The central headframe of the Gray Pit stood on an outcropping of solid granite that jutted over the northern rim like a hanging scaffold. It was a huge pyramid of rough-hewn pitch-pine timbers, sixty feet high and eighty feet wide at the base, cross-braced with heavy iron tie-rods and held together by two-inch oak treenails. At its apex, two massive cast-iron pulley wheel wheels, eight feet in width, turned slowly against the gray sky, guiding the thick hoisting cables that plunged down into the upright darkness of the central shaft.
Beside the timber tower stood the hoist house. A squat stone building where a twin-metal tube steam winding engine hissed and chugged, its heavy iron flywheel spinning with a rhythmic, pulsing thrum that shook through the granite beneath Tomas’s boots. Plumes of white steam drifted from its exhaust pipe. It condensed into icy droplets that rained over the platform, smelling of coal clinkers, hot lard oil, and sulfur.
Tomas walked around the outside of the hoist house, his cart driver’s gaze noting the coal bunker. The fuel was cheap, low-grade bituminous slack from the southern marshes, black and crumbly. That left a thick deposit of greasy soot on the cedar shingles. Beside the boiler intake, two iron safety valves were tied down with loops of rusted telegraph wire, weighed down with scrap granite blocks to prevent them from lifting under too much boiler pressure. A criminal shortcut commonly practiced by reckless mine workers seeking to push old boilers past their…
