The Secret of the Silver Mines Read online

  I scrambled along the tunnel, this weird darkness all around me, the sun shining slightly through the layers of snow above. I was getting more and more scared as I got farther in, hoping to find the end soon, almost panicking and turning around. And then it happened. The whole thing collapsed. I was stuck there, as if I were under an avalanche or something. It had taken all four of my friends, and Dad and Mr. Singh, to dig me out.

  Burrowing down the hole at the Cobalt silver mine now, I was having flashbacks. I knew what it was like to be buried alive. It was terrifying in four feet of snow; it would be lethal in here. I could hear myself breathing, deep and scared breaths, and there were weird echoes in the tunnel as our feet and arms banged against the walls. The man’s face was disappearing in the opening above me just a little sort of shadowy hole at the top with a couple of eyes looking down. For a second a terrifying thought flashed through my mind. How were we going to get out? Like the geniuses we were, we hadn’t even considered that. I quickly stopped thinking about it—too terrifying to allow into my brain.

  Somehow I managed to keep going, pushed downward by two thoughts: the silver treasure we might find, and Wynona Dixon, making good progress beneath me. About seven or eight metres into the hole I suddenly dropped into a wider, horizontal tunnel. It was hard rock in there. I fell right onto my butt, and when I looked around the first thing I saw was Wyn, sitting beside me. She shone the flashlight down a long corridor.

  “We’re in the mine,” she said quietly. She sounded frightened too.

  For a while we just sat there, listening to the sound of our breathing. Finally Wyn spoke, “Actually what we’re in is called a level. Levels are tunnels that go off in straight lines from the shaft. This is where they drilled for silver, long ago.”

  We stood up. Our flashlight could only brighten an area about five metres in front of us. Beyond that it was totally dark. What sort of ghosts lurked up ahead?

  The level was about two metres high and very narrow; we could almost touch the rocky walls when we spread out our arms. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to work in the mine all day, the courage, the determination to make a living. And I also wondered about Theo with his priceless silver down here long ago, revenge on his mind, looking for the perfect hiding place. How the heck had he done it? And where had he put it?

  We started moving very slowly along the level, as if something might come rushing at us out of the darkness. We didn’t have any choice when it came to the direction we went. Behind us was the shaft, boarded up and filled with sand. I still shook as I walked, trying not to think of where I was and what would happen if the whole mine just suddenly collapsed.

  It was an eerie place, grey and black, with rusted pick hammers and drill bits lying around, and steel rails running under our feet. They were for the open railway cars that used to take the extracted silver ore back to the shaft to ascend to the surface to be refined. There were moments when I thought I could still hear them in the dark tunnel, but most of the time the only sounds were made by our boots trudging along on the rocky floor. Whenever we spoke our voices echoed through the passageway and faded into the distance, like the groans of ghosts.

  “That hole in the ground was very weird,” said Wyn quietly as she walked. “It’s the only way in here.”

  And the only way out, I thought to myself.

  We didn’t say much else, trudging along in the narrow level, petrified, hoping to find the silver and wondering what in the world we were doing and if we would ever see our parents again. Once or twice Wyn made a few comments, like pointing out that the passageways that went off to the sides were drifts, and when they opened up into large caves they were called stopes, where the miners extracted the silver. In Theo’s day they did it by hand, chipping the ore from the bedrock with their hand-held hammers and bits and loading it onto the underground trains. It was dirty, back-breaking work.

  I kept having different frightening thoughts. One almost made me totally freak out. What would happen if Wyn’s flashlight battery died? We would be down here, lost, unable to see even an arm’s length in front of ourselves. My heart pounded. But I didn’t say a word to Wyn about what I was thinking. What was the point?

  Up in front of me she suddenly stumbled and fell. Then she screamed, screamed so loudly that the man up on the surface must have heard her. It nearly shocked my pounding heart to a dead stop.

  “WHAT?!” I yelled.

  “There!” She pointed down. “THERE!”

  I moved up to where she was. My foot kicked something. It felt like a soccer ball. But when I looked down I could see it was made not of leather, but of bone…a human skull!

  Now it was my turn to scream. And as I did we both shot off along the passageway at the speed of sound—the sound of two children shrieking. We didn’t stop until we were about a hundred metres farther along.

  Wyn sat down. She was crying. I couldn’t believe it. Wyn Dixon, crying?

  “How are we going to get out of here?” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Dylan, I’ve killed us both. And all for some silver that we probably won’t even find. And for a man who is probably dead by now anyway. Why should we worry about something that happened a hundred years ago? Look where it’s getting us.”

  I was feeling exactly the way she was, but I tried to hide it.

  “Listen, Wyn, if Theo Larocque got in and out of here, so can we. And if the silver is in here, then we can’t be too far away from it. I mean, why would he leave it kilometres from the shaft? We can’t give up now. We just have to have a little courage, and use our brains, too. There’s nothing saying we have to stay in here forever, anyway. If we don’t find it in fifteen minutes, we’ll head back. We’ll find some way out of here.”

  I couldn’t believe how mature I sounded. It wasn’t anything like the way I felt. In fact, I didn’t believe an ounce of anything I had just said. I was almost certain that we were absolute goners, and it really spooked me to see Wyn so upset. She just never got that way. I’d had it in my head that she was the leader in this thing, and she had been, but maybe now I needed to provide some leadership myself. I took the flashlight from her hand, gave her a pat on the shoulder, and marched forward. For a few seconds she sat on the ground behind me, but the fighter in her soon came back and she got to her feet. I didn’t see any sign of fear in her again after that, though I knew she felt it.

  About ten minutes later, just as we were beginning to think about turning around, we came to a fork in the level. One passageway kept going straight. It looked larger and older. The other was so small we would barely fit through.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  It seemed like a no-brainer. Deep in the dark bowels of the mine, it would be suicide to take the smaller, more frightening-looking passageway. We started into the bigger one. We were only going to go a short distance farther anyway. Then Wyn stopped.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “there’s a sign up there.” Sure enough, just over the smaller tunnel a crude sign was tacked up. “ENTER AT OWN RISK!” it read. “COBALT LAKE.”

  “Cobalt Lake?” I asked. “Down here?”

  “Look!” shouted Wyn. “Look!” Down at the bottom of the sign we saw someone’s initials: “T.T.L.”

  “Theobald T. Larocque!” we said together.

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It either means he wants us to go in there, into that little mole hole, or he doesn’t want us to. I don’t know.” She hung her head.

  “Well, we can’t go in there. Even if we want to. It must lead under Cobalt Lake. That means there might be water….”

  I almost choked on the word. Water. Suddenly my mind was back in the Haileybury hospital room. I could see the scene playing like a video in my brain. “Water,” the old man had said to me. “Water!” But when I’d filled that glass and offered it to him, he had turned his head away.
r />   “Wyn! Larocque didn’t want water at the hospital. He was giving us a clue!”

  Wynona Dixon was on her feet and plunging into the little tunnel before I’d finished my sentence. I followed. We struggled along on our bellies as fast as we could go, as excited as two kids on Christmas Day. Five metres into the passageway it opened up into a stope—a cave about the size of a living room and five metres high. When I came through, Wyn was sitting down, her eyes glowing. We could hear and feel Cobalt Lake. It seemed to be inches above our heads. We were in an incredibly dangerous place, with millions of tonnes of water just centimetres above our heads. But I sat down too. And my eyes glowed as brightly as my friend’s. Across from us, sitting there just as Theo had left it nearly a century ago, was a gleaming, shining, sparkling…stack of silver! It was piled up several feet high, a pyramid of priceless bricks. We had found his treasure!

  We sat there without speaking for at least five minutes. When one of us finally said something, it was me. “What a cool hiding place!”

  It took Wyn a while to answer.

  “Way cool,” she finally said, “way cool.”

  I was thinking about Theo, underground all alone long ago.

  “I wonder how he did it?” I said.

  We were quiet again for a while. Then we both stood up at the same time. It was weird because we hadn’t said anything to each other. We walked over to the silver. I guess we wanted to touch it. But as we approached we noticed something under the top brick.

  “What’s this?” said Wyn.

  She picked it up. It was a folded piece of paper. It looked old. She handed it to me.

  “I don’t want to read it. You do it, Dylan. Out loud.” So I did.

  To Whoever Finds This:

  You may be wondering how and why I did this. Why is easy. Because I was betrayed by a man named Lyon L. Brown. All the silver this mine ever unearthed belongs to God or to nature. But I had a rightful claim to it here on earth. Brown took it from me for the most despicable of reasons. He swindled me for his own selfish gain. May he regret it on his deathbed.

  How? I was the inspector for Brown Industries in Cobalt. They gave their employees notice that the mine would close just three weeks before it happened. But as terrible as that decision was, I knew that in it were the seeds of my revenge. I had an opportunity. I would not let old and cursed Brown Mine Ninety-nine close without taking back at least some of what belonged to me, and haunting the Browns with it forever. They, whose very souls were built on greed, would never rest if they ever discovered that any of their silver was missing.

  They will find out, someday. Men like that feel the loss of money. A penny dropped from their pockets is like the death of a child. There is an old saying that you can’t take your possessions with you when you die. They will try. And they will fail.

  Brown Mine Ninety-nine was one of the few in the area that actually refined its silver at a mill on-site, turning it into brick-like ingots, ready for sale around the world. My job was to inspect everything: the miners’ work habits, the ore, even the gleaming, finished ingots in the mill.

  The day after Lyon Brown gave the miners notice, I brought a few bars of silver down into the mine with me, hidden in my clothing. I knew of a place deep in the first level of the mine where no one ever went. At one time it had been a stope where silver ore had been extracted. But it was probably the most dangerous stope in the Cobalt mines, inches from the bottom of Cobalt Lake, just a drill puncture away from a disaster. It has been sealed up for five years now. But I knew exactly where it was, in fact I had worked there, listening each day with fear in my heart to the sound of the water above us.

  That first day I took my pick hammer with me into the mine. I waited until everyone was gone, not an unusual thing for an inspector to do. Then I got to work on unsealing the hole. I put the bars of silver in the stope and sealed up the entrance. Each day for the next twenty I did the same thing.

  Today I took a chance. I loaded up a whole cart of ingots and brought them to the mine. I took it down the shaft in the cage with me, telling no one, making an excuse for the covered wheelbarrow I was pushing. Then I wheeled it deep into the mine. When everyone was gone, I unloaded the whole stack. And here it sits.

  As I write this note I have no idea if I will live to see another day. I told my wife I would be away for a while, that I was going out into the woods to camp alone, something I have done many times before.

  I have a three days’ supply of food with me and a gallon of water. I have my pick hammer and my carbide lantern. The Mole is about to test his skills. I know a spot near the shaft that is soft most of the way down. I am going to try to dig myself out.

  If you find my remains somewhere, please bury me in Cobalt. And tell my wife, either in person or at her gravesite, that I love her more than life itself. But I had to do this. She will understand. Perhaps she will be sitting by our fireplace at home when she hears. It is where we always sit, together. She will understand.

  If you’ve found this before the Browns, then please, fight them. This silver is not theirs. Give this small amount to the people of Cobalt. They deserve it.

  Wish me luck…whoever you are.

  Theobald T. Larocque

  It was dated that day long ago and there was a stain on his name, as if a tear had fallen on the page long ago.

  “Good luck, Theo,” I heard Wyn whisper.

  I didn’t look at her. Seeing Wyn Dixon crying one more time in a single day would probably have had me bawling too. And we didn’t need that.

  We stayed there for what seemed like half an hour. Then our minds started to land back on earth and focus on our desperate situation. We could hear the water up above, making a sort of muffled thundering sound. It was almost as if we could feel it, sitting so heavy on the thin layer above us, sloshing gently back and forth like the water in an enormous bathtub. There was a steady drip echoing in the cave. Theo had called it the most dangerous stope in the Cobalt mines.

  “We have to get out of here!” said Wyn, standing up.

  We turned and struggled back into the main passageway.

  “Which way?” I asked when we got there.

  “Back the way we came. These levels are dead ends.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Wyn paused. “But what about the guy who was following us? Won’t he be coming this way? Or at least waiting for us?”

  “We’ll just have to deal with him when we get there.”

  Like any trip home, it seemed to go faster than the trip out. It wasn’t long before Wyn’s flashlight started to pick up dim signs of the bulging, sand-filled shaft in the distance. No one else seemed to be in the level. If our pursuer was still around, he had to be waiting up on the surface. But we had a more immediate problem, one we had dreaded since we’d landed in these depths. It had been hard enough getting down into the mine through that narrow mole hole Theo had dug. How in the world were we going to go back up?

  “Listen!” I said suddenly, as we approached the hole. Up above us we could hear sounds—sounds that made our blood run cold. Pick hammers and shovels. Dirt was sprinkling down the hole and falling into the level. The man was digging us out! And not only that, he had brought along some friends! We were cornered.

  We sat in the tunnel for a long time trying to decide what to do. We had been a good team so far. Every time we had encountered a difficult problem, we had solved it by working together. But there was no way out this time. So we just sat there, waiting for whoever it was who had followed us. We had been so close to solving everything. But now it was all about to collapse. We had unearthed the true story of Theobald T. Larocque, proved his parents innocent, and even found the silver. All for nothing. We had been so close.

  The blade of a shovel cracked through the surface a few metres up. Then we saw two feet land, a man’s feet. He bent down. We looked anxiously his way.


  “Dylan?” he asked. It was one half of the parental units. John A. Maples. Dear old Dad.

  17

  He Knew

  An Ontario Provincial Police officer had spotted a car moving along Lang Street in Cobalt with its headlights out about an hour or two earlier. At the same time, the Maples and the Dixons had walked down the hill towards the lake in search of their two missing children, who weren’t at the hospital and hadn’t come home. From a vantage point up on Prospect Avenue, they could see the dark car, followed at a distance by the cruiser. The car appeared to be chasing a sort of two-headed, ten-speed bicycle ripping along at top speed in the darkness on the road that led to mine Ninety-nine, a single flashlight showing the way. It didn’t take them long to figure out who was on that bike.

  Fifteen minutes later, Constable Dave McLaren and four parents were all inside the headframe, standing over an embarrassed man whose arm was reaching down a hole not much wider than a groundhog’s. He had been shouting at the top of his lungs. There was no sign of the children. A few heated questions directed at the man, an employee of Edison S. S. Brown, soon made known the whereabouts of Wynona Dixon and Dylan Maples. They had gone down the hole!

  The parents couldn’t believe it. They were frantic. But Dave McLaren, who had been an officer in these parts for as long as anyone could remember, was as smooth as the ice on Cobalt Lake. He sat the Brown employee down in his cruiser (“Driving without your lamps on, boy, that’ll get you somethin’, least till I figure out what else to set you back with”) and made a call to two buddies of his, named Darragh and McKinley. They arrived in a little more than half an hour, bearing picks and shovels and ready to work. Though their arrival seemed to calm the Dixons somewhat, it did very little to make the Maples feel better: Darragh and McKinley looked to be almost as old as Theobald T. Larocque himself and moved at about half his speed. But boy, could they swing their tools! Apparently they’d worked in the mines “in our day,” as they put it, and the earth seemed to fall away like an avalanche when they attacked it.