Tommy
The baby born into the mining community to bring them brief—but irrefutable—sense of redemption for past sins and confer upon them an aspect of civilization sorely missing before his arrival is referred to throughout with the metaphorical moniker “The Luck.” But as a metaphorical character, Tommy represents something far more potent and expansive than mere random good fortune. Tommy Luck is nothing more nor less than a Christ-figure.
Infantine Gravity
The baby at the center of the center of the story—the Luck—is described by the narrator as appearing to be generally content being surrounded by wild men in a mining camp as his collective caretakers, but then he attributes a rather odd metaphorical aspect to him that first describes rather mystically as “infantine gravity” before surrendering to more accessible figurative imagery by explaining that this gravity was realized through “a contemplative light in his round gray eyes.” This description comes rather late in the story and the additional information that it is clear enough to worry Stumpy infuses it with a definite sense of foreshadowing.
Second Skin
The harshness of frontier life which penetrated so deeply into the character of the men who pursued it is illuminated through a particularly strong metaphorical image that alludes to the environmental geography of the area as well as its distance from the social graces of everyday civilization:
“It was a cruel mortification to Kentuck - who, in the carelessness of a large nature and the habits of frontier life, had begun to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake's, only sloughed off through decay - to be debarred this privilege from certain prudential reasons.”
The Miners
The renowned if perhaps overstated roughness of the miners is put into context by the narrator through metaphorical juxtaposition:
“The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet”
“The camp rose to its feet as one man!”
The metaphorical image of community spirit and the rejection of the mercenary self-interest of the individual which describes the reaction of every miner in the camp to the news of the Tommy’s successful birth is another bit of foreshadowing. In this case, it foresees the adoption of altruistic motives as the driving force bonding the camp together in a way that produces the collateral of positive improvements there.
