Below and on Top and Other Stories

THE Peep-o'-Day had been shut down for a long time now. The grand
machinery rusted in the imposing brick engine-house, deserted by all
saving the swallows and Dick, who could just squeeze in through the slit
in the wall where the beam rode, and who did not share the superstitious
fear inspired in his schoolmates by its dim light and silence and
loneliness. The rabbits burrowed and bred under the black boilers and
about the foundations of the towering stack, and a subduing influence
hung around the old mine and touched with reverence the stranger
loitering curiously about its many buildings and piled-up tips.

Over young Dick Haddon the mine exerted a peculiar fascination. Most of
his spare time after school hours and on Saturday afternoons he spent
running at large about the place, washing innumerable prospects in his
old fryingpan at the big dam. He found his way into the locked offices,
and rummaged the blacksmith's shop, the engine-room and boiler-houses;
climbed the lightning-rod on the dizzy, rocking smoke-stack, to the
imminent risk of his precious neck; scrambled over every part of
poppet-legs, brace, and puddling plat, doing monkey on the tie-beams,
with sheer falls of a hundred or two hundred feet inviting him to the
scattered, clean white boulders below; or taking the air up on the
poppet-heads, to the scandal of Brother Bear or Brother Petric or any
other pious brother of the little Waddytown Wesleyan chapel, for all
believed such devilment to be a certain evidence of evil possession.

The mine had always filled the greater part of the boy's life. He
remembered since memory began with him a mighty, smoking, whistling
entity, vomiting unending water, and clattering truck-loads of gravel and
slate, and curious streams of white mullock, fed with big four-horse
waggon-loads of wood that came up the muddy Springs road to the
accompaniment of volleying whip-cracks and gorgeous profanity that seemed
grand and inspiring and filled him with the same large emotions as a tale
of "Arabian Nights" read aloud by his mother before the winter evening
fires.

He remembered, too, that night when he was five years old--ages ago it
seemed to him now--when he crawled from his bed and found his mother, her
white nightdress all dabbled with blood, wailing over his father, lying
silent and motionless upon the kitchen floor, whilst in the grey shadowy
background stood three or four miners, ashen-faced and still, hiding
their mouths behind their smirched felt hats. He knew that the mine had
killed his father, and thought of it as a living thing taking vengeance.
Even now, when he was eleven and almost a man, the illusion was not
dispelled, and sometimes took complete possession of him, especially when
none other was near and the wind played upon the many vast props and legs
of the mine as if they were the strings of a gigantic harp, and crooned
mournful songs amongst the timbers, or when he called through the
openings between the slabs over the pump shaft, and started the voices
whispering in the black, bottomless depths, and the moans and sobs
vibrating faintly in the miles of dripping, dark drives, far below there
in the centre of the world.

Other children came over the common occasionally during the dinner hour,
or on bright afternoons, from the weatherbeaten wooden school in the lazy
town-ship, to slide down the tips or ride on the long arms of the
capstans, breaking their limbs and their heads indiscriminately, and
Dickie resented it as an intrusion. Tinker Smith he didn't mind; the
little dry old fossicker was silent and pipeclayed, and seemed to be part
of the mine and imbued with its spirit. He had always been there, Dick
thought, pottering about amongst the tips, sluicing, puddling, and
cradling, or crooning over his pan at the water's edge.