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They had been drinking, he could easily tell, and were in a quarrelsome mood, and wrangled with one another as to what they should do with their captive. One was for stringing him up to a tree; another was for shooting him; while a third suggested that they should pitch him head first down one of the mining-shafts.
Scattered all through the town were the huge mounds of earth marking the mining-shafts of various colours, from dark brown to pure white, and beside them, with the utmost regularity, were the skeleton towers of the poppet heads, the tall red chimneys, and the squat, low forms of the engine-houses.
The shaft is dug by one man in the hole, and one or two are employed at a windlass in hauling up the dirt. Mining-shafts in placer diggings are rarely over one hundred feet deep; but one was dug in Trinity county to the depth of six hundred feet, for the purpose of prospecting, but it found neither pay-dirt nor the bed-rock. River-Mining.
She is not violent like the other elements, fire, water, and air. She calmly allows herself to be trampled underfoot; lets us make great wounds in her; lets us load her broad back with cities and towns; crush her bones by driving deep mining-shafts into her and for all that she allows us who plague her so, to live and multiply in the midst of her dust.
How many a murdered man, for instance, lies among the gum-trees of Victoria, or in the old abandoned mining-shafts on the diggings, who is missed by nobody, perhaps, but a pining wife at home, or helpless children, or an old mother? But who were their murderers? Where are they? God knows, perhaps, but nobody else, and nobody ever will."
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