"Go!" called the umpire and the hammer smote the drill-head till it made the blue granite smoke; and then for thirty seconds he flailed away while Slogger Meacham turned the short starter-drill.
"Change!" called their coach and with a single swoop Meacham flung his drill back into the crowd and caught up his hammer to strike. His partner dropped his hammer and chucked in a fresh drill--_smash_, the hammer struck it into the rock--and so they turned and struck while the ramping miners below them looked on in envious amazement. As each drill was thrown out it was brought back from where it fell and examined by the quick-eyed coach, and as he called off the half minutes he announced their probable depth as indicated by the mud marks on the drills. Across the block from the two drillers knelt a man with a rubber tube who poured water into the churning hole; and at each blow of the hammer the gray mud leapt up, splashing turner and hammer-man alike.
At the end of five minutes they were down fifteen inches, at ten they still held their pace; but as Denver glanced doubtfully at his coach and Owen the sound of the drilling changed. There was a grating noise, a curse from the turner, and as he flung out the drill and thrust in another a murmur went up from the crowd. They had broken the bit from the brittle edge of their drill and the new drill was grinding away on the fragment, which dulled the keen edge of the steel. The quick ears of the miners could sense the different sound as the drill champed the fragment to pieces, and when the next change was made the mud-marks on the drill showed that over an inch had been lost. A team working at top speed averaged three inches to the minute, driving down through hard Gunnison granite; but Meacham and his partner had lost their fast start and they had yet four minutes to go. The tall Cornishman's eyes gleamed--he struck harder than ever--but Meacham had begun to lose heart. The accident upset him, and the grate of the broken steel as the drill bit down on chance fragments; and as his coach urged him on he glanced up from his turning with a look that Denver knew well. It was the old pig-eyed glare, the look of unreasoning resentment, that he had seen on the Fourth of July.