Alaska Part 13

Our captain obtained permission to take us down into the mine. This was not so difficult as it was to elude the other pa.s.sengers. At last, however, we found ourselves shut into a small room, lined with jumpers, slickers, and caps.

Shades of the things we put on to go under Niagara Falls!

"Get into this!" commanded the captain, holding a sticky and unclean slicker for me. "And make haste! There's no time to waste for you to examine it. Finicky ladies don't get two invitations into the Treadwell.

Put in your arm."

My arm went in. When an Alaskan sea captain speaks, it is to obey. Who last wore that slicker, far be it from me to discover. Chinaman, leper, j.a.p, or Auk--it mattered not. I was in it, then, and curiosity was sternly stifled.

"Now put on this cap." Then beheld mine eyes a cap that would make a Koloshian ill.

"Must I put _that_ on?"

I whispered it, so the manager would not hear.

"You must put this on. Take off your hat."

My hat came off, and the cap went on. It was pushed down well over my hair; down to my eyebrows in the front and down to the nape of my neck in the back.

"There!" said the captain, cheerfully. "You needn't be afraid of anything down in the mine now."

Alas! there was nothing in any mine, in any world, that I dreaded as I did what might be in that cap.

There were four of us, with the manager, and there was barely room on the rather dirty "lift" for us.

We stood very close together. It was as dark as a dungeon.

"Now--look out!" said the manager.

As we started, I clutched somebody--it did not matter whom. I also drew one wild and amazed breath; before I could possibly let go of that one--to say nothing of drawing another--there was a b.u.mp, and we were in a level one thousand and eighty feet below the surface of the earth.

We stepped out into a brilliantly lighted station, with a high, glittering quartz ceiling. The swift descent had so affected my hearing that I could not understand a word that was spoken for fully five minutes. None of my companions, however, complained of the same trouble.

It has been the custom to open a level at every hundred and ten feet; but hereafter the distance between levels in the Treadwell mine will be one hundred and fifty feet.

At each level a station, or chamber, is cut out, as wide as the shaft, from forty to sixty feet in length, and having an average height of eight feet. A drift is run from the shaft for a distance of twenty-five feet, varying in height from fifteen feet in front to seven at the back.

The main crosscut is then started at right angles to the station drift.

From east and west the "drifts" run into this crosscut, like little creeks into a larger stream.

No one has ever accused me of being shy in the matter of asking questions. It was the first time I had been down in one of the famous gold mines of the world, and I asked as many questions as a woman trying to rent a forty-dollar house for twenty dollars. Between shafts, stations, ore bins, crosscuts, stopes, drifts, levels, and _winzes_, it was less than fifteen minutes before I felt the cold moisture of despair breaking out upon my brow. Winzes proved to be the last straw. I could get a glimmering of what the other things were; but _winzes_!

The manager had been polite in a forced, friend-of-the-captain kind of way. He was evidently willing to answer every question once, but whenever I forgot and asked the same question twice, he balked instantly. Exerting every particle of intelligence I possessed, I could not make out the difference between a stope and a station, except that a stope had the higher ceiling.

"I have told you the difference _three times_ already," cried the manager, irritably.

The captain, back in the shadow, grinned sympathetically.

"Nor'-nor'-west, nor'-by-west, a-quarter-nor'," said he, sighing.

"She'll learn your gold mine sooner than she'll learn my compa.s.s."

Then they both laughed. They laughed quite a while, and my disagreeable friend laughed with them. For myself, I could not see anything funny anywhere.

I finally learned, however, that a station is a place cut out for a stable or for the pa.s.sage of cars, or other things requiring s.p.a.ce; while a stope is a room carried to the level of the top of the main crosscut. It is called a stope because the ore is "stoped" out of it.

But winzes! What winzes are is still a secret of the ten-hundred-and-eighty-foot level of the Treadwell mine.

Tram-cars filled with ore, each drawn by a single horse, pa.s.sed us in every drift--or was it in crosscuts and levels? One horse had been in the mine seven years without once seeing sunlight or fields of green gra.s.s; without once sipping cool water from a mountain creek with quivering, sensitive lips; without once stretching his aching limbs upon the soft sod of a meadow, or racing with his fellows upon a hard road.

But every man pa.s.sing one of these horses gave him an affectionate pat, which was returned by a low, pathetic whinny of recognition and pleasure.

"One old fellow is a regular fool about these horses," said the manager, observing our interest. "He's always carrying them down armfuls of green gra.s.s, apples, sugar, and everything a horse will eat. You'd ought to hear them nicker at sight of him. If they pa.s.s him in a drift, when he hasn't got a thing for them, they'll nicker and nicker, and keep turning their heads to look after him. Sometimes it makes me feel queer in my throat."

No one can by any chance know what noise is until he has stood at the head of a drift and heard three Ingersoll-Sergeant drills beating with lightning-like rapidity into the walls of solid quartz for the purpose of blasting.

Standing between these drills and within three feet of them, one suddenly is possessed of the feeling that his sense of hearing has broken loose and is floating around in his head in waves. This feeling is followed by one of suffocation. Shock succeeds shock until one's very mind seems to go vibrating away.

At a sign from the manager the silence is so sudden and so intense that it hurts almost as much as the noise.

There is a fascination in walking through these high-ceiled, brilliantly lighted stopes, and these low-ceiled, shadowy drifts. Walls and ceilings are gray quartz, glittering with gold. One is constantly compelled to turn aside for cars of ore on their way to the dumping-places, where their burdens go thundering to the levels below.

At last the manager paused.

"I suppose," said he, sighing, "you wouldn't care to see the--"

I did not catch the last word, and had no notion what it was, but I instantly a.s.sured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine.

His face fell.

"Really--" he began.

"Of course we'll see it," said the captain; "we want to see everything."

The manager's face fell lower.

"All right," said he, briefly, "come on!"

We had gone about twenty steps when I, who was close behind him, suddenly missed him. He was gone.

Had he fallen into a dump hole? Had he gone to atoms in a blast? I blinked into the shadows, standing motionless, but could see no sign of him.

Then his voice shouted from above me--"Come on!"

I looked up. In front of me a narrow iron ladder led upward as straight as any flag-pole, and almost as high. Where it went, and why it went, mattered not. The only thing that impressed me was that the manager, halfway up this ladder, had commanded me to "come on."

_I?_ to "come on!" up that perpendicular ladder whose upper end was not in sight!

But whatever might be at the top of that ladder, I had a.s.sured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine. It was not for me to quail. I took firm hold of the cold and unclean rungs, and started.