the fire started an old...

the fire started an old shaft on the side of whitfield's property, some kids must have been messing about with kerosine rags and trying to get far down through the boarded up entrance and on down into the main shaft, wanting to drop down to the number three shaft that ran all the way over into the next county and came out near the steel rail bridge. and them kids probably dropped a rag or two on down to see what they could and some of that anthracite lit on and well fire can get in an old seem and run along and deep into it. there's town up north still on fire from down in the belly or so it said in a newspaper article once got passed around the mercantile. So this shaft boiled up and started spewing the blackness of smoke out into the hollar and it was like the devil himself had come up to take a look around. whitfield weren't one too happy about it and especially when the ground out in his front yard got so hot you couldn't hardly walk on it. and then he come up wondering if his entire homestead was gonna burn and he knew he had done things in his paadt that might call for such bad luck, and he could understand how a person might imagine this old mine shaft belching smoke and running fire under half the town could be misconstrued as a reckoning and he began to fear what it was that was inside the earth and how it might be an actual thing out of his hands come to take care of what it was that was inside of him......