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 this dangerous 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 of me.
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 “fourth quarry,” 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.