Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

CHAPTER XXXIX
The Doctor Sings

AS soon as Tom was gone, the Doctor turned to the others and said:

"Come, boys, we must get to work."

"What have we got to do?" asked Jack.

"Why build the new Camp Venture, to be sure. Don't you understand that we're to stay here perhaps for a month, and must protect ourselves against the spring rains? We must build a shelter before Tom gets back."

"But, Doctor," interrupted Harry, "why should we stay here for a month?"

"Why, don't you understand," said the Doctor, "that we have discovered, right here on your mother's land, a coal mine that will certainly make her comfortable all her life and probably make you boys rich. We've got to find out enough about it to enable us to exploit it, and that will take a month at least."

"But tell us about the coal," said Jack.

The Doctor replied by singing:

 
"Old King Coal
Was a jolly old soul,
And a jolly old soul was he;
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
Every fiddler had a fine fiddle
And a very fine fiddle had he,
 

but," continued the Doctor, "not a man jack of them would tune up for Old King Coal till little Tom got back, because they had promised Tom not to set the fiddles going in his absence. That's a parable. It gives you fair warning that I'm going to keep my promise to our dearest comrade, Little Tom, and tell you nothing about this or any other coal till he comes back. But I tell you we shall have to stay here for a month at least, and that we need some sort of shelter against the heavy spring rains. So come, Jack, you are our architect. Tell us what sort of house to build."

Jack thought a few minutes, after which he said:

"We shan't need a house; at this time of year all we need is a shelter, closed in on three sides and open to the fire in front. We can build it of poles and cover it with a thatch of pine branches and other brush thick enough to shed the rain."

"But if we have only three sides to our house," said Jim, "how are we to keep the ends of the poles in place?"

"Oh, that's easy," said Jack. "We'll insert short bits of pole between them, with deep notches cut into them; and we needn't chink or daub at all. We ought to be able to build quite all the shelter we need, to-day and to-morrow, particularly as we are in a thick grove of young trees, just the size that we want for our poles. Get to work, every fellow of you, and cut poles with all your might."

Just then a thought occurred to Jack, and he took the Doctor aside for consultation.

"Doctor," he said, "It occurs to me that this coal mine, if it is a coal mine, is on my mother's land and that therefore it is worth my while and Harry's and Tom's to stay here and work up the possibilities of the case. It is also worth your while, because you are in fact the discoverer of it and my mother will naturally recognize your interest in it, especially as we shall look to you to find capitalists to work the thing."

"Oh, I'll do that, of course. If I'm right about the mine, I'll have no difficulty in finding plenty of capital. The mine is at exactly the right place, and as to my interest, I'll take care of that when I come to negotiate with the capitalists. I'll see to it that they allow me a proper commission for 'bringing the property to their attention,' as they phrase it. So don't bother about me."

"No, but I'm bothering about Ed and Jim. If they are to stay here and help us for a month or so, they must be paid in some way."

"Of course," answered the Doctor. "I've been so long thinking of our party as a unit, whose constituent members 'shared and shared alike,' that I had not thought of them as persons not interested in this new Camp Venture. Let me think a little!"

He bowed his head upon his hands for a time in meditation. Then he said:

"Of course your mother cannot work this mine herself. It will need at least a hundred thousand dollars of capital to make it productive – perhaps twice that sum. I know enough of the situation to know that I can arrange that without going out of my own family. My father and my brothers will put in the entire sum necessary – for I tell you there is a vastly valuable property here, – and will allow your mother her proper share of the stock for the mine itself. I'll arrange all that to her perfect satisfaction before anything is concluded. Indeed, I must do that. Otherwise she would naturally make somebody else her agent."

"Oh, she'll trust you, Doctor," interrupted Jack.

"It isn't a matter of trust, it's business," answered the Doctor. "But on purely business principles we shall be able to arrange for your mother to put in the property and my friends to put in the money capital. I shall not ask your mother for a cent, for she has been like a mother to me ever since I came down here for my health and began boarding with her. My own people will allow me out of their share, a sufficient interest to compensate me. Now, I undertake also that they or I shall allow to Ed and Jim, half a share each in the mine, supposing it to be capitalized at a hundred thousand dollars, in return for their services while we have to stay here."

"No, Doctor," said Jack, "I will not hear of that. If you'll furnish one-half share, I engage that my mother shall furnish the other. That will divide the thing equally."

The Doctor, seeing the entire justice of this arrangement, assented to it, and the two called Jim and Ed into the conference. When they laid the proposition before the pair, it was joyfully accepted. Ed said:

"Even without that, we shouldn't have left the camp. We fellows have had so good a time together that I, for one, would have stayed and done my share of the work, with or without a financial interest in it."

"So should I," said Jim, enthusiastically. "Now that we are to be capitalists and stockholders and all that sort of thing, it will require all our self restraint not to grow cocky and refuse to work. Still there are a lot of poles to cut for the new shelter, and if you two fellows are going to stay here all day and talk, the rest of us must work all the harder."

"We're going to work at once, Jim," said the Doctor. "But I want you to understand that in my judgment this mine is going to be a great property, and that your share in it will go far to make you prosperous men."

Then Ed broke down. He had lived a hard life, trying to aid his widowed mother by such work as he could do, and this prospect opened to him, of a little income independent of his work, overcame him with emotion as he thought of the good mother released perhaps from the necessity of hard toil for the rest of her life. The simple fact is that as Ed turned away to hide his emotion, the tears rolled down his cheeks. But if he sobbed, it was not until he had gone down the hill well beyond the ledge of broken stones that marked the boundary of the camp.

When night came, the eager boys began again to question the Doctor about coal and coal mines. To every question, he replied by singing "Old King Coal," and declaring anew his resolute purpose not to talk at all on that subject till little Tom's return. But the Doctor was jubilant all the same, and he said presently, "His Majesty King Coal is a very generous monarch and he is going to make all of us well to do if not actually rich." Then he broke out again into the song:

 
"Old King Coal
Was a jolly old soul,
And a jolly old soul was he;
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three."
 

CHAPTER XL
Tom's Journey

Tom had not gone far on his journey before he discovered that the new Camp Venture was in fact situated very nearly at the base of the mountain. The headquarters of the railroad people lay a mile or so to the west, and perhaps two hundred feet or so lower. But along the foot of the hill was accumulated all the debris that had come tumbling down the steep for ages – great and small fragments of rock split off the cliffs above by the frosts of a multitude of winters and now piled haphazard wherever they could find a resting place.

In the midst of such a mass of rocky debris, now thickly overgrown with forest trees, Tom at first despaired of finding a practicable wagon path. But he toiled diligently at the task, retracing his steps many times and little by little tracing out a way, which he marked as he went by cutting branches of trees and setting them up as landmarks to show him the way when he should return with a wagon load of supplies.

All this occupied so much time that Tom did not reach his destination that night, but slept by a little fire on the mountain side.

In the morning there was a drenching, discouraging spring rain falling with pitiless persistence, and Tom's clothing and blanket were soaked through, and his limbs were stiff with cold. Fortunately his fire had not been entirely extinguished by the rain, and when he had replenished it with seasoned branches, and steamed himself in its glow for a time, his energy returned, and he cooked and ate a scant but refreshing breakfast which included the two drumsticks of the Doctor's turkey. These had been roasted the night before, but Tom threw them on the coals to broil a little. "I prefer a hot breakfast," he said, "particularly on a morning like this. How I wish I had a cup of coffee!"

Then gathering up the few things that he carried, he left his camp fire and continued his task of picking out a way by which a wagon might be dragged up and along the rocky hill. It was high noon when he reached the little railroad station where Dr. Latrobe's father had established his headquarters as a contractor. Tom was enthusiastically received by that gentleman, who was naturally pleased to hear news of his son's thoroughly restored health. There was a little tavern already established near the station and there Tom was made to dry and warm himself. Having assured Mr. Latrobe that he could conduct a loaded wagon up the hill to the new Camp Venture, Tom speedily left his occupation of warming himself and joined the older gentleman in choosing the materials that were to constitute the load. Mr. Latrobe had assigned for the purpose a heavy, stoutly built wagon, capable of enduring rough road service, and to Tom he said: "I've sent a little way down the line for four of the stoutest mules we have, to draw it, and for a driver who is used to mountain work. They will be here this evening and in the meantime we'll get the wagon loaded, so that you can make an early start in the morning." This suited Tom's plans exactly, and he set himself at work at once selecting from the contractor's stores, the things most desirable for his purpose.

There were ten large sides of bacon; half a barrel of sugar; half a barrel of molasses; half a barrel of corned beef; several hundred pounds of corn meal and a like quantity of flour in bags; a bushel or two of salt, and a good supply of potatoes, turnips, cabbages, canned vegetables and fruits with which to break the long monotony of the camp diet. Mr. Latrobe insisted upon adding some prunes, dried peaches, dried apples, and some other things that he thought the boys would enjoy. Finally a large box of coffee already ground and put up in damp-proof packages, was placed in the wagon, together with ten pounds of tea.

"You see I've done a great deal of camping, my boy," said the genial gentleman, "and I know how much of comfort there is in tea and coffee when you're rain soaked."

All these things were packed into the wagon by some of Mr. Latrobe's men, and securely lashed into immovability with stout hemp ropes. Over them a tarpaulin was spread to protect them from the rain and on top of that the picks and shovels were lashed into place.

The wagon was ready and that night Tom slept in a real bed for the first time in nearly half a year. But he was up at daybreak and off on his journey before the sun's appointed time for rising. Whether or not that luminary left his couch when he should, Tom had no means of finding out, for it was still heavily raining.

It was a toilsome journey that lay before him and Tom foresaw that it could not be accomplished much before nightfall, even should no delaying mishap occur, and therefore he disregarded the rain and insisted upon the earliest possible start.

It was Tom's function to walk ahead of the wagon, look out for the landmarks he had set up, and point the way to the driver who, armed with a long black snake whip, rode upon the "near," or left hand, wheel mule. But the driver was his own sufficient adviser as to how to overcome such obstacles as were met, and Tom was greatly interested to observe the skill and good judgment with which the man did this.

"There is science," he said, "in everything, even in driving a wagon over a rough mountain where there is no road."

But Tom got no response from the driver, who seemed a taciturn fellow, and who in fact never once spoke during the journey except to scold his mules with shocking profanity. Even when he decided to halt about noon to feed the animals, he said not one word to Tom, but simply stopped the wagon, unhitched the mules and gave them their food, hitching them up again when he thought it proper to do so and resuming his journey.

"Obviously," thought Tom, "that fellow has been used to driving alone. I wonder if he has forgotten how to talk? Or is it that he never thinks? Even the weather doesn't inspire him to make a remark, for he hasn't once asked my attention to the fact that the rain has ceased and that the sun is breaking through the clouds. He certainly can't be classified as a companionable personage, but at any rate he knows how to manage mules and get a wagon over difficulties, and after all that's what he is employed to do. He gets on wonderfully, too, considering the difficulties of the road. I suppose it is like the case of the man who tied his cravats so beautifully because, as he said, he 'gave his whole mind to it.'"

So, silently they proceeded on their way and just before sunset the wagon was stopped on the outskirts of the new Camp Venture.

The boys all rushed out to greet Tom and compliment him on his skill and success in bringing the supplies over so difficult a route. Tom greeted them all in turn, and then said:

"Try your hands, boys, and see if any of you can extract a single unnecessary word from that driver. I haven't been able to get anything out of him except vituperation for his mules."

The driver meanwhile was stripping his mules of their harness and arranging to give them the oats and fodder that he had brought with him for their use.

The Doctor filled a tin cup with coffee – for the boys had heard Tom coming and made supper ready against his arrival – and carried the steaming liquid out to the driver whose clothes were still sopping wet, and offered it to him, saying:

"You are very wet and it must have been a hard struggle to get your wagon up here. Drink this to warm you and when you get your mules fed, come to our fire and have some supper. You must be hungry."

The man took the cup, drank its contents, handed it back to the Doctor and muttered the single abbreviated word, "'Bleeged," by which the Doctor understood that he meant, "I am obliged to you."

Finally the man having disposed of his mules for the night, came to the camp fire for his supper. He received it in silence and proceeded to devour it like the hungry man that he was. Still he uttered not a word. At last Jim Chenowith tried his hand at drawing him into conversation.

"It must have been pretty tough work to get a wagon up here," he said, tentatively. The man said not a word in reply. This exasperated Jim and presently he stood up before the wagoner and angrily demanded:

"What's the matter with you? Why don't you answer a civil question?"

To this the man answered, "Hey?" at the same time putting his hand to his ear in a futile effort to understand.

"The man is almost stone deaf," said the Doctor. "That is the explanation of his silence."

Tom laughed at himself for not having made this discovery, and then crept into the bunk prepared for him in the new camp house.

CHAPTER XLI
Tom's Journey

The Doctor was an advocate of leisurely eating, but he impatiently hurried the boys through their breakfast the next morning and set them at work upon the bank with picks and shovels. He explained to them as he had before explained to Tom, that "outcrop" coal – that is to say, the edge of a coal seam exposed by any circumstance and left long exposed, deteriorates in quality and value.

"All the combustible parts of this exposed coal have been evaporated," he said, "until now the stuff is worth scarcely more than so much shale. But unless my knowledge of geology fails me, there lies behind this stuff, some of the very richest coal in Virginia. Our task is to dig in here and find out whether we have here a valuable coal mine or nothing at all."

"Suppose it is the kind of coal you think, Doctor," said Jack, "what is such a mine worth?"

"Nothing and everything. It all depends upon circumstances. A year or two ago the finest coal deposit in the world, located where this is would have been worth no more than the detritus from the hill that is piled up all around here. Such a mine at this place now, is incalculably valuable."

"But what makes so vast a difference?" asked Ed.

"The railroad," answered the Doctor. "A year ago this coal would have been worthless, simply because there was no market for it anywhere within reach. Now the railroad brings the market to the mouth of the mine, as it were. But come, let's get to work. If you want me to talk about King Coal, I'll do it to-night after supper. Just now we must dig for his majesty." Then he grabbed a pick and broke out again singing —

 
"Old King Coal
Was a jolly old soul," etc.
 

The boys dug with a will and by nightfall they had dug away three or four feet of the face of the cliff. Every now and then the Doctor would take a bit of the exposed coal and examine it critically under a strong magnifying glass. Every time he did so, he broke out again into the song about "Old King Coal." The boys had never seen him so jubilant.

When they quitted the work and began to prepare supper, the Doctor went into the shaft they had started, broke out a bushel or two of the deepest coal yet reached, and placed it on the fire. He watched it intently as it burned, and just as supper was ready he said:

"We've got it, boys, and no mistake. This is a great mine of the very best coal in the world for making gas, steam and coke, and as these hills are full of iron ore, the mine is precisely where it ought to be. When we dig a little further into that bank we shall come to coal that can be shovelled into a furnace with iron ore on top of it, and used to smelt iron without the trouble or expense of coking. Or we can make as good coke of it as there is in the world, and the vein is eight or nine feet thick, which means a lot, and it has a perfect rock roof, which means a lot more, and the volcanic upheaval which shoved it up here has kindly so placed it that it trends upward, so that in mining it we shall not have to do any pumping. All we've got to do is to dig trenches on each side of our coal car tracks and let the water run out by force of gravitation. I tell you boys, we've discovered the most valuable coal mine in all this region, and as if to make matters still better, it lies just high enough up the mountain to enable us to chute its product down to the railroad without any expense whatever for hauling."

"Well now," said Jack, "all that is good news. But we boys don't understand the thing the least bit. So you are to explain it to us after supper. You are to stop singing 'Old King Coal' and explain to us upon what grounds his majesty's authority rests."

"All right," said the Doctor, with truly boyish enthusiasm. "After supper I'll tell you all about my liege lord Old King Coal. Meantime won't somebody give me another cup of coffee and about a dozen more rashers of that paper-thin bacon? I'm hungry."

Jack replenished the Doctor's cup, and Ed cut for him a dozen or twenty very thin slices of bacon, leaving him to broil them for himself on the end of a stick and devour them as fast as they were broiled. Tom divided a pone of corn bread with him and the supper proceeded to its conclusion.

"Now then," called Tom, when the tin plates and tin cups had been washed and set up on the wall shelf which the Doctor had made for them, "we're ready to hear all about 'Old King Coal' and his claims upon our allegiance."

"Oh, no you're not," said the Doctor. "It would take me weeks to tell you the little I know on that subject and something like a lifetime for anybody who knows more to tell you 'all about' King Coal. But I'll tell you a little any how."

"First of all tell us why you call it 'King Coal,'" said Ed.

"Because in our age it is king," quickly answered the Doctor. "Without it every one of our industries would come to an end; every factory would stop; every steamship would be laid up forever; every electric light would go out; every railroad would become 'two streaks of rust and a right of way'; in short the whole fabric of modern civilization would tumble to the ground. You see every age has its key note. When men had no better implements than rough stones those people who had most stones were the easy conquerors of the rest. When they began to fashion stones into arrowheads, axes and the like, the people who lived in stony countries had a still greater advantage. When men learned to work metals – well you see the way it went. In the pastoral ages the man whose land produced most grass was the 'king pin' of his community and owned more cattle than anybody else. In the military ages the people who fought best were the supreme ones, and the rest were their dependants. In ecclesiastical ages the great prelates dominated, and so on through a long catalogue. Now ours is an industrial age and coal lies at the very root of productive industry. Without it we can't make steam or get power enough for any of the vast enterprises of modern civilization. It smelts iron out of rocks that would not give it up without King Coal's command. It enables us to make steel and to fashion metals to answer our requirements in a thousand ways. It runs our steamships, our factories, our railroads and pretty much everything else that we depend upon to make life easy, to enable us to interchange our products with people at a distance and generally to make ourselves comfortable. In short our whole civilization depends upon coal. That's why I call coal 'king.' If there ever was a monarch in this world whose authority could not be questioned without destruction to those revolting against it, that monarch is 'Old King Coal.'"

"But if we had no coal, why couldn't we do all these things with wood?" asked Jim.

"First, because we haven't enough wood," answered the Doctor. "We are using up our supply of wood much too rapidly already, and there coal is rendering us another important service. It is enabling us to use iron and steel for building materials, and a thousand other purposes for which we once used wood, and thus to spare our wood."

"What is your 'secondly,' Doctor?" asked Ed.

"Why secondly, wood cannot do the work."

"Why not?"

"Because it hasn't enough sunshine in it."

"How do you mean?"

"Why you know, don't you, that all the heat we get out of burning fuel of any kind, is simply so much sunshine stored up for us and released by burning?"

"I confess I didn't know that," said Tom. "Or at any rate I never thought of it. Now that I do think of it, I see how it is with wood. But what has sunshine to do with coal, buried as it is deep under rocks and earth?"

"Then you don't know what coal is, and where it comes from?" asked the Doctor. "Let me explain. There was a period in the world's remote history when the earth was much warmer than it is now – almost hot in fact. The atmosphere was filled with the gases of carbon, and the rains were an almost continuous cataclysm. Human life was impossible in these conditions. No man could have breathed such an atmosphere and lived. But the conditions were peculiarly favorable to abundant vegetable life. There were forests such as we do not dream of now even in tropical swamps. Ferns grew to the height of great trees, vines and cane and grass and air plants filled up every available inch of space, and they all grew in that carbonized atmosphere with a rapidity and luxuriance quite impossible now. All this vegetation died of course and fell to the ground as all vegetation does and has done from the beginning of time. Wherever it fell into water and was thus shielded from the air, and wherever it managed to get itself covered with earth or rock, as in that highly disturbed volcanic age often happened, it was converted into coal by pressure and by losing certain of its volatile elements, just as charcoal is made by expelling the volatile parts from wood. So, without going any further into details, you see that the coal is preserved vegetation which grew many thousands of years ago, and that the heat we get from it is simply the sunshine it stored up at a period before ever human life existed. What a pity it is that we have to waste so much of it!"

"How do you mean, Doctor?" asked Jack.

"Why you see we waste almost all the heat that coal gives us. If we could make effective use of it all, the burning of a single pound of coal would give us force enough to lift more than eleven and a half millions of pounds a foot from the earth; but the most that we actually get out of it is force enough to lift one and a half million pounds."

"What? All that from one pound of coal?" asked Jim.

"Yes, all that, and it all means so much sunshine which fell upon the earth thousands of years ago. Curious, isn't it?"

"It's simply astounding," said Jack. "But why do we burn coal so wastefully, Doctor? Why can't we utilize more of its heat? And what becomes of the waste heat?"

"Our methods are imperfect," answered the Doctor. "In a big manufacturing city thousands of tons of coal, or what is essentially the same thing, go off into the air every day in the shape of black smoke. You see the blackness of smoke is nothing but pure carbon or in other words coal. Then again think of the heat that goes up every smoke stack and is wasted in the air. It would run hundreds of great engines if it could be turned to account. And there is all the heat that makes an engine room so horribly torrid. Every bit of that is wasted power. Little by little, however, we are learning to save the power that coal gives us. A high pressure engine, like an ordinary locomotive, besides wasting coal, wastes greatly more than half the expansive force of its steam. It uses the steam only once and that very imperfectly, and then lets it escape into the open air and go to waste. But the big steamships and many factories have what they call triple or quadruple expansion engines which use the same steam three or four times in propelling the machinery, and then condense it into hot water and send it back into the boiler, thus saving a vast deal of the heat that would otherwise be wasted. Still even they waste most of the heat that their coal produces."

"By the way, Doctor," interrupted Tom, "how much coal does it take to drive one of the big steamers across the Atlantic?"

"From fifteen hundred to three thousand tons," answered the Doctor, "and think what a waste that is when a few hundred tons give force enough to do the work if only the force developed could all be used."

"But how do they manage to carry any freight when they must carry such an enormous load of coal?" asked Ed.

"That is another serious waste," answered the Doctor. "For every ton of coal carried means one ton less of freight. And then, too, think of the expense incurred in putting all that coal aboard. And think too of the cost of feeding and paying wages to a large company of men to handle it after it is on board! For you know besides the stokers who shovel the coal into the furnaces, there are the 'coal trimmers' as they are called, whose duty it is to keep the coal heap properly distributed in the ship. You see a ship is not stiff and rigid like a coal pocket. It would never do to begin at one end of a coal heap and use it as it comes. That would presently leave one part of the ship with no coal load at all, while thousands of tons would burden other parts. No ship that ever was built could stand that. It would twist her out of shape, warp her seams open and send her to Davy Jones in a very little time. So from the moment the stokers begin to shovel coal into the furnaces under a steamship's boilers the coal trimmers and coal carriers must busy themselves with the night and day work of so shifting the coal as to keep its weight properly distributed. But now to come back to what I was saying. Little by little we are learning to save some small part of the enormous waste in the burning of coal. One example will illustrate. In smelting iron – that is melting it out of the ore and separating it from the rock stuff, – the waste twenty-five years ago was simply appalling. The furnaces were mere pots built of fire clay brick, and filled with coal or coke beneath and iron ore on top. A blast of steam or hot air was sent into them from below to make the fire burn as hotly as possible. Sometimes this blast was strong enough to blow bushels of unburned coal or coke out at the top. That however was a mere trifle as compared with the other waste. For great flames, nearly hot enough to melt iron, poured out of every furnace top and were lost in the air. Every bit of that heat represented power that was literally cast to the winds. All that has been greatly improved since. The flames and heat that escape from the blast furnaces are now very generally harnessed and made to do further work. They are used to heat great steam boilers and thus create the power that operates rolling mills and gigantic forges, and vast machine shops. But we still waste very much more than half the heat that coal gives us – often more than nine-tenths of it."