The Deep Dark by Gregg Olsen

the 3700 level and returned the length of the drift to the station at 10-Shaft. Some of the passageway was barely six feet in height, suitable for a mine car but not for walking without affecting a Quasimodo stoop. It was lunchtime at the mechanics shop, where a bunch of miners, motormen, and other laborers assembled to eat and talk about their mornings. At almost fifty, Harris was one of the older men underground. Harris had been a mucker, a motorman, a cager, and finally a shaft repairman on graveyard, then day shift. It was a good life, and for the most part, time flew underground. Time to start, time to eat, and time to go home. He and his wife and their houseful of eight kids lived just down the road from the mine. Big Creek and Sunshine—everything a man needed—was right there. A sentimental fellow, Harris never removed a ring that his mother had made out of a steel nut when she worked at a Seattle shipyard during World War II.
    After eating, Harris and Breazeal waited for the chippy to load up with timbers before the ride to 4400 for offloading. Cagers Randy Peterson and Roger Findley finished their work, and Harris, Breazeal, and Delbert “Dusty” Rhoads, a mechanic, stepped on. Breazeal pulled a cart with an acetylene torch and an oxygen canister. When they reached 4400, Harris noticed a light wisp of smoke coming down the shaft.
    â€œWhat the—?”
    Peterson and Rhoads got off to source the smoke, and Findley, Harris, and Breazeal continued down to 4500 to see if it was coming from there. It wasn’t a working level, but it was used by shaft repair crews as a staging area for timbers and supplies needed on lower levels of the mine. The smoke didn’t appear to be coming from there, and Harris didn’t think it was all that bad. He’d been in smokier places. It never dawned on him that the influx of smoke in the shaft could be coming from
above
them. They decided to go up to 3700 to continue their shift. A mine car there needed welding.
    But when Harris pulled the bell cord for the chippy hoistman to raise them to 3700, nothing happened. It didn’t move. The smoke started to thicken so much that the men began to choke. Findley sought relief with a deep drag off the oxygen line from Breazeal’s little cart before ringing the bell for the double-drum hoistman. The chippy signal, he thought, was out of order. He belled a second time, but no answer. Not even the response—two long buzzes—the “take five” signal that indicated the hoistman couldn’t move the conveyance just yet. Two buzzes always meant “Sit tight and I’ll be right at you.” Just dead silence. The men waited a few minutes before going over to the other side of the shaft, where the double-drum ran up and down in its separate compartment bringing in supplies from above, taking out muck from below. They planned to take the double-drum to 3700 to see what the hoistman was doing. They were willing to cut him a little slack. It was possible that the bell was out.
    Harris squawked for the cage. A second later the cable began to move in that fast, reeling pace of a machine that at times seemed alive with its strength and force.
    Cager Peterson appeared in the haze and pushed open the heavy steel-plate gate.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” he asked.
    â€œWe’ve got a fire somewhere,” Harris said. He and his partner got on, shoving the cart with their welding gear into the rear of the cage. “Ain’t down here.”
    A BOUT THE TIME ROCK RABBIT L ARRY H AWKINS HEADED TOPSIDE, foremen Gene Johnson, Bob Bush, and Harvey Dionne were guzzling the last of their coffee in the blue room when electricians Arnold Anderson and Norman Ulrich called out “Smoke!” from down the drift. The three foremen grabbed their lights and left to investigate. Smoke was coming from the 910 raise, a three-hundred-foot cut through old workings, long since mined out. Jim Bush and