Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/89

 1913.]

“Most assuredly we do!” he replied. “There is no day down there in the tunnel; it is just one long continuous night. You ’d better run home now and go to bed, or you won't be fit to work to-night.”

It was n’t exactly what we had bargained for, working nights and sleeping during the day, but we thought we could stand it for a week. We found it very difficult to get to sleep early, and at 10:30 our alarm-clock awakened us after we had put in less than four hours of slumber. It was the hardest thing in the world to shake off our drowsiness, but the spirit of adventure sustained us, and kept us from backing out. We dressed hastily and had a hearty meal in a little restaurant around the corner, and at a quarter to twelve reported to Hughie Smith at the sand-hog house.

It did n't take us long to put on working clothes and boots. There wassomething weird about the whole affair—the brilliant flaming are lamps here and there casting jet black shadows around the yard; the clank and rattle of machinery; the sound of escaping air; the buckets that came up out of the tunnel, and the swish of the stuff as it slid out into the big hoppers from which it was emptied into carts that hauled it off to fill some low spot in or near the great city. We did n't have much time to muse over what we saw. A whistle sounded, and we assembled at the mouth of the shaft with the other sand-hogs, where checks were handed out. We were no longer known by name, but merely by the numbers on the checks.

The cage that rose suddenly out of the shaft discharged a gang of men, and we took their places. In a moment we were at the bottom of the shaft and stepped out into the tunnel, a huge steel cylinder seventeen feet in diameter. It was fairly well lighted with electric lamps, showingthe heavy steel plating with which it was sheathed. We followed the men down the tunnel, to a sort of bulkhead built across the tube. In this bulkhead were the air-locks, two of them, with doors large enough to admit the trucks on which the mud and sand were carried out from the tunnel heading. The men all crowded into one of the locks. It was a rather long, horizontal cylinder with seats on either side for us to occupy while the pneumatic pressure was turned on. Both doors of the locks were closed, and then the gang boss turned on the air gradually. I could feel the strain on my ear-drums as the air rushed in, although I held my nose and blew as hard as I could. When the air ceased hissing, we knew that the pressure in the lock was the same as that in the tunnel. The foreman then opened the door, and we all trooped out. We had to walk a couple of hundred feet before getting to the shield, The boss stationed his men, and then turned to us. Will had been eagerly waiting for a chance to ask questions. He was full of them, and now he started in; but the boss hushed him up at once.

“Look here, we have n’t any time for any of that! This ain't no tea-party. You are here to work, Do you understand? Take that shovel there and get busy loading this truck. No loafing now!”

Obediently we started work without further words, realizing that we must depend on our eyes to answer our questions. We saw that the tunnel shield was a sort of a drum-like affair with the ends open, but with a diaphragm dividing it in two in the center. There were a number of sliding doors in this diaphragm, through which the men could pass to the outside of the shield, to dig away the soil in front of the tunnel. We found a chance to step through the diaphragm once and see that the front of it was divided into a number of pockets by plates that ran up and down and crosswise. The men worked in the shelter of these pockets, removing the soil in advance of the shield. Our job, however, was inside the shield, loading the trucks with the sand, or “muck,” that was shoveled through the openings in the diaphragm. The trucks, when filled, were hauled away by small electric locomotives, or “dinkies,” as they were called.

We worked hard, sustained by the rich atmosphere; but our muscles were not used to suchlabor, and before long we grew exceedingly tired.Interest in the work about us, however, helped to divert our attention from aches and pains. We