eason smoked out labor organizers, the Pinkertons rousted them back to Pennsylvania, beaten bloody.
“Higgins!” shouted a foreman. “I told you to oil that winch.”
“I’m supposed to watch the derailer when the cars are coming up.”
“Do like I tell you. Oil that winch every hour.”
“Who’s going to stop a runaway if the wire breaks?”
“Get up there and oil that winch, damn you!”
Jim Higgins abandoned his post and ran two hundred yards up the steep incline to the winch engine, past the cars of coal climbing heavily to the tipple.
The tall young miner ducked his head to enter the mouth of the mine — a timber-braced portal in the side of the mountain — and descended down a sloping tunnel. He had boned up on mine engineering to prepare for the job. Strictly speaking, this tracked haulageway was not a
tunnel, which by definition had to pass completely through a mountain, but an
adit. Aditus, he recalled from his boarding school Latin, meant “access.” Once in, there was no way out but to turn around and go back.
Where he entered a gallery that intersected and split off from the haulageway, he hailed the small boy, who opened a wooden door to channel the air from the ventilators.
“Hey, Sammy. Feller from the telegraph office told me your Pirates beat Brooklyn yesterday. Eight-to-five.”
“Wow! Thanks for telling me, mister.”
Sammy had never been near a major-league ballpark — never been farther than ten miles from this hollow where the Gleason Company struck a rich bed of the Pittsburgh Seam that underlay Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. But his father had been a brakeman on the B & O, until he died in a
“Higgins!” shouted a foreman. “I told you to oil that winch.”
“I’m supposed to watch the derailer when the cars are coming up.”
“Do like I tell you. Oil that winch every hour.”
“Who’s going to stop a runaway if the wire breaks?”
“Get up there and oil that winch, damn you!”
Jim Higgins abandoned his post and ran two hundred yards up the steep incline to the winch engine, past the cars of coal climbing heavily to the tipple.
The tall young miner ducked his head to enter the mouth of the mine — a timber-braced portal in the side of the mountain — and descended down a sloping tunnel. He had boned up on mine engineering to prepare for the job. Strictly speaking, this tracked haulageway was not a
tunnel, which by definition had to pass completely through a mountain, but an
adit. Aditus, he recalled from his boarding school Latin, meant “access.” Once in, there was no way out but to turn around and go back.
Where he entered a gallery that intersected and split off from the haulageway, he hailed the small boy, who opened a wooden door to channel the air from the ventilators.
“Hey, Sammy. Feller from the telegraph office told me your Pirates beat Brooklyn yesterday. Eight-to-five.”
“Wow! Thanks for telling me, mister.”
Sammy had never been near a major-league ballpark — never been farther than ten miles from this hollow where the Gleason Company struck a rich bed of the Pittsburgh Seam that underlay Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. But his father had been a brakeman on the B & O, until he died in a
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