future. After listening attentively to all that his guest chose to tell of himself, he said:
"It's plain, lad, thee's not been brought up to work, and knows nought of mining; but thee's got head to learn and muscle to work with. So if 'ee wants job thee shall have it, or Mark Trefethen 'll know why. Now I tell 'ee what. Bide along of us, and be certain of welcome. Take to-morrow to look about, and by night I'll have news for you."
Gratefully accepting this invitation, the Oxford undergraduate slept that night in a tiny chamber of the Trefethen cottage, from which he shrewdly suspected Miss Nelly had been turned out to make room for him.
The next day he went with his new-found friends to the mine, where, in the "Dry," he saw the underground laborers change into their red-stained working-suits. Then he watched them clamber, a dozen at a time, into the great ore-cages and disappear with startling suddenness down the black shaft into unknown depths of darkness. After all were gone he spent some time in the "compressor-room" of the engine-house with Tom, who was there on duty. The remainder of the day he passed in wandering among shaft-houses, rock-crushers, ore-cars, and shops, making close observations, asking questions, and gaining a deal of information concerning the mining of copper.
That evening Mark Trefethen told him that he had made arrangements by which he could, if he chose, go to work in the mine the following morning. "Job's wi' timber gang, lad," he said, "in bottom level. It's hard work and little pay at first – only one twenty-five the day – but if 'ee's game for it, job's thine."
"I am game to try it, at any rate," replied the young man, gratefully, "and will also try my best to prevent you from being ashamed of me."
"No fear, lad. Only fear is I'll be proud of thee, and lat others see it, which would be very bad indeed. Now, I'll bate 'ee hasn't rag of clothing fit for mine work."
"I have only what I am wearing," answered Peveril, who had left his trunks in Hancock, "but I guess they will do until I can earn the money to buy others more suitable."
"Do, lad! They'd be ruined forever in first five minutes. Besides, thee'd be laughing-stock of whole mine, if 'ee went down dressed like Jim Dandy. No, no; come along of me and I'll rig 'ee out proper."
So Peveril was taken to the company store, where, with Mark Trefethen to vouch for him, he was allowed to purchase, on credit, two blue-flannel shirts, a suit of brown canvas, a pair of heavy hobnailed shoes, two pairs of woollen socks, a hard, round-topped hat, a dinner-pail, and a miner's lamp. As these things were, by order of the timber boss, charged to "Dick Peril," that was the name under which our young Oxonian began his new life and became known in the strange community to which erratic fortune had led him.
On the following morning he sallied forth from the Trefethen cottage with a tin dinner-pail on one arm, his working-suit under the other, and uncomfortably conscious that he was curiously regarded by every person whom he met on his way to the mine. As the "Dry" was already overcrowded, he shared Tom's locker, and was grateful for the opportunity of changing his clothing in the comparative seclusion of the compressor-room rather than in company with the two hundred men who thronged the steam-heated building devoted especially to that purpose.
Having assumed his new garments, and feeling very awkward in them, Peveril made his way to the shaft-mouth. There he was joined by Mark Trefethen, who regarded the change made in his protégé's appearance with approving eyes. Together, and in company with a stream of men talking in a bewildering Babel of tongues, they climbed flight after flight of wooden stairs to the uppermost floor of the tall shaft-house.
An empty cage that had just deposited its load of copper conglomerate was again ready to descend into the black depths, and, hurrying Peveril forward, Mark Trefethen, with half a dozen other miners, entered it. An iron gate closed behind them and a gong clanged in the engine-house.
"Hold fast, lad, and remember there's no danger," was all that the timber boss had time to say. Then the bottom seemed to drop out of everything, and Peveril, experiencing the sickening sensation of having left his stomach at the top of the shaft, found himself rushing downward with horrible velocity through utter blackness. Instinctively reaching out for something by which to hold on, he clutched a rough-coated arm, but his grasp was rudely shaken off, and a gruff voice bade him keep his hands to himself.
He could not frame an answer, for his brain was in a whirl, his ears were filled with a dull roaring, and a whistling rush of air caught away his breath. The motion of the cage was so smooth and noiseless that after a while he could not tell whether it were going up or down, though it seemed to be doing both, as though poised on a gigantic spring. At length faint glimmers of light began to flash past as it shot by the mouths of working levels, and finally it stopped with a jerk that threw its passengers into a confused huddle.
A gate was flung open, and as Peveril stumbled out of the cage he was only conscious of dancing lights, a crashing rumble of iron against iron, and a medley of shouting voices. At the same time all these sounds seemed far away and unreal.
CHAPTER VI
A MILE BENEATH THE SURFACE
"Swallow, lad!"
Mark Trefethen uttered the words, and Peveril, dimly comprehending him, instinctively obeyed. The effect of that simple muscular action was marvellous. His brain was instantly cleared of its weight, the ringing in his ears ceased, and his hearing was restored to its normal keenness. At the same time he was happily conscious that his stomach had been restored to its proper position.
"This is plat of bottom level, and we're a mile underground," continued Mark. "They put us down in one-thirty this time, but often they do it ten seconds better."
"I wonder how much longer it would take to drop from a balloon one mile above the earth?" reflected Peveril, at the same time gazing about him with a lively interest.
The place in which he stood was a spacious room, hewn from solid rock. Lighted by several lanterns and little, flaring mine-lamps, it was also smoothly floored with iron plates, and from it a narrow-gauge railway led away into the blackness. Articles of clothing and dinner-pails were hung about the walls, and on the side opposite the shaft was a bench of rude workmanship.
Every few minutes an iron car holding several tons of copper rock was run into the plat with a tremendous clatter from the little railway that penetrated to every "drift" and "stope" of the level. Each of these cars was pushed by a team of three wild-looking men, who were stripped naked to the waist. Their haggard faces and naked bodies were begrimed with powder-smoke, stained red with ore-dust, and gleamed in the fitful lamp-light with trickling rivulets of perspiration. The car-pushers were all foreigners – Italians, Bohemians, Hungarians, or Poles – and the uncouth jargon of their shouts intensified the wildness of their appearance. Theirs was the very lowest form of mine drudgery, and but few of them were possessed of intelligence or ambition sufficient to raise them above it.
One, who was accounted somewhat brighter than his fellows, by whom he was regarded as a leader, had indeed been promoted on trial by the timber boss to a position in his own gang. He was a perfect brute for strength, but so densely ignorant and of such sullen disposition that when a better man was offered, in the person of Dick Peveril, the boss was only too glad to return him to his hated task of car-pushing and accept the new-comer in his place. His sentence of degradation, pronounced only the day before, had been received as a personal affront by every wild-eyed car-pusher of the mine. All knew that some one must fill the place from which their leader had been ousted, and all were prepared to hate him the moment his identity should be disclosed.
Thus, as Peveril stumbled awkwardly out of the cage in which he had just made that breathless, mile-deep descent, he was instantly spotted as being a new man, and a team of car-pushers, slaking their thirst at a water-barrel in one corner
