Gold Mine

A poor old gold mine in Nova Scotia, abandoned 25 years ago and reopened last winter, collapsed on its owners last week, thus entombing one of Canada's most distinguished surgeons and a rising young Toronto lawyer. Trapped with them was one of their employes. Modest, moon-faced Dr. David Edwin Robertson, 52, surgeon-in-chief of Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and his lawyer friend, gangling, bespectacled Herman Russell Magill, 30, last February took a flyer by leasing the Moose River Gold Mine. Last week Dr. Robertson & partner were ready to take the mine's first gold brick to the mint. Night before the big day, the two men and their timekeeper, Alfred Scadding, went down into the mine at 7 p. m. for a tour of inspection.

Three hours later the boy at the pithead heard the signal bell from the 141-ft. level, indicating that the three wanted to come up. Seconds later he heard the dread nine bell alarm, meaning DANGER, then a great rumbling roar. The walls of the shaft had buckled, the ground over nearly an acre had dropped several feet. Headed by Premier Angus MacDonald, most of Nova Scotia's Provincial officials rushed to the scene.

On the surface a giant clamshell crane, dynamite, a steam shovel, squads of digging miners, burrowed from four different angles on the thin chance that the trapped men might still live. A pipe was forced into the mine tomb and, six days after the cave-in, Dr. Robertson's voice cried faintly, "Hello. We are all right." All, however, were suffering from shock, starvation, exposure. Brandy, chocolate, soup, Bi-so-dol, oilskins, flashlights and candles were dropped down the 5-in. pipe. Then a new menace appeared when water began flooding the wrecked mine. With freedom or drowning a matter of hours away, Dr. Robertson announced up the tube: "Magill is dead."

As the water rose, forcing the trapped men away from their food line, Dr. Robertson guessed that they could hold out another ten or twelve hours. Soon he could hear the picks of the miners hacking frantically overhead, passing rock and dirt up to the surface by a human chain. Hospital kits were unpacked, stretcher-bearers stood ready as the tired rescuers, themselves threatened momentarily with collapse of their shaft, sent up word that they were "almost through."

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