The Butterfly Read Free Page A

spiders, I had thought it would be the same as when they took the machinery away, but when we got up there we found some changes had taken place. The top, where the weight of the mountain was on it, had bulged down in a bunch of blisters, about like the blisters on paint, except that they were the size of a wagon wheel instead of the size of a quarter, and as thick as a concrete road instead of as thick as a piece of paper. Each blister had split into pieces, and a lot of the pieces had fallen down, with the rest of them hanging there ready to kill you if you happened to be underneath when they dropped. And the floor had pumpkined up in wavy bumps that about closed the opening in a lot of places. So in the main drift, where I had thought we'd haul stuff in and out on a mine car, and pull it up and lower it down with a falls to the old roadbed below, there were three feet of jagged slabs with a trickle of water running over them, and the car track all buried. When she saw what it was like she begged me not to go inside, but I crawled in to have a look. After a hundred feet I had to stop. Because in the first swag was a pool of water at least six feet deep, and overflowing to make the trickle that was running out the drift mouth.
    When I got out we talked it over, and I had cold feet. But she kept saying a coal mine wasn't the only place, and she was sulky and I could see she didn't mean to give up. And then I happened to remember one of those tunnels we had driven the year when they were trying to find out if there was any more thick seam. It wasn't like a mine tunnel, where they drive their drift into a layer of coal, and there's rock top and rock floor, with coal for the rib and no need of timber, except of course in the rooms where they rob the coal and have to put in posts as they go or the whole thing would cave in. This tunnel was through shale, with sandstone top, and we had timbered as we went with cribbing. It was a quarter mile around the mountainside, at the top of a straight cliff that dropped into the creek, and we went around there. Sure enough, there it was, all dirty and damp and dark, but with the timbers still holding and the track still in place. I lit up and crawled in, and saw a string of cars on the first siding, about two hundred feet in. They weren't the heavy steel cars they used on motor trains, but little ones, that we had pushed by hand. I kept on, and found all entries open, even the ones that connected with the worked-out part of the mine, though they were full of slabs, like the main drift. And then at last I came to what I'd been headed for since I first crawled in the old drift mouth, which was the shaft that was sunk for ventilation, and because it would crosscut everything, and they could see if they had anything or not, and when they found out they hadn't, they quit.
    "It's all there, everything, just like we want it, and specially the shaft. It's light enough down there to see what we're doing, we can set up scaffolds for our tubs, tanks, and kegs, so all our stuff will run downwards, and we won't have to pump. We even got our water just like we want it, because that pool in the swag, it comes from a spring that runs down one side of the shaft, and it's good sweet water, because I tasted it to make sure. We can trap it halfway up, and run it wherever we want. And nobody will find the top of that shaft, or see it from down on the road, or smell anything. And there won't be any smoke, because we'll use charcoal, and it don't make any. But how do we get anything up there?"
    "You said a block and falls?"
    "From the old railroad bed, not from the creek."
    "Could we use a boat?"
    "Yeah, and we could put an ad in the paper."
    "I guess it would look pretty funny."
    "We could figure it out, maybe, why we got the only boat on the creek, but everybody from the state road to Tulip would ask us about it, and when you start something like this you can't have any asking."
    We were climbing down, through