e mine.

He himself slept in the bunk house with some thirty others of his shift.
At half-past five in the evening the cook at the boarding-house sounded
a prolonged alarm upon a crowbar bent in the form of a triangle, that
hung upon the porch of the boarding-house. McTeague rose and dressed,
and with his shift had supper. Their lunch-pails were distributed to
them. Then he made his way to the tunnel mouth, climbed into a car in
the waiting ore train, and was hauled into the mine.

Once inside, the hot evening air turned to a cool dampness, and the
forest odors gave place to the smell of stale dynamite smoke, suggestive
of burning rubber. A cloud of steam came from McTeague's mouth;
underneath, the water swashed and rippled around the car-wheels, while
the light from the miner's candlesticks threw wavering blurs of pale
yellow over the gray rotting quartz of the roof and walls. Occasionally
McTeague bent down his head to avoid the lagging of the roof or the
projections of an overhanging shute. From car to car all along the line
the miners called to one another as the train trundled along, joshing
and laughing.

A mile from the entrance the train reached the breast where McTeague's
gang worked. The men clambered from the cars and took up the labor
where the day shift had left it, burrowing their way steadily through a
primeval river bed.

The candlesticks thrust into the crevices of the gravel strata lit up
faintly the half dozen moving figures befouled with sweat and with
wet gray mould. The picks struck into the loose gravel with a yielding
shock. The long-handled shovels clinked amidst the piles of bowlders and
scraped dully in the heaps of rotten quartz. The Burly drill boring for
blasts broke out from time to time in an irregular chug-chug, chug-chug,
while the engine that pumped the water from the mine coughed and
strangled at short intervals.

McTeague tended the chuck. In a way he was the assistant of the man who
worked the Burly. It was his duty to replace the drills in the Burly,
putting in longer ones as the hole got deeper and deeper. From time
to time he rapped the drill with a pole-pick when it stuck fast or
fitchered.

Once it even occurred to him that there was a resemblance between his
present work and the profession he had been forced to abandon. In the
Burly drill he saw a queer counterpart of his old-time dental engine;
and what were the drills and chucks but enormous hoe excavators, hard
bits