Bill’s flashlight broke the inky blackness beneath the opening.
Three feet below the floor of the office building, Ronnie saw the dry, hard, crusted earth on which the footings of the building rested. Into this for a distance of some six feet beneath the trap door, old Jacob Williams had dug a slanting hole that ran down to the top of an old drainage culvert. The brick arch, which formed the roof of the culvert, had been broken through. Below the break-through, the culvert ran in both directions parallel to the side of the building.
“Wow!” Bill exclaimed, playing his light about. “A tunnel! And it’s plenty high enough to walk through, too!”
“I’ll bet it used to carry drainage water from the village down to the St. Lawrence,” Ronnie added.
“Just the kind of place Jacob Williams would want for hiding the glassware!”
Phil, hearing the excitement, came over and crouched down beside the others. He peered over the edge and looked down into the hole.
Ronnie was trying to estimate the distance to the bottom of the culvert. He figured it in sections. From the floorof the building to the ground level was a “crawl space” of about three feet. Then the hole Jacob Williams had dug was another six feet. That added up to nine feet. The culvert itself, at the highest point in the arch, was another six or seven feet.
Fifteen feet. To Ronnie looking down into the blackness, it seemed more like a hundred and fifteen!
“We aren’t thinking of goingdownthere, are we?” Phil asked. “I suffer from claustrophobia, I’d like you both to know.”
Bill looked over at Phil. “And we suffer—just hearing you talk,” he said, grinning a little. Then he looked at Ronnie. “Think we can get down without a ladder or a rope?” he asked.
Ronnie studied the problem. “Yes, I think so,” he answered finally. “We’ll take it in stages. You know—climb down there to the ground first, then slide down the hole to the top of the culvert. There’s room to stand there. Then we can swing ourselves down through the opening in the brickwork.”
Phil gulped. “That sounds like an awful lot of work,” he said. “And even harder to getupagain.”
“Nobody’s twisting your arm and making you go,” Bill said.
Ronnie went first, holding Bill’s flashlight. The others waited above in the darkness, peering over the edge to watch Ronnie’s progress. Ronnie had no trouble lowering himself to the ground level. Then he sent the light from the flashlight down into the hole Williams had dug.
The remains of an old ladder lay in pieces along the sides of the hole. Ronnie noticed, too, that steps had beenmade leading down to the top of the culvert—pieces of split log hammered into the earth but protruding far enough to provide a foothold.
The boy tried the first one. It sustained his weight. He tried another—and another. He looked up at Bill and Phil and grinned. Things were going just fine!
He smiled too soon. The fourth step broke under his weight. His feet flew out from under him and his back struck the side of the hole. He slid the rest of the way, carrying with him an avalanche of dirt and pebbles.
Luckily, he managed to keep himself from plunging through the opening in the brickwork and down into the culvert. “You all right?” he heard Bill calling down.
“I’m O.K.,” he answered. His voice echoed back hollow and distant from within the culvert.
He sat down with his legs hanging over the edge of the broken brickwork and flashed the light down into the darkness. The bottom looked sandy—silt carried there by the drainage water over many years. There was no way to climb in. He’d have to drop.
He tucked the flashlight under his belt beneath his raincoat and began to slip forward. Then, when he was on the very edge, he let his body fall forward.
He struck bottom on his feet, but the momentum threw him forward and he landed face first on a patch of slimy sand. Picking himself up, he found his flashlight and pressed the button. Light bored through the pitch-blackness. The brick walls were slimy and green, and water dripped through the bricks and dropped to the floor. In places sand and earth had seeped through the cracks in the masonry and had formed mounds and valleys along the culvert floor.
He looked up and saw Bill and Phil peering down at him under the light from his flashlight. “What’s it like down there?” Bill asked.
“Kind of—kind of spooky,” he answered. He heard his voice come back to him from both ends of the culvert.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Bill called. “Shine the light along the way.”
Five minutes later both Phil and Bill had joined Ronnie in the culvert.
“Nice place to hold a Halloween party,” Phil commented. “I’m kind of glad now that I decided to come down to the village to see what you two were cooking up!”
Bill retrieved his flashlight from Ronnie and began to explore the culvert with it. “Wow!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Take a look over where the light’s pointing.”
Ronnie saw a crude shelf supported by sapling logs which rested on the culvert floor. The shelf ran for six to seven feet along the side of the wall, and on it were a number of wooden crates. Protruding from the excelsior with which the crates were packed, Ronnie could see a number of glass cannisters, goblets, decanters, and flasks of different colors.
“Oh, boy!” Bill exploded. He ran forward and removed one of the pieces, holding out a beautiful rose-tinted goblet of frail, delicate glass. Around the belly of the piece ran a band of men and women in eighteenth-century dress, etched into the surface like autumn frost.
The others had moved to the shelf, too. “Hey, pig,” Phil said to Bill, “how about sharing some of that light so we can get a look at some of this stuff, too!”
Bill laid the light on the shelf and pointed it so Ronnieand Phil could use it, too. Ronnie lifted another of the crates to the floor. One by one he removed a set of six wine-glasses and a decanter to match and placed them on the floor in a nest of excelsior.
Phil, however, had his eye on something different. He was interested in a small metal box at the end of the shelf. He took it down, brushed off the flakes of rust and tried to open the lid. It was rusted fast.
Bill had reached the bottom of his crate, and now he was carefully packing the contents back as he had found them. He turned to Ronnie. “It’s not going to be easy getting these crates out of here,” he said. “We don’t want to break any.”
Ronnie nodded. “I know. Yet we can’t leave them here for Caldwell to claim. One of us will have to go for a rope.”
“There’s one in the Glassworks building that we were using to haul junk outside. Maybe we can persuade Phil to go and get it.”
“Fat chance of doing that!”
A sudden squeal of surprise and wonderment from Phil interrupted their discussion. Phil came over to them with the opened metal box in his hands. “Boy, oh, boy!” he exclaimed. “HaveIhit real pay dirt. Just focus your eyes on what’s inside this box!”
Ronnie peered inside while Phil held the box so the light from the flashlight could reach the interior. “Th-the money!” Ronnie gasped.
“You bet it’s the money!” Phil echoed. He took out a roll of bills and a handful of gold and silver coins. “And plenty of it, too!”
“Wow!” Bill exclaimed. “Now we can save the village. We can build the dam! How much is there, Phil?”
The bills had been rolled and tied with a piece of cord. Phil opened the roll easily. Bill got the flashlight from the shelf and they crouched together in a group while, one by one, Phil laid the big old-fashioned bills in a pile. There were mostly twenties and hundreds, with a few fives and tens. Altogether, Phil counted over two thousand dollars.
They examined the gold and silver coins next. With these their total came to twenty-one hundred dollars.
“Put the money back in the box,” Ronnie directed. “We’ve got to work fast. I sure feel uneasy about Mr. Caldwell coming back.”
“You two get the crates over underneath the opening,” Bill said, “and I’ll run over to the glassworks and get the rope. We’ll have this stuff out of here and locked up in our office before Caldwell even knows what’s going on. Then I’ll ask Pa to come down with the truck and we’ll take it up to your house, Ronnie.”
Bill had some trouble getting back up to the padlocked building, but he finally made it. When he had gone, Ronnie set to work lifting the crates from the shelf and carrying them over to the floor beneath the opening. Phil seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of matches, and he left Ronnie to explore up the culvert. By the time Ronnie had finished, Phil was back. He had a sheepish look on his face, but he was a little pale, too.
“What’s eating you?” Ronnie demanded.
“I—I just met up with Jacob Williams,” Phil answered. “I mean—what’s left of him.”
“You mean—you mean his bones are down there?” Ronnie asked, motioning in the direction Phil had just comefrom. It really shouldn’t surprise him, of course, he told himself. Great-great-grandfather Ezra had mentioned in his diary that he had found Jacob Williams’ body “down below” and that he didn’t have the strength to get him up.
When Bill returned with the rope, the three set to work bringing the crates up to the padlocked building. It was hard, exacting work. One end of the rope was tied to a rafter in the building and the other end fastened securely about one of the crates. Then it was a matter of pulling from the top and guiding the box along the way so that it didn’t crash against the sides at any time.
In all, there were six crates to be pulled up. The boys had removed their raingear and cumbersome boots, but by the time they had finished, they were dripping with perspiration and covered with dirt and grime.
But even Phil hadn’t complained. There they were at last—the six crates and the metal box, piled together in the center of the padlocked building. The rest seemed easy in comparison. Two trips for each of them and the crates would be safely stored in their office, ready for the truck to pick them up.
Ronnie was all smiles as he and the others stole a minute or two of their precious time to sit down and catch their breaths. “Golly,” he said, “I never once thought this would be such an exciting day when I got up this morning.”
“Neither did I,” Bill agreed. “When I saw the rain pouring down, I thought for sure I was in for a real boring day. The most I thought we’d get done was to maybe clean up another building.”
“And when I got up,” Phil added, “I told myself to turn around and go back to sleep.”
Bill looked over at Phil curiously. “How come you’re so lazy, Phil?”
Phil grinned back at him. “It just comes naturally, I guess.”
Ronnie got up. He was on pins and needles for fear something might happen before they got the money and glassware safely stowed away. He looked over at the crates. “Maybe we could each carry two of them,” he suggested, “and make it all in one trip.”
“Not me!” Phil protested. “After hauling them up from below, you’re lucky I’ll agree to carryone.”
“Phil’s right,” Bill agreed. “We wouldn’t want to drop and break anything. This glassware is pretty valuable, I’ll bet.”
They put on their raingear and boots. Then each selected a crate and moved it over to the trap door in the rear of the building. Ronnie set his down so he could remove the section of wall.
He didn’t have to. The trap door suddenly opened as if by itself.
And there, framed in the opening, was Caldwell’s face and shoulders. He had a gun in his hand.