The Babu is shaking like a jelly. "Oh, sar, I have never seen a man killed before! Look at that eye, sar! I should have sent runners. I ran everywhere! I ran to your house. You were not in. I was running for hours. It was not my fault! It was the fault of the gang–Sirdar." He wrings his hands and gurgles. The best of accountants, but the poorest of coroners is he. No need to ask how the accident happened. No need to listen to the Sirdar and his "witnesses." The Sonthal had been a fool, but it was the Sirdar's business to protect him against his own folly. "Has he any people here?"
"Yes, his rukni,—his kept–woman,—and his sister's brother–in–law. His home is far–off."
The sister's brother–in–law breaks through the crowd howling for vengeance on the Sirdar. He will send for the police, he will have the price of his brother's blood full tale. The windmill arms and the angry eyes fall, for the Sahib is making the report of the death.
"Will the Government give me pensin? I am his wife," a woman clamours, stamping her pewter–ankleted feet. "He was killed in your service. Where is his pensin? I am his wife."
"You lie! You're his rukni. Keep quiet! Go! The pension comes to us."
The sister's brother–in–law is not a refined man, but the rukni is his match. They are silenced. The Sahib takes the report, and the body is borne away. Before to–morrow's sun rises the gang–Sirdar may find himself a simple "surface–coolie," earning nine pice a day; and in a week some Sonthal woman behind the hills may discover that she is entitled to draw monthly great wealth from the coffers of the Sirkar. But this will not happen if the sister's brother–in–law can prevent it. He goes off swearing at the rukni.
In the meantime, what have the rest of the dead man's gang been doing? They have, if you please, abating not one stroke, dug out all the clay, and would have it verified. They have seen their comrade die. He is dead. Bus![17] Will the Sirdar take the tale of clay? And yet, were twenty men to be crushed by their own carelessness in the pit, these same impassive workers would scatter like panic–stricken horses.
Turning from this sketch, let us set in order a few stories of the pits. In some of the mines the coal is blasted out by the dynamite which is fired by electricity from a battery on the surface. Two men place the charges, and then signal to be drawn up in the cage which hangs in the pit–eye. Once two natives were intrusted with the job. They performed their parts beautifully till the end, when the vaster idiot of the two scrambled into the cage, gave signal, and was hauled up before his friend could follow.
Thirty or forty yards up the shaft all possible danger for those in the cage was over, and the charge was accordingly exploded. Then it occurred to the man in the cage that his friend stood a very good chance of being, by this time, riven to pieces and choked.
But the friend was wise in his generation. He had missed the cage, but found a coal–tub—one of the little iron trucks—and turning this upside down, crawled into it. When the charge went off, his shelter was battered in so much, that men had to hack him out, for the tub had made, as it were, a tinned, sardine of its occupant. He was absolutely unhurt, but for his feelings. On reaching the pit–bank his first words were, "I do not desire to go down to the pit with that man any more." His wish had been already gratified, for "that man" had fled. Later on, the story goes, when "that man" found that the guilt of murder was not at his door, he returned, and was made a mere surface–coolie, and his brothers jeered at him as they passed to their better–paid occupation.
Occasionally there are mild cyclones in the pits. An old working, perhaps a mile away, will collapse: a whole gallery sinking bodily. Then the displaced air rushes through the inhabited mine, and, to quote their own expression, blows the pitmen about "like dry leaves." Few things are more amusing than the spectacle of a burly Tyneside foreman who, failing to dodge round a corner in time, is "put down" by the wind, sitting–fashion, on a knobby lump of coal.
But most impressive of all is a tale they tell of a fire in a pit many years ago. The coal caught light. They had to send earth and bricks down the shaft and build great dams across the galleries to choke the fire. Imagine the scene, a few hundred feet underground, with the air growing hotter and hotter each moment, and the carbonic acid gas trickling through the dams. After a time the rough dams gaped, and the gas poured in afresh, and the Englishmen went down and leeped the cracks between roof and dam–sill with anything they could get. Coolies fainted, and had to be taken away, but no one died, and behind the first dams they built great masonry ones, and bested that fire; though for a long time afterwards, whenever they pumped water into it, the steam would puff out from crevices in the ground above.
It is a queer life that they lead, these men of the coal–fields, and a "big" life to boot. To describe one–half of their labours would need a week at the least, and would be incomplete then. "If you want to see anything," they say, "you should go over to the Baragunda copper–mines; you should look at the Barakar ironworks; you should see our boring operations five miles away; you should see how we sink pits; you should, above all, see Giridih Bazaar on a Sunday. Why, you haven't seen anything. There's no end of a Sonthal Mission hereabouts. All the little dev—dears have gone on a picnic. Wait till they come back, and see 'em learning to read."
Alas! one cannot wait. At the most one can but thrust an impertinent pen skin–deep into matters only properly understood by specialists.