The Silver Tombstone

Chapter Sixteen

With the others following, Johnny struck out down the tunnel. It was straight and level for about fifty feet, then made a sharp right turn and dropped at least twenty feet during the next thirty yards. Then it made another turn.

There were tunnels running off at angles every few yards from the main one, but they were smaller and so obviously lesser ones that Johnny had no difficulty in deciding which was the main one and he kept to it.

But after traveling about five minutes they came to a cave-in which blocked the main tunnel. They turned back then to the first side tunnel and saw that it had been used more or less recently.

Johnny stopped. “Maybe we’d better get back to the elevator,” he suggested.

“I been thinkin’ that ever since we started.” Sam agreed, quickly.

Helen Walker shook her head. “Let’s see where this one leads too.”

Johnny hesitated a moment, then turned into the secondary tunnel. It was a winding one and not too well shored up, for every few yards there were heaps of dirt and shale, which had caved in from the ceiling or walls. But they continued on.

Behind Johnny, Sam Cragg suddenly cried out in alarm. Johnny whirled. “Cut it out, Sam!” he exclaimed testily.

“My lamp,” Sam retorted, holding it out toward Johnny. “It’s gone out.”

Johnny winced. He hadn’t noticed that at first. But now he took Sam’s lamp and shook it. There was only a tiny rattle inside. Quickly he opened the lamp and shook a small lump of carbide into his palm.

Helen Walker inhaled softly. Her own lamp was sputtering and the flame was becoming smaller. Johnny leaned over quickly and blew it out.

“I think we better start back,” he announced grimly.

“Yes,” said Helen, quietly. “I don’t think it would be fun wandering around here in the dark.”

Darkness came sooner than Johnny thought, for they had gone less than fifty feet in a backward direction when his own lamp became feeble. He blew it out and in darkness took the small lump of carbide from Sam’s lamp, added to it what remained in Helen’s and put it all in his own lamp. Then he relit the thing. The flame burned brighter. For about two minutes. Then it went out — completely.

“This is it,” Johnny said.

“We ought to be within a few yards of the main tunnel,” Helen said, in the darkness. “Once we hit that we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“If we hit it,” said Johnny. “There are about a million small tunnels here. We’ll have to stop at every cross-tunnel and feel if it’s the right size... And I guess we’d better keep close together.”

For reply Helen groped for Johnny and found his hand. Then she reached with her other hand for Sam Cragg. Hand in hand, they started again, Helen in the center and Johnny and Sam on each side, and with their free hands groping for the walls. After a moment or two Sam announced a tunnel and they paused to size it up, by feel. The decision as to whether it was a small tunnel or the larger main one, was surprisingly difficult to make, for in the dark size was hard to determine.

But they finally agreed that it was a smaller tunnel and continued on. The next tunnel was a long time in coming. It seemed larger than the previous one and they turned into it. Then came an even larger tunnel — or so it seemed.

Johnny gritted his teeth. “This isn’t right,” he said. “The first tunnel was the one we should have turned into.”

“But it was smaller than this one,” Helen protested.

“Was it? Or did it just seem so? I think we traveled too far before we turned into the last one. If we make one more mistake we’re done for. I think the best thing is to turn back now, while we can still hope to find the last tunnel.”

“But are you sure you can?”

Johnny hesitated. “No,” he said, finally. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re lost now.”

Helen pulled her hand from Johnny’s grip. “Why I ever threw in with you, I don’t know.”

“I was wondering about that myself.”

“Hey!” cried Sam. “Let’s not start fighting now.”

“I’m not fighting,” Helen retorted.

Johnny bared his teeth in the darkness. “I’m not either, but there are still some questions I’m going to ask you... when we’re where I can see your face.”

“You’ve still got some matches, haven’t you?” Helen challenged.

Johnny reached into his pocket, felt for the paper book. He found it and brought it out of his pocket. His fingers told him, however, that there was one lone match in it. He folded the book and returned it to his pocket. There might be a more urgent need for a match later.

“No,” he said, “I used the last one when I relit the lamp.”

“You fool!” cried Helen Walker in sudden anger.

Johnny accepted the designation. “I guess you’re right.”

“Now, wait a minute, Johnny,” said Sam Cragg, alarm in his voice. “If we ever get out of here it’s you that’ll have to find the way, Johnny — not me. Don’t go giving up.”

“I’m not,” said Johnny. “Not yet.”

Suddenly he reached out in the darkness. “Helen?” he asked, sharply. “Where are you?”

“Here,” replied her voice — from some distance away.

He started in the direction he thought her voice came from. But he stopped after a few feet. “Where?” he called.

“Over here,” her voice replied — and seemed farther away than ever.

Muttering, he turned back swiftly, and collided with Sam Gragg.

“This is me,” Sam exclaimed.

“Hang onto me,” Johnny ordered. “Helen!” he called again.

For a moment there was no reply at all. Then her voice called, fainter than before: “Yes!”

“Don’t move!” Johnny cried. “Stay where you are and I’ll find you.”

“All right,” was her reply.

Sam was clutching Johnny’s arm and together they moved a few feet. “Answer now,” Johnny said.

“I’m here,” came her voice.

A cold sweat broke out over Johnny’s body. He was sure now that she was in an altogether different direction than the one in which he had been moving.

“Hold on,” he advised Sam in a whisper. Then he moved carefully one step, two, and reaching out, touched a wall. He made a careful about face, paced off three steps and touched the opposite wall. Then he made a right face and with Sam holding onto his arm, went a dozen counted steps.

“Now where are you?” he called.

“Johnny!” Helen’s voice came faintly — and hysterically. “You’re farther away than ever.”

Johnny swore softly. “All right,” he cried, “I’ll stand still and you come toward me. I’ve gotten mixed up, somehow...”

There was silence for a long moment. Then Johnny could stand it no longer. “Are you coming?”

There was no reply!

“Helen!” Johnny roared at the top of his voice. “Where are you?”

“Here!” came a faint, a very faint reply.

In sudden panic, Johnny sprang forward and collided with the tunnel wall so hard that his head spun for a moment. When it cleared, he tried yelling again.

Sam took it up, bellowing at the top of his voice. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the tunnels, but there was no reply.

Helen Walker was lost.

So were they, for that matter, but there is something less terrifying if two people are together when lost.

Johnny and Sam made desperate attempts to find her. They paced off distances, returned and went in the opposite direction. They found side tunnels, venturing into them. They called and they listened. Once or twice they thought they heard faint cries and immediately went in the direction from which they believed the sound came. But it was never repeated — at least not from the same direction.

Time went by. Neither Johnny nor Sam had watches, but Johnny guessed that two or three hours had elapsed since they had entered the tunnel. It would be evening up on top of the earth.

“Let’s face it, Sam,” Johnny said. “Shall we sit down and wait for it, or shall we keep moving... until we drop?”

“How big can a mine like this be?” Sam exclaimed.

“I don’t know. I know very little about mines. Sure, I’ve read about them, but never had any particular reason to remember the details. I seem to have some recollection, though, of reading that these old-time mines sometimes had miles of tunnels...”

“But they’ve got to end somewhere, don’t they?” Sam cried. “Don’t mines have limits?”

“Not especially. The old rule is that a mine can follow a vein, no matter where it leads — as long as it begins on its own property.” He scowled in the inky blackness. “It’s the damn cross-tunnels that get me.”

“How many of those can there be?”

“Hundreds.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” said Johnny. “Let me think; it seems I read once that claims were only a hundred feet wide. Yet, I remember somewhere else something about fifteen hundred feet... Must be different rules for different states. Wait a minute... When we were up top, how far did it seem to Henderson’s place?”

“About a half mile.”

“All right, say a half mile, then — that’s saying this mine runs all the way to the edge of the Henderson one; we’re not sure of that, but let’s count it the worst way and say that it does. That’s roughly two thousand five hundred feet... and these crosscut tunnels seem to pop up every sixty or seventy feet; let’s give ourselves the worst of it and say fifty feet; that should be two every hundred feet... fifty tunnels at the outside, not counting the ten feet or so that each tunnel occupies. So there couldn’t possibly be more than fifty crosscut tunnels, probably only thirty-five or forty. And let’s say each one runs a half mile — which I doubt. Fifty times a half mile, that would be twenty-five miles. Shall we try them — one after the other, to the end, then back...” Johnny swore. “I forgot the back-trail each time. That doubles everything. All right, fifty miles.”

“Fifty miles in the dark,” Sam said, bitterly. “Let’s get moving... But what are we looking for?”

“Helen Walker,” Johnny said.

“And after we find her?”

“The elevator.”

“And what if it’s up?”

“Let’s talk about that when we find it... At least we’ll have light then; there was plenty of carbide in that can.”

“It’s no good without a match to light it.”

“I’ve got a match — one match. I was saving it for emergencies.”

They started out in the darkness, arms locked together, their free hands stretched out to touch walls, against which they bumped repeatedly, for in the blackness their feet could not travel in straight lines, even if the tunnels did sometimes run fairly straight.

They stumbled along in silence for some minutes, when they encountered a cross-shaft. Johnny called a halt and he grimly measured the distance across the tunnel in which they had been traveling. He did it by getting down on the floor and measuring with his arms, then with a sliver from one of the shoring beams that he pried loose.

He came to the conclusion that the tunnel in which they had been traveling was about six feet wide, or roughly three lengths of the piece of wood. He crawled carefully then to the new tunnel and measured it.

“Eight feet!” he announced exultantly. “It must be the main tunnel.”

“Let’s go!” cried Sam Cragg.

They went blithely down the new tunnel, but had proceeded less than fifty feet when they came abruptly to a cave-in — either a cave-in, or the end of the digging. They tested it to the ceiling, found it solid, then hopefully turned and began retracing their steps, figuring that the new direction would bring them back to the elevators. A hundred feet brought them up against a solid wall.

“What the hell!” cried Johnny.

Sam Cragg groaned.

“We’re cooked.”

Sam was silent for a moment. “What do you suppose the Indian would do... if he won the fight upstairs and knew we were down here?”

“I hope he’d come down and search for us.”

“You don’t really think he would, though?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny said, frankly. “There’re some funny things about Danny Sage. I’ve been thinking about him and I don’t think I’d trust him very far.”

“That was damn funny the way he let us down all the way into the mine,” Sam speculated. “He said he’d drop us just a few feet — out of the range of the bullets.”

“That’s one of the things that keeps sticking in my mind. All right, suppose Joe Cotter won. He doesn’t like us, but he’s a cop. It’s his duty to try to arrest us. But does he really want to arrest us? He’s in this Silver Tombstone business up to his neck... Remember what Tompkins said.”

Sam exclaimed. “Say, there’s the bird knows his way around this mine. Didn’t he say he’d explored down here for two years?”

“Yes. He ought to know these shafts and tunnels pretty well. But he’s over in California.”

“Maybe not — Joe Cotter and the girl were there, and they’re here today.”

“That’s one of the questions I was going to ask her — how she happened to show up here with Joe Cotter. They were supposed to be on opposite sides. There was something about her I didn’t tell you, Sam, something that happened in the hotel in Hollywood... while you were following Charles Ralston down to the morgue... She came to see me. And she left a few minutes before the cops broke in.”

“She squealed on you?”

“That’s what I thought at the time. It made me sore... because she hadn’t acted like that while she was in the room with me.”

“What do you mean — like that?”

Johnny cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, she was, ah, quite friendly.”

“How friendly?”

“I kissed her.”

“Yeah?” The tone was an invitation for additional revelations. Despite the seriousness of the moment Johnny couldn’t help chuckling. “That’s all. I made more or less of a date for that evening with her, but after the cops showed up I figured she’d put the finger on me. Maybe she did. I don’t know. But if we ever...” His voice broke off. Then suddenly he inhaled sharply. “Sam!” he cried softly. “Did you see something... a light?”

Sam was startled. “A light?”

“Give me a lift.”

Quickly Sam caught Johnny about the waist and raised him toward the ceiling. Johnny cracked his head on the roof, then stiffened in Sam’s grasp.

“There is a light, Sam,” he said. “Pretty far off, but it’s moving. Let me down...”

Sam lowered Johnny quickly to the floor and the latter leaped forward. He hit the cave-in, but in view of what he had seen, began groping upwards quickly. He exclaimed again. “This cave-in isn’t all the way to the ceiling, Sam. The light’s beyond it — the tunnel continues. Let’s see if we can’t get over this...”

Sam was already at his side, his fingers tearing away at the earth. They worked at terrific speed for a moment or two, digging like gophers. Then they had a space large enough at the top for even Sam to crawl through.

A moment later they were in the tunnel on the other side of the cave-in. But the light had gone.

“I don’t care,” Johnny said, doggedly. “I saw it — straight ahead, three or four hundred feet.”

“Maybe we should’ve yelled.”

“I thought of that.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I thought we’d better play it this way. Come on...”

They proceeded swiftly down the tunnel, arms again locked, hands stretched out to ward themselves off the tunnel walls. They traveled a hundred paces, two hundred, then hit a solid wall. But a tunnel cut off at right angles and at the end of it — was a streak of yellow light.

Sam and Johnny broke into a run. As they neared the yellow light it became brighter and suddenly bursting around a turn in the tunnel they saw ahead of them — suspended from the ceiling — a lighted electric bulb!

“We’re saved!” Sam babbled.

“Maybe,” said Johnny. “But this isn’t the Silver Tombstone — they didn’t have electric power there.”

“I don’t care what it is, but let’s get out of here... Help!” The last word was yelled at the top of his lungs. The response was immediate.

“Who’s there?” cried a voice.

“Here!” replied Johnny.

A man popped out of a cubicle, stared at Johnny and Sam.

“What the hell!”

“Where are we?” Johnny asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“We got lost in the Silver Tombstone...”

“The Silver Tombstone!” cried the other man. “This is the Hansonville mine... how could you get lost in the Silver Tombstone and show up here?”

“That I don’t know. But we’ve been wandering around in the Silver Tombstone for hours...” Johnny cleared his throat. “What time is it?”

The man pulled out a big nickeled watch. “ ’Bout four.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Morning. Don’t you — know?”

“I didn’t have the slightest idea. That means we were wandering around more than twelve hours.” Johnny turned, looked over his shoulder. “Isn’t there a shift working here?”

“Not any more. We on’y got a day shift going now. I’m sort of a watchman... although I don’t know what there is to watch. Boss’s orders, though.”

“Who came by a few minutes ago?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. We saw a light a few minutes ago. A moving light. That’s how we happened to come here.”

The face of the watchman showed worry. “Ain’t no one down here this time of night except myself.” He hesitated. “And you fellows.” Then he added, “I hope.”

“There was a woman with us in the Silver Tombstone,” Johnny said. “We lost her in the darkness.”

The watchman suddenly backed away. “Look, fellows, I’m only the watchman here. I don’t know anything... about anything.”

Johnny nodded. “How do we get out of here?”

“The elevator,” said the watchman. “This way...” He walked swiftly ahead of Johnny and Sam, made a sharp right turn and brought up against a wire cage. He pressed a button.

“It’ll be down in a minute.”

“What about upstairs? Anyone on watch there?”

The watchman hesitated, then added, “Old Byron.”

The elevator shaft was already whining and a moment later a closed elevator slid to a stop before the grilled door. The door opened automatically. Johnny and Sam stepped into the elevator, waved to the watchman.

Johnny reached for a button inside the elevator, but before his finger touched it, the door closed and the elevator began moving upwards.

“Something screwy in this place,” Sam Cragg muttered.

“The words out of my mouth,” said Johnny.

“The ghost down there — it couldn’t have been Helen Walker?”

Johnny’s forehead wrinkled. “If so, Question One: where’d she get a light? Number Two: why go flitting around the tunnels when she could come forward like us?”

The elevator began slowing up and suddenly came to an abrupt halt. A grilled door rose and Johnny and Sam stepped out of the elevator, to face a grizzled, astonished man who was holding a very capable-looking sawed-off shotgun.

“What the...?” he began.

“What the hell!” Johnny shot out. “My name’s Fletcher; this is Sam Cragg. And how are you...?”

The shotgun pointed at Johnny’s stomach. “Where’d you come from?” Old Byron demanded.

“Downstairs. The six hundred foot level. We broke through from the Silver Tombstone...”

Old Byron’s eyes widened even more. “Ain’t no one working the Silver Tombstone...”

“We were prospecting it.”

“Yeah, but she don’t touch our mine.” The old watchman shook his head doggedly. “Gotta report this to the boss.”

“Mike Henderson? He’s in California.”

“Who says so?”

“You mean he’s back?”

“Talked to him less’n an hour ago.”

“Here?”

“What’s wrong about that? He lives here, don’t he?”

Johnny nodded. “All right, rouse him out.”

“Oh, he ain’t gone to bed yet.” Byron gestured with his head, then stepped aside smartly so neither Johnny nor Sam would be able to reach the shotgun.

Johnny and Sam exchanged glances, then started for a door that was apparently indicated. Johnny opened it and stepped out into the open air. He drew a deep breath. Awhile back he had given up hope of ever breathing fresh air again.

“Straight ahead,” ordered the watchman.