The Abandoned Mine Mystery Page 7

  The tracks branched off several times, but their guide seemed to know where he was going. If their guide should desert them, however, they would have no means of getting out except by feeling their way along the tracks. If they made a mistake and wandered up one of the branches, there was no telling where they might end up.

  But a more immediate problem came to Ted’s mind. He thought, once or twice, that he could hear the sound of shoveling or picking somewhere up ahead. How could their guide be sure that they would not accidentally stumble upon some of the pirates at work? That bright light would be a give-away, and could be seen a long distance up the tunnel ahead.

  Ted wished they had brought a light of their own, but felt quite sure, somehow, that if they had, their guide would have taken it away from them before leading them into the mine. This must be a risk for him, and he wanted their full cooperation. Still it was awkward to be dependent upon a light held by someone else. They stumbled along after the young man, sometimes unable to avoid small obstacles that they could easily have stepped around with their own flashlights.

  The picking seemed to be getting a little louder and closer. Wasn’t it time for their guide to grow more cautious and urge them to be quiet and advance carefully? Suddenly he turned a corner, and as they followed him they saw several miners at work. They started to draw back, but their guide motioned them on, and announced to one of the men:

  “Here they are.”

  Then at last Ted and Nelson tumbled to the truth. The guide wasn’t a spy who wanted to expose the pirates. He was one of the pirates himself! It even seemed probable, from their attitude toward each other, that he was the son of the leader.

  The chief of the coal pirates had a quiet voice and a pleasant manner.

  “I take it that you are Ted Wilford, and you are Nelson Morgan,” he began. “I know your names, of course, and I wish I could tell you mine. But I think we’ll get on much better if I preserve our anonymity for the time being. If this is a newspaper story for you, you are welcome to your story, but not to our names.”

  “Do I understand that you brought us here so that I could interview you, and that you are willing to answer any questions apart from the names of your men?”

  “That’s it, Ted. You go right ahead.”

  Meanwhile, their former guide, his duty done, had drifted away, and the miners who had stopped work at their arrival now returned to their task. They were using picks and shovels, apparently the only tools they had. The little carts were loaded by hand, and when one of them was full, they saw one of the miners pushing it back down the tracks. Man power—even more primitive than mule power—and that was the way these men were earning a living! They suddenly realized how much a few dollars meant to these men, if they would work like this. Somewhere the boys heard a faint buzz, as though someone were idling the motor of either the truck or the car at the mine’s entrance, but it soon stopped.

  This was one of the most unusual interviews Ted had ever had. Just that day he had interviewed Mr. Winslow sitting before a broad desk in a neatly furnished office. Now the pirate leader was sitting on a large rock, seemingly glad of the chance to rest for a few minutes, and Ted and Nelson sat down, too.

  “It would seem, sir, that you want me to print this story, since you went to quite a bit of trouble to get me here. What’s your purpose in that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I don’t particularly want our illegal activities publicized, but I think it just as well that people know as much as possible about how things are in East Walton. The more people we can interest in our case, the more likely it is that some sort of help will come to us. And of course there can’t be any real benefits for any of us unless the mine reopens.”

  “Then you didn’t trust me to find my own story?” asked Ted with a smile.

  “I’ll put it to you directly: you couldn’t have got this story, if we didn’t want you to have it. We have a small alarm system that would tell us when someone was coming, and we could disappear without your ever catching sight of us. And of course that is exactly what we would do, if an unauthorized person approached us. I know a little about you, Ted, and feel that you are a responsible reporter who will give us fair shakes in your story.”

  “Are you really afraid of being discovered,” Nelson questioned, “when everyone knows you’re here anyway?”

  “They know about us, Nelson, but they don’t know us. They don’t know for sure who we are. Mr. Winslow could never give us permission to work in the mine the way we do. If he did, he would find himself in all kinds of trouble. But he pretends that he is unable to catch us and stop us, can’t afford all the guards he would need, and so on. We, on our part, must pretend to be thieves, even though we know in our hearts that we are not. We are taking something that, for the time being, no one else wants, and won’t be missed when the mine reopens. By helping our families, we are relieving a little of the burden on the public charities, and I suppose that people who buy our cheap coal are getting some small benefits, too.”

  “How many men do you have working here?” Ted inquired.

  “I’d rather not mention any numbers, Ted, but I don’t think I could give you any accurate figure, even if I wanted to. It isn’t always the same number, and it isn’t always the same men. Some nights there may be only two or three, some nights there are more. I suppose it depends on the state of a man’s pocketbook whether he is willing to put in a night like this.”

  Nelson picked up the ax the miner had laid aside, and took a few swings at the face of the coal seam without making very much impression on it. If this was supposed to be soft coal, it still seemed hard enough to him.

  “Whee! I thought I had muscles, but they seem to be the wrong kind of muscles for this work,” he decided, putting the ax down again.

  “Soft,” said the miner with a slight smile visible behind the glare of his miner’s lamp. Though he wasn’t giving his name, he seemed to have little fear of being identified.

  “Is this all you have,” asked Ted, “just these hand tools?”

  “That’s all we can afford. Mr. Winslow has better equipment, of course, but he would never dare loan or rent it to us. Oh, I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t like a little better tooling, some power cutters, for example, but we make do with what we have.”

  “What about mules?” Nelson wanted to know.

  “There used to be quite a few mules around. In fact, these tracks were designed for mule carts. But they were becoming obsolete, and when the mine closed the animals were all dispersed. I don’t believe you’ll ever find mules at work in this mine again. We would need better help than they could give to restore this mine to a competitive position.”

  “Then you do have hopes of this mine opening again?”

  “It’ll open, Ted, when enough people get together and decide that they want it open again. Your guess is just as good as mine about when that will be.”

  “If it reopened, would it be on an automated basis?”

  “There would certainly have to be some big improvements made in the operation. But automation—I don’t know just how far you’d have to go. If the mine were able to hire back only half the men who were laid off, that would still solve half our problem, wouldn’t it?”

  “What about safety? Isn’t what you are doing sort of dangerous?”

  “We don’t let ourselves think about that, but accept whatever risks there are.”

  The interview ended then, and the miner summoned their former guide, who reappeared out of the shadows. Wordlessly, he led the way back along the tracks and out to the mine entrance. One or two cartloads of coal had been added to the truck while they were inside, and it was now about half filled.

  They got into the car, and their guide, after circling around a little, returned them to the motel. He dropped them off a short distance from their door, then drove off, waving his hand.

  “So those were the coal pirates,” Nelson muttered. “You know, I think from now on I’ll look at a dollar bill with
a little more respect, now that I see what some people have to go through to earn it.”

  CHAPTER 10.

  A PICTURE OF A GHOST

  IN spite of being up till well after midnight, the boys were awake before eight the next morning.

  “You know something, Ted? Just that little while we were down in the mine last night, and I could feel the coal dust sifting through my clothes and down my neck. If I hadn’t had a long shower and a complete change of clothes, I’d feel dirty yet. Well, what’s on the schedule for today?”

  “I hope you don’t feel too clean, because I wanted to follow our original plan to go down into the mine ourselves.”

  Nelson shrugged. “I’m willing, Ted, but why are we doing it? Didn’t that visit last night help take care of that angle?”

  “It helped, but I’d still like to do something on our own. And there’s the matter of pictures, too. I’d like a few pictures taken inside the mine. We didn’t have any chance last night.”

  “You won’t get any pictures of workers in the mine, Ted.”

  “That’s all right, as long as the mine’s supposed to be closed anyway.”

  “We’re after something more than pictures, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose we are. It’s obvious that someone is trying to scare us out of town, and I’d like to know who and why. At first I thought it was the coal pirates, but that doesn’t seem likely, after what they did for us last night.”

  “What about that? How does it rate as a newspaper story?”

  Ted frowned. “I don’t think it rates anything, at least right now. Mr. Dobson always says he wants us to get the story we’re after, not the story people are ready to give us. Why do they want us to print this story, and how much of the truth are they really telling us?”

  “Getting the mine reopened is a pretty good motive, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is. Well, I’ll see how the whole thing fits together when I work on my long story. I won’t use it now, though I want to call the office around eleven o’clock. We ought to be back by that time. I’m not really after anything much this morning, except to get our bearings.”

  “I thought the idea was to go at night,” Nelson remarked.

  “Sure, but that was because of the coal pirates. If we go into the mine at the entrance where we found the Llewellyn children, we’ll be a long way from the coal pirates, don’t you think?”

  Nelson laughed. “You kidding?”

  “Why?”

  “You mean he really did get you lost last night? Here, if you want to know where we went, let me show you.”

  He spread his map out on the table, and traced a course with his pencil. It was not too easy a matter, for the unfinished roads were not shown on the map. But Nelson drew a line confidently, until he ended with a little circle.

  “You’ll find the entrance to the mine right around there, and I’m betting I’m not more than a small fraction of a mile off. You don’t drive nearly as much as I do, Ted. If you did you’d notice little things that tell you where you are, and of course I’ve studied the map more, too.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me you could even recognize the car.”

  “Of course,” and Nelson reeled off a detailed description of it, which, for all Ted knew, might be completely accurate.

  “How do you do that, Nel?”

  “It isn’t too hard. You notice the dashboard, and any other small points you can pick up. I admit I might be a year off on the age, though.”

  “It looks as though you’re a better detective than I am,” Ted complimented him.

  “Maybe I’m better at noticing things, but you’re better at putting the pieces together.”

  “I hoped I could recognize the driver if I saw him again. But after all, Nel, does it really matter if we recognize either the driver or the car? The important thing at the moment is that you seem to agree with me: the two entrances to the mine are miles apart.”

  They set out a short time later and soon arrived close to the spot where they had parked the car the first evening. Nelson asked whether there was any point in concealing the car.

  “I think it might be a good idea to leave the car where it could be found easily,” Ted pointed out. “If any kind of accident did happen, I’d like people to know where we went.”

  “There isn’t going to be any accident if I can help it, Ted. Plenty of fresh bulbs and batteries,” and he patted his pockets. Because Nelson had his camera to carry, Ted took the flashlight, and later went ahead as they entered the tunnel. Nelson had already taken two pictures, the first a distant shot of the entrance, and the second a closer view.

  It was with a slightly eerie feeling that the boys took the same course they had followed as they searched for the Llewellyn children.

  “Just think that I’m exploring a dirty old coal mine on a bright summer morning, for some strange reason I can’t begin to understand,” Nelson remarked. “But there’s one thing I do understand all right, Ted—I don’t intend to get lost. What about you?”

  “I don’t plan to get lost either. In fact, I’m starting right now to make a sketch of the path we came along,” and taking out his notebook Ted suited his actions to his words. “What’s your contribution to the cause?”

  “I’ve got some pieces of chalk in my pocket, and I’m going to mark every turn we take on the dark wall surface. And where the walls are too light to show the chalk, I’m going to use coal as a marker instead.”

  “I can’t think of much more we could do then, unless you want to sprinkle bread crumbs after us.”

  They reached the point of the first turnoff, where they had eventually found the Llewellyn children, and now the same decision faced them. Nelson once more maintained that the turn to the left looked like the best course, and urged that they take it. Ted, still figuring it was a tossup either way, once more agreed. He brought his map up to date as accurately as he could, even estimating the number of feet he thought they had descended below the entrance. Nelson did his part by drawing a large arrow in the required direction, with both the date and his initials.

  “How about the time?” Ted said with a laugh, but Nelson thought this was a good idea, and added it.

  They were now in the same room from which they had turned back on their first visit. Ted flashed the light all around, but there wasn’t much to see. Although this area had been mined at one time, there was no sign of recent activity as far as they could tell. There were no fresh scars, no tools around, not even a sense of loose dust, and the path looked solidly worn. They crossed to the opposite doorway of the room, and went on into another room, much like the one they had just left. The one exception was that this room had two additional outlets, so Ted brought his map up to date while Nelson made his markings once more, indicating the door they decided to follow.

  This door did not lead directly into another room, but into a long tunnel. They followed the tunnel for a while, but soon found there were numerous turnoffs. Following two or three of these, they discovered they were dead ends, and soon returned to the main corridor. There were dozens of these side paths, and they wondered whether there was any point in trying to follow them all.

  “It seems to me, Ted, that these are probes, which tested whether the coal was good enough and there was enough of it to justify larger operations. I guess they turned out to be minor leads, and so they were abandoned. What do we do? Are you anxious to make as complete a map of the mine as possible?”

  “That was sort of my idea, but I can see that we’re not going to be able to do it in a few days. It’s a little like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

  “And we aren’t even sure that it’s a needle we’re hunting for,” Nelson concluded.

  Ted did not want to abandon the side paths entirely, but felt they could save time if only one of them went in to explore these smaller tunnels, while the other stood outside on the main corridor. They took turns, without finding any thing of interest, and whenever one of them returned from
such a fruitless side expedition, Ted showed the corridor as a broken line on his map, while Nelson put a large “D.D.” in chalk on the wall at the entrance.

  “That stands for dead end,” he claimed, and when Ted asked about his choice of initials, he explained, “the first and the last letters. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, only I thought maybe it stood for Donald Duck.”

  But soon they came to a corridor that promised something more interesting. Ted came part way back and called to Nelson:

  “Come on, this seems to go on and on.”

  Nelson joined him, after marking his usual notations at the entrance while Ted brought his map up to date. The tunnel they were now following, smaller than the main corridor, took several turnings, which Ted noted as carefully as he could. It was downhill; they were gradually getting deeper and deeper into the mine. The tunnel eventually widened out into a small room, which in turn led them into a larger room. Here they came across the first really interesting thing.

  “Recent digging,” said Ted, picking up a handful of loose dirt that had not been packed down. “But that’s dirt, not coal.”

  “Maybe some coal, too.” Ted flashed the light along one of the walls, and there were a number of gashes in it. There might have been no way for them to guess how old these gashes were, except that there was a scent of coal dust in the air, fresh dust that had had no time to settle.

  “If this is real coal-mining territory, then I think it’s the place for a picture,” Nelson decided.

  He set up his camera near the entrance to the large room, the biggest they had yet seen in the mine, Ted thought, as he flashed his light about casually along the walls and roof.

  “How much can you get with a flash bulb?” he questioned.

  “Not too much,” Nelson admitted. “The light from the bulb has to travel to the subject, and then back again to the camera, so everything gets pretty faint when you get very far away. But I ought to be able to catch something, at least enough to suggest what a coal mine looks like from the inside.”