The Secret of the Silver Mines Page 11

  “Even if we could get everything straightened out, would this piece of paper really do Theo any good in court?” asked Wyn. “It’s signed by a drunk and given to a thirteen-year-old…a lifetime ago.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Ask my dad.”

  Mom and Dad were stunned by what Wyn and I told them. It all came rolling out of two excited mouths, much of it at breakneck speed: all about Theo coming here at age thirteen as an orphan, his discovery of silver, the squirrelly man from Brown Industries, the way Lyon Brown had cheated the boy, the drunk who signed the claim note, the fact that Theo’s parents were blameless, and lastly our break-in at the Edison Brown residence this evening. We even threw in a few words about Grey Owl and the mighty Cyclone Taylor. Several times they had to slow us down.

  “Calm down,” Mom said, “let’s get this straight.” Then, when we had finally finished our story, we asked our question.

  “Do you think you could make a case for a thirteen-year-old boy who got a drunken man to sign a land claim an awfully long time ago, Mr. Maples?” asked Wyn, looking hopeful.

  John A. Maples was silent for a long time. Then he smiled. He smiled because, for the first time in many months, he knew he was on the right side.

  “After hearing the whole story…yes, I believe I could,” he said.

  Wyn and I smiled weakly. We were happy to hear a lawyer’s verdict for the good guys, but we were still without our dying hero, and without his silver.

  “You have no idea where it is?” asked my mother quietly. She put her arms around both of us.

  “No,” I said sadly, “honestly.”

  “Listen,” said Mom, “why don’t you go and see Mr. Larocque again. Just go there and stay with him in the hospital for a while. Maybe that will make you feel better. I’m sure that dying people take comfort from being near others who care about them. It sounds like you two really do care, and I’m proud of you. I think he would like that.”

  I glanced at Wyn to see what she thought. She had this sad look in her eyes, as if she were seeing something disappearing into the distance, maybe the fading image of the great-grandfather she was just getting to know.

  It was almost the end of visiting hours by the time we arrived at the Haileybury hospital. It took us a while to convince the nurses to let us into his room. We had seen Larocque in his hospital bed the day he was brought in, so the sight of him lying there filled with tubes didn’t shock us.

  Tonight he seemed restless, like someone dreaming. His eyes were closed and he showed little sign of life, but every now and then his eyelids would flicker or his lips would move. It had started soon after we got into the room, as if he knew we were there.

  We sat beside him in two large plastic chairs, just staring at his kind old face. Wyn reached over and picked up his hand. She leaned close to him and told him that we had broken into Edison Brown’s house and that we knew for certain that the Browns had nothing on his parents. Suddenly his eyes flashed open. Wyn and I jumped to our feet. But then the eyes closed again.

  Soon the old man became very restless, and little sounds came from him, as if he were struggling to speak. Finally he said something that sounded like the word “nine.” Wyn and I looked at each other. We leaned closer. Again Larocque struggled and got out the word “nine.” He turned his face towards us, his eyes still shut, and gasped, “Water!” I jumped up, rushed over to the bedside table and picked up a glass. But when I brought it back to him and touched it to his lips he turned his head away. “Water!” he gasped again.

  “He must be dreaming,” said Wyn.

  “No!” whispered the old man. Then he turned away from us and seemed to slip into a deep sleep. As he did, his doctor entered the room. He wasn’t pleased. He saw us leaning over the old man and the condition his patient appeared to be in.

  “You two have to leave!” the doctor snapped. “Mr. Larocque is very ill and you are disturbing him.”

  We got up sadly, looking back at our old friend as we left the room. In the hallway we asked about Larocque’s chances.

  “He is critically ill. It was a stroke. But more than anything he is just a very old man. I don’t think I’ve ever treated anyone his age, and I’ve certainly never heard of anyone caring for himself the way he did for so many years. He had some sort of amazing spirit, something inside him that just wouldn’t give up. But even people like him have to die, and that’s what’s going on now. He is dying. He’ll be lucky to last the night.”

  Wyn and I were crushed. Our friend Theo was about to disappear and take all his secrets with him. We walked sadly down to the reception room at the entrance to the hospital and slumped on a couch.

  After a while Wyn straightened up. “What would Theo do in this situation?” she asked.

  I sat up too. “I don’t know. But I’m sure he wouldn’t give up.”

  “Right. Now, let’s think. Maybe he did give us a clue, leave us a trail. That’s what he said he was going to do. And he was a man of his word. Maybe we just weren’t listening closely enough. He wanted us to figure things out after he died, so maybe he was already dropping hints. Let’s go back over some of the things he told us. Especially lately.”

  “Well, when he last saw us all he talked about was the old days. Remember? Down on the bench in Cobalt?”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Uh…he talked about the Hardy Boys.”

  “Right,” said Wyn, without emotion. But then a look came into her eyes, as if she were on to something. “And who were the Hardy Boys, and what did they do?” she asked excitedly.

  “They were kids…” something started dawning on me too, “like us…who…solved mysteries!”

  Wyn was trying to stay calm. “Let’s try to remember what he said.”

  “I remember it clearly. He said the Hardy Boys were always finding treasures in strange places!”

  “In caves!” we shouted at each other.

  We both stood up and started walking around, throwing ideas at each other.

  “He said the books might as well have been written about places around here,” said Wyn.

  “And what caves have we got around here?”

  “Mines!” we shouted again.

  “The silver!” cried Wyn. “It’s in one of the mines!”

  “How many mines are there in the area?”

  Wyn slumped back on the sofa. “About a million,” she said.

  I wasn’t giving up. “Upstairs he kept saying ‘nine.’ What about that?”

  Wyn sighed. “I don’t know any mine that has anything to do with the number nine.”

  “He didn’t say just ‘nine,’ Wyn, he said ‘nine’ and then ‘nine’ again.”

  She leapt to her feet.

  “Ninety-nine! Ninety-nine!” She was jumping up and down like she’d just won the Stanley Cup.

  A voice barked at us from the front desk. “Please keep it down!”

  I glanced over at the nurse, and when I turned back Wyn was gone, heading for the front door on the run. I caught her a few seconds later.

  “Ninety-nine, Dylan! It’s the most famous mine in Cobalt…because it killed so many miners. People say it’s haunted. It’s been shut down for as long as anyone can remember. Since the year Brown closed up and left! The silver is in there, Dylan! IT’S IN THERE!”

  16

  Underground

  We didn’t know it then, but all the time we were talking in the hospital reception room someone was watching and listening to us. Sitting in a chair behind us was a tall guy, with a heavy build, wearing a dark coat with matching gloves and hat. He acted like he was reading a magazine, but every now and then he would peek out from it and check on us. When we got up and ran out, he threw down the magazine and sprang to his feet. Then he followed us at a rapid pac
e. When he went through the first set of doors, he must have heard us talking outside and stopped abruptly, because we didn’t see him again until much later.

  “My bike is over at the school, Dylan. I left it there on Friday because Mom and Dad picked me up for hockey. There’s a flashlight on it, a good one.”

  “So let’s go! What are we waiting for?”

  Moments later we were on her bicycle, Wyn at the controls and standing on the pedals, her powerful flashlight on full blast; I was sitting on the seat, my legs held out to the sides to keep my feet out of the spokes. We were on our way to Cobalt and its deadliest mine, good old Ninety-nine.

  Kids in the area often tried to ride their bikes all winter, but tonight was going to be a real test of our off-season cycling skills. The winding road that led the eight kilometres from Haileybury through North Cobalt to Cobalt was icy and treacherous. We put the pedal to the metal anyway, moving as fast as Wyn had ever gone on her ten-speed, especially with a passenger on the back. Going down some of the hills we had almost no traction and slid most of the way to the bottom. On our way up others we sometimes had to get off and run. We met the odd car and felt like each one was going to hit us before it got by. Before long, however, we spotted the lights of Cobalt.

  Number Ninety-nine was on the far side of the lake, in the direction the old man had been looking when he sat on the park bench. To get to it you had to cross a little bridge at the north end of town and then take a gravel road, hard-packed with snow in the winter, that wound around the woods side of the lake and then branched off in several directions towards many old mines. The other option was to cross south of the lake, near the site of the old arena where the Cobalt Silver Kings once played the Montreal Canadiens, but we chose the shortcut.

  We hit the bridge, an old steel thing with a narrow road, less than half an hour after leaving the hospital. We both had a strange feeling that we had been followed ever since leaving Haileybury. We kept looking back as we whizzed along. But we saw no one.

  Then, after we turned off the bridge and headed along the old road into the darkness, I noticed a pair of headlights switch on and quickly off again as a car made the turn behind us. Someone was following us!

  Pointing behind us, I shouted at Wyn. “Look! A car! Let me pedal for a while! We need fresh legs!”

  She had taken us the whole distance so far and was exhausted. She slid to a halt, jumped off the bike, and got back on with me on the front. Off we went again, faster than before, with a rested driver.

  It was a ghostly trip along that wilderness road. We struggled past dead mine after dead mine. Pieces of headframes lay on the ground; foundations for shafts and buildings looked like pictures I had seen of bombed-out places after wars: forgotten structures with their heads cut off. Often they were on the hills beside us and they towered over us. It sometimes felt like they were chasing us too. We heard owls and wolves and other animals crying in the night.

  At a sharp turn Wyn pointed up a side road in the direction of Ninety-nine. On the ground I saw an old sign: “BROWN” it said, in heavy black letters, barely visible in the night. We zoomed up the road. Before long the top of the mine’s headframe rose above the trees, its black peaked roof like some sort of monster children’s fort looking out over the wilderness. From there we couldn’t make out much else of its shadowy shape. There was a sudden shot of light behind us: headlights flashing on and off again. We could hear an engine gun, and a dark car began to bear down on us.

  I pushed the bike as hard as I could. We were now going up a steep grade, and the mine was coming completely into view. In seconds it loomed above us, just a hundred metres away, a huge miners’ tombstone. To me it was like a giant, a very old, mysterious one that was trying hard to stay on its feet. But it had crumpled, knocked over by too many punches; the fort at the top leaned towards us, and the barn-like bottom had been crushed under the weight of too many years without repair. It was all timber and tar paper and rusted tin. There were signs nailed to its walls with notices in huge, crude letters. “KEEP OUT!” said one. “DANGER!” cried another. Up at the top a bigger one flapped in the cold breeze, hanging on by a single nail: “MINE 99. MAY IT, AND THOSE WHOM IT TOOK, REST IN PEACE.”

  The snow was getting too deep for the bike. We leapt off, threw it down, and plowed forward through the drifts, Wyn clutching her flashlight. We heard the car spin in the snow, a door slam, and someone running after us. Wyn spoke breathlessly to me as we ran.

  “A few years ago the government and an American company that owns some of the old mining land started knocking over some of the headframes. People around here hate that. They want the mines to stay forever, even if they’re empty. But the owners said they were too dangerous, especially for kids.”

  We came within fifty metres of the headframe. Now it seemed almost on top of us, a ghost beckoning us in.

  Wyn and I had never had a chance to ask the old man exactly how he stole the silver. Was he out here one cold night rushing towards the underground with his treasure in a horse and wagon, desperate to keep it away from the people who had ruined his life? Or did he do it some other way? Had the silver been inside the mine even before he took it?

  Wyn was still talking.

  “This one. Ninety-nine, they’re all superstitious about. No one has the guts to order it bulldozed. So it may just stay like this forever.”

  Suddenly there was a huge crash. The whole headframe seem to shudder.

  “It does that every now and then,” yelled Wyn.

  We were almost under it now—I could have hit it with a stone. I looked straight up as I ran, the way I sometimes looked up in awe at the skyscrapers back home. The tar paper was still stuck to much of the headframe, giving it a dark and sinister look.

  “All they’ve done with this one is fill the shaft in with sand. The shaft is the part that goes straight down into the ground. The sand rotted the wood on the shaft’s walls, so then the ground around it started to cave in. That’s what made the whole thing crumple. But they can’t make it fall.”

  “Filled it with sand?” I shouted. “Then how do we get in? How do we get underground?”

  “I don’t know!”

  We got to the door and Wyn started frantically trying to kick it in. I joined in, and soon some of the wood splintered. Before long there was a hole large enough to crawl through. We wriggled inside. Footsteps sounded behind us, crunching, so crisp, in the snow. Wyn flashed her light around the inside of the headframe. There were old miners’ tools, old wheelbarrows, and not much else. We could see a cage that miners used to go down in, but the upper end of the shaft was bulging from the sand. There was no way in.

  We heard a loud bang behind us. Whoever was after us was trying to make the hole in the door larger, kicking it with his feet. He was coming right into the headframe, after us!

  Wyn anxiously shone her flashlight around the space again. How in the name of Cyclone Taylor were we going to get into a sealed mine shaft, especially with time running out?

  Then I saw something. “There!” I cried. “Put the light back over there!”

  Wyn turned it towards the large stone I was pointing at. There seemed to be something carved into it. We ran over and saw “W. D. & D. M.” scraped on the surface. It was expertly done, by someone who obviously knew how to work with rocks, but it was shaky, as if from the hands of a very old man.

  “It’s our initials, Dylan!”

  Theo had left a trail all right. And he had done it recently. Since he had met us. Somehow he had struggled out here and put those letters on that rock. It was an incredible feat by an incredible man determined to defeat his enemy.

  We seized the rock and pushed as hard as we could. For a few moments we couldn’t budge it. We could still hear the man smashing wood with his feet right behind us. Wyn flashed her light his way for an instant, and we saw his thick-soled city boot come pounding through. The
n we saw his hands reaching inside.

  We both grabbed the rock and shoved it with all we had. It moved! We pushed again and it moved a little more. One last effort, and it finally rolled away. We looked down. There was a hole not much more than half a metre across, burrowed straight down into the ground.

  Wyn looked over at me. “It’s just perfect for moles.”

  “And kids our age.”

  “Ready?” asked Wyn.

  The man burst through the door and looked around for us in the darkness.

  “Ready,” I said.

  Wyn plunged down into the earth, feet first, and I scurried after her.

  “HEY!” we heard the man shout. I could see him running towards me, a hand stretched out. I slithered down into the hole: down went my legs, my chest, my neck, my head. The man got there just as I vanished into the ground. He threw himself on the dirt and thrust his arm into the narrow opening. His hand groped down into the hole, reaching for me, grasping for my hair. But it was too late. I turned my head slightly upward as I descended deeper below the surface, scrambling with both hands and feet. I could see two eyes, black as coal, looking down at us. And I could hear him shouting, muffled words that sounded angry.

  Wyn had a bit of an advantage in being a girl. There wasn’t a lot of difference in our height (though I was growing so fast these days that I think I had actually gained an inch on her since I came up north), but she had a slighter frame and was more flexible. She moved down the hole like a cat, almost disappearing beneath me. I had another disadvantage I hadn’t told her about. I just couldn’t. I was afraid of being inside closed spaces. And that certainly included dark, narrow tunnels that led into deadly silver mines.

  I had known this, and the word for it, “claustrophobic,” ever since I’d crawled into a snow tunnel my friends and I had built back in Moore Park, the downtown neighbourhood where we lived in Toronto. It was the year of the big storm, the time the Mayor had to call in the army to remove the snow. I guess we had about half as much as Cobalt had this year, but it sure seemed like a lot back then. My friends Bomb Connors and Rhett Norton and I had built this amazing tunnel that went all over our big backyard. Terry Singh and Jason Li were building one that was coming the other way from the Singhs’s yard next door. They were supposed to meet near the fence. For some stupid reason I had volunteered to be the first one in.