Operating the double-drum is Ira Sliger's job, although some days, like today, he has a partner to assist him. Sliger is sixty years old, looks, as he likes to say, "big enough to eat oats and pull a plow," but forty-four years of metal mining have left their mark. One lung is gone, and the other has been weakened by emphysema-"dust on the lungs," he calls it. All morning Sliger and his partner, Bob Scanlan, sit in the control booth in the cavernous underground hoistroom, hauling muck buckets up and down the shaft according to bell signals from the cager, who supervises the muck loading a half-mile below. Until noon it is an ordinary day. At one o'clock more than half of the crew will be dead.

Shortly aftertwelve Sliger gets a phone call from a shaft crew on the 4400 level. (The crew had smelled smoke in the shaft and signaled for the 3700 chippy hoist. When it didn't come, and no one answered in the hoistroom, they called Sliger to ask what was wrong.) They don't mention the smoke. Sliger figures the signal system must have gone out. It failed once before in the past week, and he isn't surprised that it has apparently happened again. Underground miners keep their sanity by not worrying too much, and Sliger is philosophical. He turns back to his controls, but immediately there is another call, this from his boss, Gene Johnson, on 3700.The Sunshine Silver Mine

"'Where's your cager at?" asks Johnson. "Get him up here as soon