The Burly drill boring for
blasts broke out from time to time in an irregular chug-chug, chug-chug,
while the engine that pumped the water from the mine coughed and
strangled at short intervals.
McTeague tended the chuck. In a way he was the assistant of the man who
worked the Burly. It was his duty to replace the drills in the Burly,
putting in longer ones as the hole got deeper and deeper. From time
to time he rapped the drill with a pole-pick when it stuck fast or
fitchered.
Once it even occurred to him that there was a resemblance between his
present work and the profession he had been forced to abandon. In the
Burly drill he saw a queer counterpart of his old-time dental engine;
and what were the drills and chucks but enormous hoe excavators, hard
bits, and burrs? It was the same work he had so often performed in his
"Parlors," only magnified, made monstrous, distorted, and grotesqued,
the caricature of dentistry.
He passed his nights thus in the midst of the play of crude and simple
forces--the powerful attacks of the Burly drills; the great exertions
of bared, bent backs overlaid with muscle; the brusque, resistless
expansion of dynamite; and the silent, vast, Titanic force, mysterious
and slow, that cracked the timbers supporting the roof of the tunnel,
and that gradually flattened the lagging till it was thin as paper.
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