"I do not know," said Brewster, "but I fancy that the fairest final prizes may not be to the best musicians, but to those who made the sorest sacrifices in order to get a ticket to the concert." With this the good nights were repeated. CHAPTER XVII. At length there came a day when there was real trouble in the Club. The foreman of the mine in which Wright was at work ordered Wright and a fellow miner to go to the surface to assist in handling some machinery which was to be sent down into the mine. The two men stepped upon the cage and three bells were sounded--the signal to the engineer at the surface that men were to be hoisted and all care used. The cage started from the 2,400-foot level. Nothing unusual happened until, as they neared the surface, Wright said to his comrade: "By the way we are passing the levels, it seems to me they must be in a hurry on top." The other miner answered: "I guess it is all right;" but hardly were the words spoken, when they shot up into the light; in an instant the cage went crashing into the sheaves and was crushed, the men being thrown violently out. Wright's companion, as he fell, struck partly on the curbing of the shaft, rolled in and was of course dashed to pieces. Wright was thrown outside the shaft, and though not killed outright, two or three ribs were broken, one lung was badly injured, besides he was otherwise terribly bruised. People unfamiliar with mining may not understand the above. On the Comstock the hoisting engines are set from forty to eighty feet from the mouths of the shafts. Directly over the shafts are frames from thirty to fifty feet in height, on which pulleys (rimmed iron wheels) are fastened. The cages are lowered and raised by flat, plaited, steel wire cables, which are generally four or five inches wide and about three-eighths of an inch in thickness. This cable is first coiled on the reel of the engine, then the loose end is drawn over the pulley, then down to the cage, to which it is made fast. The wheel of a pulley is called a sheave, and by habit it has grown to be a common expression to call the block and wheel in hoisting works "the sheaves." At intervals of one or two hundred feet on the cables they are wound with white cloth, as a guide to the engineer, as the cable is uncoiled in lowering or coiled in hoisting. Also, on the outer rim of the reel, is a dial with figures or marks at regular intervals, and a hand (like the hand of a clock) which perpetually indicates to the engineer about where the cage is in all stages of lowering or hoisting.