THE TRAGEDY AT BIG HOPE SHAFT.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3058, 20 February 1892, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE TRAGEDY AT BIG HOPE SHAFT.

" He's entirely harmless, sir ; that's old Dave Bradley. Old, says I ? Well, thirty-two ain't very fur out in life, yet Dave Brad 103' is old— has been 3ince '83, and cranky as beans."

I was tempted to ask my stalwart, dust-begrimed vis-a-vis—the engineer at the Big Hope coal mine—whether the "crankiness" of beans was a peculiarity of the Pennsylvania variety, but I thought the question might possibly divert what I felt to be an interesting story. Besides, I wished no discourtesy to cut off the chances of a strong recommendation to headquarters of an improved Automatic Lubricator, with which, in the interest of a New York house, I was doing the coal regions. The person indicated as Dave Bradley had cut short my flowery dissertation on the superior merits of the "Improved," had, in fact, by his uncanny appearance, caused me to jump half way across the engine room. And yet, sticking his head over the closed half door, all he had said was : " Send down the cage for Bill Gates; don't you hear the signal ? He's married to-day." But the voice, the gesture, the face made up an ensemble which has haunted me ever sinee—which make 3 me even now, in my own snug parlour, rise and turn on a little moro gas at the chandelier. His voice was very deep, yet the words were spoken almost inaudibly. His face was ashy in its paleness, his black matted hair and beard streaked with a dirty white, his great bloodshot eyes almost ready to leave their sockets. And thus Dave Bradley leaned over the half door of the engine house saying : " Send down the cage for Bill Gates. Don't you hear the signal ? He's married to-day." An assurance from the person thus addressed that " Bill Gates is a gettin' married as fast as he can," sent the man hobbling off over an old dirt-bank, chuckling to himself in the bass cleft. " He does that two or three times every day," says toe engineer ; " but he's as harmless as a dead mule." "Who is Bill Gates?" I asked. « Who tvets Bill Gates, you mean. Do you chew ?" The bribe was given and the following story spun, which I transpose from its original provincialism. Dave Bradley was in charge of the engine house at the Big Hope shaft in the Fall of the year 1883 ; had, in fact, held the position since ground was first broken over what proved to be some of the finest veins in the county.

A young man of some little culture, he had taken much to heart his subordinate position in a locomotive repair shop, and had gone to the Coal State in the hope of finding more responsibility. His appearance had found favour in the eyes of the owners of the Big Hope Tract, and Dave Bradley soon developed into a valuable servant.

He was a quiet fellow, was Dave —fond of keeping his own counsel, fond of quiet hours, when such could be had, with his few books— yet by no means unsociable. In fact, thsre wasn't a man or boy at the mines but had a good word for him, and, when the Sabbath came around, with its respite from toil—■ when the great earth arteries were still, the engine fires banked, the huge breaker deserved, and, dressed in his other "clothes," he joined the throng of worshippers at the little white church, that was black before the paint was dry, not a single woman at Big Hope but had a glance of admiration for him.

Perhaps Dave's popularity among Big Hope's unmarried daughters was in some measure, due to his well-known thrifty habits, a goodly Eortion of his monthly wage being anked with the Company. In the coal mines, where men's lives are as easily snuffed out as tallow candles, a man with an eye to the future, be the nest eggs ever so small, is the kind of husband to be desired.

Before the great shaft had been driven through the uppermost coal vein the young engineer had lost his heart; by the time the thousand foot level was reached he had determined either to marry Jane Darrow or go back to the locomotive shop and invest his savings in a generous stock of wild oats. Yet, at the time of which we write, the Fall of '83, the splendid red ash vein at the thousand foot level had been burrowed into for more than a year, and Dave and Jane had never spoken of love.

Jane's mother was dead; her father was but a "pit boss," and an angular, grumpy, souless one at that. Dave always referred to him as " The Cactus," alluding probably to the fact that some of the most forbidding of the cacti are adorned with the rarest of flowers. How such a blossom as Jane could thrive near culm piles the dust laden and the human residuum of a. coal mine was a huge mystery to Dave, and he often told himself that those large brown eye«, that pale, serious face, that faultless figure, that quiet, modest bearing were intended by Dame Nature for an entirely different walk in life.

It was his high opinion of the girl that caused Dave to hesitate; he felt that she was not to be gainud, though but the daughter of a coarse miner, for the mere asking, so he chose to live on dreams of a more contented life, wntil such time as hit accumulated savings should give

him courage to come to the point. Day after day, night after night, he busied himself with the future, mapping it out with the mathematical precision of a mine survey. He would take Jane from the mines to some more congenial soil, where his hard work might obtain for her some of the comforts of life. The prospect of a neat little flat, he reasoned, in New York or Philadelphia was likely to have some weight with a girl of her station. One Sunday afternoon in dull October Dave saw the girl start down the valley road, dressed as though a lengthy walk lay before her. Meeting the Cactus, he learned that she had gone to Turret Hill, a mine some five miles distant. Tiie Cactus intensified Dave's interest by remarking, with a leer worthy of a first-rate Anderson ogre :

" Thay's a church here and thay's church thayr, and I reckon it's all as one to Bill Gates."

"Bill Gates—who is he?" asked the engineer. "The lad as got a line round your uncle" (meaning himself) " when he lay choked with the damp in a gallery at Turret, and none durst come a-nigh. He weren't hisself for a month after." " Bit of brave work," said Dave. " And now he's got a line around her,' grinned the barbarous joker; "thar's a church here, and thar's a church thayr, and I reckon it don't matter which." And the Cactus turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Dave standing, stupified, to watch his retreating figure until the angle of the Company's store hid him from view. He had dreamed, and this was the waking! This clodhopper, this unknown fellow, who had been given the chance of dragging the Cactus from death by firedamp, was—ugh ! it seemed like profanation. A score of times he cursed himself for his backwardness in not speaking to the girl months ago of his feelings toward her, even though the bargain between Bill Gates and the Cactus had be>in then in existence. It was impossible, he told himself, that a girl so remarkably superior to her class could love such a man as he felt Bill Gates must be —a common scrubby earthworm. Love had suddenly filled Dave Bradley with hair-splitting ideas of caste ; between the status of a coal shaft engineer and that of a labourer in the mine there seemed to him a wide social moat which even an innovating republic could never bridge.

Dave soon found himself —ho knew not for what purpose- —on the road to Turret Hill. A heavy storm had set in; but he cared nothing for the cold rain, that his hot face seemed to dissipate into steam. On and on he walked, pushing his way tkrough the numerous gullies that traversed the darkening road, heedless of the boulders and the wind, and the bat that almtst struck him in its heavy flight. Once he stumbled and fell, only to rise aad throw his hands up to the sky and shout out a curse, that the black copse on his left, refusing to receive, flung over the dim hills on his right. He felt that he had not loved Jane Darrow until now ; that love had suddenly come to him in the beating rain, and the gusts that swept the deserted country, in the night without the darker night within.

Presently he thought he heard voices ahead. The knotted roots of an oak, torn up by some recent tempest, afforded a hiding place. Nearer and nearer they came; he could hear her voice ; he could hear Bill Uate's voice; he could bear the thudding of his own heart above the splash of the icy rain and the sweepfof a searching wind. Now he can just discern their faces against the dark back ground, like corpses of last year's will-o-the-wisps. They are passing him now, and he hears her say : "Ishall loe a true wife to you, Bill, fori like you, and father likes you." " Hang ' like!' Say you love me. Jane." Clutching a great prong of the dead tree's root, Dave leaned out on the road and listened—listened —listened for her answer. But if it was uttered it was stolen by the wind(To be continued.) A melancholy letter reaches ua from a farmer who in experienced in his calling and observaut of the position of his fellow agriculturists. He says cattle, iheep aud pig* are selling at ruinously low prices : thus a year that was thought would brighten the prospects of the farmer after hia long series of depression has, in numerous instances, proved to be one of disastrous disappointments. When it is considered that the consun ing powers of the population of the nation wore never so great as at the present period—the result of high wage in every industry, and the great increase of population year after year—it becomes a matter of surprise and enquiry why the price of live-stock should be ho depreciated, seeing that there has been a large decrease in the importation of both living animals for food and of dead meat during the past eleven months, as compared with the corresponding period ot' last year. Those decreases, according to the Trade and Navigation returns, were 55,299 oxen and bulls, 23,268 ccws. 15,935 calves, 28,768 sheep, 3,568 pigs, and 83,859 cwt of dead meat. Following such an enormous decrease in the importations, it becomes manifest that the depreciation is not the result of the importations, neither can it be ultogether attributed to the very large increase of the flocks anil herd-. The f.-ar that the necessity of meeting payineuts solely by th" S'lle of live-stuck, which cannot now be aided by corn, in cosnquence of the damp stars in which it was placed in the ricks, has much to do with it. Tho writer, however, looks with confidence for a reliction shortlyßritish Times.