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He walks up with Axel Ström on the way back, leading his sheep on a string. Axel is taciturn, seemingly anxious about something, whatever it might be. There's nothing he need be troubled about that one can see, thinks Isak; his crops are looking well, most of his fodder is housed already, and he has begun timbering his house.
To drive three hundred yards of a heading large enough for a stooping man to pass through, would be a simple matter to men who had shown the skill of these conspirators. The soil was light and sandy, and they could use without suspicion as much timber as they required to shore up their work. It was true they would have to pass under the railway, but that again was a matter of timbering.
When you reach the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone silver ore; you select choice specimens from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery" to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped "incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it.
"It's on account of Harry being here, you see," explained he behind his horny hand, but in a tone perfectly audible to the other tenants of the bar parlor; "or else he would tell you how the timbering of the pit once fell upon him, so as nothing was free but his head and his left hand; and yet he never lost his wits in all his agony, but told the men where to saw and what to do; but he don't like to boast before the 'gal."
Nor is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling, stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the changing seasons as the unburied dead are cloaked. Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age.
"You !" A pumpman had picked up a piece of heavy timbering and thrown it at him in mock ferocity. "Work us to death and then come back and give us the laugh! Where you been at?" "Center City," confessed Harry cheerily. "And you knew all the time?" Mother Howard wagged a finger under his nose. "Well," and the Cornishman chuckled, "I did n't 'ave any money.
In timbering up this is divided into four different compartments, some for the hoisting and some for the pumping machinery, thus presenting the appearance at the top of four small shafts set in a row. Over the shaft stand several large buildings, all filled with ponderous machinery.
Extra timbering was needed and the men risked their lives as they wedged the props under the cracking beams, while now and then they worked for a shift with buckets to help the clanging pump. Their clothes were always wet, and they were generally smeared with mud when they came up to eat and sleep. The miners grumbled, and Scott and Thirlwell felt the mental and physical strain.
And all three stopped at once. The hollow sound was coming directly to them now. Harry once more brought out his carbide to light it for a moment and to examine the timbering. "It's a good job!" he commented. "You could n't tell it five feet off!" "They 've made a cross-cut!" This time it was Anita's voice, plainly angry in spite of its whispering tones.
A party of five miners, who have been very kind to me while you have been ill for you have been ill now for more than a week, though you don't know it have made me a very good offer, although I could not accept it until I consulted you. You see I cannot get on much with the claim by myself; the ground falls in and wants timbering, and I can do nothing alone.
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