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"Somebody else is tied up by the railroad accident. The Coal King's son!" "The Coal King's son?" echoed Hal. "Young Percy Harrigan. He's got a private car here or rather a whole train. Think of it dining-car, drawing-room car, two whole cars with sleeping apartments! Wouldn't you like to be a son of the Coal King?" "Has he come on account of the mine-disaster?" "Mine-disaster?" echoed Keating.
He, Hal Warner, would play the god out of a machine in this case, and in several others equally pitiful. He had the right to sign his father's name to checks, a privilege which he believed he could retain, even while undertaking the role of Haroun al Raschid in a mine-disaster. But what about the mine-disasters and abortive strikes where there did not happen to be any Haroun al Raschid at hand?
The young Irishman smiled, rather sadly. "You're new at this game," he said. "If a mine-disaster was enough to win a strike, God knows our job would be easy. In Barela, just down the canyon from you, they've had three big explosions they've killed over five hundred men in the past year!" Hal began to see how, in his inexperience, he had lost his sense of proportion.
This would be paid by check to the "Red Cross," whose agents would understand how to distribute relief among such sufferers. So the members of Percy's party felt that they had done the proper and delicate thing, and might go their ways with a quiet conscience. "The world can't stop moving just because there's been a mine-disaster," said the Coal King's son.
He had read about mine-disasters in his morning newspaper; but here a mine-disaster became a thing of human flesh and blood. The unendurable part of it was the utter impotence of himself and of all the world. This impotence became clearer to him each moment from the exclamations of Cotton and of the men he questioned. It was monstrous, incredible but it was so!
Some continued to stare into the smoking pit-mouth; others covered the sight from their eyes, or sank down upon their knees, sobbing, praying with uplifted hands. Little by little Hal began to realise the full horror of a mine-disaster. It was not noise and smoke and darkness, nor frantic, wailing women; it was not anything above ground, but what was below in the smoking black pit! It was men!
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