In the Heart of a Fool

The fan had reversed. The air was rushing back, bringing the flames to the barn. They beat the fire madly with their coats, but in two minutes the roaring air had brought the flames upon them. The loose timber and shavings in the barn were beginning to blaze and the men ran for their lives down the air course. As they ran for the south passage, the smoke followed them and they felt it in their eyes and lungs. The lights behind them were dimmed, and those in front grew dim. They reached the passage in a cloud of smoke, but it was going up the air shaft and did not fill the passage. “Mugs,” yelled Grant to a boy driving an ore car, “run down this passage and tell the men there’s a fire–where’s your father?”

“He’s up yon way,” called the boy, pointing in the opposite direction as he ran. “You tell him.” The fire was roaring down the air course behind them, and Grant and the three men knew that in a few minutes the reverse air would be sucking the flames up the air shaft, cutting off the emergency escape for the men on the first and second levels.

Grant knew that the emergency escape was not completed for the third level, but he knew that they were using the air chute for a temporary hoist for the men from the third level and that the main shaft was not running to the third level.

“Run down this passage, Bill,” called Grant. “Get all those fellows. Evans, you call the first level; I’ll skin down this rope to the men below.” In an instant, as the men were flying on their errands, his red head disappeared down the rope into the darkness. At the bottom of the hoist in the third level Grant found forty or fifty men at work. They were startled to see him come down without waiting for the bucket to go up and he called breathlessly as his feet touched the earth: “Boys, there’s a fire above on the next level–I don’t know how bad it is; but it looks bad to me. They may get it out with a hose from the main bottom–if they’ve got hose there that will reach any place.”

“Let’s go up,” cried one of the men. As they started toward him, Grant threw up his hand.

“Hold on now, boys–hold on. The fans will be blowing that fire down this air shaft in a few minutes. How far up have you got the ladders?” he asked.

Some one answered: “Still twelve feet shy.” There was a scramble for the buckets, but no one offered to man the windlass and hoist them up the air shaft. Grant was only a carpenters’ boss. The men around the buckets were miners. But he called: “Get out of there, Hughey and Mike–none of that. We must make that ladder first–get some timbers–put the rungs three feet apart, and work quick.”

He pointed at the timbers to be used for the ladders, stepped to the windlass and cried:

“Here, Johnnie–you got no family–get hold of this windlass with me. Ready now–family men first–you, Sam–you, Edwards–you, Lewellyn.”

Then he bent to the wheel and the men in the bucket started up the shaft. The others pounded at the ladder, and those who could find no work clambered up the stairs to the bottom of the gap that separated them from the second level. As the men in the buckets were nearly up to the second level, where the hoist stopped, Grant heard one of them call: “Hurry, hurry–here she comes,” and a second later a hot, smoky wind struck his face and he knew the fan was turned again and soon would be blowing fire down the air course.

The men had the ladder almost finished. The men above on the stairs smelled the smoke and began yelling. The bucket reached the top and was started down. Grant looked up the air shaft and saw the fire–little flickering flames lighting up the shaft near the second level. The air rushing down was smoky and filled with sparks. The ladder was ready and the men made a rush with it up the stairway. Most of their lamps were put out and it was dark in the stairway. The men were uttering hysterical, foolish cries as they rushed upward in their panic. The ladder jolting against the sides of the chamber knocked the men off their feet and there was tumbling and swearing and tripping and struggling.

Grant grabbed the ladder from the men and held it above his head, and called out:

“You men go up there in order. You’ll not get the ladder till you straighten up.”

The emergency-passage was filling with smoke. The men were coughing and gasping.

Up and down the stairs men called:

“Brace up, that’s right.”

“Red’s right.”

“We’ll all go if we don’t straighten up.”

In a moment there was some semblance of order, and Grant wormed his way to the top holding the ladder above him. He put one end of it on a landing and nailed the foot of the ladder to the landing floor. Then he stood on the landing, a great, powerful man with blazing eyes, and called down: “Now come; one at a time, and if any man crowds I’ll kill him. Come on–one at a time.” One came and went up; when he was on the third rung of the ladder, Grant let another man pass up, and so three men were on the ladder.

As the top man raised the trapdoor above, Grant and those upon the ladder could see the flames and a great gust of smoke poured down. The man at the top hesitated. On the other side of the partition in the air chute the smoke was pouring and the fire was circling the top of the emergency escape through which the men must pass.

“Go ahead or jump down,” yelled Grant.

Those on the ladder and on the landing who could see up cried:

“Quick, for God’s sake! Hurry!”

And in another second the first man had scrambled through the hole, letting the trapdoor fall upon the head of the scrambling man just under him. He fell, but Grant caught him, and shoved him into the next turn upon the ladder.

After that they learned to lift their hands up and catch the trapdoor, but they could see the flames burning the timbers and dropping sparks and blowing smoke down the emergency shaft. Ten men went up; the fire in the flume along the stairs below them was beginning to whip through the board partition. The fan was pumping the third level full of smoke; it was carried out of the stairway by the current. But the men were calling below. Little Ira Dooley tried to go around Grant ahead of his turn at the ladder. The cheater felt the big man’s hand catch him and hold him. The men below saw Grant hit the cheater upon the point of the jaw and throw him half conscious under the ladder. The men climbed steadily up. Twenty-five went through the trapdoor into the unknown hell raging above. Again and again the ladder emptied itself, as the flames in the shaft grew longer, and the circle of fire above grew broader. The men passed through the trapdoor with scorching clothes.

The ladder was filling for the last time. The last man was on the first rung. Grant reached under the ladder, caught Dooley about the waist and started up with him. On the ladder Dooley regained consciousness, and Grant shoved him ahead and saw Dooley slip through the trapdoor and then stop in the smoke and fire and stand holding up the door for Grant. The two men smiled through the smoke, and as Grant came through with his clothes afire, he and Dooley looked quickly about them. Their lights were out; but the burning timbers above gave them their directions. They headed down the south passage, but even as they entered it the flames barred them there. Then they turned to go up the passage, and could hear men calling and yelling far down in the dark alley. The torches were gone. Far ahead through the stifling smoke that swirled about the damp timbers overhead, they could see the flickering lights of men running. They started to follow the lamps. Dooley, who was a little man, slowly dropped back. Grant caught his hand and dragged him. Soon they came up to the others, who paused to give them lights. Then they all started to run again, hoping to come out of that passage into the main bottom by the main shaft in another quarter of a mile. Occasionally a man would begin to lag, but some one always stopped to give him a hand. Once Grant passed two men, Tom Williams and Evan Davis, leaning against a timber, Davis fagged, Williams fanning his companion with his cap.

From some cross passage a group of men who worked on the second level came rushing to them. They had no lights and were lost. Down the passage they all ran together, and at the end they saw something cluttering it up. The opening seemed to be closed. The front man tumbled and fell; a dozen men fell over him. Three score men were trapped there, struggling in a pile of pipes and refuse timber that all but filled the passage into the main bottom. Five minutes were lost there. Then by twos they crawled into the main bottom. There men were working with hose, trying to put out the fire in the air course leading to the mule stables. They did not realize that the other end of the mine was in flames.

Coal was still going up in the cages. The men in the east and west passages were still at work. Smoke thickened the air. The entrance to the air course was charred, and puffing smoke. The fans relaxed for a moment upon a signal to cease until the course was explored. A hose was playing in the course, but no man had ventured down it. When Grant came out he called to the men with the cage boss: “Where’s Kinnehan–where’s the pit boss?” No one knew. Some little boys–trimmers and drivers–were begging to go up with the coal. Finally the cage boss let them ride up.

While they were wrangling, Grant said: “Lookee here–this is a real fire, men; stop spitting on that air course with the hose and go turn out the men.”

The men from the third level were clamoring at the cage boss to go up.

Grant stopped them: “Now, here–let’s divide off, five in a squad and go after the men on this level, and five in a squad go up to the next level and call the men out there. There’s time if we hurry to save the whole shift.” He tolled them off and they went down the glimmering passages, that were beginning to grow dim with smoke. As he left the main bottom he saw by his watch under a torch that it was nearly eleven o’clock. He ran with his squad down the passage, calling out the men from their little rooms. Three hundred yards down the smoke grew denser. And he met men coming along the passage.

“Are they all out back of you?” he called to the men as they passed. “Yes,” they cried, “except the last three or four rooms.”

Grant and his men pushed forward to these rooms. As they went they stumbled over an unconscious form in the passage. The men behind Grant–Dooley, Hogan, Casper Herdicker, Williams, Davis, Chopini–joined him. Their work was done. They had been in all the rooms. They picked up the limp form, and staggered slowly back down the passage. The smoke gripped Grant about the belly like a vise. He could not breathe. He stopped, then crawled a few feet, then leaned against a timber. Finally he rose and came upon the swaying group with the unconscious man. Another man was down, and three men were dragging two.

The smoke kept rolling along behind them. It blackened the passage ahead of them. Most of the lights the men carried were out. Grant lent a hand, and the swaying procession crawled under the smoke. They went so slowly that one man, then two on their hands and knees, then three more caught up with them and they were too exhausted to drag the senseless man with them. At a puddle in the way they soused the face of the prostrated man in the water. That revived him. They could hear and feel another man across the passage calling feebly for help. Grant and Chopini, speaking different languages, understood the universal call of distress, and together crawled in the dark and felt their way to the feeble voice. Chopini reached the voice first. Grant could just distinguish in the darkness the powerful movement of the Italian, with his head upon the ground like a nosing dog’s as he wormed under the fallen body and got it on his back and bellied over to the group that was slowly moving down the passage toward the glimmering light. As they passed the rooms vacated by the miners, sometimes they put their heads in and got refreshing air, for the smoke moved in a slow, murky current down the passage and did not back into the rooms at first.

Grant and Chopini crawled on all fours into a room, and found the air fresh. They rose, holding each other’s hands. They leaned together against the dark walls and breathed slowly, and finally their diaphragms seemed to be released and they breathed more deeply. By a hand signal they agreed to start out. At the door they crouched and crawled. A few yards further they found the little group of a dozen men feebly pushing on. Seven were trying to drag five. Further down the passage they could hear the shrill cries of the men in the main bottom, as they came hurrying from the other runways, and far back up the dark passage behind them they could hear the roar of flames. They saw that they were trapped. Behind them was the fire. Before them was the long, impossible stretch to the main bottom, with the smoke thickening and falling lower every second. So thick was the smoke that the light ahead winked out. Death stood before them and behind them.

“Boys–” gasped Grant, “in here–let’s get in one of these rooms and wall it up.”

The seven looked at him and he crawled to a room; sticking his head in he found it murky. He tried another. The third room was fresh and cool, and he called the men in.

Then all nine dragged one after another of the limp bodies into the room and they began walling the door into the passage. There were two lights on a dozen caps. Grant put out one lamp and they worked by the glimmer of a single lamp. Gradually, but with a speed–slow as it had to be–inspired by deadly terror, the wall went up. They daubed it with mud that seemed to refresh itself from a pool that was hollowed in the floor. After what seemed an age of swiftly accurate work, the wall was waist high; the smoke bellied in, in a gust, and was suddenly sucked out by an air current, and the men at the wall tapping some spring of unknown energy bent frantically to their task. Three of the six men were coming to life. They tried to rise and help. Two crawled forward, and patted the mud in the bottom crevices. The fierce race with death called out every man’s reserves of body and soul.

Then, when the wall was breast high, some one heard a choking cry in the passage. Grant was in the rear of the room, wrestling with a great rock, and did not hear the cry; but Chopini was over the wall, and Dooley followed him, and Evans followed him in an instant. They disappeared down the passage, and when Grant returned, carrying the huge rock to the speeding work at the wall, he heard a voice outside call:

“We’ve got ’em.”

And then, after a silence, as the workmen hurried with the wall, there came a call for help. Williams and Dennis Hogan followed Grant through the hole now nearing the roof of the room, out into the passage. The air was scorching. Some current was moving it rapidly. The second party came upon the first struggling weakly with Dick Bowman and his son. Father and son were unconscious and one of the rescuing party had fainted. Again the vise gripped Grant’s abdomen, and he put his face upon the damp earth and panted. Slowly the three men in the darkness bellied along until they felt the wall, then in an agony of effort raised themselves and their burden. Up the wall they climbed to their knees, to their feet, and met the hands of those inside who took the burden from them. One, two, three whiffs of clean air as they stuck their heads in the room, and they were gone–and another two men from the room followed them. They came upon the first party working their gasping, fainting course back to the wall, with their load, rolling a man before them. And they all pulled and tugged and pushed and some leaned heavily upon others and all looked death squarely in the face and no man whimpered. The panic was gone; the divine spark that rests in every human soul was burning, and life was little and cheap in their eyes, compared with the chance they had to give it for others.

Flicks of fire were swirling down the passage, and the roar of the flames came nearer and Grant fancied he could hear the crackle of it. Chopini was on his knees clutching at the crevices in the wall; Hogan and Dooley dug with their hands into the chinks, then four men were on their feet, with the burden, and in the blackness, hands within the wall reached out and took the man from those outside. The hands reached out and felt other hands and pulled them up, and five, six men stood upon their feet and were pulled, scrambling and trembling and reeling, into the room. The blackness outside became a lurid glare. The flickering lamp inside showed them that one man was outside. Grant Adams stood faint and trembling, leaning against a wall of the room; the room and the men whirled about him and he grew sick at the stomach. But with a powerful effort he gathered himself, and lunged to the hole in the rising wall. He was trying to pull himself up when Dooley pulled him down, and went through the hole like a cat. Hogan followed Dooley and Evans followed Hogan. “Here he is, right at the bottom,” called Hogan, and in an instant the feet of Casper Herdicker, then the sprawling legs, then the body and then the head with the closed eyes and gaping mouth came in, and then three men slowly followed him. Grant, revived by the water from the puddle under him, stood and saw the last man–Dennis Hogan–crawl in. Then Grant, seeing Hogan’s coat was afire, looked out and saw flames dancing along the timbers, and a spark with a gust of smoke was sucked into the room by some eddy of the current outside. In a last spurt of terrible effort the hole in the wall was closed and plastered with mud and the men were sealed in their tomb.

It was but a matter of minutes before the furnace was raging outside. The men in the room could hear it crackle and roar, and the mud in the chinks steamed. The men daubed the chinks again and again.

As the fire roared outside, the men within the room fancied–and perhaps it was the sheer horror of their situation that prompted their fancy–that they could hear the screams of men and mules down the passage toward the main bottom. After an hour, when the roar ceased, they were in a great silence. And as the day grew old and the silence grew deep and the immediate danger past, they began to wait. As they waited they talked. At times they heard a roaring and a crash and they knew that the timbers having burned away, the passages and courses were caving in. By their watches they knew that the night was upon them. And they sat talking nervously through the night, fearing to sleep, dreading what each moment might bring. Lamp after lamp burned out in turn. And still they sat and talked. Here one would drowse–there another lose consciousness and sink to the ground, but always men were talking. The talk never ceased. They were ashamed to talk of women while they were facing death, so they kept upon the only other subjects that will hold men long–God and politics. The talk droned on into morning, through the forenoon, into the night, past midnight, with the thread taken from one man sinking to sleep by another waking up, but it never stopped. The water that seeped into the puddle on the floor moistened their lips as they talked. There was no food save in two lunch buckets that had been left in the room by fleeing miners, and thus went the first day.

The second day the Welsh tried to sing–perhaps to stop the continual talk of the Irish. Then the Italian sang something, Casper Herdicker sang the “Marseillaise” and the men clapped their hands, in the twilight of the last flickering lamp that they had. After that Grant called the roll at times and those who were awake felt of those who were asleep and answered for them, and a second day wore into a third.

By the feeling of the stem of Grant Adams’s watch as he wound it, he judged that they had lived nearly four days in the tomb. Little Mugs Bowman was crying for food, and his father was trying to comfort him, by giving him his shoe leather to chew. Others rolled and moaned in their sleep, and the talk grew unstable and flighty.

Some one said, “Hear that?” and there was silence, and no one heard anything. Again the talk began and droned unevenly along.

“Say, listen,” some one else called beside the first man who had heard the sound.

Again they listened, and because they were nervous perhaps two or three men fancied they heard something. But one said it was the roar of the fire, another said it was the sound of some one calling, and the third said it was the crash of a rock in some distant passageway. The talk did not rise again for a time, but finally it rose wearily, punctuated with sighs. Then two men cried:

“Hear it! There it is again!”