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 floor of 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 going down there, 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.”