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black-faced by day’s end, asked the question
     of a thin boy of about eighteen who stood somehow apart from the other miners, even though it was a tight fit in the elevator.
     The youngster was unaccustomed to his helmet light and was having difficulty turning it on, fumbling for the switch at the
     back of his hard hat.
    “Here, let me help you with that,” Hughes offered. He switched it on for him, slapped the boy across the shoulder blades,
     and asked, “Now tell us your name, won’t you?”
    “Frank,” the boy said nervously.
    “How do you do, Frank,” Hughes boomed. “You got to learn to speak up in the pit, boy. Things is much better than they were
     a coon’s age ago, but it’s still black as a witch’s bum down here, and sometimes when things happen, it’s good to be familiar
     with the sound of your mate’s voice.”
    Hughes slapped the boy again across the shoulder blades. The elevator was about halfway down the shaft now. Hughes and the
     other men saw the lighted marker indicating the same.
    “Frank!” The boy said it much louder, more exuberantly, the way Hughes had. “The name’s Frank LaRaja—”
    “A Frenchy!” one of the others shouted. “I thought all them Frenchies was either gay boys or muff divers. Didn’t know them
     Frenchies had any real men.”
    “Shut your dirty face, you dumb fart-brain,” Hughes said. Then, to LaRaja, “You must become acquainted with our ways rather
     quickly, I’m afraid. We believe, you see, in spendin’ our days in savage amusement. And—”
    Hughes stopped himself. He sniffed at the air, sensing something foreign in this dank, compressed atmosphere, something dry
     and acrid. He saw that most of the other men noticed the smell, too.
    “Smoke,” someone said.
    “Yeah, same here. I smell it, too.”
    “No, it can’t—”
    It was the last word any of them said. They all made sounds, the horrible, raw sounds of fear men make when trapped like rodents,
     scurrying about some small bit of space, knowing that in a matter of seconds or perhaps minutes they will meet their violent
     end.
    The smell of smoke in a mine shaft is the terrible precursor of rapid death—for the lucky ones. Even in this day of mostly
     mechanized mining, it remained necessary to send down scores of men each day to cut away at the coal face. More machinery
     meant more generation of electricity; more production invariably meant more men, and therefore increased human error; more
     production meant increased release of flammable gasses that would have to be controlled and neutralized by safety workers
     in advance of the miners themselves.
    Modernity, in some cases, meant both more comfort to the laboring—and more risk of deadly consequence. And in the mining industry,
     even modernity and all the wondrous new safety techniques, developed by and forced upon the big companies, would never be
     able to erase the grim links with the necessary crudities of the past, namely, the canary custom.
    Before and after each production shift, safety workers pass through the network of tunnels with live canaries carried in small
     bird cages. Canaries, being especially susceptible to gaseous poisoning, are the barometers of carbon, sulphur, and cadmium
     vapor presence. If the canaries live, the tunnels are deemed safe from the potential of instant holocaust. If the canaries
     die, the safety workers pump in adequate amounts of gaseous elements to neutralize the presence of combustibles in the air.
    There is no substitute for the canary custom.
    And now, at this moment, twenty-two men crowded together on a descending elevator cage, twenty-two men sniffing at the darkness
     with the white heat of terror in their eyes, knew what the canaries were blessed never to experience.
    Hughes caught sight of the two-hundred-foot marker. Two hundred more feet, and the acrid fumes were growing stronger.
    Then came the explosion.
    A small, muffled explosion, followed by a powerful rumbling from