Right around the time the mining engineers were getting off the stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins— real cave-ins, big ones—at the mine.
Right around the time the mining engineers were getting off the stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins— real cave-ins, big ones—at the mine. The first was on the adit side of the hanging wall the Lushan brothers had pulled down. It sealed off the last sixty feet of the drift like a cork in a bottle. And the thump it made coming down—tons and tons of skarn and hornfels—set off another one, deeper in. That ended the screams, at least the ones close enough to the surface for people to hear. It was all over before the mining engineers got up from town in an ore-wagon. They looked, they sank some core rods, they listened to the story, and when they heard about the second cave-in, which people said shook the ground like an earthquake and made the horses rear up, they shook their heads and said there was probably nobody left alive to rescue. And even if there was, they’d be risking more lives than they could hope to save if they tried to go back in.”
