"Jim Will Come Out Alive"

At 9 o'clock on the morning after Christmas, the women and children of Four-Mile, Ky. began running out of doors. It is not the sort of village in which people ordinarily run--its weathered shacks squat dismally in a muddy hill hollow amid slatternly fences, outhouses and discarded tires. The women and children straggled past the empty coalies on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad spur, and up a barren knoll to the tipple of the Belva Mine. Smoke and burned fragments of cardboard and paper were puffing hotly from the tunnel mouth.

There were 30-odd somewhere inside, but for a long time nothing happened. It takes time to gather rescue crews. It was noon when helmeted, heavy-shod men began going in, laden with masks, tools, equipment. When the first crew came out again, black-faced and exhausted, the word they carried was bad.

Fire in the Coal. There had been a terrible explosion, probably far down in the two-and-a-half-mile tunnel, for no sound had been heard outside. There was fire in the coal only 500 feet in, and more fires beyond. There were innumerable slate falls and blockades of rubble. Timbering was shattered, the ventilating system dam aged, and there was blackdamp as well as thick, choking coal smoke inside.

The rescue crews began taking in telephone wire, timbers, chemicals and rock dust for extinguishing fires. As night passed, the people standing beside bonfires outside began to understand how slowly the terrible work was going. As the new day dawned, a rumor ran wildly through the crowd: 31 men had been found, all dead. It was denied, but believed--for the fight seemed hopeless.

Mrs. Anna Mae Bain, a miner's wife, stood weeping in the rain, repeating desperately: "Jim will come out alive. He simply has to do that for me and his children." Many other tired women stood in numb silence. The Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Co. had not seen fit to insure its men under Kentucky's workmen's compensation laws, and there would be no benefits for the widows.

Eight Stretchers. The work went on, all day and through another night, and through the morning of the third day. Then, late in the afternoon, the crowd stirred. Ambulances began arriving. Two doctors drove up and went into the tunnel. Crazy news spread from sooty, bone-tired rescue workers. Nine men had survived the blast, had bratticed themselves into a side tunnel. Eight of them were alive. Women jostled and called as the blanketed forms were carried out on stretchers. There had been few such miracles in the Southern coal country.

Five more miners were discovered during the fourth night. All were dead. Jim Bain, many another good man were still missing, and fires still raged deep in the earth. At week's end women still waited in the cold near Four-Mile's tipple; 20-man rescue teams still toiled in Four-Mile's shattered tunnel.

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