SECTION 5.
The mule is notoriously a profane and godless creature; a blind alley of
Nature, so to speak, a mistake of which she is ashamed, and which she
does not permit to reproduce itself. The thirty mules under Hal's charge
had been brought up in an environment calculated to foster the worst
tendencies of their natures. He soon made the discovery that the "colic"
of his predecessor had been caused by a mule's hind foot in the stomach;
and he realised that he must not let his mind wander for an instant, if
he were to avoid this dangerous disease.
These mules lived their lives in the darkness of the earth's interior;
only when they fell sick were they taken up to see the sunlight and to
roll about in green pastures. There was one of them called "Dago
Charlie," who had learned to chew tobacco, and to rummage in the pockets
of the miners and their "buddies." Not knowing how to spit out the
juice, he would make himself ill, and then he would swear off from
indulgence. But the drivers and the pit-boys knew his failing, and would
tempt "Dago Charlie" until he fell from grace. Hal soon discovered this
moral tragedy, and carried the pain of it in his soul as he went about
his all-day drudgery.
He went down the shaft with the first cage, which was very early in the
morning. He fed and watered his charges, and helped to harness them.
Then, when the last four hoofs had clattered away, he cleaned out the
stalls, and mended harness, and obeyed the orders of any person older
than himself who happened to be about.
Next to the mules, his torment was the "trapper-boys," and other
youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so
they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job--there seemed to their
minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending
mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and
Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed
little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of
English curse words and obscenities; the filthiness which their minds
had spawned was incredible to one born and raised in the sunlight. They
alleged obscenities of their mothers and their grandmothers; also of the
Virgin Mary, the one mythological character they had heard of. Poor
little creatures of the dark, their souls grimed and smutted even more
quickly and irrevocably than their faces!
Hal had been advised by his boss to inquire for board at "Reminitsky's."
He came up in the last car, at twilight, and was directed to a dimly
lighted building of corrugated iron, where upon inquiry he was met by a
stout Russian, who told him he could be taken care of for twenty-seven
dollars a month, this including a cot in a room with eight other single
men. After deducting a dollar and a half a month for his saloon-keepers,
fifty cents for the company clergyman and a dollar for the company
doctor, fifty cents a month for wash-house privileges and fifty cents
for a sick and accident benefit fund, he had fourteen dollars a month
with which to clothe himself, to found a family, to provide himself with
beer and tobacco, and to patronise the libraries and colleges endowed by
the philanthropic owners of coal mines.
Supper was nearly over at Reminitsky's when he arrived; the floor looked
like the scene of a cannibal picnic, and what food was left was cold. It
was always to be this way with him, he found, and he had to make the
best of it. The dining-room of this boarding-house, owned and managed by
the G. F. C., brought to his mind the state prison, which he had once
visited--with its rows of men sitting in silence, eating starch and
grease out of tin-plates. The plates here were of crockery half an inch
thick, but the starch and grease never failed; the formula of
Reminitsky's cook seemed to be, When in doubt add grease, and boil it
in. Even ravenous as Hal was after his long tramp and his labour below
ground, he could hardly swallow this food. On Sundays, the only time he
ate by daylight, the flies swarmed over everything, and he remembered
having heard a physician say that an enlightened man should be more
afraid of a fly than of a Bengal tiger. The boarding-house provided him
with a cot and a supply of vermin, but with no blanket, which was a
necessity in the mountain regions. So after supper he had to seek out
his boss, and arrange to get credit at the company-store. They were
willing to give a certain amount of credit, he found, as this would
enable the camp-marshal to keep him from straying. There was no law to
hold a man for debt--but Hal knew by this time how much a camp-marshal
cared for law.
