SCRIBNER'S
VOL. XXXVII
peace Wh TE
MAY, 1905
MAGAZINE
NO. 5
MOUNTALNS
By Edwin B. Child
ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
he OIN’ to shoot inthere. Got about = twenty or thirty holes we’ve got to fire.” It wasa tall, gaunt Yankee
overseer in a mountain marble quarry, and I was asking what the unusual look of things meant. I had hung around this and other quarries for days at a time, and this day was different. ‘The noisy clank of cutters and drills was stilled, and a number of machines had been loaded on cars where the skewy track came elbowing out of the quarry pit, giving somewhat the look of a May moving.
“You ain’t goin’ to touch ’em all, air ye, Ed?” queried the Blacksmith, who, like all native Yankee quarrymen, always calls the foreman familiarly by his first name, ab- breviated. ‘‘ Got eighteen filled, and I can touch nine. If the other feller’s as good as I be, we’ll git ’em.”’
‘Guess the fust ’ll come pretty near bein’ warm before you gitround,” said the Black- smith with a grin.
“Ed” looked at him dryly. ‘Once I touched twenty-two and a ‘cotton’ alone.” A grim twinkle came into a corner of his near eye, and he spit with precision at a chunk of marble. ‘‘The fust one was pretty nigh burnt when I touched the last, and I wa’n’t ahellof a ways out of the quarry when they begun to pop.”” And he stalked away around a pile of refuse marble— “‘refuge,’’ Sim Jenkins called it—to another part of the quarry.
So I learned that they were about to blast away a layer of stone that covered a lower pocket of marble in a part of the pit hidden by the buttressed entrance. Before I got in sight of the men who were tamping
Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
in the charges there came a sudden sharp explosion, followed by somewhat involved diaconal] oaths that belong to Vermonters, and back around the turn came the over- seer, running with ashy face, followed by other men, fearful of a premature explosion. Luckily no harm was done, though it had been a close call for young Abe Slocum, lately graduated from water-boy to helper. The scare made ‘‘ Ed” reminiscent.
“No, nobody ever got hurt blastin’ in my time. Once when we was gettin’ out a slice up there jest below where you see that derrick ’’—and he pointed to where a flying buttress of marble seemed to bolster up the mountain at one side of the entrance, a striking piece of natural architecture left by the accident of cutting away the marble each side—‘‘ you know we had a way of strippin’ back the cotton an inch or so, an’ then shakin’ out the black paowder. We had about a dozen holes to bust up there, and jest as I had touched two or three, I heard akind of a ‘siss’ behind me, an’ I sez, ‘Gosh, boys, she’s in the paowder!’ We had to git up about ten or a dozen feet of ladder to git out of that hole, and we didn’t stop long. We’d jest got over the edge when the place was pretty well filled with pieces of rock. You can bet I give that feller a combin’ thet stripped that cotton. He said they was just goin’ down in to find us. They’d heared the blow and didn’t see usinthesmoke. I told him he’d better git his mind on strippin’ his cotton ruther’n goin’ down in holes pickin’ up pieces of humans. ‘Then we went back and fired the other nine.”
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