CHAPTER THREE

When Henry Duncane turned off the main road at West Thor Mine and began to climb the crooked hill, his car passed first over the railroad spur, and then ran between the shafthouse and the roaring building across the road which housed the giant hoists. It twisted on around the compressor house, which lay a little higher, and passed, in turn, a very long, low and very narrow wooden building which lay on a shelf of land and was divided like a ruler, of which the inch nearest the crooked road was Captain Trezona’s office. (Back of that, other offices—the clerks’, the timekeepers’, the mining engineer’s and his staff, and the chemist’s.)

Above this, a footpath snaked and climbed off over the hillside, to the dry. (A change house, for the men who worked underground and of course wore special and necessary costumes to do so.) Highest buildings of all on the hill—the carpenter shop and the machine shop, lay on opposite sides of the road. Duncane’s car passed between these two. Here the road ended; the woods came down over the crown of the hill like a cap of curls. There was, however, an upper road, a mere trail that wound off along the hairline above the mine buildings, below the woods on the rim of the sloping meadows that lay to the east and to the west.

On it, Duncane turned his car right and left on a patch of bare ground.

His office bit off this upper corner of the machine shop, and a peaceful north light came in upon his desk and upon the high draftsman’s desk where a young man, named Bush, was working.

Henry inspected the drawing in progress and commented. Then he sat at his desk and spoke on the telephone.

As chief engineer, Duncane’s finger was on the pulse of mechanical power.

He was responsible for everything in the way of machinery that was being erected or operated either on surface or underground. Under him worked the men who erected or operated; among them the electricians, hoisting engineers, pumpmen, the compressor house crew, the machine shop men, and those who tended the stream turbines and the power plant.

Thor mines used electric power. The Company had harnessed for this purpose a fall of the Sturgeon River, about five miles south and east of the town. If and when this source was interrupted, then the stream turbines drew power from coal.

Power there had to be, for mines are wet. Water seeps out of the rock and accumulates. A hole in the ground will fill, and a mine, however vast and complex, is a hole in the ground. The pumps must run. Almost seventy-five per cent of the power generated went, in fact, to do this pumping. (At West Thor, for instance, eighteen hundred gallons of water had to be raised twelve hundred feet every minute, day and night.)

Besides this, of course, the men, mules, timber, and all else, including the ore itself that came up from its deep home, had to be hoisted by power. And besides, power had to compress the air that thereafter ran down through a multitude of pipes to operate the drills that drilled the holes into which they tamped the dynamite that ripped the rock open.

Power there had to be. All the time. Duncane could never put aside his responsibility. Not only because the mine worked day and night shifts, but because the water does not cease to seep out of the rock because night falls and men go home to bed. He was on call, as is a doctor who goes home to bed like other men, but gets up for trouble.

Trouble was a large part of Henry’s business.

There was, this Tuesday afternoon, a little trouble at the pumping station on the twelfth level. (So called, because it lay twelve hundred feet below the surface.) So, in mid-afternoon, dressed in oilskins, boots, and a miner’s hat, Duncane entered the cage to go down. The cage was no plush elevator.

Henry rang the signal himself—two bells to lower. The engineer sat on a platform in the building across the way with his hands on the tall levers and his eyes on a huge indicator, and could not possibly see who was riding, yet knew it was Duncane and dropped him like a stone. Henry grinned. It was a delicate attention.

Underground, Thomas Thomas, the little Welshman, looking over his shoulder, let the anxiety peel off his face and fall away. The arrival of Duncane had this effect. He never seemed to fumble. If he did not at once perceive the source of trouble and its remedy, he at once began to look for it. And Duncane’s groping was so full of purpose; he hunted for cause with such order and clarity, that he was totally reassuring. One felt that Henry Duncane would get to the bottom of a problem if it were humanly possible, and one further felt that it was humanly possible, of course.

He was quick to reject a useless idea a split second after he saw it was leading nowhere. So he often came to the useful idea so quickly that the whole process of hypothesis, of exploration and discard, was lost to sight, and his men would whistle and wonder by what magic he was able to go, as it seemed, instantaneously to the answer.

He was not quite so quick to blame a human error—but quick enough. And when he did, the man who had made it knew he had better not make the same mistake again. Henry attracted responsibility; it gravitated toward him and he took it and he carried it. But, by the same token, he expected other people to be responsible. Since he knew what he could expect from a metal shape under certain forces, and that, within limits which he recognized, the expectation was reliable, he tended also to expect obedience and accuracy from his men, within limits that were a trifle rigid, for they did not reckon with the soft blobs of formless personal emotion that fog and impede the functioning of the human organism.

Nevertheless, his men were always relieved to see him. For characteristically, Henry’s severity was perfectly reliable. If a man mended his ways he was not nagged, and all came to be imbued with Henry’s simple idea: Look for the trouble and eliminate it, wherever it lies. So the worry fell off the Welshman’s face, and he began to tell Henry eagerly all he’d known, all he’d done and not done.

The pumping station was well lighted—although the dark was not far off—for darkness here was implacable. Unless it was fought, it fell without a chink or a ray. All around rose the dank and faintly acid smell that prevailed in this deep place.

But the long drifts that were lit, the crosscuts that were not, the high slopes and the raises where men carried their light on their hats, and otherwise had none; all this that lay about and beyond was none of Henry’s business.

It was the business of John Erickson, the chief mining engineer, to know the extent of the ore body here. He and his assistant, Gilchrist, and the staff of surveyors plotted and charted the position of the ore, and they directed man’s attack upon it.

It was the business of Captain Gideon Trezona to boss, through a hierarchy of assistants and shift bosses, the miners, drillers, muckers, trammers, timbermen, and all who, working underground, got the ore out.

It took Duncane less than an hour to diagnose the trouble and arrange for its cure. That was that.

The cage, going up, stopped at the tenth level. A young surveyor, named Davies, who stepped on, saluted Henry. “My boss is back there feuding with Captain T. I’m getting out ahead before I say something.”

“You’re not going to make it,” Henry said, peering.

In courtesy they waited for the two men who could be seen looming rapidly out of the poorly lit distance.

Captain Gideon Trezona came striding. He was of medium height, but so thin as to seem taller. He had a long, narrow face with a narrow thin-lipped mouth that never quite closed over his long teeth. He had a thin, high-bridged nose and frosty blue eyes. He was fifty-five years old, and in his prime, for he had a cold toughness that showed no sign of diminishing.

Alex Gilchrist was a much younger man. He wore his habitual smile of blended patience and exasperation, a smile that was in its way more arrogant than the captain’s cold face altogether, for it implied: I hear you, but you don’t understand, and on the whole, your obtuseness amuses me.

After the first murmurs and nods, the four of them rode to the surface without speaking. This silence would have been intolerable to four women in the same circumstances. Four women would have used bright patter to ease the knowledge of tension between two of the party or even the mere accident of being in each others’ company. But the four men had no patter.

It wasn’t Henry’s business. Davies, subordinate, kept his mouth shut. Captain Trezona had said all he intended to say and was in the cage for the purpose of getting above. Gilchrist was glum behind his pitying smile and felt no compulsion to disguise this.

The cagetender’s eyes rolled to see such a concentration of authority.

On surface, the captain strode off up the hill with no farewell. Davies grinned and followed him by a few paces. But Gilchrist held Duncane, grumbling, “That son of a gun …”

Henry waited to be told why.

“Know what he is going to do now until quitting time?” Gilchrist nodded after the captain’s climbing figure. “Sit in his office and read the Bible.”

Henry grunted.

“We’re taking a second side-slice off a pillar. All of a sudden, he sticks his nose in the air and says he doesn’t like it.”

“Cousin Jack,” shrugged Henry.

“Sometimes I wonder …” Gilchrist said. He was a wonderer. For all his air of pitying another’s ignorance, Gilchrist himself was carefully what he would call “open minded.” He not only saw both sides, but was often on both sides of a question.

He and Henry Duncane were classmates and, if not the closest of friends, at least acquaintances of long standing. Gilchrist often told his troubles to Duncane. Duncane rarely told his troubles to anybody.

“Can’t figure out whether he’s got a reason,” said Gilchrist impatiently, “or if he just turns stubborn every once in awhile for the fun of it.”

“In what way is he being stubborn?” asked Henry. They had begun to walk.

“Oh well, he’s going ahead, that’s true,” Gilchrist said in that exasperated tone. “He won’t quit on anything he starts. Never has. But I can’t pin him down to why he doesn’t like it. When I try, he brings in God. That stops me, Henry. How can you talk to a man who brings God into a discussion?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry, with some sympathy.

“Sometimes, I wonder.” Gilchrist shook his head.

“Talked to Erickson or the Old Man, about it?”

“Erickson’s on a trip; you know that. McKeever says pay no attention.”

“Pay no attention then.”

But Gilchrist shook his head again, uneasily.

“That old Cousin Jack—got no education—never read a technical book in his life, I suppose. But these, these Cornishmen … got it in their bones.…”

“Got what?” Henry was not the man for mystic intuitions.

Gilchrist sucked his cheek. “Damned if I know. Knowledge, maybe.” His eyes wavered.

“Knowledge doesn’t come in the bone, Alex. You mean he might have a hunch, based on experience, that he can’t explain? Something like that?”

“It may be,” said Gilchrist uneasily. “The timbering looks good. The roof’s all right. We’ve done it before.”

They climbed in silence.

“Did he like it before?” asked Henry thoughtfully.

“No,” said Gilchrist with relief. “That’s right, come to think of it, he did not.”

Henry laughed, and they parted.

When the whistle blew, Eedie Trezona peered into her oven and then shifted pots on the top of the wood range until they were safe to leave for a few moments. She went into the dining room, where her daughter, Dorothy, was setting table.

“Dickie ’ome?”

“He’s down in the field, Ma.”

“Call ’im, dearie. I’ll just be waking Wesley now.”

Dorothy went out onto the porch which overlooked a whole fold of the land, almost a private valley, from this high point on the north of it. Eedie gathered her skirts to climb the stairs.

Gideon Trezona had come over from the ‘old country’ as a very young man. But Edith, his wife, and the children, of course, had been born in Michigan. The Cornish twist to their tongues was graduated accordingly. The children had it hardly at all. Eedie herself dropped her aitches, but not always. Only the captain sometimes abused his pronouns. Yet all of them kept something of the rhythm, a swift anapaest replacing now and then like a little dance step the iambic march of the English.

Eedie climbed swiftly. Her son, Wesley, was asleep in the largest of the three upstairs bedrooms, for he was on night shift this week and must sleep by day.

If anyone had told Edith Trezona that she was a pretty woman, she would have laughed merrily, and in so laughing been prettier than ever. Small and dainty in body, she was not stout, but pleasantly not thin either, with a neat bosom. Although she was forty-five years old, and sought in no way to deny it, her age seemed like a veil, a gauze thrown over her, so that there was only a faint softening of the line of her chin, and a gentle diminishing of her color. Her hair still was light brown in effect and, although she wore it according to her age and station—pulled straight up all around to a matronly knob on the top of her head—the tendrils that escaped around the forehead and lay on the nape of her neck rolled of themselves into shadowy little curls. Her skin was not a young girl’s skin any more, but it was fine and fair, even so, and the cast of her face—round, high at the cheekbones—was pretty as a very young girl’s face is pretty. She had small and beautifully even teeth and she smiled a great deal of the time.

She had the gift of being happy. This seemed to her a normal condition. She had no idea it was rare. Everything about her inconvenient, high perched, isolated and old-fashioned frame house pleased her very much. The smells of supper now, the long sunbeams lowering towards the day’s end, and the sense of the family drawing toward home at an appointed time, were her delight. The sight of her son, asleep with the quilt kicked askew, filled her with tenderness toward him and toward a good God.

She touched him gently.

“Ma?” he stirred.

“Whistle blew, son.”

“All right, Ma,” he yawned and he burrowed. But just the same as he awakened, he passed increasingly into that state of tension, that strain she sensed was the accompaniment of Wesley’s consciousness these days. So Eedie sat down close beside him. Her hand touched his neck.

“Wesley?”

“Ma?”

“Is she mad?” She meant angry. “Are her people mad, do you think?”

“Uh uh …” he said in vigorous denial. And Eedie knew she was not on the right track towards discovering what it was that was worrying him. Something was worrying him, she well knew, although he had not said so.

“Are you thinkin’ about the girl much, Wesley?” she asked delicately.

“Not much,” he said.

He had turned so that his face lay in profile to her. He was looking past his long lashes across the room away. Eedie believed that he did not think much about the girl any more.

“It’s all passed over then?” She stroked him.

“Sure, Ma.” His mouth went into the pillow. He was not sure.

“I think about the girl sometime,” Eedie confessed. “If she liked you, Wesley—now to be cut off might make her feel bad, eh? Or sad. Or mad.” She smiled at her own rhyming.

Wesley said, “We had a lot of fun kidding, Ma. I told you.”

She stroked him. Her fingers said, yes I remember. I know you did no wrong. There was no wickedness.

“You didn’t ever tell ’er what Pa said …”

“Pa said I better never see her at all. Best cut it right off. So I did.” He squirmed but his voice was calm. “And anyway …” he murmured.

“I’ve been thinkin’, Pa would have give you leave to talk to ’er—straight out. Would that been kinder?”

“Oh Ma, no, Ma. No …” He rolled. “And I couldn’t’ve. How could I, Ma? We never … never got nowhere near thinking about getting married. I told you. Anyhow she knows. It gets to her.”

Eedie was trying to imagine what could be troubling him.

“And listen,” he said. “Her people wouldn’t want her to get married to me, neither.”

Eedie said slowly, “I see that. Still it’s ’ard.”

“Ma, let me up, eh?”

She felt the tension in him now like springs and she rose to release him. “Pa means to watch out for you,” she murmured still groping to understand.

“I know.” He flung over toward his mirror and rubbed his head.

“I suppose,” said Eedie in an intuitive flash, “young people think less of a boy who minds ’is Pa, eh?”

Now she knew that her hunt to understand was getting warm. He stiffened.

“I’m not just minding Pa,” Wesley said. “You know that, Ma. Pa’s right. If I wouldn’t want to marry her, I should quit going with her.”

“You saw what Pa was getting at,” she said thoughtfully, “and Pa and me know that. But maybe there’s bound to be a little while before the young people would see you’re not just mindin’ Pa, eh?”

Wesley didn’t answer.

“Well, you’ve got past that now,” she said in hope.

He said, “Ma, I got to change clothes.”

It was evasive and Eedie let it be. Wesley was not yet past all of it. In just what way she did not know, but it had something to do with this kind of trouble. Maybe his friends were jeering at him for an obedient boy.

How Eedie Trezona, sheltered in her own world as she was, nevertheless knew what this younger generation’s attitude might be, she could not have told. But she did know. Youth was beginning to flame even in Thor that year, and she felt it through her children’s conflict with it.

Well, if he needed to tell her his trouble, why, he would tell her. For Wesley knew he could be absolutely sure of her, and she was serenely sure of that.

“I can see that it’s ’ard,” she said softly. She straightened his bed with a few quick, practiced motions, smiled lovingly upon him and left his room.

She went downstairs, thanking the warm Deity who lived in the house with her (for she was truly pious and spoke to Him often) that Edith Trezona was so blessed among women. Her husband, Gideon, was a fine and good man, who feared God, and what he had done to her son Wesley was in Eedie’s view no more arrogant or cruel, and no less truly loving, than the slap she, herself, would have given to a baby’s fingers drawing near a flame.

And her son, Wesley, was a fine, good boy who understood his father’s wise concern for his future. And who agreed with the captain’s sternly given warning and who now perhaps had to face, on his father’s side, an irreverent, rebellious, younger generation at some pain to himself.

Ah that’s ’ard, she thought. Everybody saw Pa order ’im ’ome, but never ’eard the talk they ’ad. And that’s ’ard. Yes, ’tis.

She knew what the captain would say. “Wesley must do what was right, whatever.” But Eedie tried to know what it was costing Wesley to “do right” in this case. And she felt there was no harm in this effort to understand and no harm in her sympathy. Never harm to say, “I can see that it’s ’ard, my dear. I can see that it’s ’ard.” For her, God was no less loving than she. How could He be? And He understood both these good men just as she did, or even better. And He knew it was hard for the boy, the good boy.

When Gideon Trezona, walking on the upper road eastward, came to his back gate and marched through, Dorothy and Dick and Wesley, coming down, felt the impact of his presence in a tiny tightening of their nerves, a faint tensing of their muscles. For their father’s God was a God of Wrath, stern against evil.

“Well mither?” they heard him say in the kitchen.

“Well, fayther,” said Eedie, merrily, revolving toward him to touch his stern cheek with loving fingers.

And the children’s faces reflected the little miracle they saw every day. Their mother was not afraid of Gideon Trezona or his God, either.

It was a fact: she had never been able to fear God very much. Did she not love Him? And He her?

Henry Duncane heading home saw, a little late, out of the tail of his eye, young Davies’ sturdy figure at the side of the road. He braked abruptly to offer him a lift. Only then did he see that Davies had a companion. They both thanked him and got in.

Arthur Cole leaned on the seat back and poured his breathy voice into Henry’s ear. “Thanks a lot, Mr. Duncane. Night shift, tonight. Be glad to get home. Say, what’s your opinion of the School of Mines, at Houghton, Mr. Duncane?”

“Davies knows more about it.”

“Good school,” Davies said promptly.

“I’m thinking of going there,” said Arthur rapidly. A lock of dark hair fell on his forehead. “I want to get ahead somehow. If I’m not too old already, I’d like to get a little schooling along engineering lines. Do you think they’d take me?”

“High school, Cole?”

Davies did the talking. Henry was silent as the car slipped swiftly down into town.

“Yeah, sure, and a year at the Normal before the war.”

“You were in the war?”

“Yeah, I was in,” said Cole as if he just remembered.

“They should take you.”

“What about that, Mr. Duncane? Do you think I’d be smart? I’m married and all, but my wife could go back to teaching. I think she would, and if I could get in a couple of years …”

“Education never hurt anybody,” Henry said.

“They slam it into you,” warned Davies in his pleasant, rasping voice. “You’d have to buckle down.”

“I could do that. If I care enough about anything, I can buckle down, don’t worry. If it isn’t too late, that’s all. You were in the war, Mr. Duncane, but it hit you when you were farther along. You had the stuff. But I guess, even at my age …”

“This all right, Cole?” Henry stopped the car at the foot of the hill, preparing to take the sharp-angled turn back toward his own house.

“Yeah sure, thanks very much. Good night, Mr. Duncane. Thanks for the encouragement.”

“Sit still,” said Henry to Davies.

The car made the acute angle and Henry stopped it again almost immediately, for Davies boarded with Mrs. Trestrial in the gray house on the right, just back of the pie-shaped vacant lot at the corner. He got out.

He wrinkled his nose. “Say, what’s the old Cousin Jinny got? Saffron buns again? Do you smell saffron?”

“Smell it all the way to my house,” Henry said, “pretty near every day.” In his pleasantry there was the note of parting, but the car did not move yet so Davies stood still.

“Did I encourage him?” asked Henry softly of the evening.

“Not that I heard,” said Davies in a surprised tone, and then he laughed.

Henry put the car into gear. They saluted each other. He pulled across the street into his own driveway and Davies moved toward the scent of saffron and his supper.

Arthur Cole, proceeding down the block toward the town hall corner, walked with his face turned to look somewhat wistfully back over his shoulder.