Victory

Two weeks ago, late one night, seven grimy miners toiled in the zinc-and spar-veined bowels of a mountain near Salem, Ky. With a surly roar, the wall of their tunnel collapsed behind them. Two men dashed for the shaft, shouting, "The cut's pullin', boys!" Another man, Roy James, could have escaped, but tore back the other way, through a foaming flood of subterranean water, to warn his comrades, George Castiller, Harry Watson, U. B. Wilson and Randolph Cobb. . . . Out in the shaft, Garth Heare, the mine's superintendent, labored night and day to drill through to the prisoners. Hard rock smashed the drill-bits. The mine pump failed. It was 153 hours (six days and a half) before Salem rejoiced and the victims, still alive and astonishingly cheerful, lay in the first aid station having their mud-caked clothes cut from their backs. In their cloth caps was scrawled this legend: "If we are dead when you find us, we are saved." Propped up in bed at home, Randolph Cobb told a terse, simple story: "We laid there till Friday morning, I guess, and then we all got victory from God except James. He failed.. We prayed on then until Sunday morning. We had only our carbide lamps. I told them I was going to do some writing. I turned to James and said, 'Roy, are you right or are you wrong? I'm going to put down what you say.' "Roy said, 'I don't know what to do.' Then turning his eyes toward Heaven he said, 'put it down I'm saved.' "We held a grand and glorious meeting then and were living on the Lord's love when they found us." There indeed was material for one more of the half-hymn-half-folksongs that Kentucky mountaineers sing in their cabins to the soft thrumming of guitars.* They sing the death of Floyd Collins, who perished in Sand Cave at Cave City, Ky., in February 1925--a haunting, primitive, narrative dirge that begins: Oh, come, all you young people, And listen while I tell Of the fate of Floyd Collins, A lad we all knew well. . . . They sing William Jennings Bryan's Last Fight, The Convict and the Rose, The Wreck of the Shenandoah, Little Mary Thagan --and many another sad story. All the tunes are alike, never departing from the few chords within reach of the unschooled accompanist. Every tale has its moral lesson. In the Bryan song, the singer warns: If you want to go to Heaven, When your time on earth is through, You must be as Mr. Bryan, You will fail unless you do. The villain that brings little Mary Thagan to her "fatal doom" is made an object of pity as well as loathing. And the Floyd Collins song counsels--as the miners of Salem, Ky., well knew--to "get right with your Maker before it is too late."

* And that phonograph owners everywhere have lately been buying eagerly in record form, sung and played in faithful dialect for the Columbia Company.