It was starting to get a little chilly in the house at night so Clyde Barrow figured it was time to dig a little coal out of the basement. He didn’t actually dig it out if the basement. He dug it out of the field in front of the house. He got there from the basement, like his daddy before him. The Barrows had been digging their own coal out for years. Better than buying it.

Clyde got on the small dolly and pushed himself along the shaft. He had a pick, a shovel, and a large bucket with him. The shafts were shored up with various pieces of lumber. Clyde was picking at the seam of coal when there was a slight tremor and some dust was moving. Clyde decided it was time to get out of the shaft and started pushing backwards.

Orey Manning was digging a foundation out with his backhoe. He was putting the dirt into Nance Rollings truck. It was good work and it paid well. Why Roy Hopper wanted to build a house here was beyond Orey. This was a crummy place. The Barrows as neighbors? Not something Orey would want. They were lowlifers if there were any.

Then Orey felt the ground move. Then, he was in the foundation. All the way in. What the heck was this?

Nance Rollings also was glad for the work. He didn’t have to do much. He’d sit here while Orey filled his truck with soil. Then he’d take it to the other side of the lot and dump it as evenly as he could. Then he’d go back and get more. Pretty easy. He was only half awake as it was. He realized that the ground was moving and then he saw dirt in front of his truck.

Wayne Payne was supervising the job. Wayne was a good man to have on the job . He was happy for the work too. Wayne was a happy man most of the time unless you said something about his name being Wayne Dewayne Payne. That would get him all riled up. He looked over to where the backhoe and the truck were and they weren’t there. Huh? He walked over and saw them down in a hole. Uh, oh.

Orey and Nance climbed up out of the hole they were in. The three of them looked at the equipment sitting in a hole. Then they followed the caved in ground back along the field to Clyde Barrow’s land. Uh, oh. Roy Hopper wasn’t going to be happy about this. This had all the makings of trouble, real trouble.

Roy Hopper stood looking at his lot. The backhoe and the truck were being hooked up tp comealong so they could be hauled out. Roy didn’t care about that. He didn’t own them. He cared about his lot which was now a hole in the ground. He was even more upset after Wayne Payne told him the lot was going to make, “a fine lake after the next good rain.”

What really irked him was that he couldn’t do a thing about it. Even if he proved that the Barrow had mined out under his field he couldn’t change it. He could sue the Barrows but what good would that be. They probably owed more in taxes on their place than it was worth.

Clyde came up to Roy with a hangdog look on his face. Roy was too stunned to even yell at him. Roy was defeated. Clyde stood there looking at the field. Then he spoke to Roy.

“Real sorry about this, Roy. Darn near thing. It almost got me, you know. At least you’re goin to have a nice pond here if we gets a good, hard rain or two. Maybe you can put some fish in. At least my place didn’t go down too. Guess it weren’t a total loss, now was it, Roy?”