There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a waisin, a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad.”
“Anyway, they were a hundred and fifty feet down—almost twice as deep as when the white miners threw down their picks—when the cave-in happened. There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a waisin, a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad.”
“What’re tommyknockers?” David asked.
“Troublemakers,” Johnny said. “The underground version of gremlins.”
“Three things,” Audrey said from her place at stage-right. She was nibbling a pretzel. “First, you call that sort of mine-work a drift, not a shaft. Second, you drive a driftway, you don’t sink it. Third, it was a cave-in, pure and simple. No tommyknockers, no earth-spirits.”
“Rationalism speaks,” Johnny said. “The spirit of the century. Hurrah!”
“I wouldn’t go ten feet into that kind of ground,” Audrey said, “no sane person would, and there they were, a hundred and fifty feet deep, forty miners, a couple of bossmen, at least five ponies, all of them chipping and tromping and yelling, doing everything but setting off dynamite. What’s amazing is how long the tommyknockers protected them from their own idiocy!”
