The store-clerk met me at the station with a conveyance, and told me the pit-boss was armed and crazy drunk and had every one terrorised, also that there had been an accident in the pit in which a man was nearly killed. I met the pit-boss on the steps of the manager’s house, and he wanted to know what I had come back for. I noticed that he had the company’s 45 Colt buckled on him, the gun that was supposed to lie on my desk in the office. This I proceeded to take from him, and then went over to my house. It turned out that one of the men (disobeying strict orders), while unloading a “missed shot,” started to dig out the dynamite with his iron spoon, instead of loading on top of it and so discharging the shot. When the spoon reached the cap it exploded, the charge tearing off one of his arms at the elbow and the other at the wrist. They had sent him into town in the hack, and wired for a doctor to meet him on the road. After attending to this the pit-foreman’s nerve failed him, and he asked the storekeeper for the key of my house, so that he could get a drink, as he felt sick. He had found out about the liquor by the storekeeper running up to my house for a drink for the injured man. Having once started he went at it in good shape, for in four days he consumed a bottle of whisky and three gallons of Californian wine, besides about three dozen pint bottles of beer. The men in the pit got scared and refused to go to work, as there was a rumour that there were some more shots that might go off. This so enraged the foreman that he went to the office, got a Colt’s 45, and going down to the pit threatened to kill any man who did not go back to work at once. In his frenzied state they were more afraid of him than they were of any possible explosion, so they went back in a hurry.