Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

Very early the next morning the boys, who had caught the Doctor's enthusiasm, began again their task of digging through the "out crop" coal, which began now to grow softer and more workable, while the coal itself grew steadily better in quality.

But about noon, when they had pushed their little shaft about a dozen feet into the hill, the Doctor ordered a cessation of the digging.

"We must put in some supports for our roof," he said, "or we shall presently be caught in a cave in."

"How are we to do it?" asked Jack.

"Well, I am not a mining engineer," answered the Doctor, "but I've seen enough of the work to know how to protect a little shaft like this, anyhow. The engineers, when they come, will of course tear out all that we do, because they must drive a big shaft into the hill, while all we want to do is to push a little gallery three or four feet wide far enough in to find the best of the coal. But even in doing that we must securely support the roof of our mine. So we'll cut some timber and put it in place. Jack, I wish you would choose the trees to be cut."

"All right!" said Jack. "What dimensions are required?"

"First of all," answered the Doctor, "we want from six to ten pieces of oak, say four feet six inches long and fully twelve inches in diameter. They will serve for roof timbers, and will be enough to carry us thirty or forty feet further. Then for perpendicular supports – one at each end of each timber – we shall need just twice as many perfectly straight oaken sticks eight or nine inches in diameter."

"But why do you want big sticks to go crossways and comparatively little ones for the perpendicular supports?" asked Ed. "The perpendicular timbers must after all bear the weight."

"Oh, that's simple enough," said Tom, whose perceptive faculties were always alert. "You see a stick set up on end, if it is perfectly straight and set true, will bear vastly more weight than a stick of twice or three times its thickness, if laid crossways. In fact a straight eight-inch stick nine feet long, if set on end will support nearly as much as another stick nine feet thick – if there were any sticks that thick – laid lengthwise."

"That's it," said the Doctor. "We want heavy timbers across the top, supported by stout eight- or nine-inch sticks set endwise under them. Now, Jack, select the best trees and we'll all get to work as soon as dinner is over. We'll get the dinner ready while you choose the timber to be cut."

The cutting of the timber was a small task to expert young wood choppers; but it was a very difficult task for the six boys to bring the timbers to the mine and set them in place. True, only two frames had to be set up for the present, but the cross pieces, short as they were, were enormously heavy, and it required all the ingenuity as well as all the strength the boys could command, to get these two frames up, each consisting of one cross piece under the roof and two uprights supporting it.

When night came only one of the two frames was in place, and it was obvious, as Jack said, that "another half day must be wasted on such work" before they could begin mining again. But that evening the Doctor dug two bushels of coal out of the farthest end of the shaft, built a special fire, placed the coal on it, and carefully covered it with earth.

"What are you doing, Doctor?" asked his crony, Tom.

"I'm making a coke oven, Tom," he replied. "I want to see how our coal will coke."

"But I don't understand about coke," answered Tom. "Why is it that when you burn most of the substance out of coal it will make a hotter fire than with all its combustible materials in it?"

"That isn't quite the case, Tom," answered the Doctor. "What we do in making coke is chiefly to expel the gas from the coal and to roast out the sulphur, which seriously interferes with the making of sufficient heat to smelt iron. Some coal gets burnt up in the process; some makes an indifferent and nearly worthless coke; while some makes a coke that would melt the heart of a miser. Now, as I told you the other night, I am convinced as a geologist, that a little further in our mine we shall come to coal so free from sulphur that we can smelt iron with it without making coke of it at all. But it is always preferable to make coke of it, and so I'm trying to see what sort of coke our coal will make. Of course we haven't come to the real coal yet, but I can tell a good deal by what we have now. We'll let my little coke oven roast all night and in the morning I'll know a great deal more than I do now. But if you have any question in your mind as to the gas making capacity of this coal, I'll remove it at once."

With that he went to the camp fire, seized a blazing brand and applied it to the little mound of earth under which he had buried his coal. Instantly the whole outside of the mound was aflame.

"That's the gas," said the Doctor. "You see there's plenty of it, even in the imperfect coal that we've reached. It will burn out presently and meantime its heat will help roast my coal into coke."

After supper the boys again plied the Doctor with questions concerning coal. Tom began it by saying:

"You told us the other evening, Doctor, that the value of a bed of coal depends upon many things besides its location and its accessibility to market. What are those things?"

"Thickness, for one thing," answered the Doctor, "and that is a point in which our mine excels. You see coal seams are of every thickness, from that of a knife blade to beds 100 feet through. Those last are very rare, however. In this country the seams vary from knife blade thickness to about nine or ten feet. Now, in working a coal mine the men, of course, must have room to stand up in the shaft, so that wherever the vein is less than six feet thick a good deal of rock or earth must be removed so as to give sufficient height to the mine. It costs as much to remove the rock or earth as to handle a like amount of coal, and the stuff is worthless. So you see it is greatly more profitable to work a thick than a thin vein. Indeed there are very few veins under three or four feet thick that it pays to work at all. Our deposit here appears to be about nine feet thick, and that means much to us.

"Another condition of value in a coal mine is a good roof. There are many rich veins of coal that have only earth or soft shale above them, and they are practically worthless because they are unworkable. We fortunately have a superb rock roof over our mine."

"But, Doctor," said Tom, "you told us the other night that coal is at the basis of modern industrial civilization. Then I suppose that those nations which have coal must be the foremost ones in industry and consequently in civilization."

"Certainly they are," said the Doctor, as the other boys gathered about to hear the talk; "and they will be more and more so as time goes on. England has more coal than any other country in Europe and so England is by all odds the foremost industrial nation in Europe, though other nations there have the advantage of buying English coal in an open market. Ever since our modern age of industry and machinery set in – that is to say ever since Old King Coal came to his throne – England has grown greater and richer, till now she is by all odds the richest country in Europe."

"Haven't the other countries there any coal?" asked Ed.

"Yes, but comparatively little. Let me see if I can remember the figures approximately. Great Britain's coal fields cover nearly 12,000 square miles; France has only 2,000 square miles, Prussia about the same, Belgium has only 500 square miles, Austria less than 2,000; Italy none at all to speak of, and as for Spain, the Spanish indolence, which puts off everything till 'to-morrow' has prevented that country from even finding out what coal she has. Russia has vast fields and bids fair to take her place ultimately among the great coal producing and industrial nations of the earth. But as yet her coal fields are imperfectly developed and her coal production is only about one-thirty-fifth as great as that of Great Britain."

"What about the United States, Doctor?" asked Tom, who was an aggressive patriot.

"Well, we have many times more coal than all Europe combined," answered the Doctor. "Great Britain's 12,000 square miles of coal lands sink into insignificance in comparison with our 214,000 square miles of measured coal fields, our 200,000 or 300,000 square miles in the Rocky Mountain states, and our totally unguessed-at coal fields in Oregon and Washington. As four or five hundred thousand and probably more, is to twelve thousand, so is our known coal area to that which has made Great Britain the greatest industrial nation on earth next to our own. And some of the British mines are pretty nearly worked out, while we have scarcely scratched the surface of ours."

"Then this is likely to become the greatest industrial nation on earth?" said Jack.

"It is already that," answered the Doctor. "We are selling our manufactured goods – even iron and steel products – in England to-day, almost as freely as we are selling our grain and our meat. I tell you, boys, there is nothing in this world that can happen to a man that is so good as being born an American citizen."

"Amen!" said Tom. "To employ the dialect of my friends among the mountaineers, 'them's my sentiments every time all over and clear through.'"

"All right," said Jack, "now let's get to bed."

"I suppose there's a lot more you could tell us about coal, Doctor," said Jim, "if there was time."

"Of course there is," the Doctor responded; "but you'll learn it all practically. For we've a great mine here, and you boys will have first choice of places in its management."

With that they all went to bed.

CHAPTER XLIII

The Camp Venture Mining Company

The next morning the Doctor "drew" his coke oven, which was quite cool by that time. He minutely examined the coke and called Tom to look at it. "You see," he said, "how perfectly it is fused. You see how free it is from any sort of admixture of sand or anything else. I tell you, Tom, we've got a great mine here, and it is going to make all of us comfortable for the rest of our lives. Your good mother is especially to be congratulated. This find will make her not only independent, but really rich. Now I want you to understand me, Tom. If your mother prefers to have anybody else manage this affair for her, I will instantly withdraw. At present I have no interest whatever here, and I can have none except by her consent. This mine is absolutely hers, to do with as she pleases. I want to serve her in the matter, by finding among my friends the capitalists who can make the thing 'go.' If she prefers to put the matter into other hands, I hope, Tom, you'll urge her to do so."

Tom arose, took the Doctor's hand, pressed it warmly, and said simply:

"I'm not quite an idiot, Doctor. Go on with your plans."

Somehow, although Jack was Tom's elder brother, the Doctor and indeed the whole company had learned to think of Tom as essentially the head of his family. Curiously enough his mother and the other boys themselves had learned to regard Tom in precisely the same way.

"But Doctor," said Tom, eager to divert the conversation, "why were you in such a hurry to put out the fire here that night when we first discovered the coal? Would it have burned any considerable way into the vein?"

"I can best answer you, Tom, by telling you that about fifteen or twenty miles back of Mauch Chunk, in Pennsylvania, there is a bed of coal that has been burning for about half a century. Everything that human ingenuity could do to put it out has been done, but all to no avail. The whole mountain is slowly burning away, and when one walks about on the crust he is liable at any moment to have a foot sink into the fire below. So you see why I didn't want our mine to begin its career by getting afire."

The next thing on the day's program was work upon the second truss for supporting the mine roof, and this was got into place before midday, so that the afternoon was given to vigorous digging into the coal bank. About five o'clock the Doctor called out:

"You needn't dig any further, boys, we've got it safe enough!" Then he began singing "Old King Coal," as he hugged some specimens of the coal he had dug out of the extreme end of their little shaft to his bosom.

"Got what?" asked Tom, who watched the Doctor's antics with eager interest.

"Why, we've got what we've been looking for, coal equal to the very best that was ever mined in Virginia or West Virginia. I was sure I could not be mistaken. Now I know." And with that the Doctor danced and sang again.

"Now," he said, "you boys come here. I want to talk with you. I'm going down to the station to-morrow to see my father. I propose, if you approve the plan, to have him come up here to inspect our find. Then I'm going to get him and my brothers and their financial associates to make a plan for capitalizing and working the mine. When their plan is made, you, Tom, and I will go to your mother and see what she thinks of it. You see the mine belongs to her absolutely, and any interest that any of the rest of us get in it we must buy from her. But, by way of preparing for such a purchase, I'm going down to the contractor's camp to-morrow, to get my father to come up here with a mining expert and an engineer, to look at the property and make up their minds about it."

The suggestion was welcomed by the three boys concerned, and so the Doctor made his preparations for an early departure in the morning.

The distance was not over two or three miles, and, as the Doctor had no wagon road to look out for, it took him less than an hour and a half to reach his father's headquarters. Early in the afternoon a cavalcade reached the camp. It consisted of the Doctor, his father, one of his brothers, a mining expert and two engineers.