The Courage of the Commonplace | Page 9

dragged her hands
across it. Then in a turn she felt this to be worse than useless and
dropped on her knees and found out what prayer is. She read the paper
again, then, and faced things.
It was the oft-repeated, incredible story of men so accustomed to
danger that they throw away their lives in sheer carelessness. A fire
down in the third level, five hundred feet underground; delay in putting
it out; shifting of responsibility of one to another, mistakes and
stupidity; then the sudden discovering that they were all but cut off; the
panic and the crowding for the shaft, and scenes of terror and
selfishness and heroism down in the darkness and smothering smoke.
The newspaper story told how McLean, the young superintendent, had
come running down the street, bare-headed, with his light, great pace of
an athlete. How, just as he got there, the cage of six men, which had
gone to the third level, had been drawn up after vague, wild signalling,
filled with six corpses. How, when the crowd had seen that he meant to
go down, a storm of appeal had broken that he should not throw his life
away; how the very women whose husbands and sons were below had
clung to him. Then the paper told of how he had turned at the mouth of
the shaft--the girl could see him standing there tall and broad, with the
light on his boyish blond head. He had snatched a paper from his
pocket and waved it at arm's-length so that everyone could see. The
map of the mine. Gallery 57, on the second level, where the men now
below had been working, was close to gallery 9, entered from the other
shaft a quarter of a mile away. The two galleries did not communicate,
but only six feet of earth divided them. The men might chop through to
9 and reach the other shaft and be saved. But the men did not know it.
He explained shortly that he must get to them and tell them. He would
go to the second level and with an oxygen helmet would reach possible
air before he was caught. Quickly, with an unhesitating decision, he
talked, and his buoyancy put courage in to the stricken crowd. With

that a woman's voice lifted.
"Don't go--don't ye go, darlin'," it screamed. "'Tis no frinds down there.
'Tis Terence O'Hara and his gang--'tis the strike-makers. Don't be
throwin' away your sweet young life for thim."
The boy laughed. "That's all right. Terence has a right to his chance."
He went on rapidly. "I want five volunteers--quick. A one-man chance
isn't enough to take help. Quick--five."
And twenty men pushed to the boy to follow him into hell. Swiftly he
picked five; they put on the heavy oxygen helmets; there was a deep
silence as the six stepped into the cage and McLean rang the bell that
signaled the engineer to let them down. That was all. They were the last
rescuers to go down, and the cage had been drawn up empty. That was
all, the newspaper said. The girl read it. All! And his father racing
across the continent, to stand with the shawled women at the head of
the shaft. And she, in the far-off city, going though the motions of
living.
The papers told of the crowds gathering, of the Red Cross, of the
experts come to consider the situation, of the line of patient women,
with shawls over their heads, waiting always, there at the first gray
light, there when night fell; the girl, gasping at her window, would have
given years of her life to have stood with those women. The second day
she read that they had closed the mouth of the shaft; it was considered
that the one chance for life below lay in smothering the flames. When
the girl read that, a madness came on her. The shawled women felt that
same madness; if the inspectors and the company officials had insisted
they could not have kept the mine closed long--the people would have
opened it by force; it was felt unendurable to seal their men below; the
shaft was unsealed in twenty-four hours. But the smoke came out, and
then the watchers realized that a wall of flame was worse than a wall of
planks and sand, and the shaft was closed again.
For days there was no news; then the first fruitless descent; then men
went down and brought up heavy shapes rolled in canvas and bore
them to the women; and "each morning the Red Cross president, lifting
the curtain of the car where he slept, would see at first light the still
rows of those muffled figures waiting in the hopeless daybreak." Not
yet had the