d clerks of Market
Street, and that the clerks were getting the better of life. And Grant
cried in his heart: "Why--why--why?"

Then Dick Bowman said: "Red--penny for your thoughts?" The men near by
turned to Grant and he said: "Hello, Dick--" Then to the boy: "Well,
Mugs, how are you?" He spoke to the others, Casper and Barney and Evans
and Hugh and Bill and Dan and Tom and Lew and Gomer and Mike and
Dick--excepting Casper Herdicker, mostly Welsh and Irish, and they
passed around some more or less ribald greetings. Then they all stepped
upon the soft ground and stood in the light of the flickering oil
torches that hung suspended from timbers.

Stretching down long avenues these flickering torches blocked out the
alleys of the mine in either direction from the room, perhaps fifty by
forty feet, six or seven feet high, where they were standing. A car of
coal drawn by forlorn mules and pushed by a grinning boy, came creaking
around a distant corner, and drew nearer to the cage. A score of men
ending their shift were coming into the passageways from each end,
shuffling along, tired and silent. They met the men going to work with a
nod or a word and in a moment the room at the main bottom was empty and
silent, save for the groaning car and the various language spoken by the
grinning boy to the unhappy mule. Grant Adams turned off the main
passage to an air course, where from the fans above cold air was rushing
along a narrow and scarcely lighted runway about six feet wide and lower
than the main passage. Down this passage the new mule barn was building.
Grant went to his work, and just outside the barn, snuffed a sputtering
torch that was dripping burning oil into a small oily puddle on the damp
floor. The room was cold. Three men were with him and he was directing
them, while he worked briskly with them. Occasionally he left the barn
to oversee the carpenters who were timbering up a new shaft in a lower
level that was not yet ready for operation. Fifty miners and carpenters
were working on the third level, clearing away passages, making shaft
openings, putting in timbers, constructing air courses and getting the
level ready for real work. On the second level, in the little rooms, off
the long, gloomy passages lighted with the flaring torches hanging from
the damp timbers that stretched away into long vistas wherein the
torches at the ends of the passage glimmered like fireflies, men were
working--two hundred men pegging a