The trouble in the Michigan mining town of Thor begins when one married woman covets another married woman’s husband and progresses toward disaster when that husband covets a young girl, and when the whole town of Thor is involved in its own disaster caused by a fatal explosion in the mines. The human problems are handled with great skill by Miss Valentine and the tumult of the disaster is tense and gripping.
Libby and Henry Ducane, Madeline and Arthur Cole, Celestina and Wesley, the young lovers, and Dickey, the boy who waits bravely and manfully at the head of the mine shaft for the news of his brother down below—these are the main characters around whom the emotions and actions revolve. The author makes the reader hurry anxiously toward the solution of the problems so expertly presented, so inevitably resolved.