Chapter 10 - Twenty-Eight Men Below
Nobody in Copper Jack slept.
The town became lanterns, mud, steam, and numbers.
Feet remaining.
Inches of water.
Biscuits delivered.
Men accounted for.
Minutes since last contact.
Dorothy discovered terror became easier to survive when converted into tasks.
She baked.
Wrapped.
Counted.
Sent.
Started again.
At midnight, she altered the ration.
Ordinary pocket biscuits were too dry considering the miners’ limited water.
She made a softer dense cake using a small amount of molasses and fat.
The first version crumbled inside the test pipe.
She changed the ratio.
Second survived.
Third slid cleanly.
“How long does it keep?” Bellamy asked.
“Doesn’t need to.”
“Why?”
“They’ll eat it tonight.”
Nobody corrected the optimism.
By 1:00 a.m., twenty-eight compact cakes went down the line.
The trapped men sent one back.
On the cloth Benjamin had written:
BETTER.
Dorothy smiled.
Caleb added beneath it:
BARELY.
She laughed aloud.
At 2:30, the rain stopped.
At 3:10, underground water stabilized.
At 4:00, the old shaft crew hit a collapsed timber lattice.
Progress slowed.
At 5:00, the main rescue passage shifted again.
Nobody was injured.
At 6:15, Samuel Price’s condition worsened.
His leg was likely broken.
Pain.
Cold.
Exhaustion.
Dorothy listened as Mrs. Price asked if her husband would lose the leg.
No one could answer.
Dorothy sat beside her.
“He is alive.”
Mrs. Price stared at the mountain.
“I know.”
“That matters.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure?”
Dorothy looked at her.
“Because dead ends decisions. Alive means there are still choices.”
Mrs. Price began crying.
Dorothy held her.
She had spent years being treated as though softness belonged only to thin women.
As if large bodies were built for labor but not tenderness.
She had stopped caring what people assumed.
By breakfast, Copper Jack had consumed nearly all Bellamy’s regular bread flour.
He approached Dorothy.
“We’re down to two sacks.”
She kept working.
“And my salvaged flour?”
“Maybe seventy pounds.”
Bellamy stared.
“You kept that much?”
“I told you not all the shipment was wet.”
“Will it work?”
“For rescue food, yes.”
“For town?”
Dorothy shook her head.
“We ration.”
Bellamy looked toward the families.
“What do we tell them?”
“The truth.”
He grimaced.
“People hate the truth.”
“They hate hunger more.”
Bellamy climbed onto a crate outside the store.
He announced that until the road reopened, flour products would be restricted.
Nobody complained.
Not one person.
A month earlier, they would have.
Now everybody knew where the flour was going.
At 9:40, a rider arrived from the south.
Road to Helena remained blocked.
But he brought news.
A drilling crew from Silver Ridge had equipment capable of boring a six-inch hole through the last section if rescuers could reach the proper angle.
“How far?” Crowley asked.
“Equipment arrives maybe eighteen hours.”
Too late.
Unless water stayed stable.
Unless air stayed clear.
Unless the platform held.
Unless injured men survived.
Mining, Dorothy decided, seemed to be built almost entirely from unless.
At noon, Caleb spoke again through the pipe.
His voice weaker.
“Dorothy.”
“I’m here.”
“Tom says you bought all that flour.”
“Tom should spend less time gossiping underground.”
Weak laughter traveled from below.
“How much?”
“Six hundred pounds.”
“Why?”
“Because Bellamy is a poor negotiator.”
Bellamy shouted from behind her, “I heard that!”
More laughter from the pipe.
The sound did something extraordinary.
It made trapped men human again.
Not numbers.
Not victims.
Men teasing Bellamy from beneath a mountain.
Caleb said, “Dorothy.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
She swallowed.
“You can thank me when you come eat something that isn’t shaped for plumbing.”
“Deal.”
Then another voice took over.
Owen.
“Cook?”
“Yes?”
“Whole crew agrees.”
“On what?”
“Best terrible biscuits in Montana.”
Dorothy wiped her eyes.
“Flattery won’t earn dessert.”
Owen laughed.
Then the line went dead.
Not gradually.
Instantly.
The engineer checked.
“No airflow.”
Everyone froze.
“What happened?” Tom demanded.
“Blockage.”
“Where?”
“Could be line collapse.”
Dorothy looked at the pipe.
Without airflow, the miners’ chamber could become dangerous long before hunger mattered.
“Can you clear it?”
Crowley asked.
The engineer pushed a rod.
It traveled fifty feet.
Then stopped.
He pushed.
Nothing.
“Rock?”
“Maybe crushed joint.”
Tom grabbed the tube.
“BEN!”
No answer.
The engineer pulled him away.
Dorothy looked at Crowley.
“How long do they have?”
He refused to answer.
“How long?”
“Depends chamber volume.”
“Estimate.”
“Maybe hours before air gets bad.”
The old shaft crew still had forty-three feet.
The main route thirty-eight.
Drill eighteen hours away.
For the first time, Dorothy’s food could not buy enough time.
Then Henry Bell looked at the pipe map.
“There’s another line.”
Crowley turned.
“What?”
“Old exhaust.”
“Sealed.”
“Aboveground.”
Crowley stared.
Henry pointed toward the north ridge.
“If we open it?”
“Could restore draft.”
“Where?”
“Old compressor house.”
Nobody had used the building in fourteen years.
It stood half a mile up a steep slope.
Crowley shouted for tools.
Men ran.
Dorothy looked at the food table.
Then the mountain.
“I’m coming.”
Bellamy grabbed her arm.
“To do what?”
“Whatever needs doing.”
“You cook.”
Dorothy pulled free.
“Today everybody does more than one thing.”
And twenty minutes later, the woman men once believed too large to move through narrow aisles was climbing the steep north slope faster than half the men who had laughed at her.
At the top waited a rusted ventilation door.
Behind it might be the only remaining air passage to twenty-eight trapped miners.
Crowley struck the first bolt.
It did not move.
May you like
Below them, the clock kept running.
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