The Deep Dark by Gregg Olsen Page B

every day. Beehner was an easygoing guy who could talk about anything, a trait Wilbur knew he put to good use when bartending nights at the Wallace Corner. Beehner, who was responsible for emptying the crude toilets and disposing of garbage underground, had things to do topside the last part of his shift. He usually waited on the station while Wilbur unloaded the cage, then they rode to the surface together.
    A ringing phone interrupted their conversation. From 10-Shaft, electrical foreman Floyd Strand told Wilbur there was a fire, and that they’d been looking for its point of origin. It was getting so smoky, however, that a hoistman with a bum lung had been sent out on a muck car. Bob Scanlan was now operating the double-drum. Strand said they were going to evacuate the mine.
    â€œGet the cages on the double-drum,” Strand said. He seemed remarkably cool, without the slightest trace of alarm. “I want a cage there all the time.”
    During day shift, the double-drum was configured for muck, not men. Wilbur belled himself topside. He joined the double-drum hoistman, and the two of them went up to the collar, or top, of the shaft to pull out the pins and switch out to man decks. The exchange took a few minutes. When he returned to the station, Wilbur told a trainee to watch the men exiting the mine.
    â€œKeep a count as best you can,” he said.
    No one had any particular anxiety about smoke. It just wasn’t uncommon underground. At that time of day, clouds of smoke emanated from the cumulative blasts that miners reserved for shift’s end. Such timing allowed the dust particles to settle before men returned to survey the success of a particular round the next day. There could be other causes for a little smoke, too—machines, cigarette smoking. Wilbur remembered how the power went out occasionally and the drifts clogged up with smoky air. That had happened four or five times since he’d been at Sunshine. Sure, guys coughed, but after a few minutes it usually cleared up and everyone was fine.
    Miners can take a little smoke,
he thought.
It isn’t like it’s going to kill anybody.
    11:45 A.M., M AY 2
4600 and 4800 Levels
    B ESIDES THE BELL SIGNAL SYSTEM AND THE SQUAWKER, S UNSHINE had AN UNDERGROUND TELEPHONE SYSTEM MINERS KNEW AS THE “RED PHONES.” WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE TELEPHONE BY THE DOUBLE-DRUM HOIST ON THE SURFACE, WHICH WAS BLACK AND WAS MERELY
LABELED
RED PHONE , all phones underground were indeed a dull crimson. The phones were a pager system and a party line, which allowed any man to pick up and hear what was being said. They were the old-fashioned hand-crank models, powered by two dry cells and mounted just outside the cage. They crackled from level to level and took some experience to operate.
    Shift bosses Virgil Bebb and Charlie Casteel were talking on the station when the phone, the squawker, and the bell system went haywire. Casteel was in charge of the 4800 level, which connected with 4600. Some of the men working for Casteel would get off the cage at 4800 and head up to their stopes, depending on where they were in their work. Bebb, fifty-two, ambled across the station to answer the phone. It was a call from an upper level that there was a fire, but by then the call was moot. Smoke had begun to skulk into the drift. Bebb told a pair of miners to get the word out to the seventeen men working on that level that the mine was going to be evacuated.
    At almost six feet tall and barely 130 pounds out of the shower, Dennis Clapp was a stick-figured young man with wire-hanger shoulders. He defiantly wore his sandy blond hair shoulder length, and braced himself to defend it when guys like Dewellyn Kitchen reached to tug it during the man-train ride to 10-Shaft. Sometimes he wasn’t able to. Kitchen was quick. Clapp and his partner had been mining on 4800 for nearly four years, and were nearly finished with their stope. They’d worked their way up to 4600,