The yellow light of the safety lamps flickered across the cold, dark iron of the drop-gate.
It was a monstrous piece of heavy-duty ironwork, eight feet wide and nine feet high, built of interlaced two-inch square bars of Swedish charcoal iron, forge-welded at every intersection. The upright bars were seated deeply into a massive granite doorstep at the bottom. Meanwhile, the lateral ends were mortised four inches into the solid hard black rock bedrock of the drift walls. It was sealed with molten lead that had been poured into the seams sixteen winters before.
In the center of the gate, securing the two sliding halves of the drop-gate together, was a forged iron locking bar as thick as a heavy cart horse’s leg. Through three heavy iron hasps passed three huge square-bodied padlocks, each weighing at least twenty pounds, forged from cold-hammered steel. A thick layer of black sheep fat and pine tar coated the iron bodies, preserving them from the humid damp of the mine air so perfectly that the stamped lettering on their faces was as crisp as the day they left the foundry.
Tomas and Sile set to work on the rubble face.
Working with heavy iron pinch-bars and two-inch ash rollers, they began systematically prying away the outer facade of loose granite blocks. Tomas’s scarred left wrist, braced firmly in its stiff calfskin support, took the pivot point pressure as he jammed his steel bar beneath a three-hundred-pound slab. Beside him, Sile Rook’s massive shoulders bunched…
