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Fifteen minutes more and they were on the surface, making their plans; projects which entailed work from morning until night for many a day to come. There was a track to lay, an extra skip to be lowered, that they might haul the muck and broken timbers from the cave-in to the shaft and on out to the dump. There were stulls and mill-stakes and laggs to cut and to be taken into the shaft.
Harry and Fairchild made their trips, scrambling ones as they went outward, struggling ones as they came back, dragging the "stulls" or heavy timbers which would form the main supports, the mill-stakes, or lighter props, the laggs and spreaders, all found in the broken, well-seasoned timber of the mountain side, all necessary for the work which was before them.
One for mining timber stulls, logs, and that sort of thing, for the Machol Mine at Idaho Springs; one for the Tramway company in Denver for two thousand ties to be delivered in June; one for " "I don't mean that sort. Are there any stumpage contracts?" "Only one, sir." "One? What!" "The one you signed, sir, to Thayer and Blackburn, just a week or so before you started out West.
The rusted rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away.
And thus began the weeks of effort, weeks in which they worked with crude appliances; weeks in which they dragged the heavy stulls and other timbers into the tunnel and then lowered them down the shaft to the drift, two hundred feet below, only to follow them in their counter-balanced bucket and laboriously pile them along the sides of the drift, there to await use later on.
Every night, every shift, the swelling ground moved in, breaking stulls and square-sets like tooth-picks; and now with solid steel and quick-setting concrete they were fighting for the life of the mine. It was a dangerous job, such as few men cared to tackle; but to Denver it was a relief, a return to his old life after the delirium of an ugly dream.
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