The gaining speed pinned Tomas Reed’s boots to the shaking oak floorboards.
The cage was roaring upward through the central shaft at more than twenty feet per second, the air howling through the wire mesh like a hurricane. The upright pine guide rails flashed past in a blur of gray splinters and wet moss, the iron guide-shoes shrieking as friction heated the metal to smoking heat levels.
Above them, through the darkness of the shaft collar, the opening of the Gray Pit grew closer—a circle of pale gray mountain daylight, scarcely fifty feet above their heads.
“He’s not stopping!” Sile Rook roared over the ear-splitting scream of the guides. “The engineer is going to pull the cage straight through the headframe pulley wheels!”
On a mine headframe, the pulley wheel wheels sat sixty feet above the ground. If a hoisting cage was pulled past the landing platform into the pulley wheel structure, the iron cage would strike the massive timber crossbeams at full speed, shearing the cable and dropping the wreckage four hundred feet to the bottom of the pit.
“The safety dogs!” Mara Flint cried, pointing her staff at the upper crosshead. “The springs are wired open!”
Tomas looked up. The thick loops of rusted telegraph wire bound the heavy steel safety teeth back against the iron frame. Even if the cable parted, the emergency teeth wouldn’t drop into the wooden guides.
