The Big Idea
CHAPTER I.
JIMMY’S BIG IDEA.
Jimmy Rand came out of the wash-house that early April morning andtook his place in the line of men dressed in their black, greasymine-clothes. It was a long line—stretching past the power-house, pastthe big tower where the coal came tumbling down with a great clatterupon the sorting screens and into the waiting railroad flat carsbeneath, until finally it wound itself to the little iron gate andgate-house near the mine-mouth where, through a tiny window, the mengave their numbers to be checked down in a great book.
It took Jimmy many minutes to reach the window that morning—minutesthat dragged slowly by as he impatiently shuffled forward with themoving line. For this was the day he was to stop work at noon, and heand Anne were to take that long walk together they had planned. Jimmylooked up at the sky; it was a perfect day, almost cloudless, and withjust a hint of chill in the air.
By birth and breeding Jimmy Rand was a coal miner. His father andgrandfather before him had been miners—his father, now dead some threeyears, had worked in this same Fallon Brothers Mine. It was locatednear the little town of Menchon, Pennsylvania, in the valley of theSusquehanna.
When he was fifteen Jimmy had left school and entered the mine as amule-boy. Now, at twenty-two, he was a full-fledged miner, and by hisrecord was one of the best “loaders” on the books; for he was astalwart young chap, deep of chest, and with long, powerful muscles.
His work was to clean up the coal that had been undercut and thenblasted out in the little galleries down in the mine, loading it ontothe waiting mule-pulled cars that took it to the bottom of the shaft,where it was hoisted to the surface and on up into the tipple-tower tobe dumped upon the screens.
Jimmy did his work well; there were few other loaders who couldsurpass him in tonnage. This the records showed, for each car bore alittle metal tag with the loader’s number, of which account was kept.
But although Jimmy was a good coal miner by heredity and training, hewas by nature not a miner at all. He had known this now for manyyears; but only to Anne, and to his mother, had he ever said so.
Way back in the days when he was mule-boy Jimmy could remember sittingalone in the great dark silences of the mine, listening to its vague,distant, muffled sounds, and thinking of the great world outside—theworld of light and air and color, the world he knew so little about,was in so seldom, and dreamed of so constantly.
Jimmy Rand was by nature a dreamer. He had imagination, which, to onewho mines coal, is neither necessary nor desirable. It was not thehours of active work in the mine that proved irksome to him. Strippedto the waist, his lean torso covered with sweat and the grime ofcoal-dust, he would load steadily. But when the little car was filled,properly trimmed, and the last great, glistening chunk of coal heavedto its top, there was nothing more to do but sit quiet while themule-boy took it away and brought him another “empty.”
Then Jimmy would slip on his coat and sit down in the cool, damp airto wait. He could hear his heart beat then in the sudden silence, andcurious noises filled his ears. The comforting noises of his own workwere gone; the distant, dull