort the hole in the wall was closed and plastered with mud and the men were sealed in their tomb.
It was but a matter of minutes before the furnace was raging outside.
The men in the room could hear it crackle and roar, and the mud in the c.h.i.n.ks steamed. The men daubed the c.h.i.n.ks again and again.