Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during
which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All
through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going
down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil--just as if
he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds
of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness. He would
not add the oil to the common stock of his gang, but would save and
sell it.
'I knew these workings before you were born,' Janki Meah used to reply:
'I don't want the light to get my coal out by, and I am not going to
help you. The oil is mine, and I intend to keep it.'
A strange man in many ways was Janki Meah, the white-haired,
hot-tempered, sightless weaver who had turned pitman. All day
long--except on Sundays and Mondays when he was usually drunk--he
worked in the Twenty-Two shaft of the Jimahari Colliery as cleverly
as a man with all the senses. At evening he went up in the great
steam-hauled cage to the pit-bank, and there called for his pony--a
rusty, coal-dusty beast, nearly as old as Janki Meah.
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