When Sam Hall arrived for his morning shift at the Coal Glen coal mine on the morning of May 26, 1925, it was just another day on the job. He had been employed for some months as an underground miner, laboring thousands of feet from the sunlight every day, extracting the Deep River’s “black diamonds” for the Carolina Coal Company. The work was hard and dangerous, but the pay wasn’t bad, so Sam didn’t mind. At least, not until he saw the rats.