gerous mine because
gas forms in it unusually often, and he gets fifteen dollars a day
for the one hour he works. There's a contract, but he's told them he's
twenty-one, and when you prove he's under age they'll make him stop."

Rose still wound and wound, her clear eyes, looking over her glasses,
fixed on Nellie.

"It's bad enough, I'll say," rapped out the spare, angular woman, "to
have everybody talking about the way Martin has ditched his son, without
having the boy scattered to bits, or burned to a cinder. Already he's
been blown twenty feet by one windy shot, and more than once he's had to
lie flat while those horrible gases burned themselves out right over his
head. His 'buddie,' the Italian who fires in the other part of the mine
at the same time, told Harry Brown, the nightman, and he told Frank,
himself. Why, they say if he'd have moved the least bit it would have
fanned the fire downward and he'd have been in a fine mess. Sooner or
later all shot-firers meet a tragic end. You want to put your foot down,
Rose, and put it down hard--for once in your life--if you can," she
added, half under her breath.

"It isn't altogether Martin's fault," began Rose, but Nellie cut her off
with a short: "Now, don't you tell me a word about that precious brother
of mine! It's as plain to me as the nose on your face that between his
bull-headed hardness and your wishy-washy softness you're fixing to ruin
one of the best boys God ever put on this earth."

"I'll talk to Billy," Rose promised.

It was the first time she ever had found herself definitely in
opposition to her boy, but she felt serene in the confidence of her
own power to dissuade him from anything so perilous. She understood the
general routine of mining, and had been daily picturing him going down
in the cage to the bottom, travelling through a long entry until he
was under his home farm and located in one of the low, three-foot rooms
where a Kansas miner must stoop all day. Oh, how it had hurt--that
thought of those fine young shoulders bending, bending! She had
visualized him filling his car, and mentally had followed his coal as it
was carried up to the surface to be dumped into the hopper, weighed and
dropped down the chute into the flat cars. Of course, there was always
the danger of a loosened rock falling on him, but wasn't there always
the possibility of accidents on a farm, too? Didn't the company's man
always go down, first, into the mine to test the