# McClure's Magazine/Volume 33/Number 5/A Question of Salvage

Extracted from McClure's magazine, September 1909 pp. 544–551. Illustrations by J. A. Cahill may be omitted.
A QUESTION OF SALVAGE
BY
GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND
ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. A. CAHILL
"DOWN! Down!" bawled Juozas Barthkus. On hands and knees raw with the cutting of the jagged slate dislodged from the mine roof—he crawled along the gangway in the sudden, shrouding dark. Naked he was to the waist, round which a broad red sash was knotted in the manner of many a Lithuanian miner. On his forehead still smoldered the Wolf lamp, extinguished by the roaring shock of the explosion. His ears still rang with the splitting thunders of it; and all about him he still heard junks of coal and sandstone splintering down in the gallery, but he paid no heed.
"Down! Gat down!" he yelled. "You lis'n vat I says to tell you! Atsígulk! De gaas—de fire—he mebbe coom back! Gat——!"
One of his mangled hands touched something that lay inert across the twisted tram-rail, something big and soft and terribly still.
"Antan, mine buddy!" groaned he, shaking the senseless form. "Antanai! You dead? Vake oop! Ve must to gat out off here, hey vat? De fire—he mebbe come back, now. Antanai!"
With all the strength that the catastrophe had left in him he shook his "buddy," but to no avail. Antan would not rouse. Juozas in the drowning blackness passed his hands over the lad's head.
It was wet—wet with a horrible warm wetness.
"Blood!" groaned the Litvak with stifling lungs. "Blood. Ach! I makes me 'fraid from such a beesness!"
He struggled to think. Thinking was harder labor for Juozas than cutting coal, at any time. Now it was doubly hard, with the resistless stupor of the after-damp numbing his brain. Still, he managed to get some connected idea of what had happened.
The New East workings, he knew, had "let go." And why? The incautious striking of a match, maybe; an overheated lamp; a blown-out shot; any one of a dozen mishaps—who could tell? New East, he understood, had been making gas very badly for some weeks. He himself had spoken about it to MacTavish, the fire-boss, but MacTavish had only cursed him and called him a "Hunkie." Mac's pet aversions were sobriety and East Europeans. Juozas had not answered. Who was he, a Lithuanian cutter, to question Authority? The more so as Katré and the little Domukas had always to be fed and clad, and the sliding scale seemed never to slide up, but always down, down, down.
No, Juozas had not answered. He had simply kept on toiling, with Antan; and now—a spark, something,—the inevitable.
"Teip, istiesy," he murmured dully. "Yas, sure. He gat to happen sometam. Dat so! He gat to!" Thus he felt resigned. Ages of fatalism in his blood asserted themselves. He sat down on the track and waited.
What, he wondered, had befallen the rest of Cumberland? How big had the explosion been? How far had the gases penetrated? Who, if anybody, was still living in the gallery? Juozas could not even guess. But in his dull, slow way, one concept at a time, he concluded that all the pit-men between the main shaft and the Old Sump, where he now was, must either have escaped by now or else be dead. That anybody except himself could still remain alive there he thought impossible. That explosion—ach! what an explosion it had been!
With painful mental gropings he got a vision of the pit-mouth: the huddle of dust-grimed buildings; the huge, lop-sided, roaring breakers; the reeking, ever-smoking culm-banks, and the high board fence topped by its trocha of barb-wire; and outside that fence—the women! The women and the children, wailing in long, shrill, minor cries, or mayhap stricken into dumbness. The women, with their broad, flat, pale faces underneath their shawls. The crowding, jostling, agonizing women! Katré, he well knew, was there among them now, gripping the little Domukas by his thin paw.
And at thought of that, Juozas burst into long and hoarse howls, inchoate, horrible.
No answer! No call, no word of comradeship; nothing but the drip-drip-drip of the mine-water, somewhere, and the slide and rattle of still falling slate. No lights, no voices—nothing!
Once more the Litvak yelled. The stifled echoes died, leaving him all, all alone in that abyss of night.
Alone? No, he had forgotten Antan. There lay the boy, still prone across the rails. Juozas lowered his head, listening intently. A faint wheezing murmur reached his ears.
"He livin', hey vat?" panted the miner.
A moment his mind cleared, despite the dead air, foul with choke-damp. He realized that there might still be some small chance for safety. But where? Up along the gallery, toward the main shaft? That was a good three quarters of a mile distant, the shaft was, and the gallery reeked with strangling gases. Even were it not choked by falls and menaced by fire, Juozas understood he never could win through. And the boy? Could he leave him, in search of safety elsewhere? He had to choose!
"If I stay, I mebbe to die," reflected the imprisoned man, with painful care. "If I go, he die, teip!" His mind sluggishly pondered the choice. To save Antan at all, he understood, he must in some way manage to drag him down along the gangway and into a "room" or working-chamber which opened off to the left, three hundred yards farther toward the heading.
This room, lower than the bottom of the cut, was joined to it by a narrowish neck hewn through the living coal. There, if anywhere, they might escape the fire, should the fire come—provided only that Juozas had sufficient strength left to get the boy thither in time. Only in that refuge could they find air enough to last till help should come.
Juozas felt absolutely certain that help would come! He had seen other explosions. He had helped dig out five buried Polacks, last year. He had witnessed their wild greeting just outside the colliery fence. He, too, he and Antan, would surely be saved and greeted thus—if only they could keep alive till some rescue gang found them!
"Dey von't to leave us die here, Ne! Ne!" said Juozas very slowly to himself in the close stillness. "Niekada! Dev vill not neffer do it! I makes me to go in de chamber now, me an' mine buddy."
With huge exertion—for he felt strangely weak—he got to his knees, then stood upright. His head struck a jagged rift of rock. His eyes dazzled with sparks, but he cared not for the pain.
"De roof!" his only thought was. "She been low. She mebbe to fall, hey vat? I been 'fraid from it, de roof, sure. Ve must gat avay, now, quick!"
He bent over the unconscious Antan. A sort of stolid rage welled up in him at so much darkness. If only he had a light, now, he might see what hurt the boy had taken; he might spy out the way and see what obstacles opposed. But there was no light. His lamp was smashed and dead; and to strike a match, he knew, might fire the whole cutting.
No matter. He would fight the dark just as he would fight the choke-damp, and the rock-falls, and the whole of Cumberland Mine, if that were necessary. He got a hand-grip on the buddy's coarse woolen shirt. Stumbling forward along the tramway ties, he half dragged, half carried Antan down along the gallery.
Once he fell, the lad with him, inert as a bag of slack. But again he found his hold, and sweated on. The footing was uncertain. His mine-boots slipped on the wet rubbish of the road-bed, slid on rucks of greasy slate and small loose coal. Fallen props tripped him. His breath, too, hampered him. It seemed hardly to penetrate his lungs at all, but merely to strain in his contracted throat. His head ached bitterly; his ears sang with buzzing diapasons, but he would not give in. Now and again he laid the boy down and explored forward on hands and knees, feeling always on the left wall for the chamber-mouth.
"Here she been!" he choked at last, and dragged Antan down the slope into the room.
The air, it seemed, was fresher here, damp and cool with the moisture of this lowest working of the Cumberland. Juozas felt a little strength return. On to the end of the chamber he drudged, right down to the "face," where the spur of the tram-line terminated.
There, with Antan's head upon his knees, he settled down for the long wait—the wait till help should come.
II
How long he sat there, who could tell? Time there seems none where there is neither light nor sound. The drowsiness that grappled him he fought off with a dogged patience. To yield—well, Juozas knew what that would mean!
After a time a slow thought was born in the Litvak's mind. He took off his crimson sash, tore it into strips, and clumsily bound up Antan's head.
"Mebbe he vake op, so. Hey vat?" he reflected. "It don't to be so lonesome if he vake op!"
He talked to the unconscious boy. "I like it you vake op!" said he, with mild persistence.
"But mebbe it been better for you if you ain't—not till de help coom!"
His thoughts trailed out, long, ponderous, unafraid. Now that the first instinctive fear had died in him, no other took its place. Rescue, he believed, was only a matter of time. Men could live long, he knew, without eating. And as for drinking, was there not ditch-water, if it came to that? There might be much suffering, yes—but—— Juozas shrugged his massive naked shoulders in the dark.
"I go, myself, pretty soon," said he. "I go, ven I been sure de damp been clear out, an' see where de gallery she been block op. But if I go, if I stay, no metter. Dey safe us, annyho!"
That thought never left him: Authority, up yonder at the pit-mouth, would save!—Authority, stern to repress, yet strong to rescue. So Juozas, leaning stolidly on perfect confidence, Waited—waited—waited. Is there anywhere on earth or under earth any other patience like the dumb, slow, fatalistic patience of the Slav?
After a long time, very, very long, Juozas seemed to perceive a dull, vague blur against the black—just the ghost of a ruddy smudge.
"Mine eye she been bad," he told himself, and winked to drive away the blur; but it persisted. He decided it was not a trick of his vision, wrought by the foul, gas-laden air.
"De mine she been to burn, somewhere," he decided. "I guess so; I go see it."
He put the still unconscious boy down from off his knees and stumbled out once more to the gallery. Fear he had none. A fire? They would put it out! Smoke? They would draw it up with fails! "They" would do everything, even unto saving Antan the Polander and Juozas the Litvak.
Out in the gallery, when he had groped his way thither, he saw dim reflections from far off toward the main shaft. Fitful gleams played over the black walls and roof.
"I t'ink so, she burn," he remarked simply. "No metter. Before she burn here, help coom. Hey vat? Sure, istiesu! It coom—if dey knows ve here! ..."
The new concept spoke itself almost without his own volition. If they know! But do they know? Or do they think both he and Antan are either dead or else out of the workings by this time? Has any count been taken? Do they know?
He pondered all this slowly, calmly, for a while, despite the strange pain that ringed his brows, despite the droning in his ears.
At last, "I mak' dem to know!" said he.
Bending, he groped in the road-bed, found a lump of slate, and with it squatted beside the tramway. He began to hammer on the twisted rail—Tunk! Tunk! Tnnh-tunk-tunk!
A long time he hammered, with steady cadences. The light of the fire kept growing ever brighter, stronger. A scent of acrid, biting smoke began to drift down the gallery, mingling with the lethal air, making it still more deadly. Juozas' pain and lassitude increased. The work of signaling got very hard. The man's big bare arms rose and fell more slowly; they seemed to weigh a ton. A great weariness was rising up about him, as the tide rises about a castaway on a splinter of deserted rock. Exhaustion was engulfing him. His whole body seemed leaden. Moment by moment, his eyes kept sagging shut. He crouched there by the tramway, still hammering on the rail by sheer brutal, bulldog stubbornness. The time of rescue, he thought vaguely, was very long—much longer than he had expected.
"I must mak' dem to know!" he still repeated to himself, swaying at his task like a man blind-drunk. "Mak' dem know. Dey coom. Dey safe us, teip, me an' mine buddy!"
Tunk! . . Tunk! . . Tunk-tunk-tunk!
III
MacTavish, the fire-boss, his square face grimed with sweat and coal-dust, burst open the door of Cumberland Pit office and stumbled in.
With him there entered, bellying along the floor, a roll of bitter smoke, which blent and mingled with the already smoky air of the room.
"Feckless lunacy!" MacTavish bellowed with hoarse rage. "New East's all blazin'—Old Sump's like t' go next, an' then——! Arrrh, these eejit Hunkies, ramstam sooties out o' hell, t' burrn old Cumberland on me so! To go an'——"
"There, now, Mack, that's enough!" Connover snapped him short. Connover, the superintendent, was used to obedience or else fist-play; a lover of few words. This brawling fire-boss, mouthy, irate, alcoholic, was a red rag to him at any time, now trebly red.
"That's enough!" the "super" shouted. "Shut that there door, you! Want t' smoke us all out, here?"
MacTavish obeyed, chopfallen. Connover's scorn of him he paid back with bitter interest of hate—the hate of a small mind, a tyrant mind, for a large and vigorous soul which dominates, yet which is just.
"Come here!"
The Scotchman came. Blinking with smoke-rheumed eyes, he perceived another figure than Connover's, sitting across the table from the superintendent; a small figure, dry, wizened, keen-sighted.
"Eh? Why, 'twull be Maister Vandenburgh, sir?" he faltered, tugging off his cap.
Vandenburgh never so much as looked his way. With Cumberland ablaze, Cumberland, in which he held nine shares of every ten, he had no breath for fire-bosses.
"Drinkin' again, you?" Connover's voice rose sharp above the blur of tangled sounds that beat in from the colliery inclosure—sounds of creaking cables, hoarse coughing of exhaust-pipes, shouts, whistles, pandemonium from which he and Vandenburgh had shut themselves away in the office, to think, to plan what must be done. "MacTavish, you fool, you've been at th' booze again!"
"Na, na, mun, only a wee drappie," hiccoughed the Scot. "Juist a nip, sir, 'gainst fire an' water an' such-likes. Ye wadna blame me, sir?" His eyes were red and sullen as he gestured with great, dirty paws at his scorched hair and dripping clothes.
"Come here an' report. You ain't much, that's a fact, but you're somethin'. How's she stand now, down below? Out with it!"
"I'm sore afeared——"
"Cut that! Give us th' facts!"
"A-weel, New East's guid as gone, an' only sax hours after blawin', at that." The intonation of the fire-boss was ugly. "Old Sump's like t' go, I tolt ye a'ready. An' after that——"
"I know!" interrupted Connover sharply. "We got to stop this thing, an' stop it quick. Once she gets goin', she'll maybe take weeks to put out."
"Months!" roared MacTavish. He slapped one hand on Connover's desk and smeared the other over his red jowls, lining them with dirty marks. "Months? Years, mayhap, wi' the richness o' it—like Baker's Creek Number Five, ye'll mind?"
Vandenburgh stood up and made as though to speak, but changed his mind and closed his traplike jaws with a click. He turned and walked over to the office window, stood there, and gazed out; a little round-shouldered, ungainly creature, flint-faced, with gray, impenetrable eyes.
"Years!" the Scot reiterated fiercely. "Spite o' vent-holes an' brattices, spite o' wallin' up wi' masonry, spite o' hell! Once she gets her head——"
Vandenburgh seemed not to listen. He seemed only to gaze out across the smoky inclosure, with hard eyes. In his heart blazed a fire of rage and hate hotter than the coal fire down there, very deep down, two thousand feet below him—rage at the inanimate, cursed, fiery nature of the Pit—hate of the dumb stupidity of what to him were jabbering, flat-faced, foreign beasts, the toilers in his mine.
His glance swept over the darkening place, with bonfires blazing here and there and smoke rising contorted from the headgear of the shaft. It took in the decrepit tipple on its gaunt, high stilts; the cables, runs, and wheels standing up in fantastic skeleton outline against the menace of the November sky.
Powdered with jetty dust was everything above; slimed with a greasy, sticky mud everything below. The mine-owner noted with supreme contempt his workmen clotted in a shifting group about the hoisting-lift—the figures wallowing hither or yon through the mud, all blurred, all made unreal and grotesque by the drifting smoke-clouds wherein the arcs winked feebly.
Beyond the engine-house, he knew, beyond the pump-house and the colliery fence, outside the restraining barb-wire, a great mob was swarming with frantic, ant-hill eagerness—a mob waiting its cheap dead. He heard the tumult of that mob, did Vandenburgh, but his lip only curled.
As he looked, he listened too. He harkened every word that Connover and the fire-boss were saying. That was a favorite trick of Vandenburgh's. It had gained him much, the ability (when vital things were forward) to slip indifference on as one puts on a coat. No word escaped him.
"An' so ye'll see, sir," MacTavish was saying, "ye'll see we've done a' we can do, save juist that. I've even got a gang o' fufty, in ten-minute shifts, wi' hose on th' breast o' Lower Seven. But 'tis no guid, in my opeenion. She's gainin' steady, worrkin' deeper——"
"The men are all out, you say?"
"Ou aye—that is, sir, sax-an'-forty o' th' staumrel knurls was doon, ye'll onderstand. Weel, thirty-two's came up alive, in th' cage. Nine's deid. That'll mak' one-an'-forty, eh? Five unaccounted for. There'll be three o' them in Eight, I'm thinkin', an' twa in Sump. But, do ye no see?" and MacTavish rapped impatiently on the table with his filthy nail. "Do ye no onderstand? Th' three wull be dead lang syne. Whoosh, mun! 'Tis fair a furrnace the noo, I'm tellin' ye!"
"Yes, yes. But how about the two in Sump?"
"Oh, them? You mean that Ba'thkus eejit, I'm thinkin', and Antan What's-his Nameovitch. A-weel, seems like they'll be deid, too. Must be, eh?"
"How so?"
MacTavish leered and steadied himself against the table.
"They'll be deid th' noo!" he declared stubbornly.
"Are they?"
"Ou aye. They—"
"You're a damned liar! I know by th' way you answer, you!"
"Na, na, Maister Connover, sir! Deid? Why, for sure—or, if they ain't, forby, there'll be no whit's th' dufference!"
Connover shot a piercing glance at the fire-boss. MacTavish could not meet the look. His bleary eyes shifted, and he stammered into incoherence.
"You lie, Mack, an' you know it! There's a lot you ain't tellin' me. Come, spit it out!"
"Hunkies!" bellowed the Scot, with sudden blind rage. "Damn, chancy, jabberin' brutes, th' lot!" A withering fury blazed up in his drunken soul. "Hunkovitches! Likes o' them as sets off mines wi' their everlastin' nonsense! No safety-lamp but they can start a blaze wi'! No rules that they'll gie heed to! . . ."
His fists were swinging now; the eyes were rolling in his head.
"Likes o' them as burrns up coal by million dollars' worth—ties up th' pits—throws white men oot frae warkin', by th' thousan'! Alive, them twa? Aye, damn their Rooshian bones, alive—which they'd nae been, by God, no, not one, if I'd my way wi' 'em! Alive, doon in Old Sump, an' rap-rap-rappin' on th' rail, though I misdoot if any leevin' soul has heerd 'em but juist mysel', an' me th' lunatic t' tell it! Rap-rap-rappin'—for why? For men like us, white men, t' risk guid lives——"
"MacTavish!"
Connover sprang up and faced the fire-boss. His chair clattered backward. The Scot remained open-mouthed, panting with the lust of murder.
"Mack, that's enough! You skunk! Say, for two cents I'd—I'd ——"
"Hold on there, Mr. Connover," said a voice, a dry, sharp, colorless voice. The superintendent found himself facing Vandenburgh.
"You mean?"
"I mean this, Mr. Connover, that every question has two sides. Look at both, in this one, if you please." The mine-owner's courtesy was pungent. "I mean this, that we know now just where we stand and just how to choose our course."
"Choose? You—there's a—choice what to do?"
"Of course. From what MacTavish here says, we've got to act quick or the whole of Cumberland's likely to go up in smoke. If we take this thing in hand at once, if we flood the lower levels now——"
"But, my God! There's men down in Old Sump—living men!"
"Only two. Only one, maybe. They can't be saved, anyhow, with the fire all ahead of them as it is in New East."
"Can't? How about Number Nine manway? Put on a big gang there, cut through from the adit to the old showdown tunnel, and then——"
"How long would that take?"
"Only till to-morrow morning!"
"By which time we'd have lost thousands of tons, and the fire would have gained such headway—you see? No, decidedly not. MacTavish here is right, for once. You're wrong."
Vandenburgh smiled. It was a dry slit of a smile, cracking his beardless face into myriad puckers.
"You're wrong, Mr. Connover. Good intentions, and all, but bad judgment, very. Flood the mine, by all means. Yes, call up O'Donnell, please. Have the pumps started. Then——"
"Living men!"
"See here, Connover." The mine-owner's voice got fine and cold as a razor-edge. "See here, don't be Utopian. We're all practical men here, I hope. Don't be a fool! Why, man, if you were down there, trapped, and those beasts were up here, and if by flooding the mine they could put ten cents a day more onto their cards, d'you suppose they'd hesitate? Not much!"
"Living men, 1 tell you!" Connover's protest rose harsh, unyielding.
"Idiot! How about all these other thousands of living men, eh? these other thousands that'll be thrown out of work, that'll starve, if this thing goes on? How about my duty to them? How about my duty to my stock-holders? To Christ Church, with its five hundred and sixty shares in Cumberland? How about the widows and children that look to Cumberland for their living from the dividends? We've got to choose, I tell you, and choose quick! If the mine burns out and the midwinter dividends are passed, what'll I have to meet them with?"
Vandenburgh came close up to the desk. He had a pencil in his hand. He rapped with it upon the desk, as though to drive his meaning into Connover's skull.
"Meet them?" asked Connover, in a daze.
"Yes, meet them! What'll I have to meet my duty with? My duty as one of the men into whose hands God has given the property interests of this country? What, eh? Words, just words! Words won't pay dividends! Words won't——"
"By the living Lord!" cried Connover, and his clenched fist rose in air. "By the living Lord, so long's I'm superintendent of Cumberland there'll be no men drowned for dividends! Once the men are all out, all right, start the pumps. But out they're comin' first! I'll put two hundred men to work, three hundred——"
"Rot! Those pumps, 've got to start at once; you hear? Call up O'Donnell; call him quick!"
"What?"
"You don't understand English, eh?" sneered Vandenburgh. "I said, start those pumps!"
"No, by Jesus!"
The mine-owner laughed outright. "Oh, yes, you will," he mocked. "You will! I just crook my finger, here, and things are done."
"This won't be done!"
"And why not, please?" His voice grew soft again, and fine.
"Because—because when O'Donnell knows—when the men know——"
"Oh, but they aren't going to know, you see. Who'll tell them?"
"Who? Well, James R. Connover, that's who!"
"Ha, ha! Hardly! You won't leave this office till it's all over. And then what? Who's to prove it? Who's to believe it or even listen to such a story? You know! Nobody! It'll be your word against mine, here, and MacTavish's. Why, man, it's preposterous. Don't be a driveling fool!"
Vandenburgh leaned across the table and picked up a burnt match in his sleek fingers.
"Don't you realize," he gibed, "don't you know that I can break you like that?" He snapped the bit of wood. "Don't you know that if I say so——"
Connover glanced round like a trapped lion. His eyes, wide with horror, felt on the telephone. Useless to try for that, he knew; insane even to think of it. He looked at the door, gaging its distance.
Vandenburgh saw the look.
"Now, now!" he shrilled, his mask of self-restraint slitting and tearing away in rags of passion. "Now, there, no foolishness!"
But already Connover was round the table, rushing for the door.
"Stop that lunatic!" screamed the magnate.
Up in front of Connover rose Burr MacTavish, his brute face empurpled with drink, with fury, with race-hatred and the long-pent bitterness of spite. Connover lashed out at him, but the man dodged. Then, suddenly, something that crushed, something that annihilated, smote Connover on the head.
Shrieking, he flung up both his arms, and fell.
Vandenburgh, laughing, dropped the pipe-wrench he had struck with, and reached for the telephone.
IV
The flood from the gigantic over-driven bull-pumps caught Juozas (screeching with sudden agonies of horror) right at the face of the chamber. It caught Antan, too, but that did not matter, for Antan had been dead an hour.
But Juozas the Litvak, husband of the flat-faced Katré, father of the little Domukas, had to die as a rat dies when its trap is soused be neath the water in a tub, with stones laid on to keep the creature down. You have seen that, eh? The rat swimming, swimming under water, with a fine silvery line of bubbles pouring from its nose and mouth as the bursting lungs refuse to hold? Then, kicking, writhing, palpitating, growing still, with glazed eyes and upturned lip that shows the fangs? Only a rat! A beast! Juozas had to die a rat's death.
He made a game fight of it, though, Juozas did; very game, considering his weakness and exhaustion—astonishingly game! When the loud waters first began pouring in, before the main flood burst upon him, he gathered up the body of Antan and tried to struggle up the sloping fore-breast. In some vague and stupid way of his own he thought maybe to save the body till "they" should come—for would "they" not come before it was too late?
Not for long, though, he held the body. In roared the deluge, frothing, leaping, crushing down roof-props, twisting tram-rails like bits of string. In it lashed, hurling forward on its lip a mass of timbers, ties, all manner of débris—a black, cold, foul, irresistible torrent, whipped to frenzy by its long fall, by its repulse at the heading of the cut, by its swirl through the gangway into the chamber. Round and round it boiled. From Juozas' clutch it dragged the body of the Polish boy.
Then higher up climbed Juozas, and higher still in the black dark, up the loose coal, with the loud waters at his heels, the thunder of its tumult in his ears. A handhold broke. He plunged backward. His screams became only a bubbling in the maelstrom as he, too, swept round and round the chamber, together with the body and the other refuse, in a cold, black, hideous dance of death.
It was a dream, then, to Juozas; just a wild nightmare, mercifully short, from which the miner knew there never would be any more awakening; a nightmare, monstrous, unreal, yet flashed through here and there by some coherent thought, some perception—as of Katre and the little Domukas standing in the rain and the sticky mud outside the colliery gate, waiting, watching with the others in that big crowd as things were carried out under blankets, things that had been men, husbands, fathers. He saw it all quite clearly for a second; then it faded and the kinetoscope-film of his mind grew dim and blurred, till up flashed a scrap of prayer in his own Lithuanian tongue, "'Ob, Dieve! . . ." and after that a wild, terrible, agonizing lust for life, for a sight once more of the sun, which set him fighting starkly, thrashing with supreme abandon as he whirled. Then that left him, and he sank, passive, swirled to the surface, sank again.
What was this torturing thought, this wild wonder? He knew; it was, Why had "they" failed to come, to save? . . . Juozas' last upgathering of reason flung itself upon that problem. Suddenly he knew! They had not heard his knocking on the rail!
"Dey not hear me! . . . Nobody hear—God!—nobody, only You! You hears me—even ven I don't to knock! . . ."
A whirling beam hit Juozas on the head. All thought ceased, all consciousness, all fear, all pain. Juozas ceased absolutely. Even the bubbles of his last breath, silvery bubbles in the black waters, made no sound above the droning roar of the great flood.
But for a long, long time his body, Antan's body, the shoring-timbers, tramway-ties, and all the other worn-out, broken, useless, unproductive rubbish whirled round and round and round together in the dark.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 87 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse