length of fuse,
the length depending altogether upon the time required to reach a point
of safety after the fuse is lighted. The cap is really more dangerous
to handle than is the dynamite itself. The cap is a tricky thing that
may go off at any jar or scratch or at a spark from pipe or cigarette.
You can, if you are sufficiently careless of possible results, light
the twisted paper end of a stick of dynamite and watch the dynamite
burn like wax in your fingers; it MAY go off and set your friends to
work retrieving portions of your body. More likely, it will do nothing
but burn harmlessly.

Well, then, a piece of fuse is inserted in the open end of the cap, and
the metal pressed tight against the fuse to hold it in place. Pressed
down by the miner's teeth, sometimes, if he has been long in the
business and has grown careless about his head; otherwise he crimps the
cap on with a small pair of pliers or the back of his knife blade--and
feels a bit easier when it is done without losing a hand.

You would think, unless you are accustomed to the stuff, that when five
holes are loaded with, probably, ten or twelve sticks of dynamite to
the lot, each hole containing a six-X exploding cap as well, that the
first shot would likewise be the last shot and that the whole tunnel
would cave in and the mountain behind it would shake. Nothing like that
occurs. If there are five loaded holes in the tunnel face, and you do
not hear, one after the other, five muffled BOOMS, you will know that
one hole failed to go off--and that the miner is worried. It happens
sometimes that four holes loaded with eight sticks of dynamite explode
within a foot or so of the fifth hole and yet the fifth hole remains
"dead" and a menace to the miner until it is discharged.

So please don't swallow those wild tales of a stick of dynamite that
threw down a mountainside. I once read a story--it was not so long
ago--of a Chinaman who wiped out a mine with a little piece of dynamite
which he carried in his pocket. I laughed.

Casey Ryan, on the first day when he was left alone with his crippled
hand and his pots and pans for company, did nothing whatever that he
would not have done had one of the three been present. He was
suspicious of their going and thought it was a trap set to catch him in
an attempted escape.

On the second day when the three went off together and left him alone,
Casey went out gathering wood and discovered just where the "powd