Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/91

 1913.]

Slowly the hours dragged by, Finally, when it seemed as if we could endure it no longer, the signal to quit was sounded, and we all trooped out. Tired! I was never so tired in all my life, and I was desperately hungry, too. The first thing we did was to hunt up a restaurant, where we devoured such a breakfast as astonished the waiter. Then we went straight home to bed.

toward the middle of the week. we were shifted to the heading at the other side of the river. The work here did not differ materially from that which we had been doing, but we found it easier to do a day’s work that began at eight and ended at four  than one that took up the hours between midnight and our customary rising hour. We were learning how to swing the shovel to better advantage, and we were not half so weary when our day’s toil was ended, We got very well acquainted with the men, and found them a pretty decent sort. To be sure, they “jollied” us a great deal, but it was all done in a good-natured way.

Nothing very exciting occurred until the last day of our contract week, That day started wrong. In the first place, the gang foreman failed to show up, and we went down the shaft without him, taking our regular places. Soon the superintendent came down and appointed one of the more experienced men foreman of the gang. That ‘s where the trouble first started.

We had been having considerable difficulty with boulders in the path of the shield. They had to be broken up before they could be hauled out of the way During the night, an extra large boulder had been encountered,and an attempt had been made to blast it. The blasting had failed to make any material impression on the rock, but it had loosened up the silt and mud overhead so that it was in a very shaky condition. Had our foreman shown up that morning, no doubt he would have learned from the foreman of the night gang just what had occurred, and, accordingly, would have proceeded very cautiously; but we went about our work as if nothing had happened.

Several men were outside of the shield at work in the different pockets. The new foreman climbed up into one of the upper pockets, when he noticed a bad leak at the edge of the “apron.” The apron in this case was a curved steel plate that projected from the upper part of the shield, like the poke of a sunbonnet,and protected the men below from material that might fall on them. It was supported by slanting braces. As soon as he saw the leak, the foreman called the men to bring up bags of sand and hay to choke up the hole. Two men climbed up through the door in the diaphragm with bags of sand. The first one, “Jerry,” was about to hand up the bag, and the other fellow, “Jake,” was right behind him, when suddenly, with a sound like a giant