CHAPTER XIVUNDERGROUND
Puttingthe Pennykorn gang out of our minds for the time being, Poppy and I again took up the peculiar puzzle of the one-armed cat killer. He sure was a big hunk of mystery, all right. The crazy things that he had done in Tutter you already know about. Less than three hours ago, after having followed us to the church, he had given us the slip in broad daylight. And here he was in the secret cellars of the pirate’s house pounding away with his tack hammer as unconcerned as you please, seemingly with as little fear of detection as he had shown at the church. Had he followed us here, too? Or had he left town ahead of us? We wondered.
What he was after, of course, in this secret work of his, was the balance of the hidden treasure. Having found one of the gold cucumbers he naturally wanted the whole caboodle. To believe Mrs. O’Mally’s story, he had been working here, like a hidden ghost, for a month or more. That he was still on the job, with a tap! tap! here and a tap! tap! there, as the old scout song goes, proved thatthe crafty pirate had put his treasure away in some peculiarly secure place. But where had the man gotten his clews to the hidden treasure in the first place? Further, where was the secret entrance to these mysterious underground rooms that enabled him to come and go in broad daylight without detection? And, most puzzling of all, considering his cat-killing mania, who was he?
With nothing in the cellar now except green cucumbers and silence, we were led to believe that the mysterious worker had gone off somewhere to take a rest. So we got busy and did some extensive wall tapping ourselves, with the big hope, of course, that we would be successful in locating a hollow section in the heavy masonry. But the guy who did the needle-sleuthing stuff in the haystack had an easier job than us. For those cellar walls sounded about as hollow as a butcher’s chopping block. The secret doors, it would seem, were a myth.
As I have written down, the cellar was deep and dungeon-like. It was full of creeping shadows, too. Shadows that had twisting octopus arms one minute and spider-like legs the next. I didn’t like it for two cents. I kept thinking of that iron jigger that had grabbed the poor cat. And other stories of murders believed to have been committed here ran through my mind. Sniffing, I could almost imagine that the dank air was heavy with the smell of blood.Like a slaughterhouse. However, when I told Poppy what I was sniffing about he said that it was a dead-rat smell, after which he went upstairs, in further wall tapping, but to no better success.
We then went over the outside walls inch by inch, not only tapping, but searching, as with a microscope, for a possible secret door, on the order of those amazing secret doors that we bumped into while working on the mystery of the spotted gander, as related in an earlier book, POPPY OTT AND THE GALLOPING SNAIL. At the end of our work we were dead sure that there were no secret doors here. So, unless the man got into the hidden rooms from within the house, which seemed impossible, the only other view to take was that he did the trick from underground.
“Didn’t you tell me something about a tunnel, Jerry?”
“I’ve heard thereisa tunnel,” I answered.
“But you haven’t seen it?”
“No,” I shook my head.
If therewasa tunnel leading from the river to the stone house, with a secret entrance at the cellar end, certainly we ought to be able to find it, the leader said. But here again we bumped our noses against a solid brick wall, as the saying is. And after an hour’s unsuccessful search up and down the shore of the river, where the bank for the most part wasnothing but a mud-baked slope sprinkled with willows, we came to the conclusion that the “tunnel” also was a pipe dream.
Cutting a willow club for myself, with the thought that I might need it before the night was over, I came back to the shore to find Poppy staring across the wide stretch of water at the sandstone bluffs that have been given earlier mention in my story.
“Quick, Jerry!” he beckoned.
What he had seen was a man in a rowboat, nothing unusual in itself except that the boatman, who was little more than a speck to us, disappeared into one of the unfrequented canyons, sort of pushing the boat along with a pole.
Poppy, of course, as could have been expected of him under the circumstances, was now bound and determined to cross the river. And remembering about old Cap’n Tinkertop’s hidden rowboat, I led the way to the sheltered mouth of Weir creek. But the boat was gone! And then the truth of the situation slowly percolated into my bean. It was the Cap’n’s boat that we had seen across the river. The one-armed man had stolen it, which explained why the boat, as we had gotten a glimpse of it at a distance, was being pushed along with a pole.
Poppy’s interest switched quickly from the cat killer to the creek.
“Where does it go to?” says he, rubbering up streamthrough the bushes that cluttered the banks.
“I never followed it,” I told him, “so I can’t tell you.”
Using a willow pole as a measuring stick, he thus learned that the water in the middle of the narrow stream was up to his neck.
“Hot dog!” he cried, jumping with excitement.
“What wonderful discovery have you made now?” says I.
“Don’t you catch on, Jerry?” he laughed. “The pirate used this creek as a sort of hidden harbor. For he was too foxy, let me tell you, to have his secret tunnel open directly on the river. So the thing for us to do is to follow the creek until we come to shallow water. And then, kid, don’t be surprised if wedofind an underground tunnel, after all. Come on, Jerry!” and off he tore through the thicket like a house afire.
The creek, as we followed it, keeping as close to the banks as possible, wound here and there, as such streams do. So far as we could determine the depth in the middle was never less than two feet, which was plenty deep enough for a flat-bottomed skiff. There was no current, which showed that the stream, in spite of its name, was really nothing more than a bayou. Still, was my conclusion, it probably had some kind of a feeder up ahead, if nothing more than the occasional overflow of thecanal. There was a heavy growth of slough moss here, but the channel was noticeably open, and we fancied, as we pushed and pulled our way through the dense willows, that we could see places here and there where the one-armed man had jabbed his pole into the moss.
Presently the leader gave a triumphant shout.
“Look, Jerry!” he parted the willows. “There’s the old stone house.”
Sure enough, we had circled until now we were not more than thirty or forty rods from the pirate’s house, in a low strip commonly called the “Weir jungle.” And were we ever excited! Oh, boy! As the saying is, we were getting “warmer” every minute.
It was no trick for us to pick out the exact spot on the creek bank where the boatman had landed. And so frequent had been his trips here during the past month that a path, which led off to the right, showed plainly. Following this path, with a sharp lookout ahead, we soon came to what seemed to be the mouth of an abandoned cement tunnel, similar to dozens of other old tunnels that I had seen in and around Tutter. I never had known, though, that any early tunneling for cement rock, which underlies the floor of the valley, had been done here.
“I wish we had a light,” said Poppy, rubbering into the black hole.
“Gosh!” I sort of held off. “Wouldn’t you be afraid to go in there?”
“What’s the risk,” says he, “when we know that the one-armed geezer is on the other side of the river?”
It was our theory now that the treasure hunter, living in one of the hidden caves across the river, was resting there for a few hours. So I ran back to the stone house for a flashlight, as eager as the leader was to do the exploring act.
Mrs. O’Mally nearly had a fit when she learned what we were planning to do.
“Please don’t,” she begged, thinking, I guess, of the fix that we would be in if the one-armed man came back to the tunnel sooner than we expected. “Ye may be killed.”
But I didn’t let her scare me.
“Don’t you worry about us,” I laughed. Then, ready to go, I told her to listen for us through the cellar walls. We’d give five quick taps, I said.
If you think that a cellar is a cool place, you ought to wrap yourself in a hunk of mosquito netting some blistering-hot July day and stroll around in a cement tunnel. You’d soon lose your sweaty feeling. It’s strange to me where the cold air comes from. Still, I guess it’s much the same with coal mines or any other kind of underground places. For my part, though, I’ll take the good old sunshine,even when the thermometer has its neck stretched out full length.
The pirate’s tunnel, as we now called the underground passageway, seemed cooler to me, once we got into it, than the average old tunnel of its kind. As we went deeper into the icy hole, where everything beyond the reach of our flashlight was as black as pitch, we not only stopped every few seconds to listen, but we doused our light, thinking that if we stood in the darkness we could better pick up another moving light, either ahead of us or behind us. But we heard nothing. Neither did we see anything.
As you may never have been in a cement tunnel, especially an old one, I’ll describe what this tunnel was like. The floor, of course, like the walls and the seven-foot roof, was of solid rock, perfectly flat, but cluttered with countless fallen chunks. The walls, about twelve feet apart, were sort of jagged, showing the way nature had put the rock together in layers. Oak posts, or “props,” as we call them, held up the roof. Some of these timbers, as picked up by our flashlight, looked pretty rotten to me. And I wondered, sort of anxious-like, if they hadn’t just about come to the end of their usefulness. At one place a hunk that must have weighed hundreds of tons had fallen out of the roof, leaving a gaping black hole. I was glad when we had passed thisdangerous spot. For I had the feeling that there might be more stuff up there ready to do the tumbling-down act. And not for one second did I want any young cement-rock mountain to tumble down on top ofme.
Here and there we saw traces of the old two-rail track over which the early mule-drawn dump-cars had carried the raw rock into the daylight, to be later hauled away to the mill. Some of the ties were so rotten that they went together under our feet like a sponge. At one place we waded ankle deep through a pool of icy water. Br-r-r-r! Deep in the tunnel now, the walls on both sides of us were wet and dripping. Cold drops came down from the ceiling on my head. It made me think of spiders. And I sure hate spiders.
Tunnel exploring such as this was new stuff to Poppy, so, naturally, as it is his nature to want to know all the “why’s” and “wherefore’s” of everything, he had a hundred questions to ask me. I told him what I knew about cement work, explaining that the new mill in Tutter was fed by rock that was “stripped” instead of “tunneled,” as the tunneling process was considered out-of-date. In the places where the stripping was done, called quarries, the workmen frequently tapped artesian veins, and that, I said, was how we came to have those dandy swimming holes south of town, of which the “fourthquarry,” as you may recall, entered so prominently into my book, JERRY TODD AND THE WALTZING HEN.
But aside from the unusual features of the tunnel, itself, we saw nothing of special interest. Certainly, to our great disappointment, we saw no “treasure” chests, or, for that matter, anything that had a “pirate” look to it.
The tunnel ended in a chamber of good size, the walls of which were unbroken except for the entrance. Plainly this was as far as the early miners had gone. Were we now under the old stone house? We wondered. Certainly, was our conclusion, we had been traveling in that general direction. But we saw no break in the chamber roof, which, like the narrower passageway, was supported by oak props.
“Let’s yell,” says I. “Maybe if we’re as close to the house as we think, Mrs. O’Mally will hear us.”
So we whooped it up at the top of our voices. The sound was deafening to us. But we got no answer.
Going back to the mouth of the passageway, after having spent an unsuccessful hour underground, we found ourselves wondering if the river pirate had helped to build this tunnel, or whether, after it had been abandoned, he had just copped it for his own use, upon learning, possibly, that it ran under his house.
“Glory be!” cried Mrs. O’Mally, when we showed up safe and sound. So full of joy was she that she even tried to hug us! But that was all right with me. I don’t mind letting an old lady hug me. “Sure, ’tis a burden that has been lifted off me mind at sight of ye. An’ what luck had ye?”
“No luck at all,” says Poppy. Then he told her about us yelling.
“Didn’t you hear us?”
“Sure, I was expectin’ to hear ye. An’ the continued silence was what set me to worryin’.”
Somewhat to my surprise Mother and Dad drove into the yard about five o’clock. The doctors had operated on Mr. Weckler, they said, and the old man was getting along all right, though he was still out of his head.
“He seems to think that his daughter Clara is in the next room,” says Mother. “And they say it’s very pitiful to hear him begging her to come to him.”
“Is his daughter dead?” says I, remembering how sad the old man had acted that day in the orchard.
“The general opinion is that she is dead. For she hasn’t been seen or heard of since the time when she ran off to get married, more than twenty years ago.”
The two women then got their heads together in “pickle” talk. And learning that our car had comehere purposely to take home a bushel of cucumbers, I lugged them out of the cellar.
Mother was running around with a cucumber pickle in each hand.
“Oh!...” she took on, like she does when she sees a new baby or an unusual crochet pattern. “Aren’t theyper-fectly delicious? Have you tried them, Jerry?”
“No, thanks,” I shrugged.
I told her then that Poppy and I were going to stay all night on the cucumber farm. Mrs. O’Mally wanted us to, I said. For she had been hearing strange sounds. I caught Dad looking at me curiously. He realized, of course, that my chum and I were up to something. But he didn’t ask me any questions, realizing, I guess, that I was looking forward to the fun of surprising him.
Mrs. O’Mally lugged out a swell supper for us. And then we sat around until it got dark. The air, after the day’s heat, was sort of stagnant. And as though begging for a cooling shower a bullfrog army lined up in chorus on the river bank. Then the katydids got busy.See-e-e-saw!See-e-e-saw! They seemed to be very busy “sawing” something. I wondered what it was. Down near the mouth of the creek an owl shook itself awake and went, “Whoo-o-o-o! Whoo-o-o-o!”
“Lively stuff, huh?” laughed Poppy.
I didn’t say anything. But somehow I had the shaky feeling, as I watched the moon come up, that it was going to be plenty lively enough for us before morning. A fellow very frequently gets a premonition like that, or whatever you call it. You know what I mean.