That evening my “buddy,” that is, the man who was to be my working companion, called to see me. He was a man of middle-age who had spent his life in the mines. He had the pronounced stoop that I noticed in all the miners and which I very soon acquired. His skin was of that sickly yellow hue characteristic of convicts and coal-miners, brought about by being shut out from the light of day. It seems that I drew a very lucky number in having this man assigned me for “buddy.” The other miners told me that he possessed a “machine.” That is, after years of toil in the mines he had been able to save enough to buy a drilling-machine that retails at the Company store for fourteen dollars. Wonderful fortune! Almost a lifetime spent in labor, and all that he had to show for it was a fourteen-dollar drilling-machine! We talked long into the evening and I found him not without ideas that were expressed in a crude way, but above all, and, what was of vastly more importance to me just then, he was a practical miner. I do not know what he might have thought about it, but he had the tact not to hint anything about objecting to a green hand as “buddy.” Indeed, I suspect that the Company would hardly tolerate any criticism of their actions in that regard. I appeared next morning clad in the habiliments of a coal-miner. My “deck” was filled and handed me and I followed the long line of stooping figures headed for the mines. We paused at the mouth of the pit and lighted our lamps and swung them from the front of our caps. Then, stooping still lower, passed down the long incline that leads into the coal vein. Soon the gloom surrounded us, and the flickering yellow-light from the burning lamp became our only guidance. Once upon the level of the coal body, the air became oppressive and warm. Used as I had always been to the free air of the mountains, I paused and gasped for breath. I was merely one atom of the inward moving black stream and was pushed onward. I soon grew accustomed to the lack of oxygen and before many days learned to exist upon a minimum supply of that article just as I learned to exist upon a limited supply of many other articles that in my ignorance I had considered essential. I neglected to state that I had been met at the pit mouth by my “buddy,” who escorted me through the mazes of the underground streets of the mine to the Third West, which was the field of our future efforts for some time to come. On the way in he conversed very cheerfully about the condition of one of his children who was ill with pneumonia and not expected to live the day through. I half suspect that he secretly hoped that the Death Angel would come, and not only relieve the little one of her sufferings, but relieve him of one hungry mouth to feed.