The Abandoned Mine Mystery Page 11

  “She’s taking us into the strange part of the mine. Quick, Nel, we’ve only got a few seconds to decide, and it may be a matter of life or death. Do we follow Alice blindly, or do we wait around for some human beings to find us?”

  “Right now I’d rather trust Alice than people. But don’t let me have the whole say.”

  “We follow Alice then!”

  They did not want to follow so closely as to alarm the mule, nor did they want to lose her. They hurried after her until they were some twenty feet behind her, and then they slowed their pace to match hers, talking quietly the while.

  “You know that air door, Nel? It’s usually closed, and maybe Alice knows it. She has to go a different way.”

  “I only hope she knows what she’s doing. Do you think she can see any better in the dark than we can, Ted?”

  “No, not when it’s as black as this. But her hearing may be a good deal better. Blind people often do well by listening for echoes. And it may be that she has this whole course memorized. She worked down here for many years.”

  They found it best to drag their feet along as they walked, thus kicking aside small stones or feeling their way cautiously over larger ones. A sprained ankle wasn’t a pleasant thought, and a straggler would have to be left behind while the other one went for help. Alice seemed much more sure of foot than they, and never faltered. Making turns offered a ticklish problem in the dark, and occasionally her bell stopped tinkling, giving them a momentary scare, but it soon commenced again as she regained her former stride. She seemed to have no fear of these people she must know by now were following her. Whatever was going on in her mulish mind, she was intent upon it. They hoped that she was heading home for supper.

  They were lost through the myriad of turnings, but they had a feeling of climbing, which was a good sign. Had they come a half mile . . . a mile? It was hard to guess in the dark. About half an hour had passed since they had chosen Alice as their guide, but it was hard to translate time into distance.

  And then they made a turn, and there was daylight ahead! Furthermore, they found, as they neared the opening, that it was the same entrance they had used.

  “I guess we did it,” said Nelson in an awed voice.

  “Yes, we did. I’ve got a feeling, though, that Alice brought us back through the left turn, not through the right turn where we went down.”

  “Whatever it was, she did just right. If I ever want to give my grandchildren any advice, I’ll tell them this: ‘When you get in trouble, always trust a mule.’ ”

  CHAPTER 14.

  THE MILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

  ALICE, as it turned out, was wearing a halter, and they led her down the hill to the car. She seemed satisfied to go in this direction, so they had no trouble; had she been determined to go elsewhere there might have been difficulties.

  “I don’t think Alice is obstinate, Ted,” Nelson observed. “She’s just stubborn.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Sure. A stubborn person wants his own way; an obstinate person wants the opposite of whatever other people want. We’re not going to turn Alice loose to find her own way home, are we? We owe her more than that.”

  “You bet we do,” said Ted. “Traffic might be harder for her to cope with than all the dangers of a coal mine. Why don’t I lead her home, while you go along in the car? If we both walk, we’ll have to come back for the car.”

  “Nothing doing, Ted. I’ve fallen in love with Alice. You drive and I’ll walk. There’s something for us to decide first, though. How much of this are we going to tell anybody?”

  “Let’s not tell. It would only alarm our folks and Mr. Dobson. I’d like to give credit where credit is due, but I don’t think Alice will mind a bit. We can just say we found her while she was on her way out of the mine. After all, all that really happened is that we’re getting back an hour later than we planned. But after we’re home and cleaned up, we’re going to have to do some pretty clear thinking. I still want to know what Alice was doing in that mine.”

  Ted drove on ahead to tell the Llewellyns their mule had been found and was being returned to them. Joyce and Johnny had been sad over the latest disappearance of their mule, but had been barred by the strictest of promises to their mother from setting out in search of her. Now their sober faces lit up with happy smiles when Ted told them the news.

  Although Mrs. Llewellyn invited the boys to stay for supper, they declined with thanks. They felt very dirty, and Ted wanted to call Forestdale before Sergeant Jeffers went off duty. He made the call from a booth on the way home.

  “I think I’ve got what you want, Ted,” the sergeant said. “The man’s name is Professor Walberg Thomas. He’s a professor of geology and paleontology up at Usher. As far as I know, he’s a perfectly responsible man, and has never had any trouble with the police. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted. Thanks a lot, Sergeant Jeffers.”

  But Ted’s voice was dull as he relayed this report to Nelson. “So you see, there was nothing in our ghost after all. He’s just a professor interested in fossils, and of course coal itself is a form of fossil.”

  “So we cross Professor Thomas off our list?”

  “You mean the list for my newspaper story? Might as well. I don’t see how he is going to be of any use to us. I’m much more interested in Alice right now.”

  “What about Alice, Ted?”

  But Ted refused to say anything more until they had cleaned up, gone out for dinner, and returned to the cabin. He wanted to get the thing a little clearer in his own mind.

  “I wonder if we didn’t begin our whole chain of reasoning on a false premise,” Ted began. “Our first idea was that when Joyce and Johnny ran into the mine after their mule, they had made a mistake. How do we know they made a mistake? It’s possible they were right and we were wrong. It was nearly pitch black in that tunnel, and I just don’t believe they would have had the courage to go on, unless they were pretty positive that Alice was in the mine. And we finally got our proof today that Alice did visit the mine once in a while at least. So let’s say that Alice was in the mine, and spent the night there, which is the reason she didn’t get wet in the storm.”

  “Go on, Ted,” said Nelson, all attention.

  “Well, what was on Alice’s mind? She was attracted by that fresh green grass across the river, and wasn’t going to let anything swerve her. And our proof there is that she did reach the nice grass, and was found there the next morning. So we have our mine on one side of the river, and the grass on the other side. The problem is to connect the two.”

  “How do you connect them, Ted?”

  “Why, I’d connect them with a tunnel under the river.”

  “Hey! Ted!” Nelson pounded his leg with his fist. “Now how about that?”

  “If that’s the truth of the matter, we’ve solved our little puzzle. But this raises another question: does this matter? Is it of any importance?”

  “Is it, Ted?” Nelson returned, undecided.

  “Who knew about the tunnel, and what was he doing about it? It doesn’t seem to be general knowledge. Mrs. Llewellyn didn’t know about it, and neither did Mr. Stevens. In fact, we’ve talked to quite a few people, and no one has ever mentioned it to us. But who ought to know about the tunnel? It must come up somewhere in West Walton, on Mr. Sorrel’s property. He’s been all over that property so many times, surely he ought to know about it if anybody does, but apparently he isn’t saying a thing.”

  “Why not, Ted?”

  “Why don’t we ask him?”

  Nelson was enthusiastic, and Ted put through the call, asking if he might interview Mr. Sorrel that evening. At first Mr. Sorrel wanted to know why Ted couldn’t ask him whatever it was over the phone. But Ted explained that it was rather complicated, and managed to rouse his curiosity enough so that he consented to the interview.

  At Mr. Sorrel’s home they were invited to sit down, but he said he would app
reciate it if they would come directly to the point.

  “I’ll do just that, Mr. Sorrel,” said Ted. “The fact is that we know about the tunnel under the river.”

  Mr. Sorrel looked from one to the other and then seemed to deflate like a flat tire.

  “So you know about the tunnel. I don’t know how much else you know, but that doesn’t matter because you can easily get the rest of it now. I may as well tell you the whole truth. It isn’t just a tunnel. It’s an old coal mine, a whole network of tunnels running beneath my property. The mine wasn’t as profitable as the one on this side of the river, and was abandoned over fifty years ago.

  “I don’t think anyone around here remembers that there was once some mining on the other side of the river. But the tunnels are still there. I knew nothing about that when I bought and leased and optioned the property, scraping up every cent I could beg, borrow, or connive.” He laughed bitterly. “So everybody thinks I cheated the people I bought from. Look what they did to me.”

  “Are you sure they knew about the tunnels?” Ted questioned.

  “Of course they did!”

  “Is the situation really bad?”

  “Bad? Just picture it: you show a prospect a forty-thousand-dollar home. He says it’s just what he wanted, and asks if anything is wrong with it. So you tell him, ‘Oh, there’s one small thing. There is an old coal mine running under the property.’ If you can catch his coat tails before he starts running, the first thing you do is to knock ten thousand dollars off the purchase price. Then, maybe, he’ll show a small spark of interest again. I was planning on putting up a hundred homes. Multiply ten thousand dollars by a hundred, and what do you get?”

  “A million dollars,” said Ted, while Nelson was still trying to calculate the correct number of zeroes.

  “That’s right. My secret was worth a million dollars to me. You wonder that I tried to hang on to it?”

  “Wasn’t it a dangerous thing to do?”

  “Dangerous for those who might buy the property? Of course not. There’s no danger from the mine. The tunnels are all deep, the rocks are solid, the coal was never over-mined. That ground is just as safe as any other ground you might care to mention.”

  “Why is it that no one on this side of the river knew about the tunnel?”

  “Because the tunnel wasn’t there. Remember that big explosion? That was what knocked out the wall between the two old mines and joined them. In exploring the abandoned mine a week or so before the explosion, I discovered a pocket of gas. That was the reason for my inquiries about gas and explosions. Then, before anything could be done, the explosion came, apparently touched off by mining operations coming through from the other side. Of course I had no idea at all that the mining was that close to my property. If you wonder why I was so bitter over people accusing me, it was because I knew I was guilty. I was the only one who could have prevented the accident.”

  “Didn’t you ever try to explain?”

  “Would people have believed me if I did? And I couldn’t say anything without giving away my secret. I thought surely someone would soon discover it, but it seemed that no one did. There were safety inspections, of course, but the inspectors all went in from this side. It was assumed that the mine had happened to connect up with an old abandoned section, but no one explored it thoroughly to see just where this other section went. The miners never went down again after the explosion, of course; even the coal pirates operate a considerable distance away.”

  He hesitated. “I said I’d tell you the whole story, Ted, and I will. There’s one person who knows—because he’s been blackmailing me.”

  “Blackmail! Who is the person?”

  “That I don’t know. I send twenty-five dollars a week in a blank envelope to a post office box in some other city. You can’t very easily find out the name of a box-holder, and though I made an attempt to watch the box for a while, the blackmailer didn’t make a practice of picking up his mail regularly or promptly, so I never caught him. He’s not being terribly exorbitant—for now. But he’s told me frankly that he’s not going to be satisfied with this sum. He wants me to deed one of my houses over to him, and that will end the matter. It probably would, too, because after that, once I closed my deals, it probably wouldn’t matter.”

  “Did you agree to his terms?”

  “I’ve been making the weekly payments,” Mr. Sorrel said slowly. “I haven’t made any commitment about the house yet. A forty-thousand-dollar loss to protect a million-dollar profit might be a good bargain, if everything turned out right. But I don’t like it. I thought that if I could find out who the blackmailer is, I could threaten to expose him, and that might shut him up.”

  Ted stood up and so did the others.

  “Do you intend to print the story?” asked Mr. Sorrel. “I mean about the tunnels, of course. If that part of the story comes out, the blackmailer won’t be able to hurt me any more.”

  “I couldn’t say, Mr. Sorrel. That decision will be up to Mr. Dobson.”

  Then they all said good night on a fairly cordial note.

  “That’s a pretty big secret,” Nelson offered. “I don’t see how he could ever hope to keep it, do you? But of all the people who might have told that secret, Ted—Mr. Sorrel, or the farmers, or the blackmailer, or almost anybody who happened to stumble across that tunnel in the mine—none of them did. It was Alice who let the secret out of the bag.”

  CHAPTER 15.

  DIRTY HANDS

  NEXT morning they realized they would have to think about getting home. Ted had pounded out a good many rough pages of his story and his notebook was crammed with notes. Nelson had taken more pictures than Mr. Dobson would be able to use. They had picked up the atmosphere of East Walton and the coal mine, were acquainted with its problems, and had heard several possible solutions.

  “You do have a story, don’t you, Ted—a really good one?”

  “Well, I think I have a few things that will surprise people, if that’s what you mean. There’s the part about the coal pirates, and about the tunnels under Mr. Sorrel’s property, if Mr. Dobson decides to use it. Alice would make a good feature story all by herself. I guess my big disappointment is about something I didn’t have any right to expect anyway: I don’t have any real answer to the problems of East Walton.”

  “So what, Ted? Neither does anyone else, and you’re not Houdini. What do we still need?”

  “Just a few more interviews, and then I guess we’ve had it. Maybe we can wind up today, and leave tomorrow.”

  “Will we be leaving any unfinished business behind us, Ted?”

  “Some, I suppose, but I don’t see how it can be helped. I’d like to know who was blackmailing Mr. Sorrel. But it’s been going on a long time, and he couldn’t find out, so how can we?”

  “Are you sure we can trust Mr. Sorrel?” asked Nelson. “Wasn’t he really trying to cheat people?”

  Ted rubbed his head. “I don’t know anything about the legal end of it. The important thing, I guess, is that he hasn’t cheated anybody yet, and we can’t be sure he ever will. He probably doesn’t even know for sure himself. I think he was telling us the truth, though. There wouldn’t be any reason to lie about the blackmailer, once we had found out about the tunnels.”

  “Do you suppose the blackmailer is somebody in East Walton?”

  “By all odds it ought to be,” said Ted. “The secret is here, so why not the blackmailer? The fact that he doesn’t go to his postal box very often may mean that he has trouble getting there.”

  “Isn’t there any way Mr. Sorrel could catch him?”

  “I doubt it, not by himself. The blackmailer is probably pretty well acquainted with Mr. Sorrel’s movements, and wouldn’t go to the box unless he was quite certain Mr. Sorrel was busy elsewhere. The name of the box-holder is probably a phony, so all you could hope to do is catch him in the act.”

  “But the name would come out when he signed over the property, wouldn’t it?”

  “
Maybe not even then. He might have some friend to stand in for him as front man.”

  “I think there’s one more piece of unfinished business, Ted. Who was trying to run us out of town? Are you certain it wasn’t Mr. Sorrel? He was the one who had the big secret we were threatening to uncover.”

  “There’s a chance that it was, I suppose, though I hate to think so. Mr. Sorrel seemed to talk pretty frankly with us last night.”

  “Because he knew you had him in a corner anyway, Ted,” Nelson quickly pointed out. “Maybe he realized it was too late, or he may have other secrets that he isn’t talking about.”

  “Yes, and so might anyone else in town.”

  Looking at his hands, Ted noticed coal dust deeply imbedded in the knuckles. It was the sort of thing that didn’t come out with just one washing, no matter how vigorous. Nelson’s hands were even worse, having been compounded with oil as he did a little tinkering with his car. Though Ted wanted to appear as presentable as possible at his interviews, Nelson didn’t think it mattered.

  “People are used to that, especially in a mining town. Mr. Allen told us they’re even suspicious about a person whose hands are too clean.”

  The interviews went off quite well. Ted was able to ask questions with more assurance, because he knew what he was talking about, and had a better idea what he was trying to find out. They completed their interviews about the middle of the afternoon, then stopped at the drugstore. Phil was on duty, and served them sundaes, with some fancy extras, on the house. They discussed with him their work up to date, although they didn’t tell him anything about the secrets they had discovered.

  “Has Mr. Winslow put that barricade back up at the mine yet, Ted?”