“When the cave-in finally did happen, it happened in what should have been a good place,”
“When the cave-in finally did happen, it happened in what should have been a good place,” Billingsley resumed. “The roof fell in about sixty feet from the adit.” He glanced at David. “That’s what you call the entrance to a mine, son. The miners got up that far from below, and there they were stopped by twenty feet of fallen hornfels, skarn, and Devonian shale. The whistle went off, and the folks from town came up the hill to see what had happened. Even the whores and the gamblers came up. They could hear the Chinamen inside screaming, begging to be dug out before the rest of it came down. Some said they sounded like they were fighting with each other. But no one wanted to go in and start digging. That squealing sound hornfels makes when the ground’s uneasy was louder than ever, and the roof was bowed down in a couple of places between the adit and the first rockfall.”
“Could those places have been shored up?” Steve asked.
“Sure, but nobody wanted to take the responsibility for doing it. Two days later, the president and vice president of Diablo Mines showed up with a couple of mining engineers from Reno. They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread out on linen while inside that shaft—pardon me, the drift—not ninety feet from where they were, forty human souls were screaming in the dark.
