The Mystery of the Deserted Village, by Elbert M. Hoppenstedt

Ronnie was in the hayloft sliding down the piles of newly-stacked hay when he heard the car drive up into the yard and come to a stop. Spitting a mouthful of hayseeds from his lips and tongue, he ran over to the open doors and peered down into the yard.

The car was shiny and new, a big black sedan with white-walled tires. A man in a business suit carrying a briefcase climbed out of the driver’s seat and headed briskly for the front door of the house.

Ronnie knew who he was and why he was here, and his heart sank. Why did the St. Lawrence Seaway need a piece of the Rorth farm land, and why did it have to be just that part where the deserted village lay?

Of course he really knew the answers to his questions. What he meant was—why did it have to happen that way? Why did the land have to be so low that when the dam was built and the waters of the St. Lawrence River began to pile up behind it, the deserted village would be flooded?

He thought of Grandfather and Father in the parlor talking with the man and he wondered about what they were saying and how it would all turn out. The last time Mr.2 Evans had come in his black sedan Grandfather had gotten very angry and Ronnie had heard him shouting and thumping his cane on the floor.

Ronnie went over to the opening in the loft floor and, grasping the ladder, climbed quickly down to the bottom. It was darker below, and for a moment the boy had trouble seeing his way. He heard Beatrice stamping in her stall, and smelled the sharp, pungent odor of fresh manure.

His bare feet padded across the hard earth floor as he moved toward the barn door. A moment later he was out in the glaring sunlight, the full heat of the afternoon striking him on his bare shoulders and back.

Ronnie squatted down beside him. “The man from the Seaway, of course. I just hope Grandfather gets hopping mad again and gives it to him good. Nobody’s got a right to just come along and tell a person he’s got to sell his land. Nobody!”

“Of course you don’t care one bit, Philip Rorth!” Ronnie continued. “I think Grandfather was right. He said you’re not a real Rorth! ’Cause a real Rorth’s got fighting blood and a love for his land, and most of all he wouldn’t let the village go without a fight.”

Phil opened his left eye and squinted up at his brother.3 “All the fighting in the world’s not going to save the village, Ronnie, ’cause when the government wants something, it gets it. Period!”

Ronnie turned away in disgust. What could he expect of Phil? His brother had never gotten excited about anything, and he probably never would.

He headed toward the other side of the house, partly because it was shady there, but mostly because he knew the parlor window was open and he might be able to hear what was going on inside.

He passed the woodshed and swung around the corner of the house. Almost immediately he heard Grandfather’s voice. “Why, young fellow, do you know this land’s been in the family close onto a hundred and fifty years? And you come along, and without so much as a how-do-you-do, tell me I got to up and off it? Hah! Well, I’ve got a lawyer, too, to protect my rights!”

Ronnie settled down in the shade near the lilac bushes. He really wasn’t eavesdropping. He’d been wanting to weed the lily-of-the-valley bed for some time now, and this was a perfect time to do it with the sun on the other side of the house. He grabbed hold of a ragweed and started to pull it, but he stopped tugging after a few seconds so he could hear what Mr. Evans was saying.

“Mr. Rorth,” the man said, his voice like a whisper compared to Grandfather’s, “Mr. Rorth, I wish you’d try to understand. We—”

He didn’t get any further because when Grandfather was angry he didn’t usually give anyone else much time to talk. “I don’t understand, eh? Well, young fellow, I understand4 just fine, and just don’t you bother giving me any more of that hogwash about how wonderful it will be when big ships can come sailing down the river from the ocean to the Great Lakes, because that doesn’t touch me one bit.”

Ronnie heard his father’s voice next. “Father,” said Mr. Rorth, “it doesn’t do a bit of good getting yourself all upset like this. The Seaway Authority has told us that the water level of the lake formed behind the dam will cover the section of land where the deserted village is, and for this reason it will have to be purchased. There isn’t a thing we can do about it. Our lawyer has told us that himself.”

“More hogwash! Sometimes I think that lawyer is working for both sides and against the middle.”

The weed came loose from the ground with a suddenness that sent Ronnie reeling backward. Before he could catch himself he had crashed against the side of the house. When he looked up, there was his father peering at him from behind the screen. “Ronnie, what are you doing out there?”

“Y—yes, sir.” Ronnie wandered away toward the front of the house. He felt ashamed for having been caught snooping, and he was peeved at himself too. He wanted to hear what happened next. He hoped and prayed that there could be something that would save the village.

Almost without thinking, he headed across the dirt road that led out to the paved highway and then he entered the apple orchard. The blossoms had faded already, and in their5 place were clusters of tiny green knobs with big whiskers on the ends.

A few minutes later he left the orchard and stood for a moment at the top of the bluff, looking down into the tight little valley where the buildings of the deserted village lay half hidden among the hemlocks and spruce and maples and oaks. Great-great-grandfather Ezra Rorth’s father had built the village, and had chosen a beautiful location. The brick and stone buildings were nestled comfortably in the deep ravine. A cobbled road ran through the center of the village, and Goose Brook raced along its rock-strewn course down to the St. Lawrence.

Every time he stopped to look at the village from up here on the bluff, Ronnie thought of Grandfather. When Ronnie was hardly old enough to walk, his grandfather had brought him here. For many years after that the old man and the boy had walked together down the cobbled road in the late evenings, and Grandfather had told stories of the days when the village was alive with people, and the glass furnace belched smoke day and night and Rorth glassware was known almost around the world.

Now, as always, the village drew Ronnie like a magnet. He raced down the face of the bluff, whirling his arms about like propeller blades to keep his balance. At the bottom he stopped. Now that he was here, he couldn’t decide just which part of the village he wanted to visit. He could swing on the wild grapevines in front of the gristmill, and maybe take off his trousers and go sailing feet first into the millpond. Or, he could have fun climbing around on the pile of rubble that remained from the old bakery building.

He decided to visit the old, padlocked, boarded-up building6 which had been the office of the Glassworks back in Great-great-grandfather Ezra’s days. He started down the path, keeping his eyes open for any big toadstools he could splatter against a tree trunk. Then he spied Bill.

His best friend was coming through the trees from the opposite direction. Ronnie put his fingers to his lips and whistled shrilly.

“I was just coming over to your place,” Bill greeted him. “Where are you headed?”

“No place special. Thought maybe I’d climb around on the old office building roof and maybe get a look at that swift nest down the chimney. You figuring on something else?”

They started down the path together. “You know, Ronnie,” Bill said as they came to the cobblestone road through the middle of the village, “you know, I’d sure like to get a look inside that building sometime. How come your grandfather keeps it all locked up with shutters on the windows?”

“I guess that’s because he hasn’t opened it up since we were big enough to remember,” Ronnie said.

“My pa was talking about it the other night. He said it’s supposed to be haunted. You believe that, Ronnie?”

Ronnie thought it over. “Maybe, maybe not.” He wouldn’t let Bill know how he really felt. Grandfather never seemed to want to talk about the building, so perhaps there was something that he wanted to hide. Of course, Ronnie had heard the stories from others, about how his7 great-great-grandfather Ezra had killed someone in the office building and had robbed the Glassworks of money. No two people told the same story, and Ronnie had decided not to believe any of them.

The old office stood back from the cobblestone road. Two giant sentinel pines towered over the roof, dwarfing the building and the sapling hemlocks and pines that crowded close to its sides.

“Race you to it!” Bill yelled suddenly and started down the narrow path from the cobbled road.

Ronnie knew he couldn’t outrun Bill with his longer legs, but he’d sure try anyway. Gasping for breath, Ronnie reached his friend, who had dropped to the ground and stretched himself out in a nest of last year’s leaves just in front of the padlocked door. Ronnie threw himself down beside Bill.

They lay there for a few minutes catching their breaths. Then Bill got up and began to hunt around on the ground. He found a rock and brought it over to the door.

Ronnie pulled himself to his feet. “Forget it. We were going to climb to the roof and look down the chimney at the swift’s nest—remember?”

Bill looked at the stone in his hand and then into Ronnie’s face. “O.K.,” he said, letting the rock drop to the ground. “Some other time, maybe. But, by golly, I sure want to see what’s inside.”

“Grandfather said there’s nothing much. And he knows because he’s hunted through everything.”

8 Bill had shinnied up a young sapling and was pulling himself carefully onto the roof. “What was he looking for?” he grunted.

Ronnie started up after him and by the time he reached Bill’s side he had conveniently forgotten to answer the question. They mounted the slope together and then edged their way down the other side where the chimney was located. Bill had no trouble peering down into the chimney flue, but Ronnie had to stand on his toes to do it.

“I can make out the nest. See it, over there toward the back? I think there are eggs in it.”

They watched for a minute or two more and then lost interest. Instead, they sat down on the edge of the roof, with their legs hanging dangerously over the side.

Off in the distance, Ronnie could see a stretch of the St. Lawrence River and a smudge of smoke from a river boat, now already out of sight.

“A man from the Seaway’s at the house talking with Dad and Grandfather,” he said suddenly.

“The Seaway’s dickering with my pa, too,” Bill said. “Pa says it’s the best thing that ever came to him. They’re going to pay him five hundred dollars an acre, and most of it’s no-good swamp land. ’Course, it’s different with you, Ronnie. I know it’s the village that’s going.”

“Sure is a shame, because they don’t really need that part9 where the village is. Not for the main steamship lanes, anyway. But just because it’s bottom land and will flood up, it’s got to go.”

“Too bad your great-great-grandfather didn’t build the village on high ground. But then, I guess they used the stream for power to turn the wheels for the gristmill.”

Ronnie nodded. “I sure as shooting wish I could just pile up a heap of ground along the river to keep the water out. Then they wouldn’t want the village land.”

He was looking at the narrow gap where Goose Brook tumbled between the two bluffs that formed the margins of the valley. Why, it wasn’t more than seventy-five or a hundred feet across, and if it were filled in, the water behind the new Seaway dam could rise as high as it needed to without flooding the valley.

Ronnie almost lost his balance and plunged over the edge as the thought struck him. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “I’ve just gotten the coolest idea you ever did hear of. Now why in the name of common sense didn’t I think of it sooner?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Bill answered, “seeing I haven’t got the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.”

“Well, come on and I’ll show you!” Ronnie exploded. Then he scrambled up the roof and back over the other side, and swung himself into the sapling like a monkey let out of its cage.

Chapter 2

Ronnie was so busy telling Bill about his idea, and Bill was listening to it so intently, that neither of the boys saw the station wagon until it was almost upon them. “... and if we could build a dam across that narrow gap the village could be saved,” Ronnie was saying.

It was Bill who saw the station wagon first and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Look, Ronnie,” he exclaimed, “a car—in here!”

There was an old dirt road leading from the highway and connecting with the cobblestone road, but neither of the boys could ever remember seeing it used. But now that Ronnie thought about it, there wasn’t any reason why it couldn’t be used—if someone had a mind to get to the village without walking, someone traveling along the highway, that is. And here apparently was someone who wanted to do just that.

The man stopped the car, turned off the engine, and stepped out. He came toward the boys, smiling broadly. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I thought sure I was lost and the road was too narrow to turn around and go back to the highway.” He took a step toward Ronnie, offering11 his hand. “My name’s Caldwell,” he said. “Joseph Caldwell.”

Ronnie shook hands. “I’m Ronnie, and this here’s Bill. You looking for something special, mister?”

“But there’s nothing here any more, Mr. Caldwell,” Ronnie added quickly. “I mean, they don’t make glass now—not for the last seventy-five or eighty years, near-abouts.”

“I know.” The man smiled faintly. “Anybody who’s traveled up that dirt road could guess that there’s been no activity here for years.”

Ronnie grinned. “Now that you’re here, what are you fixing to do?” he asked.

“Well, what I’d like to do is look the place over. But I suppose I’ll have to get permission first.”

Ronnie shook his head. “You won’t have to do that, Mr. Caldwell. This land belongs to my grandfather. He’ll let you look. Maybe you’d like to have us show you around?”

As Ronnie led the man down the cobbled street, a hundred stories Grandfather had told him about the village leaped to his mind and begged to be told. He remembered the evening Grandfather and he had sat on the top of the bluff overlooking the village, with the bats circling overhead and the buildings standing silent below and fading from sight among the trees in the gathering darkness. How vividly Grandfather had told the story of the great fire of 1871 when ten of the workers’ cottages had burned to the ground, and Great-great-grandfather Ezra had worked beside12 his men, battling the blaze until he had fallen from smoke poisoning.

Or, the winter of the great blizzard when the roof of the Glassworks had caved in from the weight, and when the drifts were so high it took three days to dig out the road so that supplies could be procured from the storehouses.

He remembered, too, the story Grandfather told about the duchess from Bavaria who had visited the Works because she admired the Rorth glassware so much. Great-great-grandfather had blown a special piece for her that day, and she, in turn, had left a treasured piece of Bavarian glass.

They approached the two-story building beside Goose Brook. “This was the gristmill,” Ronnie told Mr. Caldwell. “Every bit of flour and meal for the village was made here from the grain grown on the fields up above where Dad has his orchards now.”

Caldwell inspected the huge, overshot waterwheel mounted on its two stone-and-cement piers and connected to the inside of the building with a rusty shaft by which the power was transferred to the grinding stones.

They went inside. A musty smell of damp stone and stale air touched Ronnie’s nostrils. The large grinding stone stood motionless now. Big copper caldrons and stone mixing pots gave evidence that the grain had not only been ground to flour, but baked into bread as well. A massive fireplace with an iron oven on each side formed the entire rear wall.

Caldwell poked about among the smaller articles for a while and then followed the boys outside. Next they visited the main building where the glass had been made and13 blown. Bill showed the man the main furnace with its four openings into the main chimney which rose like a giant above the furnace and disappeared through the roof. Some of the long-handled “pots” in which the glass was heated were still stacked against the wall.

Otherwise, the building was bare of its former equipment. Caldwell led the way outside. “I’ve got time for more—if you have,” he announced.

The church, sawmill, and a few of the workers’ houses which were still intact, followed. Then came a quick inspection of the smith shop and finally the old office.

“All boarded up and locked, I see!” Caldwell commented. “Something special housed inside?”

“Why, no, sir!” Ronnie answered. He didn’t feel like giving an explanation of something so personal that even Grandfather didn’t like to talk about it.

Caldwell didn’t press his question. “I certainly am impressed by how well preserved some of the buildings are,” he said instead.

“That’s because Grandfather didn’t want to see the village fall to pieces,” Ronnie answered. “Before he came down with his gout he spent days working down here, every time he could get away from the farm. He told me for a while he even milled his own lumber from the wood lot so’s he could afford to do it.”

“Your grandfather must have a real love for this place,” the man said sincerely.

“I reckon it’s just about the biggest thing in his life.” Ronnie was going to add “and mine too,” but he didn’t because Caldwell had turned away and had started down the path toward the cobbled road.

14 “Grandpa even replaced some of these stones in the old roadbed,” Ronnie added as the three headed back toward Mr. Caldwell’s car.

He handed each of the boys a quarter. “You’ve been real fine guides,” he said. “Thank you for taking me around.”

“You don’t need to pay us, mister,” Ronnie said, handing the money back. “Bill and I—we would have hung around here anyway.”

“Keep it, please,” the man insisted. “Who knows—I may want you to help me more, and then I wouldn’t feel right asking you, would I?”

“All right,” Ronnie agreed. Bill had already pocketed his quarter. “Say, Mr. Caldwell,” Ronnie had an idea, “do you suppose other people would pay money to have us show them around?”

Mr. Caldwell thought about the question. “I’m sure you could attract quite a few interested people—if they knew about it.” He opened the door to his car. “Say, son, I wonder if I could come to see your parents tomorrow and your grandfather, too.”

“I haven’t got any mother. She died when I was born. But you can sure come to see Dad and Grandfather. Something you want, maybe?”

“Well, perhaps. You see, I’m writing a book about early American glassware, and an idea just struck me that might prove interesting. But let me go back to my motel and think it over, and I’ll tell you about it tomorrow when I visit your folks.”

Caldwell climbed into his car and started the engine.15 Ronnie and Bill watched him while he maneuvered his machine about on the narrow, cobbled roadway and headed in the opposite direction. Then Caldwell leaned from the window and waved good-by. He started back up the road toward the highway in low gear.

“Now just what do you suppose brought him here to see the village in the first place? He couldn’t have stumbled on it just by accident, that’s for sure!”

“He was eying the locked-up building mighty suspicious-like, I’ll tell you that!” Ronnie added. “Did you see him, Bill?”

Bill nodded his head. “He’s come here for something, and I don’t think writing a book is the whole answer.”

They walked up the path together, picking up old acorns and shooting them into the trees. Suddenly Bill stopped and confronted Ronnie. “How come you asked him would other people pay money to see the village, Ronnie?” he asked.

“Well, that narrow gap where Goose Brook comes down through the valley, plus some money we might be able to earn this summer showing people around. Maybe it equals a dam and saving the village.”

Bill thought about that while he searched the dried leaves beneath a giant bull oak for more ammunition. “How much you figure a dam would cost?”

Ronnie shrugged. “I haven’t got the slightest idea. A hundred dollars, maybe?”

“Well, it would be a beginning anyway. And I know people hereabouts who would want to see the village saved, too, and I’ll bet if they heard how we were working to earn money, maybe they’d help out too. My dad knows the president of the historical society in town, and he told Dad he was sick hearing about how the village would be bulldozed and flooded, and if there was anything the society could do to help, he should just speak up.” Ronnie sighed. “I’d sure like to try to earn the money to save the village. It would be fun, too—you and me and maybe Phil, if he wants to, and you don’t care.”

“And then if we can’t use the money for the village, we can always have it to put in the bank.”

“It’s a deal! Rorth and Beckney, Guided Tours of the Rorth Glassworks’ Deserted Village.”

As they walked together down the path, each of the boys was filled with ideas as to how they would proceed. There would have to be a sign on the highway, of course. And the road leading into the village would need some repairs, and the branches overhanging it should be pruned short. They’d have to decide upon how much to charge and what they’d tell their guests about each of the buildings.

They stopped where the path divided—one route leading toward the Beckney farm, the other, up the embankment to the Rorth orchard.

Ronnie turned and began to run, digging his toes into17 the embankment as he scrambled to the top. He raced through the apple orchard, leaping a time or two to grab at a pea-sized apple. He suddenly felt light enough to fly. At least now he’d be doing something to save the deserted village, not just standing by and listening to Grandfather argue with Mr. Evans.

Chapter 3

When Ronnie entered the house, he was whistling a tune through the space between his two front teeth. In the living room he found Phil sprawled out on the couch with his head propped up against a pillow and a comic book in his hands. Phil turned a page and looked up at Ronnie. “Hi!” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Down in the village.” Ronnie went over to Dad’s desk to see if there might be some important-looking papers as a result of the meeting that afternoon. “Don’t you get tired of lying around all the time?” he asked Phil.

“Not me.” Phil shifted his position. “It’ll take me another month to rest up from a year of school. What’re you looking for?”

“Nothing like that—yet. Gramp’s lawyer arrived soon after you got booted away from the window, and they got nowhere from then on!”

“Because I was listening from the other side—from the hall! Soon’s the lawyer arrived, Gramps began demanding a lot more money for the property than the Seaway wanted to give, and they argued about that for a while and then19 Mr. Evans left. I’m telling you all this because I know you’re going to ask me anyway.”

Ronnie turned and headed for the kitchen, where he was met with a frown from Mrs. Butler, who did the housework and prepared the meals for the Rorths.

Mrs. Butler was a huge woman with a heavy-set jaw and a sharp, straight nose and piercing eyes that darted rapidly from one place to another.

“Now don’t you be running off somewhere!” she warned Ronnie. “Supper’s nearly ready to serve up, and if it’s like usual I’ll have to hunt the four corners of the farm to find everyone.”

“If you’re going out back, take a look at the gas tank for me, will you? I don’t think it’s been exchanged in a month.”

The indicator showed the tank to be almost half-full. Ronnie passed this information on to Mrs. Butler and then hurried toward the barn, chasing a dozen chickens out of his path.

His father was sitting on the homemade, bicycle-propelled grindstone sharpening one of the blades to his haymower. He didn’t look up from his work as Ronnie came to a stop at his side and stood watching him.

Mr. Rorth slowed down his pumping and then climbed off. “All right,” he answered. “I’m on the last one, but my legs are getting tired.”

20 Ronnie climbed onto the seat and started turning the pedals. The eight-inch-diameter stone began to whirl. Sparks shot in every direction as Mr. Rorth laid the edge of the blade against the stone.

A few minutes later, he signaled the boy to stop. “There, that’s better,” he said, running his finger cautiously along the edge of the blade. “Now if the weather holds out, I can get the north field cut and maybe into the loft.”

“Now who’s coming?” Mr. Rorth sounded annoyed. “I wasted the whole afternoon on this property deal when I should have been haying. Now who’s going to take over another half a day?”

Ronnie sympathized with his father. It wasn’t an easy job teaching agriculture in the local high school during the winter and then trying to run a sixty-acre farm during the growing season. Ronnie wanted to say, “I’ll give you a hand, Dad,” but he couldn’t summon enough will power to do it because he was looking forward so eagerly to starting his business venture.

“Me neither, until a little while ago. He came driving into the village while Bill and I were there, and he asked us to show him all around. And after we’d done that, he said he’d an idea he wanted to see you about—you and Grandfather.”

“Well, whatever it is, I’m sure Grandfather can take care of it by himself.”

Mrs. Butler’s voice bellowed from the rear door. “Come21 and get it! Come and get it before I throw it down the sink.”

Mr. Rorth grinned to himself. “Nice wholesome creature, that Mrs. Butler. But heaven knows what we would do without her.”

Mr. Rorth wiped his hands free of grease and started toward the barnyard door. Ronnie snapped off the overhead bulb and followed. “Dad,” he said, hurrying to catch up, “Dad, if you need me with the haying, I’ll help.”

Mr. Rorth thought it over. “I guess not. Thanks, son. Maybe after I get it cut, you can help load the truck. And I’ll probably need a hand getting it up into the loft, the same as last week.”

Ronnie went into the dining room to wait for the others to arrive. He stood in front of the sideboard, idly tinkling the bullet-sized glass crystals that hung in a circle of dewdrops from the rim of one of the Rorth candlesticks. A ray of light from the ceiling chandelier struck one of the crystals, and a rainbow of colors danced before the boy’s eyes.

Grandfather’s cane came thumping into the room and stopped behind the boy. “You watch your step with that candlestick!” Grandfather warned. “Doesn’t pay to monkey around with it for no good purpose. There’s little enough of the old Rorth glassware left in the world, and those two candlesticks are the prize of the lot.”

“I know. I know. I’ve heard you say that before—with disastrous results. Those sticks, next to the village, are the pride of my life. Now you wouldn’t want to have everything taken from me, would you, lad?”

22 “No, Grandfather.” He turned away from the sideboard and looked up at his grandfather. “Grandpa,” he said, “Dad told me once there was a story about the candlesticks. Will you tell me about it? Dad said you were the one to tell me if I was to know.”

Grandfather’s gray eyes twinkled for a moment. “Remember how not so long ago you used to come sit a spell in my room after supper, and we’d talk about the village and about your Great-great-grandfather Ezra and about the Glassworks?”

“Well, maybe if you were to slip in for a while tonight, we could talk about the candlesticks.”

Phil was already seated at the table, and Mrs. Butler was glaring in Ronnie’s direction, warning him to do the same. He helped Grandfather into his special armchair at the head of the table, and then slipped around and sat down next to Phil. Grandfather said grace, Mrs. Butler brought in the corned beef and cabbage, and Mr. Rorth made a late entrance to take his place opposite Grandfather. Mr. Rorth’s face was drawn into a frown. “I wish,” he exclaimed irritably, “the Seaway would hurry up and buy the land so I could get on with the farm work.”

A loud snort from Grandfather warned him that he had not worded his feelings in quite the way the old man would understand. “What I mean is,” he hurried to correct himself, “what I mean is that we haven’t got a ghost of a chance23 of saving it, so we might as well be done with the whole thing.” But it was too late. Grandfather had already risen to his feet, his hand turning white as he clenched the handle of his cane. His face was a fiery red against his snow-white hair, and the vein on his right forehead popped from the surface like a big purple knot.

For a moment he was so angry his words wouldn’t come out straight. “You, why, you—you’re a traitor to the Rorths! The village is the soul, the heart, the life of this family, and you throw it away in a few idle words. Why, why this boy here,” he pointed to Ronnie, “has a greater appreciation for what the village means. Far greater. I can’t understand it. I just can’t understand it.” He sank back down into his chair, breathing rapidly.

For a minute there wasn’t a sound in the room. Ronnie could hear a cricket chirping mournfully in the cellar. Then his father looked up from his plate. “I’m sorry,” he said to Grandfather. “I really didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

After supper Ronnie and Phil helped Mrs. Butler with the dishes. “Folks down in town are mighty sad knowing the old deserted village isn’t to be spared,” she said as she wrapped up some of the table scraps to take home to her cats. “Mighty sad. It’s surprising how many folks there have a fond spot in their hearts for the place. Fact is, there’s talk going around to do something about saving it—if there’s a way to get it done.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, boy, sometimes public opinion is powerful strong magic when it comes to something like this.24 The government doesn’t like to rouse up public sentiments if they can help it.”

There was a lot to what Mrs. Butler had said, and Ronnie stored the information away for later use. Maybe a combination of raising money for the dam and getting the townspeople interested might just turn the trick. Now, more than ever, he was anxious to get started on his venture.

Mrs. Butler had her scraps wrapped, and turned now to putting away the dishes Phil had dried. “You know,” she said, “either I’m getting daffy in my old age, or something mighty queer’s going on around here.”

“Well, I’ll let you figure it out. This afternoon I put a blanket out on the line to air. A little while ago I went out to get it, and it was gone. I even got a flashlight to follow the line down to the barn, thinking maybe I’d put that blanket farther away from the house than I’d figured.”

“Nowheres about. Not even on the ground, figuring maybe the wind might have taken it—if there’d been a wind. Asked your pa, asked your grandpa if they’d taken it.”

“Some tramp, probably,” Mrs. Butler grumbled, going to the closet to get her coat. But something in her voice told Ronnie she didn’t believe it.

Chapter 4

After Mrs. Butler had left, Ronnie headed for the sunny room on the ground floor of the back wing of the house. There he found Grandfather seated in his Morris chair, working frantically at the dials of his radio transmitter. “Confounded sunspots,” the old man growled. “I just can’t seem to make contact with Donavon tonight.”

“Now that’s as foolish an explanation as I’ve ever heard. Of course he’s home! He’s been home every night for the past two years, all ready to give me his next move and hope like the devil that he’s got me stymied.”

Ronnie looked over at the table beside the transmitter where Grandfather had his chess set. It was a beautiful board of alternating light and dark squares of imported inlaid woods. The chessmen themselves were large and ornate and handsomely carved from the best ivory.

The crackle in the loudspeaker was suddenly broken by Albert Donavon’s voice in Detroit. “W3x2Z calling W2N4L. Come in, W2N4L.”

“Why in blazes are you telling me to come in, you old fogy?” Grandfather retorted. “I’ve been trying to raise you26 for the past ten minutes. What’s the matter—you afraid I’m going to check you with my next move?”

“There isn’t a move in the books you could check me with!” Donavon returned.

They chatted for a few minutes about the weather and each other’s health, and then exchanged their moves. “Move my castle to White’s king rook file, third rank,” Grandfather told him, “and then sweat that one out!”

“Why you old buzzard!” Donavon came back, “you think that’s going to help you? Wait until you see what I’ve got in store for you! Move my queen’s bishop to the king knight’s file, fifth rank. Now figure that out if you can!”

“Ha!” Grandfather was indignant. “You’ll have to get up early in the morning to find a move that I can’t figure out. Your trouble always has been that you jump to too hasty conclusions, Donavon!”

But Grandfather looked worried, Ronnie noticed. He was studying the board and frowning. “See you tomorrow night, same time!” Donavon signed off, and the loudspeaker went dead.

Then Grandfather turned off his transmitter and receiver. “Thinks he has me cornered, does he! Well, let him figure out that move I gave him!”

He leaned back in his chair. “Ronnie,” he said, “it’s nice having you back in here with me like old times. I’ve been fearing that maybe you and I were drifting apart of late.” He closed his eyes for a few moments and leaned his head back against his chair. “So many things have been slipping from me these past weeks, so many things.” He opened his eyes again and looked at Ronnie. “You aren’t going to slip from me too, are you, boy?”

27 “Of course not, Gramps. It’s because you’ve been worried about the village and I didn’t want to pester you,” Ronnie explained. “That’s why I haven’t been coming in here to see you so much lately.”

“Of course, and you’ve been worried too!” Grandfather added. “Why, it’s been written all over you. You wouldn’t be my boy if you weren’t worrying about the village.” He stretched out his game leg to ease some of the pain. “You won’t be forgetting the wonderful times we had together in the village now, will you, boy?”

“No, sir, Gramps!” Ronnie exclaimed. “Why, just this afternoon I was telling Mr. Caldwell some of the stories you told me!”

Ronnie explained to Grandfather how Caldwell had driven into the village and how Bill and he had taken the man on a tour of the buildings. “And he gave me and Bill a swell idea, Gramps. We’re going to make money so we can build a dam across that pass where Goose Brook comes through, and then they won’t have to flood the valley and—”

“Say, hold on there a minute, boy! You’re going faster than a runaway locomotive down a steep grade, and I lost you a ways back. Now just how are you going to make this money, and what pass are you going to dam up? This all sounds pretty fantastic to me.”

But by the time Ronnie had finished explaining his plans, Grandfather was nodding his head slowly and puckering his lips the way he did when he was almost convinced. “There’s a chance ... there’s a chance,” he kept repeating. “I know the spot you mean. It would take a lot of fill, but it’s not28 impossible. And with folks in town stirring things up for the Seaway, it might come about. Of course, you realize you couldn’t raise near enough money yourself to do the job, don’t you?”

“You never said a truer word, boy! You’ve got my blessings. Go to it, and don’t forget, just because I’ve got a leg here that won’t do its job any longer doesn’t mean I can’t help. There’s one thing I got plenty of—advice!”

Ronnie smiled up at his grandfather. “We’ll lick this yet, won’t we, Gramps? And now will you tell me about the candlesticks?”

The old man nodded, then frowned. “Now where in tarnation do I begin a story like this? Well, let’s begin with your great-great-grandfather, Ezra Rorth. He was the son of the man who founded the Glassworks down in the valley, but it was really Ezra who built it up so that it was known practically around the world for its fine glass. I reckon Ezra was a real craftsman, an artist in his trade. He had a habit, so I hear, of rarely duplicating what he once had made.

“Well, now, this Ezra, for some reason nobody’s ever been able to figure out, took in a partner, a man by the name of Jacob Williams. Seems like both these men fell in love about the same time and got themselves engaged. Then they decided to hold a double wedding ceremony. Old Ezra, about that time, got the idea he and Jacob ought to give their brides-to-be something extra special for a wedding present. So the two went off for three, four days into the Glassworks and shut themselves up and said they didn’t want anybody busting in and bothering them for any reason29 at all. When they came out, they’d created two pairs of those candlesticks, one pair for each bride. Those in the dining room came right down the family tree from generation to generation. I gave them to your grandmother, and when your dad got married he gave them to your mother. It’s your turn next, seeing you’re the oldest.”

“Me?” Ronnie blushed. “I’m never going to get married, not on your life.”

Grandfather roared with laughter. “You’ll sing a different tune in another ten years—maybe sooner.”

“Well, that’s mighty nice of you to say, lad. Tarnation, you don’t know how sad this whole affair with the village has made me. And your father isn’t showing the fighting spirit I expected of him. So it’s good to hear you say nice things like that.”

“Well, maybe so, and I’m sure sorry I lost my temper like I did at the table. Always was one for blowing off steam and then feeling sorry about it afterward. I’m glad that’s one trait you didn’t inherit from me.”

Ronnie got up, stretching, and then started for the door. “Gramps?” he said, turning about suddenly. “You’ll tell me about the boarded-up building too, won’t you?”

Grandfather’s eyes came closed wearily, as if he were trying to shut out thoughts of the building. “No, boy,” he answered finally, his eyes still closed. “Let’s let its secret die along with me. I searched the place timber to timber, but I found nothing. She’s stubborn, that building, just30 like some of the Rorths. I guess she’s old and set in her ways, and if she won’t tell me what happened, she won’t tell anybody.”

“She likes me, Grandfather. I know she does. I’ve sat on the roof lots of times, and listened to the swifts down in her chimney, and I’m sure she was telling me to look! But I don’t know what to look for.”

Grandfather’s eyes were open again and he was smiling. “You’re a clever rascal, you are, boy! Trying to touch my sentiments, are you? Well, I’ve made up my mind the secret’s to die with me, so there’s no use in your pestering further.”

“Oh, all right. But I think it’s a shame, letting the secret get buried under all that water.”

Grandfather’s smile faded and his face grew flushed and the vein on his temple began to swell and turn purple. He started to rise, too, but suddenly changed his mind and sank back down and rested his head back against the chair. “I won’t get tempered over it again,” he said, more to himself than Ronnie. “But don’t you go talking like that any more. Remember, always keep thinking the best is going to happen.”

“I really do believe that, Gramps. I was just saying what I did because I hoped you’d change your mind and tell me the secret.”

“Well, I’ll think on it. I’ll think on it. Maybe I’ll decide to tell you. But don’t bother me about it any more, you hear?”

“All right. Now go on and get out of here. I’m tired and I’m going to bed.”

31 Ronnie was tired too, but he stopped in the dining room on his way upstairs to take another look at the candlesticks. They were beautiful. Twelve cut-glass, diamond-shaped crystals hung by spun glass chains in a circle from the rim of the candle holder. The base and stick itself were of solid frosted glass, embellished with intricate designs of rose and turquoise embossing. He set one of the crystals in motion and it tinkled like a bell against its neighbor crystal.

He climbed the stairs to the upstairs hall. Phil was in his own room, working at his desk. Ronnie poked his head inside and watched his brother cutting out baseball players’ pictures from the backs of cereal boxes he had been accumulating. “Bill and I are starting a business in the morning. You can come in with us if you want.”

Ronnie explained what they had in mind. Phil seemed interested. “I’ll sleep on it,” he told Ronnie and went on with his work.

Ronnie moved down the hall and entered his own room. He didn’t turn on the light, but instead went to the window and, brushing back the curtains, stared out into the blackness.

The moon was at the quarter, but there was enough light from it to light up patches of the St. Lawrence River so that it looked like stretches of a concrete highway cutting through the darkness. Below and a little to the left, the night was blackest, and here Ronnie located the deserted village.

For a moment he thought he could picture the black, inky water covering the land as the floodwaters rose behind32 the proposed dam. The thought of such a thing happening sent his stomach sinking.

Then suddenly his eyes widened. He blinked a few times to make sure he wasn’t seeing something that wasn’t there.

It was there all right! Directly in the center of the black patch of night where he had located the village, a halo of light lay shimmering over the roof of one of the buildings. It moved a little to the left, then shifted back again slowly, faded slightly, and brightened again.

Ronnie rubbed at the windowpane to clear the glass. But he couldn’t erase the light he had seen—not for another minute or two anyway. Then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

Chapter 5

Ronnie was up bright and early the next morning. All the time he was washing himself and brushing his teeth, he was trying to figure out what it was he had seen the night before.

It had looked somewhat like a flashlight beam hitting the thick foliage from underneath a tree. But that wouldn’t account for the way the light had reflected from the sloping-roof surface of one of the buildings.

“I reckon that was just about where the boarded-up building is,” he told himself.

He wondered if he should tell anybody about what he had seen. Nobody was likely to believe him. In fact, he was having a hard job trying to convince himself that his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him. Sometimes the netting in the screens made lights take on strange shapes and do crazy things. Or maybe it was the moon coming out suddenly from behind a cloud and lighting up the roof of the building. Yet this wasn’t the first time he had gazed out over the deserted village from his bedroom window, and he had never seen the light before. He pulled on his trousers and went down to the kitchen where he found his father34 at the table finishing a bowl of cold cereal. “Morning, Dad,” he said.

“Morning, Ronnie! What’s the special occasion—getting up so early, I mean?”

The boy explained about the plan Bill and he had made—how they hoped to attract tourists to the deserted village and perhaps earn some money too.

“Sounds like a fine idea to me, son!” Mr. Rorth nodded his head. “Let me know if I can help you in any way.”

Mr. Rorth washed his dish out at the sink and set it into the drain to dry. “A fine day for haying,” he said glancing out the window at the sky. “In a few days I’ll need you and Phil to help gather it in.”

After his father had left, Ronnie got his breakfast of fruit juice and cereal from the refrigerator and pantry shelf and then sat down at the table to eat.

While he was eating, he thought over all the things Bill and he would do that day to prepare for their new business venture. He jotted them down on a piece of scrap paper: “Clean out all the buildings that are in pretty good shape. Cut off all the branches that stick out over the dirt road and the cobblestone road. Clear a small parking place. Print a sign to put on the highway.”

Then he added: “Tell Bill what I saw last night?” He added two more question marks at the end of the words.

Just as Ronnie was finishing his meal, he heard Mrs. Butler drive up in her car. A few minutes later she came bustling into the kitchen. “Well,” she exclaimed, “aren’t you the early bird!”

She opened the cupboard door and placed her pocketbook inside. “Strangest thing about that blanket,” she said35 to Ronnie. “I was sure I’d find it this morning. But I don’t see hide nor hair of it. Did you make your bed, youngster?”

“I might have guessed. Well, I’ll take care of it for you this once. ’Pears like you’ve got some mighty important things on your mind, or you wouldn’t be up so early. Keep your eyes peeled for that blanket.” She picked up the carpet sweeper from beside the refrigerator and hurried from the room.

Phil shuffled into the kitchen, still in his pajamas. He fell into a chair and yawned deeply. “That cereal looks O.K. Mind fixing me up a batch?”

“Help yourself. Be my guest.” Another idea had come to Ronnie and he jotted it down on his list: “Maybe make some circulars to leave around town telling about the village.” Lots of tourists came through Massena on their way to the Thousand Islands. Some might be interested in seeing the old glassworks.

Phil settled himself at the table with a bowl of corn flakes and a bottle of milk. “Watcha writing?” he asked his brother.

“Maybe I’ll tag along and see what it’s all about. If it looks interesting, I’ll think about joining up.”

“Aw, I don’t mind. In fact, it sounds kind of intriguing. Maybe I can pick up a few fast bucks to get that bicycle I’ve had my eye on.”

Ronnie put down the pencil, folded up the paper and stuffed it in his trouser pocket. “All the money we make is36 going into helping to save the village. If you want to come, you’d better get dressed because I’m taking off in a few minutes.”

Ronnie washed out his plate and glass and put them away. Then he left the house. The sun was hardly over the treetops, and the grass still sparkled with early morning dew. A fine haze streaked the horizon, and the boy knew it was going to be hot before the day was over. He cut through the orchard, slid down the embankment, and cut into the forest where the buildings of the village were scattered.

On the cobbled road he paused and whistled shrilly, a signal to Bill. He listened, but no answer came back to him. Well, he’d wait for Bill by the boarded-up house.

He cut down the side path to the building. The bare earth, where the leaves had blown away, was damp from the night dew, and his bare feet padded noiselessly along. He broke out into the small clearing that faced the front of the building and stopped abruptly.

For a second he had thought the figure moving hurriedly away from the rear of the building was Bill, and he had been just about to whistle a greeting. Now he saw that it was a man, and while he could only see a portion of his shoulders and head, he thought of Mr. Caldwell, the man who had driven into the village the day before. “Hi, Mr. Caldwell!” he yelled.

The man turned for an instant to face the boy, then whirled about and hurried into the woods.

The man’s face had been in the shadows for that single instant he had faced Ronnie, and the boy still wasn’t sure37 whether he was the man who had paid them the visit and promised to return for a talk with Mr. Rorth. Ronnie shrugged, as if to tell himself that it really didn’t matter. If it had been Caldwell, he’d explain his actions later.

Ronnie decided to take a quick swing around the building to see if he could find anything that might tell him about the light he had seen the evening before. The rusty lock, snapped in place three or four years before when Grandfather had abandoned his search, was still in place. The window shutters were as tightly closed. Everything looked perfectly normal.

“Strangest thing ever,” he said to himself. He was beginning to believe he had been seeing things the night before.

He spied a narrow crack where the shutter did not fit tight against the window frame, but it was a little too high to look through. But off in one of the thickets of hemlock saplings, he saw a fair-sized log. He grabbed hold of it, rolled it over beneath the window, and then wedged a smaller piece of wood under it to keep it from moving.

Holding onto the window frame for support, Ronnie climbed onto the log and placed his right eye against the crack. The room was dark except for the glow from a faint patch of light that found its way down the chimney flues.

The light, however, was sufficient for him to make a very puzzling discovery. Somebody, apparently, had spent the night sleeping in the boarded-up house! Spread out on the hearth was Mrs. Butler’s missing blanket. The stub of a candle was waxed securely to the floor, and a flashlight lay to one side.

“Hi, Ronnie!” he heard Bill’s voice behind him. “Gee, let me take a look inside too!”

38 Ronnie stepped down from the log. “Hi, Bill. I just discovered the queerest thing. You take a look and tell me what you think.”

“Sure thing!” Bill was only too happy to comply. He climbed the log and, shielding his eyes, peered through the crack. A minute later he was down on the ground again facing Ronnie. “Looks like somebody’s been sleeping in there!” he exclaimed.

“Just what I thought!” Ronnie agreed. “And that looks just like the blanket Mrs. Butler lost yesterday. I know it because it’s the one she uses when she takes her nap in the afternoon. I’d know that Indian blanket anywhere!”

“In?” Ronnie was flabbergasted. “Why, I don’t know how he got in! I just looked at the lock, and—and all the shutters are still nailed shut—I think.”

“Couldn’t be!” Bill started out on his own inspection tour. He joined Ronnie a few minutes later, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t find any way to get in, either. You’d better tell your dad about this, Ronnie!”

“And maybe your grandfather will open up and take a look inside to find out what’s going on.”

“Yea, sure.” Ronnie was still too deep in thought to pay much attention to Bill’s remarks. How had the intruder gotten in? he asked himself over and over again. Mrs. Butler had hung the blanket on the line the day before, and now Ronnie was sure that it was inside the boarded-up building. But who had put it there, and how had he gotten inside?

39 The boys didn’t give up searching for an answer until they had re-examined the four walls and had even climbed to the roof for an inspection. “Maybe he went down the chimney!” Bill suggested.

“Don’t be silly!” Ronnie laughed. “Even a baby couldn’t get down there.” He peered over the top and looked down the flue. “Besides, the swifts’ nest is still there, and it would be broken if anyone had gone down.”

Just then Bill spied Phil coming down the cobblestone road. “Hey, Ron-nie. Hey, Bill,” Phil called out.

“Don’t let on what we’ve found inside,” Bill warned Ronnie. “It’s our secret—yours and mine. O.K.?”

Ronnie nodded. They went down the path to meet Phil, who had seated himself on a fallen log to wait for them to join him. He had cut himself a walking stick from a wild cherry tree and was busy paring ringlets and designs by stripping off the bark. The live wood showed through, a pale green.

“Thought you’d never get here,” he said without looking up from his work. “How’s the business coming?”

“We haven’t started yet.” Bill turned to Ronnie. “I was thinking last night that first off, we’ve got to have an office to work in, and where we can keep all our stuff.”

“How about one of the workers’ cottages?” Phil suggested. “Gramps fixed up a couple of them and they’re still in good shape.”

Ronnie and Bill agreed, and the three set off down the cobbled road, crossed Goose Brook and struck out down the overgrown path that led to the row of workers’ cottages. Only two of them were still in good repair, the two on each40 end of the row that formerly contained close to a dozen. Of the rest, most had completely fallen to ruin. Only their foundations and chimneys were still standing. A few had walls, but the roofs were caved in and rotting.

The boys chose the one closest to the cobbled road and set to work cleaning it up. While Ronnie and Phil removed the debris that littered the floor, Bill ran home to get a broom and pail and mop.

By noontime the walls and floors had been mopped with water from the brook, a makeshift desk had been constructed from old lumber, and several rickety but serviceable chairs had been located in other buildings.

“We should have done this a long time ago,” Bill said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, “even if it was just for a clubhouse. It’s real neat!”

Before leaving for lunch they agreed to return that afternoon and begin work on some of the items Ronnie had written on his list at breakfast that morning. “The road from the highway comes first,” he decided. “Then, cleaning up the buildings we’re going to use in our tour. Then, the sign.”

Phil groaned. “I just remembered,” he announced. “I’ve got a date with the hammock for the afternoon.”

When Ronnie came within sight of his own house fifteen minutes later, he recognized Mr. Caldwell’s station wagon parked near the back door. He’d already left Phil a good distance behind, so he began to run, afraid that he might already have missed something of importance.

Mr. Caldwell was in the barn, talking with Ronnie’s father. He looked up and smiled in the boy’s direction as Ronnie entered. “Hello, Ronald,” he said.

Ronnie tagged along behind his father and Mr. Caldwell as they walked slowly from the barn and then stopped alongside Mr. Caldwell’s car for a few final words. Then Mr. Caldwell climbed into his station wagon and started the engine. Ronnie waved good-by.

“Dad,” he asked, following his father back to the barn, “what did he want?”

“Supposing you come up in the loft with me and help pile up the hay you knocked down the other day. Then I’ll be able to get the rest of it in after it’s finished drying on the fields. I’ll tell you about Mr. Caldwell while we work.”

Ronnie followed his father up the ladder. It was stifling hot in the loft. Mr. Rorth opened the two loft doors that faced onto the barnyard. Overhead a wasp darted angrily among the beams, droning like a model airplane.

Mr. Rorth picked up two pitchforks and handed one of them to Ronnie. “How come you’re so interested in this Mr. Caldwell?” he asked, starting to move some of the hay toward the rear of the loft.

Ronnie grinned. “I guess maybe because I’m just plain nosey!” he answered.

Mr. Rorth had gathered up a large pile of hay. Now he jabbed the tines of his fork underneath it and heaved the load to the top of the stack. Then he turned to face the boy. “Couldn’t ask for a more honest answer than the one you gave me, could I?” he queried. “I’ll say this, though, about the man,” he went on, more seriously, “I’ll say that I was impressed by the way he talked. He seemed genuinely interested in antiques, particularly glassware. And apparently42 he’s built up quite a name for himself as a connoisseur of old glass.”

Ronnie thought about what his father had just told him. “Dad, what’s a connoisseur?”

“A connoisseur? Well, he’s a person who knows a great deal about some special art subject. Caldwell got interested in glassware when he was a boy. It seems his family had a couple of pieces of Rorth glassware that had been handed down from one generation to the next. He started doing some research on them, and pretty soon he was studying up on all makes of glassware. Now he’s writing a book on early American glassware. He wants to include a few chapters about Rorth glass.”

Ronnie stopped work long enough to turn toward his father. “And is that why Caldwell came to see you?” he asked.

“Yes, in a way.” Mr. Rorth leaned lightly on the handle of his fork. “He wants to spend some time here poking around in the buildings and talking with your grandfather about the history of the Glassworks. He thought maybe he could bed down in one of the buildings in the village.”

“He does!” Ronnie exclaimed. “Golly, maybe he’ll help us set up our business, specially if he knows so much about glassware. Think he might, Dad?”

“Well, now, I don’t know. He’s coming here to learn more about it himself. But you ask him if you want.”

Ronnie went over to the opening of the loft and sat down on the edge with his feet dangling out over the barnyard. The perspiration was running down his body in streams, and he wanted to cool off. The hayseeds were sticking to his skin, too, and itching something awful.

43 His father came over and stood behind him, leaning on the handle of his fork, trying to catch a few puffs of the cooler air.

“Because somebody slept in the old office building, that’s why. And who else would it be excepting Mr. Caldwell?”

“That’s nonsense, Ronnie,” his father protested. “Why would Mr. Caldwell want to sleep in the old office building? And how would he get in without breaking down the door?”

Mr. Rorth shook his head slowly as if to say, “These kids!” and then picked up his fork and moved back to work. Ronnie got up and followed him. “Don’t you believe me, Dad?” Ronnie asked.

“Well,” Mr. Rorth said, grinning, “I’ll say I’m having a hard time believing you. For instance, how can you tell that a man slept there—what evidence do you have?”

“Well, there’s a little crack in the window, and Bill and I climbed up and looked through it. We saw the blanket Mrs. Butler was looking for last night.”

Mr. Rorth raised his eyebrows a bit and looked straight at Ronnie. “Well, that is convincing.” He thought about it for a moment. “Tell you what, Ronnie. I’m going down to the village later this afternoon to see if Mr. Caldwell got settled all right. I’ll take a look at the old office building on the way.”

“Never mind the crack. I’ll bring the key—if that old lock will still turn. Last time I looked it was wrapped with a cloth to keep it from rusting.”

After lunch Ronnie gathered together some tools and lumber to use in building a sign for the highway. With these under his arms, he stopped by the grape arbor where Phil was lying in the hammock. “You coming down?” he asked, hoping he would so he could carry some of the load.

Phil eyed the lumber and tools. “I’ll be down after my siesta,” he said. “Nobody with any sense exercises during the heat of the day.”

By resting his load on the ground every few hundred feet, Ronnie reached their new office without too much trouble. Bill hadn’t shown up yet, so Ronnie stretched out in one of their chairs, making plans for the afternoon while he waited for his friend.

But after five minutes he grew restless and decided he’d kill some time by taking another peek through the shutter into the boarded-up building. He slipped out of the office and made his way toward the building. Soon he was standing on the log and peering through the crack.

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Now what’s Dad going to think of me?”

Chapter 6

“That man,” Ronnie told himself again and again as he trudged back to their office, “that man I saw this morning running from the boarded-up house is the person who slept in there last night.” And “that man” had looked an awful lot like Mr. Caldwell, even seen from a distance and hidden somewhat by the early morning shadows.

Ronnie groaned. He sure did hate the thought of the teasing he’d get when his father inspected the building and found nothing there.

Bill was waiting for him when he reached their office building. “’Bout time you got here,” he said.

“I’ve been here,” Ronnie retorted. “I went over to take another peek into the boarded-up building. But I wished I hadn’t.”

Ronnie told him. Bill groaned too. “I told my pa about it, too, and he said he was going to call your pa on the telephone. Somebody’s made a monkey out of us for sure!”

“Well, we know somebody slept there last night,” Ronnie announced stoutly. “Some mighty strange things are going on around here, let me tell you.” He decided to break down46 and tell Bill about the peculiar light he’d seen the evening before, and about the man who looked like Mr. Caldwell who had turned and run when the boy had shouted his name.

Bill gave a long, loud whistle of amazement. “Looks like we’ve got two things to do this summer—save the village and solve this mystery, too.”

But within a few minutes they had forgotten the mysterious prowler. Armed with the pruning sheers and sickle that Bill had brought with him, they started clearing the overhanging branches from both sides of the dirt lane. A half hour later, when they were within sight of the main road, Mr. Caldwell’s station wagon turned off the highway and came toward them.

He stopped alongside the boys and poked his head out the window. “Hop in and I’ll drive you back in—that is, if you’re finished.”

Ronnie nodded and the two climbed into the front seat. “You’ve done a fine job of clearing the roadway,” Mr. Caldwell said. “You are going ahead with your tourist business, I take it.”

“Your father told me.” Mr. Caldwell swung off the dirt road onto the cobblestones. “Now, the question is—which building shall I occupy? Your father said I could have my choice.”

“How about one of the workers’ cottages?” Bill suggested. “We’re using one of them for our office, but there’s a real good one with a fireplace at the other end of the row.”

Ronnie and Bill helped Mr. Caldwell unload his suitcases47 and cardboard cartons from the rear of the station wagon and carry them into the cottage. Then they sat on the floor with their backs against a wall and watched him unpack.

Just about that time, Mr. Rorth drove up in his pickup truck. In the back he had a cot and mattress, blankets and sheets, a table and a few chairs, as well as some cooking utensils.

Ronnie walked back to the truck beside his father. “Now,” said Mr. Rorth, “let’s take a look at the evidence of this mysterious guest we’re supposed to be harboring in the old office building!”

Ronnie looked up sheepishly at his father. “It’s not there any more, Dad,” he said.

“But it was there this morning, Dad. Honest it was. Bill saw it too. He’ll tell you.”

Mr. Rorth stared at his son a moment, then laughed and climbed into the truck. Ronnie’s face was scarlet as he turned back to join Bill.

For the remainder of the afternoon the boys worked at cleaning up the gristmill and the general store. Phil joined them about three o’clock, but as usual he wasn’t much help.

Twice during the afternoon they took a breather to see how Mr. Caldwell was coming with his unpacking. On their final visit, Ronnie exclaimed, “Gosh, Mr. Caldwell, you’ve got this place looking just like home!”

“And that’s what it’s going to be for a couple of weeks. Who knows, I might just decide to stay on indefinitely!”

48 “Oh, but you couldn’t do that—not unless you want to be under water,” Ronnie explained.

Mr. Caldwell looked at Ronnie questioningly, not knowing whether to take the boy’s remark seriously or as some kind of joke. “Are you fooling?” he asked.

“Oh no. In a year or two, when they build the dams on the St. Lawrence Seaway, this’ll all be under water. Gramps is furious, but Dad says he can’t do anything about it.”

“What a pity. What a great pity!” Mr. Caldwell exclaimed. “I’m certainly glad I decided to come here when I did.”

Mr. Caldwell’s alarm clock showed four-thirty. Bill suggested that they start work cleaning up the main building where the glass had been manufactured and packed. “We’ll never get started showing people around at the rate we’re going,” he told Ronnie and Phil.

Ronnie, of course, didn’t need any convincing. He would work all night if it would step up their opening date. Phil tagged along reluctantly.

They managed to cart five or six loads of the larger debris from the building and dump it in the woods out of sight, and then Bill announced that it was probably time for him to get home. He had chores to do before supper, and so did Ronnie and Phil.

They walked back to the office together. Bill wanted to gather up his tools to take home. “I’ve got to be sure to get these back,” he explained. “A couple of nights ago a saw and hammer and a couple of other tools disappeared from the barn, and Pa insists I took them and left them somewhere.”

49 They walked down the cobbled road to where their paths separated. “You know,” Bill suggested, “we could work on the sign tonight and leave the cleaning up for the daytime. Think you could get away for a while after supper?”

“Sure,” said Ronnie. He turned to his brother. “Want to come too, Phil?”

When Ronnie got home, he pitched into his chores immediately. He chased the few remaining hens into the chicken house, filled their trough with water, and fastened the door shut. He stabled the horse and then watered and fed her. Then he went into the house to collect the garbage and trash to take to the dump for burning.

Returning from the dump, he caught sight of his father driving the tractor and pulling the mowers down the farm road from the fields. Ronnie cut through the triangle of alder bushes to meet him. “Say, Dad,” he asked, climbing up beside him, “could I go back down to the village after supper and work for a while with Bill? We’re going to make our sign to put out on the highway.”

“I don’t see why not. You pretty near ready to start your big business venture?”

Mr. Rorth nodded his head in approval. “I was in town today and I happened to run into Steve Mercer. He’s president of the historical society. Told me that they’d written a letter to the Seaway saying their society’s violently opposed to any flooding of the village unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Ronnie’s heart leaped. “Maybe that’ll help us get permission to build the dam across the top of the valley.”

50 “It might,” his father agreed. A smile tugged at his lips. “Think you can raise that kind of money?”

“No,” Ronnie said honestly. “But it’ll get the ball rolling, and that’s what counts, Grandpa says.”

“And of course he’s right,” Mr. Rorth agreed. “Heaven knows I want to see the village spared as much as you and Gramps. But I can’t let the whole farm go to pieces in the meantime. You’ve got to be practical about these things.”

When Ronnie reached the office at eight o’clock, Bill was waiting for him. Bill had brought a kerosene lantern and it was already burning when Ronnie entered the door. Outside, the late evening shadows were deepening among the trees, and the peepers were piping down in the marshes along the river.

“Pa gave me a piece of plywood for our sign,” Bill announced, “and I brought some paint and brushes.”

They sat down at their improvised desk and composed the words they would letter on the sign:

“That ought to get their curiosity roused up!” Bill exclaimed when they had finished. “Now let’s get it laid out on the plywood.”

The time passed quickly for the two. Outside, the night closed in among the old buildings and the silent trees.

51 “Now that looks right nice!” Bill said at last standing back to survey the sign. “Looks almost like a real sign painter made it. Tomorrow, first thing, we’ll get it up on the road.”

Ronnie glanced at his wrist watch. “I’d best be getting on home. Nothing much more we can do tonight anyway.”

They picked up their flashlights, and then Bill blew out the lantern. The two stepped out into the night. The beams from the flashlights cut a solid lane down the path as they made their way toward the cobblestone road. Bill was in the lead. Suddenly he stopped and pointed off into the trees. “Look!” he whispered.

It was the light again, the same light Ronnie had seen last night from his bedroom window. Now that it was closer, he could make out more of the detail.

At first glance it seemed like some strange, unearthly cloud resting motionless over the top of the building. But Ronnie was quick to discover that what he really saw was the light striking the undersurface of the thick canopy of foliage that overhung the roof, setting the leaves aglow.

Ronnie moved closer to his friend and whispered, “Sure looks spooky, doesn’t it? First off it does, anyway.”

“Yea,” Bill answered, “sure does. Somebody must be behind the building, pointing a flashlight up into the trees.”

Ronnie shook his head. “Whoever’s doing it is inside the building, poking around in the chimney. Otherwise you’d see the light in a circle.”

“Maybe you’re right. Let’s slip over and take a peek through the crack in the shutter.”

Chapter 7

Ronnie shivered. The shiver started at his shoulder blades, traveled down his spine, and made his flesh stand out in goose pimples. Just a few feet ahead, almost in the thick blackness that lay between the bushes along the path, he could make out Bill’s light-colored shirt. And at the end of the path lay the padlocked building with its strange halo of light still shimmering in the foliage over the roof.

As they drew closer, Ronnie could see that the light did come from the chimney as he had suspected. “Somebody poking a flashlight around in the chimney flues, all right!” he thought. But why? Was it just a trick to scare Bill and him away for some unknown reason, or was this intruder searching for something?

They were almost to the building when the light went out and the blackness closed in over the roof. Ronnie shivered again. The building seemed lonelier and more desolate than it had before.

Bill turned about and came close to Ronnie. “There’s somebody inside for sure!” he whispered. Ronnie could feel53 his friend’s breath against his cheek. “Listen. I can hear him walking around.”

Ronnie heard the sounds too—floor boards creaking under the intruder’s weight. “Come on,” he breathed, and taking his friend’s arm, steered him toward the side of the building.

The log was still in place below the window. Ronnie found a hold on the window frame and pulled himself up. He leveled his eye against the crack and peered inside.

Only a small portion of the interior came within his view, and the intruder, whoever he was, was out of range. But a portion of his flashlight beam was visible and lit up the fireplace and the hearth before it. Then the light shifted suddenly to the other side, stayed out of view for a moment, and then returned.

A moment later the light went out completely and the building was plunged into complete blackness.

Ronnie felt Bill tugging at his arm. “I hear something around back!” his friend warned. “Maybe he’s getting out.”

“But there’s no way out through the back,” Ronnie protested. Hadn’t Bill and he searched every square foot of the outside of the building? But then, the intruder had to enter and leave the building somewhere.

Ronnie stole another quick look through the crack before making up his mind. The interior was still pitch-black. “You stay here and watch the front and sides,” he directed Bill. “I’ll see what’s going on around back.”

Before Bill could protest, Ronnie had dropped from the log and was making his way toward the rear of the building. It wasn’t easy finding a way through the thick tangle of54 vines and bushes, but he didn’t want to risk giving his presence away by turning on the flashlight.

He rounded the corner of the building just in time to see the figure of a man step back, away from the rear wall of the old office. For a moment or two his face was silhouetted against a patch of sky. “Caldwell!” Ronnie called angrily before he realized what a foolish thing he was doing.

The man’s hand rose. A brilliant beam of light struck the boy full in the face, blinding him instantly. Then the light went out and the man sprang away into the darkness.

Burning with anger and disappointed from the stupid mistake he had made, Ronnie leaped wildly after him, and plunged into the undergrowth. He had taken no more than a few steps when he tripped over a log and hurtled headlong through the air. He landed with a jolt in a tangle of briars and his head smashed against a tree trunk. Whirling lights and brilliant flashes stood out before his eyes as he fought for consciousness.

The next thing he knew Bill was standing over him. “You all right, Ronnie?” Bill was asking. “Ronnie, you all right? Say something, can’t you?”

Ronnie struggled to sit up. The top of his head throbbed and he could feel a lump rising. “I—I guess I’m all right,” he said.

He tried to stand up. The trees, the sky, the building started to swing around before his eyes. He grabbed Bill’s hand for support.

Within a few minutes he felt better. Bill took his arm and helped him down the path. “Golly, I sure as shootin’ messed that up,” he said to Bill. Then he told his friend what happened.

55 “So you figure it was Mr. Caldwell?” Bill asked when Ronnie had finished.

“Well, I reckon I did then, or I wouldn’t have called his name. But, gosh, now I’m not so sure. It was plenty dark. What a fool I was yelling out to him. Boy, could I kick myself in the pants for being so stupid.”

“Yea,” Bill agreed, “yea, if you weren’t so woozy, I’d do it for you. But what do you say we pay Caldwell a hurry call? I think we can still beat him back to his cottage, seeing he’s got to detour around through the woods. Feel well enough to try it?”

Ronnie agreed that he did. Except for a slight throbbing in his head, he felt as well as he had before the accident.

They hurried down the cobblestone road, using their flashlights only when they needed them to find the way. They approached Caldwell’s cottage cautiously. Light was shining from the two windows that faced the path.

“Let’s take a peek in the window first,” Bill whispered. “You know—see what he’s doing before he gets wise that we’re here.”

They crept noiselessly to the window and peered over the sill. Caldwell was seated before a small table that held his typewriter and a kerosene lamp. He was busily at work.

Bill leaned over to whisper in Ronnie’s ear. “Boy, either he’s real sneaky or else he wasn’t ever out of the building,” he said. “He looks as if he’d been at work for hours.”

“Maybe he has been,” Ronnie said. But if Caldwell wasn’t their man, why had he turned so instinctively when Ronnie had called out his name?

“Let’s go in and have a talk with him just the same,”56 Bill suggested. “But don’t let him know we suspect him of anything.”

Caldwell opened the door to them after Bill had knocked. “Well!” he exclaimed, motioning for them to come in. “How did you know I was just itching for a little company?”

Caldwell turned his chair away from his typewriter to sit facing them. “What are you doing down here at this time of the night?”

“I thought I saw a light coming from your office windows, and I was thinking about going down to investigate earlier. But I got so wrapped up in my work I just never got around to it.”

Ronnie glanced over at Bill to find his friend looking at him too. Bill was thinking the same thing, evidently. Caldwell was claiming that he hadn’t left his cabin all evening. That didn’t prove a thing, of course, Ronnie realized. In fact, Caldwell might have told them this just to cover his movements.

Mr. Caldwell got up and crossed over to his “kitchen” and returned with a box of crackers. “I can’t offer you much, but perhaps you’ll have a few crackers?”

“Thanks,” Bill answered taking several. “We can’t stay much longer. I’ve got to be getting back home soon.”

A miller moth made a dive-bomb attack at the lamp. Caldwell picked up a folded newspaper he had handy and swatted the insect. The lamp swayed precariously and the moth flew off unharmed.

57 “I’ll bet you they could be made to fit the windows. Might even be a screen door. I’ll ask him about putting them up.”

“You just get them to me—along with some tools—and I’ll do the putting up, gladly!” the man answered.

Bill stuffed the last cracker into his mouth. “We’d better be getting along right now.”

Mr. Caldwell came to the door with them. “If I can help you with your tourist business in any way, just say the word. You’re welcome to use any of the information I’ve gathered when you’re talking about the village.”

“Thanks, Mr. Caldwell,” Ronnie answered. “We just might take you up on that. I’ve been thinking maybe we’d mimeograph a little booklet about the place.” He turned to Bill. “We could use the Grange mimeograph, and the paper wouldn’t cost much. We could tell all about the Glassworks and life in the village in the olden days and—”

“And the mysterious locked-up office building,” Bill added, picking up the idea with great interest, “and even about those old glass candlesticks of your grandfather’s, Ronnie!”

“They must be worth a great deal,” Caldwell said. “What do they look like?”

Ronnie described them. Caldwell nodded slowly as Ronnie brought out detail after detail. “I’d certainly like to see them sometime,” he said when Ronnie had finished.

“Come on up to the house any time,” Ronnie offered. “I’m sure Grandpa would be glad to show them to you.”

58 When they were alone outside, Bill turned to Ronnie. “You know,” he said, “I think Caldwell is kind of a swell guy. I just can’t believe he’s the one sneaking around the village and running off when we catch sight of him.”

Ronnie thought about this after he had left Bill and was hurrying up the steep incline to the orchard above. Was Bill right about Mr. Caldwell? There were arguments for and against. That silhouette of the man’s face against the night sky, for instance. Ronnie had tried again and again during the evening to convince himself that he had been wrong when he had called out Caldwell’s name. But somehow he just couldn’t do it. And he couldn’t forget what had happened that morning! It had been daylight then. Was it just a coincidence that both times Caldwell’s name had come to his mind?

He’d talk to Gramps about it, that’s what he’d do. But when he arrived home he found the door to his grandfather’s room closed and no light showing from underneath.

He climbed the stairs and headed for his room. Phil was in his own room, in his pajamas, and lying on his bed with a pile of old comic books at his side. A wild idea hit Ronnie suddenly and he poked his head into Phil’s room. “Have you been in the house all evening?” he demanded. Maybe, just maybe, Phil was playing tricks on them and he had been in the padlocked house!

Phil looked at his brother in surprise. “What’s the matter—the heat got you or something? Sure I was here all the time.”

Phil dropped his comic book and sat up. “Say, something real interesting must have happened to you down in the59 village, or you wouldn’t be putting me on the witness stand. Come on, out with it.”

“Nothing happened. You’re imagining things, that’s all.” Ronnie hurried down the hall, hoping that Phil wouldn’t have the energy to follow him.

Phil didn’t. Ronnie ducked into his room and closed the door. Then he went over to the window and looked out.

The valley was in complete darkness. Even the lights in Mr. Caldwell’s cottage were out. The deserted village was asleep.

Chapter 8

After breakfast the following morning Ronnie looked for Gramps in his room, but there was no sign of him there nor anywhere about the house. It was Mrs. Butler who told Ronnie where his grandfather had gone. “Why, seems to me I saw him headed out the door a while back,” she said. “Went off toward the orchard, I’d guess.”

Ronnie took off after his grandfather. He found him sitting on a rock at the top of the bluff and looking out over the valley and the deserted village.

“Well, now, boy, come set a spell with me. My old legs won’t let me get down there in the village any more, but by golly, they can’t keep me from sitting here and looking.”

Grandfather shifted his position by leaning heavily on his cane. He faced Ronnie. “Boy, you’ve got something on your mind, and don’t tell me you haven’t because I’ve come to know when you’re troubled.”

Ronnie nodded. “There’s something going on down in the village that I’m all mixed up about.”

“You’re darned tootin’ there’s something going on down there!” the old man retorted. “Those Seaway people plotting61 and scheming to take the village away from me. I know what’s going on.”

“Not that, Gramps. Something else.” Ronnie went on to tell him about the blanket and the candle he had seen through the crack in the shutter, and about the strange light that had startled Bill and him the night before. He told Gramps about the mysterious prowler too.

“Gramps,” he concluded, “do you suppose it’s got anything to do with the secret of the boarded-up building? Maybe there’s something hidden there that this man is looking for.”

“Really, Gramps. I’m not sure. I don’t want to say until I’m real sure.”

Grandfather didn’t press the point. “Ronnie,” he said, “this village has been the love and joy of my life. But lately it’s just as if—just as if the prophecy were meant to come true.”

“What prophecy, Gramps?” Ronnie asked. “Is that what the secret’s all about?”

“Yes, in a way, I suppose.” The old man looked out over the valley and then back to the boy. “I reckon the time has come when you must hear the story. It can’t die the way I’d hoped it would. The past won’t let it.”

Gramps took out his pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket. He filled the bowl of the pipe and placed the stem between his yellowed teeth.

62 “Turn your mind back, boy, to what I was telling you the other evening when we were talking about the candlesticks.” He lit a match and drew heavily on the stem of the pipe until the tobacco glowed crimson. Then he exhaled the blue smoke in a cloud that rose over his head. “I told you about your great-great-grandfather Ezra and his partner Jacob Williams, if you’ll recollect. This Williams fellow was a kind of no-good scoundrel, from everything I’ve heard tell, and why Ezra got bamboozled into such an arrangement, nobody’ll ever know. Took him in as a full partner he did, lock, stock, and barrel, or in other words—Glassworks, land, and merchandise.”

“Yep, I reckon so, if there’s anyone around to claim it. I’ll come to that later. Well, anyway, these two partners seemed to have gotten along well for a number of years. The business flourished. Rorth glassware got to be known practically around the world. Then around 1886 or thereabouts, things started worsening up, and by 1888 the company was well-nigh bankrupt. Now this Jacob Williams, who was keeping the books, finally got around to telling your great-great-grandfather how bad things were, and darned if he didn’t accuse Ezra of milking the company dry. Yep, he claimed Ezra had been stealing quantities of money and glassware from the company. And this Williams didn’t stop at that. He spread it all around the neighborhood, and pretty soon people began to believe it was true.”

“Can’t really answer that because it’s never been proven63 one way or the other. But maybe when you hear the rest of what happened, you’ll understand it a mite better. Now one day in June of 1889 Jacob Williams disappeared. Of course, everybody started saying Ezra had done away with him to keep him from accusing Ezra of the thefts. And I guess there was some evidence to make people believe it, too. First of all, more money and glassware were missing. Then there was this man, John Sutton, a worker at the Glassworks, who testified that he’d heard Ezra and Jacob Williams arguing and shouting at one another. Then, when he passed by the building again later, he claims he heard Jacob screaming for help. He didn’t go in, figuring it was none of his business, but later on he got to thinking about it, and went back. There was no sign of Ezra or Jacob Williams. Fact is, that was the last anybody ever heard of Jacob Williams. Old Ezra made a search for his partner—even put notice of a reward in the paper for anybody sending news of him. It was like the earth had swallowed Jacob—him and the money and the missing glassware.”

Grandfather tamped his pipe with a leathery thumb and continued. “Well, boy, people here put two and two together, and there began to be talk. When people begin to talk, they make things bigger and meaner. Old Ezra had killed Jacob to cover up his own thefts and he’d hidden the body somewhere. Search parties went over every square foot of the village, but they didn’t turn up a clue. Well, no matter, people said, Jacob Williams’ curse was on the Rorth family until Jacob’s death was avenged.”

Grandfather puffed hurriedly at his pipe to start up the dying coals. “But what happened to Great-great-grandfather Ezra?” Ronnie asked.

64 “The case came before the grand jury, but the jury failed to indict Ezra. There wasn’t proof of anything, really. So Ezra was freed, but people didn’t stop accusing him for a long time. Some even tried to find Jacob Williams’ son, then a man in his late twenties, to persuade him to come back and avenge his father’s death. But he wasn’t anywhere to be found.

“Then came reports of people who claimed they’d seen Jacob Williams’ ghost near the old office building, and there were those who said the ghost had cried out that he’d never stop haunting the Rorth family until his death was avenged. Funny thing was, though—no Rorth ever saw this ghost!”

“Which just proves the whole thing’s a phony!” Ronnie exclaimed. “Who believes in ghosts, anyway?”

“No one—excepting maybe those who haven’t gotten a proper education. But there’s more to this story. A few years after Williams disappeared, an epidemic of typhoid struck the village. Probably came from drinking the water out of Goose Brook. Anyway, lots of people died and the rest left like rats from a sinking ship. Soon there were only Ezra and his family left. He sent them away, too, while he stayed behind to close up. The Glassworks never opened again. When Ezra’s wife and my father returned, they had the office boarded up tight and padlocked, and I guess it was never opened until I went in there five or six years ago.”

“Yep, that’s right. It was a terrible blot on the family name. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. But all my searching65 proved nothing. I’m afraid the evidence—if there is any—will be covered by the floodwaters when they come.”

Grandfather smiled down at Ronnie. “You’re right, boy. That wasn’t a Rorth talking then, but a discouraged, old man.”

Ronnie looked down into the valley. The thin mists that had settled in the lowlands during the night were dissipating now under the hot sun. “Gramps, do you think this man I saw is hunting for evidence too—the way you were?”

Grandfather thought over the question for a moment or two. “Nope, I don’t think so, Ronald. More’n likely—if he’s hunting for anything at all—he’s after the money and glassware that was stolen. There’ve been others before him.”

“Gramps?” Ronnie asked again. “What finally happened to Great-great-grandfather Ezra?”

“Well, when my father and mother returned after the epidemic was over, they found him in the office building. He was dead from the typhoid. But everyone said it was Jacob’s ghost that did it.”

The old man grasped the head of his cane with both hands and pulled himself to his feet. He stood for a minute with the hot breeze ruffling his snow-white beard and hair while he looked down into the valley. His sharp eyes darted from one building to another and finally rested upon the old, padlocked building.

“The answer’s in there somewhere,” Ronnie heard him say, although the wind tried to take his words away. “I hope the good Lord will let me live long enough to see it found.” He turned to face the boy. “Ronnie,” he said, “Ronnie, your father’s in town now, but when he comes66 back tonight, you tell him I said he’s to let you have the keys to the Rorth office building. You and this friend of yours take a good look around inside and maybe you can find what this man is doing in there. And maybe your keen, young eyes will find what I’ve failed to find all the times I looked.”

“Sure, Gramps!” Ronnie’s eyes lit up with excitement. “You bet we’ll find something to prove Great-great-grandfather Ezra didn’t harm Mr. Williams. And maybe we’ll find the glassware—and the money too!”

Grandfather was looking down into the valley again. “Went through every paper in the place,” he was saying, not waiting for Ronnie to finish talking. “Hundreds of them. But not a clue. Not a single clue. Just old bills and statements and records. Put them all back in the files, I did, just the way I found them. But somewhere in that building there’s an answer. I’m convinced of that.”

He drew himself up tall and breathed in deeply and squared his shoulders. “We aren’t licked yet. No, sir, not by a long shot! Now, boy, how about helping an old man back to the house?”

Chapter 9

“Now we’re officially in business!” Ronnie exclaimed. He stowed the spade he had been carrying in the corner of their office and dropped into a chair. His hair was wet with perspiration and beads of it were rolling down his face and stomach. “That’s the hardest ground I’ve ever had to dig a hole in,” he added, fanning himself with a newspaper.

The boys had just finished erecting the sign alongside the highway. Layers of coarse gravel and heavy blue clay had made the job of digging difficult. But, as Bill had said, they wanted the sign planted plenty deep so the first heavy wind wouldn’t carry it away. “Who knows,” he had added, “we may want it there a long, long time!”

On their way back from the highway, Ronnie had told Bill everything that Grandfather had said about old Ezra Rorth. Bill said nothing until they reached the office. “Ronnie,” he said then, “Ronnie, this afternoon you bring the key to the padlocked building with you, you hear? We’ve got business to attend to in there!”

“You bet we have,” Ronnie agreed. “Once we find out who this man is who’s sneaking around the village—and68 why too—maybe we’ll get to the bottom of all these shenanigans.”

Bill nodded. “We’ll search the building from top to bottom, and maybe we’ll have more luck than your grandfather did. Maybe we’ll clean up this mess around your family name.”

“I know my great-great-grandfather didn’t harm Jacob Williams or steal anything, either. I just know it.”

“Sure, Ronnie, sure, but we’ve got to prove it. And that isn’t going to be easy, not after all these years have passed. But we’ll do it. Every minute we’ve got when we aren’t showing people around, we’ll use to hunt for clues. And the first thing we do is search that old office building, so don’t forget to bring the keys.”

Ronnie sprawled a little lower in his chair and watched a drop of perspiration run down over a fold of skin on his stomach. Bill, he knew, wanted to hunt for clues immediately, but it was just too hot to move. It all seemed like such a tremendous, almost impossible job. Hadn’t Grandfather tried and failed?

A moment later Phil sauntered into the building and plunked himself down in the one remaining chair. “I don’t know why I killed myself coming down here,” he sighed.

“I don’t see why you did either,” Ronnie commented with a smile. “All you did was move from the hammock to that chair. You shouldn’t exert yourself so much.”

A horsefly buzzed angrily across the ceiling and slammed into the wall. It fell dizzily for a few feet and then regained its balance. Off it went in the opposite direction and slammed into the other wall. “Crazy critter,” Phil commented.69 “See how he’s exerting himself—and where does it get him?”

Before Ronnie could think of an appropriate answer, there were footsteps on the path and Mr. Caldwell popped his head in the door. He entered and perched himself on the edge of the desk. “I’m going up to your house this afternoon to take a look at those candlesticks,” he told Ronnie. “From the description you gave me I’d say that the pair I have at home are identical.”

The horsefly suddenly stopped buzzing and the office seemed strangely quiet. Ronnie sat up and looked at Mr. Caldwell, his mouth hanging open just a bit. “Did—did you say you—you had a pair of candlesticks like Gramps’?”

“I don’t see why. There were probably quite a few pairs turned out during the years the Glassworks was in operation.”

Ronnie opened his mouth to protest, and closed it again. There was plenty of time to tell Mr. Caldwell what he knew. He decided to play it safe for the time being. “Yes,” he answered, “yes, I suppose there could be quite a few around, if they haven’t been lost or destroyed.”

A car drew up in the improvised parking lot and came to a stop. Ronnie, looking out the window, saw a man, woman, and two boys leave the car and start toward the office. Ronnie and Bill went out to meet them.

70 The man looked first at Ronnie and then at Bill. He seemed a bit skeptical. “Well, all right,” he said finally. “Where do we begin?”

Ronnie and Bill led them down the path to the cobblestone road. “This is the original road that ran through the center of the village,” he told them. “Some of the cobblestones have been replaced from time to time, but mostly it’s just the way it used to be. Mules used to pull cartloads of sand along this road to be used in making the glass.”

They swung off the cobblestone road and approached the two-story building beside Goose Brook. Bill, slipping up beside Ronnie, whispered: “Hey, you’re doing all right!”

“Now this was the gristmill where all the wheat from the surrounding fields was ground into flour. That overshot water wheel you see there was in running order when my grandfather was a boy. He says our family still used it to grind the grain.”

They visited the main building where the glass had been made and blown. From here they moved to the general store, the blacksmith shop, the smith shop, the carriage buildings, and the workers’ cottages. This brought them in a circle back to their office.

There, they found another car pulled into the parking area. Two men were waiting inside the office. Before entering, Bill and Ronnie collected their fees and said good-by to the first group. “We enjoyed the tour very much,” the man told Ronnie and Bill. “It was well worth the stop.”

Mr. Caldwell was still in the office, chatting with the two71 men. He introduced them to Ronnie and Bill. “This is Mr. Perkins, and this is Mr. Brown.” Ronnie and Bill shook hands with the men.

“They’re interested in learning more about the business you’ve started,” Caldwell went on to explain. “You see, they’re from the Massena Sunday paper, and they’re thinking about writing a story for next Sunday’s edition.”

“That’s right,” Brown broke in. “We feel that more people will take an interest in the fate of this place if they’ve heard about what you two boys are doing. Besides, it’ll help bring you business!”

“Gee, that’s swell of you!” Ronnie exclaimed. “Bill and I are awfully anxious to do everything we can to save the village.”

Mr. Perkins pulled out a notebook and seated himself at the desk. “Let’s make that our first question,” he said. “Just how do you expect to save the old village by taking tourists through it?”

Ronnie explained how they hoped to raise some of the money to build a dam across the narrow gap in the valley through which Goose Brook ran down to the river. “My dad says it could be done,” Ronnie continued. “’Course, we won’t get enough money ourselves to do it. But we’re hoping maybe other people will get worked up enough to want to help out.”

“People are beginning to wake up already,” Mr. Brown said. “I happen to know that your father saw Steve Mercer the other day and put a bug in his ear about the village. Steve wrote to the Seaway Authority, trying to convince them to use your plan and save the village. He got some kind of a letter back—but they didn’t commit themselves72 one way or the other. It’ll take time, but I’m sure it can be done.”

Mr. Brown’s remark gave Ronnie some of the encouragement he needed. Sure, he’d had his doubts, right from the beginning when he’d first thought of opening the village to the public. They would need public support, and perhaps more money too—unless the Seaway agreed to foot the bill.

By the time the two men were ready to leave, Mr. Perkins had several pages of notes, some of them on the history of the village itself. “I think I’ll get a statement from the Seaway Authority, too,” Brown said as he slid into the driver’s seat. He had an impish smile on his face. “That will really put them on the spot! They know how the people around here feel about the village, and if there’s a way to save it, they’ll have a hard time explaining why not!”

After the car had driven off, Mr. Caldwell left to work on the notes he had gathered in the Glassworks during the morning. Ronnie, Phil, and Bill walked back toward their office. Ronnie had cooled off considerably, and now he felt more like working again. There wasn’t time before lunch for hunting for clues or cleaning out a building, but he had an idea in mind for a sign to hang outside the office door. It would read: “Tours from 9–12 and 1–5. OFFICE.”

He had found a suitable piece of wood the day before and now he set to work sandpapering it down smooth. Bill sat opposite him, tipping back in his chair again. Phil seemed restless, and a few minutes later announced that he was going back to the house.

“You know,” Bill said thoughtfully as he watched Ronnie rubbing vigorously with the sandpaper, “you know, Ronnie,73 there are two things that bother me. Two questions I can’t answer.”

“Well, the first one is this: How is this fellow we’ve seen around here getting in and out of the padlocked building?”

“That’s a question maybe we can answer this afternoon when I get the key and we get a chance to look inside,” Ronnie said.

“Maybe. But I don’t see what we can see from the inside that we can’t see from the outside.”

Ronnie ran his hand over the wood to see how smooth it was. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Supposing he’s dug a tunnel? We couldn’t see that from the outside. Anyway, what’s the other question?”

“This question’s a real stickler,” Bill said. “Remember what Mr. Caldwell said before—that he has a pair of candlesticks like your grandfather’s?”

“Well, let’s just say that he finds out this afternoon that he has. And let’s say these candlesticks have come down through his family the way he claims.”

“All right. My question’s this: Doesn’t that mean that Mr. Caldwell owns half this land?”

Chapter 10

While Ronnie climbed the bluff and made his way through the orchard on his way home to lunch, he did a great deal of thinking about the question that Bill had raised. He knew why his friend had asked it. If the candlesticks had come down through the Caldwell family—probably on his mother’s side—then it would be pretty safe to assume that they were the pair Jacob Williams had made for his bride. And if they were, then Mr. Caldwell and his brother were direct descendants of Williams, and would have a claim against the property.

But did Mr. Caldwell know about this? If he didn’t know now, would he put two and two together and come up with an answer? That depended upon how much he knew about the history of the candlesticks, Ronnie decided. And from the way Caldwell had talked earlier that afternoon, the boy doubted very much that he was aware of how the candlesticks had come into his family.

Then probably he wouldn’t know anything about the hidden glassware or the money either, which would cross him off the list of suspects for the mysterious prowler—unless,75 of course, the prowler wasn’t hunting for the money and glassware.

By the time Ronnie reached the house he had decided one thing only: it was all very, very confusing!

Mrs. Butler served Ronnie, Phil, and the two men their lunch at the kitchen table. Now that the hay was in the barn—Ronnie and Phil had spent the previous day helping their father load the truck in the field and hoist the hay to the loft—Mr. Rorth had turned his attention to the orchard. The young fruit was ready for spraying. “The weather’s going to hold for a few more days, I think,” Ronnie’s father told the others, “so I think I’ll mix a batch of spray this afternoon. Phil, you want to help me?”

“All right. You don’t have to. I just thought maybe you were looking for something to do. You’ll have the hammock worn through by the end of the summer at the rate you’re using it.”

The telephone rang. Ronnie volunteered to answer it. He went into the hall at the foot of the stairs and lifted the receiver.

It was Bill, calling to tell Ronnie that he had to work that afternoon. “Pa’s mending some fences, and I got to help,” Bill said. “But Ronnie, somebody should be at the office, in case we get any tourists.”

After lunch, Ronnie went to the cold cellar and selected two apples, which he stuffed into his pockets. Then he went76 out to the barn to see how his father was getting on with the job of mixing spray. “I’ll help you, Dad,” he said, “if you really need help. Only I promised Bill I’d stay down at the village in case we got tourists.”

“Thanks, son,” his father answered. “I’ll get along all right. This is really a one-man job.”

Ronnie watched his father measure out the poison powder. “Dad? Gramps said I could have the key to the locked-up building.”

“Really, Pa. I told him about how somebody’s been in the building. Bill and I saw him again after I told you about it.”

“Well, if your grandfather said you could go in, it’s all right with me. The key’s in the left-hand front drawer of my desk in the living room.”

Ronnie went back into the house. Phil was seated at the desk putting together a model airplane. “What’re you after?” he demanded, as Ronnie pulled open the desk drawer.

Phil thought it over. “Naw, I’ll stay here and finish this up. It’s too hot outside. Besides, there’s nothing in that77 building that isn’t in all the rest. Just a lot of dust and dirt and a few rats’ nests.”

Ten minutes later Ronnie had the door of their office open and was sitting on the doorsill waiting for customers. He had the key to the locked-up building in his pocket, but somehow it didn’t seem quite fair to Bill to go inside without him.

After a while Ronnie got tired just sitting and doing nothing, so he went inside and finished up the sign he had been working on. Then he found a rock and an old nail and using these, tacked the sign into place over the top of the door.

He sat down on the doorsill again and waited. A porcupine was rattling and thrashing on the thin, top branches of a maple tree. Ronnie watched it for a while. The animal didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

The afternoon wore on, but no tourists appeared. Ronnie got up and started slowly down the path. It wouldn’t hurt to take one quick trip around the locked-up building and maybe steal a peek through the crack in the shutter. Then he could climb up on the roof and sit there for a time. He could see so much more from up there, and if a car came up the dirt road, he’d know about it in time to get back to the office.

He circled around the old office building as he’d planned and then he climbed up on the log and peered through the window. Everything looked just about the same as the last time, except for some white objects scattered about the floor. He couldn’t make out what they were because of the darkness, but he decided they might be pieces of paper.

Well, he’d take one more quick look at the outside of78 the building and then he’d get up on the roof and see if he could spot any river boats on the St. Lawrence. But when he got around to the rear of the building, something on the ground caught his eye. Nothing very startling, but the thin layer of sawdust sprinkled on top of some of the leaves set him wondering. Carpenter ants, maybe—or had someone been sawing firewood? Mr. Caldwell, perhaps, the boy concluded.

But when he looked about for some sign of the white butt ends of the discarded pieces of logs that would surely be left lying around, he found none. His brow puckered in a frown.

He gathered a pinch of the sawdust and brought it up closer to his face so he could examine it, rolling it around between his fingers to get the feel of it. He couldn’t be sure, but it felt fresh. Maybe this sawdust could help him find out how the stranger was getting into the building.

He turned to inspect the rear wall of the building. At first glance it looked just like all the other walls. But when he looked closer he found a faint, irregular crack following the contour of the shingles. Tracing it, he discovered that it formed a rough square. “I’ll bet that whole section comes out!” he whispered. Apparently the shingles had been removed first, then a hole cut through the boards between the studs, and the shingles nailed cleverly back in place.

Ronnie remembered the tools that Bill’s father had found missing from his barn. Someone, the boy thought, had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure that no one found his entranceway!

He’d have to try the trap door out, of course, to see how it worked. He gripped the shingles from underneath and79 pushed up gently. The section moved and then the bottom came free; and a minute later the entire piece had come away from the wall.

Ronnie poked his head inside and looked around. The air smelled stale and moldy. He heard the flutter of wings beating against the inside of the chimney and knew that one of the swifts was entering the nest. In the semidarkness he could make out some of the larger objects in the room—the fireplace, an old-fashioned roll-top desk, a filing cabinet, and several chairs.

He withdrew his head and slipped his feet through instead. Then, twisting about with his back toward the inside, he pulled the upper part of his body through.

For a minute he stood near the opening, not knowing quite what to do next. He had a strange, uneasy feeling that somebody was watching him. Perhaps it would be better if he put the trap door back into place. Then if the man who made it should come by outside, he wouldn’t notice anything different and he’d go away.

But after he had the trap door back in its place, he was a little sorry that he’d done it. It was pitch-black in the room now. He felt in his pocket and found a package of book matches. He tore one loose and struck it. The flame seemed very feeble, but it gave him a few moments to look around the room. He noticed the papers scattered about the floor and saw that the filing cabinet near him had been emptied, and the drawers left leaning against the wall.

It was clear to the boy that someone had been searching through the papers of the old Rorth Glassworks.

When the match had burned out he wet his finger and cooled the hot end and dropped the match to the floor.80 He lit another and moved toward the fireplace. His foot brushed against something. Looking down, he discovered the stub of a candle and he stooped to pick it up.

The light from the candle gave him a better view of the room. Now he could see an old leather-upholstered chair, a brass spittoon, and a metal coat rack. Raising the candle, he saw above the mantelpiece a white-bearded man with a bald head, rimmed with tufts of fluffy hair. The man looked down at him with sharp, piercing, brown eyes from a massive oak picture frame.

Ronnie backed up a few steps and the eyes seemed to follow him as he moved. “Great-great-grandfather?” he asked, but when he heard the sound of his voice he grinned at his foolishness.

He lowered the candle hastily and thrust it inside the huge opening of the fireplace. A partially decomposed mouse lay just beneath the pair of beautifully molded andirons. Ronnie poked his head inside the fireplace and looked up. The light from the candle reached almost as high as the swifts’ nest. Sure, Ronnie told himself, a powerful flashlight shining up the chimney flues could have made the weird light they had seen several evenings before.

He heard the young swifts chirping in the nest overhead and saw a single yellow beak protruding over the edge for a second or two. “I’m not going to hurt you none,” he said, and then realized that the sound of his voice would frighten the young birds even more than the light.

Ronnie backed out of the fireplace and stood for a moment or two near the center of the room, undecided on what he would do next. He wished that he hadn’t come through the trap door, but had come around and opened the81 regular door with his key. Then he’d have more light and could inspect the building and its furnishings more carefully. Well, he’d have time to do that when Bill and he returned.

He started toward the rear wall, ready to leave. But he had taken no more than a few steps when he froze in his tracks, his heart racing wildly.

From outside, behind the building, he could hear the sound of approaching footsteps in the dry leaves—the same quick footsteps he had heard inside the building.

Chapter 11

Bill Beckney’s cat had cornered a mouse in the concrete manure pit one afternoon the year before. The mouse ran from one side of the pit to the other trying to avoid the cat’s claws.

Ronnie remembered the picture all too vividly now as he stood with his feet frozen to the floor and his heart beating like a tom-tom, and the sound of the footsteps coming closer and closer with each second. Only now he was the mouse!

He knew there wasn’t a chance that he could escape. The door was padlocked on the other side, and even the key in his pocket couldn’t help him. The opening in the wall through which he had come would place him face to face with his opponent.

His legs and feet came to life again. He swung about, holding up the candle as he searched for a place large enough to hide. The flickering light picked out the fireplace.

He started for it quickly. Behind him, small creaks and thumps told him that the section of wall was being removed. Doubling over, he swung his body into the fireplace. The83 acrid smell of stale, wet ashes struck his nose. He straightened up and blew out the candle.

Suddenly light flooded the fireplace. The section of wall had been completely removed. Looking down, he saw his feet and legs illuminated as by a floodlight. He knew he couldn’t stay where he was if he wanted to remain hidden.

Desperately reaching up his hands, he found a narrow ledge, and using this as a support, he pulled his feet up until he was sure they were out of sight. Then he moved them cautiously until he found a small ledge where he could gain a toehold. Now he could ease the strain on his hands and arms.

Whoever was in the room had evidently returned to continue his search. A door came open with a jerk, and more papers fluttered to the floor within the boy’s range of vision. “Please, please don’t do any more hunting in the fireplace,” Ronnie prayed.

The minutes dragged on. The muscles in the boy’s arms and legs and back began to ache. Twice he thought of moving, but each time he decided against it. Too risky. He couldn’t take the chance of slipping or making a noise.

Now the intruder was tapping with some heavy object, first against the floor boards in different parts of the room and then upon the bricks of the fireplace. Now, Ronnie thought! Now would be a good chance to ease his muscles. If he moved very carefully, the small sounds he might make would be drowned out by the tapping. Shifting some of his weight to his right leg, he began to slide his palm along the top of the ledge toward the rear of the fireplace. He had moved no more than a few inches when the side of his hand touched an object resting on the ledge. He knew it wasn’t84 part of the brickwork because it moved along with his hand. It might be—well, perhaps a book of some kind, he decided.

A book! Maybe, just maybe, this was the very thing that the intruder was looking for! And just maybe it was the clue that Grandfather had hunted for and never found! A tingle of excitement and anticipation ran down Ronnie’s back. He just had to get hold of the object and find out for sure what it was.

And he could do it, too—with risk, of course, that he’d lose his balance and fall from his perch. It was going to take a lot of good balancing and some muscle testing, too! But Ronnie loved a challenge such as this.

Summoning all his strength, he rested his entire weight on one small part of his inner wrist. At the same time he curled his fingers up over the object until they reached the flat surface at the top. Then with a quick, sudden movement, he shifted his entire hand to where his fingers had been.

Now his fingers could explore in all directions without fear of losing his balance and falling from his perch. It took him only a few moments to prove to himself that his first guess had been correct: he had discovered a small, thick book!

Outside the fireplace, the sounds suddenly increased. Apparently the intruder was losing patience, and had thrown caution away. Over went the desk on its side with a loud crash. Out came the drawers, one after another. Then the desk went over again. Papers flew over the floor in every direction. “Confound it!” the man growled, “there’s got to be something here somewhere! I’ll find it if I have to tear down the whole confounded building.”

85 Ronnie grinned to himself in the darkness of his hiding place and his fingers tightened on the book. If the man only knew how close he had come to finding what he wanted those nights he had searched the fireplace with his light!

But then Ronnie’s grin faded. The man’s words were still ringing in his ears and there was something familiar about the sound of the voice—something that made Ronnie think of Caldwell. And yet, there was something to the voice that wasn’t Caldwell’s.

The light at the bottom of the fireplace brightened and Ronnie heard the footsteps approaching the fireplace. He drew in his breath and held it. He flattened his body as close against the wall as he dared without risking his balance.

The footsteps stopped near the hearth. The man coughed. The soles of his shoes scraped against the hearthstone as he shifted his position. Then Ronnie heard the scratch of a match and smelled cigarette smoke.

Ronnie frowned, puzzled. He’d never seen Caldwell smoke. Of course that wouldn’t disprove positively that this man was Caldwell. But it confused Ronnie more than ever.

At last the man turned and crossed the room, and the boy breathed more freely again. The footsteps moved toward the rear wall. There they stopped for a moment. Then Ronnie heard the section of wall being removed, and a flood of light from outside filled the room.

As soon as the wall section was back in place, Ronnie took a firm grip on the book and dropped to the floor. A moment later he was out of the fireplace and standing in86 the blackness of the room, trying to make up his mind what to do next.

One thing he did want to do, and that was to catch a glimpse of the intruder before he disappeared into the woods. He hurried across the room, tripping over one of the desk drawers, but managing to catch his balance just in time to save himself from a headlong fall. He reached the wall, pushed open the section of wall a few inches from the top, and peered out.

The brilliant light blinded him for a few seconds. Then he saw the man disappearing into the trees a short distance from the building. But all Ronnie could see was the back of his head and shoulders. The rest of his body was hidden in the underbrush.

It was Caldwell, and then again it wasn’t Caldwell. Ronnie just couldn’t be positive. “I reckon I’m never going to get a real close-up look at this fellow,” he told himself.

He pulled the section of wall closed again. Better to wait a few minutes until he was sure the man would not see him climbing from the building.

“Ronnie! Oh, hey, Ronnie!” he heard Bill’s voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of their office. The suddenness of his friend’s voice made Ronnie jump. He had seemed so far away from his normal, everyday life during the past twenty minutes.

He found Bill wandering slowly up the cobbled road while he called Ronnie’s name every few minutes. “Where in tarnation have you been?” he demanded when Ronnie reached him. “I got through working, so I thought I’d come join you.”

“Come on down to our office and I’ll tell you all about87 it!” Ronnie exclaimed. “And, boy, will your eyes pop when you hear about it.”

Bill’s eyes didn’t pop when he had heard Ronnie’s story, but he certainly was as excited about the find as his friend. “Golly, maybe we’ve got something real important at last. Let’s see it, Ronnie.”

They sat down together at the desk, and Ronnie placed the old book before them. It was old—very old. Its leather-bound cover was warped from water and age. Heavy rains down through the years had found their way to the book’s resting place, and drop by drop had soaked through its pages.

Carefully Ronnie opened the book. The long columns of figures, page after page of them, were still legible despite the water damage. “Doesn’t look very exciting,” Bill said. “There’s nothing but numbers and entries like a bank book.”

“But then why would it be hidden in the chimney?” Ronnie asked as he continued to turn the pages. “That old office is full of papers just like this.” His voice showed his disappointment.

He had almost reached the last page when he exclaimed, “Look! Writing! It looks like a diary!”

“Oh, boy!” Bill exclaimed in excitement. “Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.” He pulled the volume closer so he could see it better. Ronnie began to read aloud while Bill followed the words with his eyes.

Ronnie turned the page. The next one was blank. “I89 guess that’s all,” he said quietly. It seemed to the boy as if his great-great-grandfather had been in the room talking to him during those last few moments of his life. He thought of the eyes watching him from the picture over the fireplace in the padlocked building earlier that afternoon. Yes, in spirit anyway, Ezra had come back again to make one last desperate effort to save the Rorth name. Almost as if he knew there wasn’t much time left to get it done, Ronnie thought.

He felt the pressure of Bill’s hand about his arm, and the movement brought his thoughts racing back to the present. He looked up at Bill. His friend’s face was turned toward the window. “Ronnie,” Bill whispered to him, “somebody was watching us through that window!”

Chapter 12

Ronnie went directly to his room when he reached the house. Bill and he had decided that this would be the best place to keep the old ledger after what had happened at their office. And since Bill couldn’t be sure whom he had seen at the window, they had to protect their new possession against an unknown adversary. Anybody, really, could be under suspicion. “I saw him out of the corner of my eyes,” Bill had told Ronnie afterward. “When I swung my head around he was gone. All I know for sure is that he was wearing something red. That’s what first caught my attention.”

They had searched the area outside their office as soon as the initial surprise had worn off, but had failed to catch even a glimpse of the man. And then the search had been interrupted by the arrival of two cars, and by the time they’d taken the two groups around, it was too late to continue hunting.

Now Ronnie stretched out on his bed with the old volume propped up against his pillow. He wanted to reread91 his great-great-grandfather’s notations and do some thinking about them.

A little while later he got up to find a pencil and a piece of paper. He sat down on the edge of the bed with a magazine beneath the paper. At the top of the paper he wrote: “THE IMPORTANT THINGS I’VE FOUND OUT FROM READING GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S DIARY.”

When Ronnie had finished, he stretched out on his back with his knees up in the air and the paper resting against them. He read over what he had written. Most of the ideas were interesting because they proved Great-great-grandfather’s innocence. But only Number Three seemed to be any help at all in finding the hidden glassware and money. And this one was so vague, Ronnie couldn’t see that it92 would be much help either. “Down there” could be anywhere on the face of the earth! Well, maybe not that large an area, but anyway it could mean the whole deserted village. And Ronnie couldn’t see Bill and himself digging up the whole village to find the lost glassware and money.

Ronnie rested his head back against the bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking. Surely Great-great-grandfather must have wanted his heirs to find the lost articles, and if he did, he certainly would have given adequate directions for finding them. “Why, ‘down there’ must mean underneath the old office building,” Ronnie thought, “because that’s where Great-great-grandfather was when he wrote this!”

It was a startling discovery, and its possibilities set the boy’s heart racing. Wouldn’t Grandfather be surprised when Ronnie placed the diary before him and announced, “There, Gramps, there’s the proof you wanted about Great-great-grandfather Ezra!” Wouldn’t Gramps smile then!

But maybe it would be better to wait until he had the glassware and the money. Then Gramps’ eyes would really open wide. Yes, that’s what he’d do—throw the whole thing at Gramps all at one time!

Ronnie wanted to run from the house and down through the orchard to the village and then tear every board loose from the floor of the old, padlocked building until he knew for sure that he had figured correctly. He got up from the bed and went to the window. The sun was sinking fast. In another hour or two it would be dark, too late in the day to start his search. Besides, he wanted Bill with him when he found the glassware and money. He decided to make a trip to the kitchen to see how Mrs. Butler was getting on with supper.

93 “Lands sake!” she exclaimed when he asked her how long it would be before he could eat. “Land sakes, you’re getting as bad as your brother—always thinking of filling your stomach.”

“Well, it’s the right time of the day to be thinking of that,” he told her. “Say, where’s Phil, anyway?”

“I suppose he’s in the living room with your grandfather and that Mr. Caldwell who came to see the candlesticks a while ago.”

“He is!” Now wasn’t that a fine kettle of fish, he thought. Here he was missing out on a very important event while he dawdled around in the kitchen talking with Mrs. Butler.

He hurried down the hall. The door to the living room was partially closed. Ronnie poked his head through the opening. The two Rorth candlesticks were standing on the desk. Mr. Caldwell was seated near them and Grandfather directly across from him. Phil was lolling on the couch, his bare feet resting on the wall and his head propped up with a pillow. He seemed more interested in the comic magazine on his chest than what was going on in the room.

Ronnie pushed the door open the rest of the way and came over to sit on the floor near Grandfather’s chair.

“I have just finished explaining to Mr. Caldwell that if he really has a pair of candlesticks like these,” Grandfather said to Ronnie, “and if they have come down to him through the family, then I guess we can be pretty sure he’s related in some way to the Jacob Williams who was a partner of your great-great-grandfather.”

His amazement must have shown in his face, for Grandfather gave him a searching look and explained gently, “It’s got to be that way, Ronald. There would be no advantage in keeping the information from him. You see, the Seaway has learned of the unsettled title to the deserted village land. At first I thought this would help me—I thought they would be snarled up in such legal troubles that it would be better for them to build the dam the way we want than to be held up for a year, maybe more, fighting us in the courts. But it doesn’t work that way, I learned. The Seaway just puts half the value of the property away in a bank in trust, and if and when the person who’s got a claim on the land shows up, why, the money’s there and waiting.”

“This way the whole affair’s settled, once and for all.” He looked closely at Ronnie to see how the boy was taking what he had said.

“Confound it, Ronnie,” he went on, his face flushing slightly. “Confound it, you don’t think I like what’s going on, do you? I’m still fighting, boy, fighting for the village. And saving the village from being destroyed, that’s the important thing. Maybe with Mr. Caldwell as a half-owner, we’ll add strength to our side of the fighting. Seems to me this man’s kind of keen on saving the village, too.”

Ronnie looked over at Caldwell. “Are you, Mr. Caldwell?” he asked. He wasn’t seeing Caldwell, not really. He was seeing the man who had slipped into the padlocked building that afternoon, the man who had overturned furniture and thrown the family papers about on the floor.

95 “Very much so, Ronald,” Mr. Caldwell answered. He spoke with genuine feeling. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to accuse him, Ronnie told himself. He had never made a positive identification. And yet—yet there were so many times that Ronnie had almost been sure.

“This comes as such a complete surprise,” Mr. Caldwell was speaking again. “I shall certainly have to look into the matter. I suppose there are agencies that will trace a family tree?”

Grandfather nodded. “I’d get myself a good lawyer, if I were you. He’ll tell you if you’ve got claim to the property.”

“My brother was the one who was interested in our family tree—and the family history of the candlesticks. As a boy, he was always snooping through old trunks and boxes in the attic.” Caldwell went over and stood before the candlesticks, touching the glass crystals lightly and lovingly with the tips of his fingers. “Beautiful, beautiful workmanship,” he said.

“Why don’t you ask your brother?” Phil rolled over to a sitting position. “Maybe he’s been holding out on you. Maybe he knows all about the property.”

Mr. Caldwell did not look around. “I—I’m afraid that’s impossible,” he answered finally. “He’s—away.”

Ronnie brought his knees up against his stomach and then wrapped his arms about his legs to hold them close. He looked over at Caldwell. How much did the man really know? Was this all a put-up job—pretending he had no knowledge of his relationship to Jacob Williams? Acting as if he didn’t know a thing, so Ronnie would not connect him with his mysterious prowlings about the village?

96 Ronnie sighed. It was all very puzzling. But somehow he couldn’t believe that Mr. Caldwell was guilty of deceiving them. Ronnie had to admit to himself that he liked the man.

The room had grown darker. Off in the distance Ronnie heard the low rumble of thunder. The back door slammed shut and Mr. Rorth came down the hallway and poked his head into the room. “Hi, everyone,” he said cheerfully. “Mr. Caldwell, how are you? By the way, I dropped some screen doors and windows off at your place, but I didn’t have time to put them up. I left some nails and a hammer, though, and you can tack them up temporarily.”

“Many thanks!” Caldwell said. “I can certainly use the screens! I never knew there were so many insects in the world until I came here. Too bad you left the hammer, though. I have one of my own.”

Whose hammer, Ronnie wondered? Caldwell’s—or was it the one that had disappeared from Bill’s barn?

The room grew another shade darker. A brilliant flash of lightning dispelled the darkness for a brief moment, and then the thunder broke. The house vibrated from the sound.

Mr. Caldwell moved toward the door. “I’d best be going before the storm breaks.”

“Come along,” Mr. Rorth offered, “and I’ll take you most of the way in the truck. You’ll never make it before it rains.”

The truck was hardly out of sight when the rain fell in torrents. Ronnie, at the living room window, watched the puddles grow deeper and deeper. The rain turned to hail and beat against the pane like a kettledrum solo. A streak97 of lightning split the black clouds and pierced the earth. Almost immediately a crack of thunder seemed to explode overhead. The rain fell heavier.

Ronnie turned from the window and let the curtains fall back into place. Grandfather got up from his chair. “I might as well do a little DXing while I wait on supper to be served up,” he announced. “Ronnie, does that sound interesting to you?”

“I don’t think so, Gramps. Really, you shouldn’t DX during a thunderstorm.”

“Fiddlesticks! Rubbish! If the lightning’s got your name written on it, it’ll strike you no matter what! Besides, what’s there left for me around here now?”

He stomped from the room as fast as his cane would permit. Phil turned over heavily on the couch, bringing his magazine around with him. Ronnie watched his brother for a moment, then turned and left the room.

He went upstairs to his bedroom because he could think of nothing better to do. For a while he stood by his window watching the storm. Below, he saw his father’s truck drive into the yard and come to a quick stop. Mr. Rorth got out and ran for the back door.

And down in the deserted village Ronnie saw another figure running in the rain. The figure appeared out of the trees and ran toward the rear wall of the padlocked building. It disappeared from sight behind the building. Ronnie waited for it to reappear, but the minutes passed without another movement in the village.

The boy remembered Great-great-grandfather’s words in his diary: “His body lies below, together with the evidence of his guilt.” There was no doubt in the boy’s mind now98 what his great-great-grandfather had meant. Down below the padlocked building, of course.

And Ronnie remembered, too, how savagely the stranger had attacked the interior of the building that afternoon overturning furniture, pounding on the walls, scattering the papers.

It wouldn’t be long, Ronnie realized, before the man would begin to rip up the floor boards.

Chapter 13

The thunderstorm did not roll away to bother other parts of the country as thunderstorms usually do. Instead, it turned into a steady downpour that showed no signs of letting up. The barnyard flooded and the water ran down the driveway in small streams that washed away the gravel and left gullies along the edges.

All night it rained, and when Ronnie awoke the next morning it was still coming down. After breakfast the boy moved from one room to the next, trying to decide what to do. He was worried about what the intruder might have discovered during the night. Perhaps by now he had found the money and glassware and had already left the village with his loot.

Ronnie made up his mind. He went to the telephone and called Bill. He told him about the figuring he had done, how he believed the money and glassware were hidden somewhere beneath the padlocked building, and how he was afraid the intruder might already have found it. “We’ve got to work fast, Bill,” he said urgently.

“I’m with you, Ronnie,” Bill agreed. “I can get away, I think. Can you?”

100 “I’ll wear boots and my raincoat and cape. My dad’ll say yes, for sure.”

“Then I’ll see you there! And bring the ledger book. I want to see the part you’re talking about. Meet you in our office in twenty minutes.”

Ronnie went to find his father to get permission. “Now how in the world would I know where he is?” Mrs. Butler protested. She had just arrived and was removing her plastic raincoat and hat. “Go look in the barn. He generally works there when the weather’s bad like this.”

Ronnie dashed across the yard and sailed through the open barn doors. He found his father at his workbench cutting tomato poles from old boards on his power saw.

“Sure, go ahead,” Mr. Rorth agreed. “A little rain’s not going to hurt anybody.”

Ronnie ran back to the house. He went up to his room and got the ledger. Then he got his boots, raincoat, and rubber raincape from the hall closet. Phil appeared from the kitchen. “Where are you heading for, Ronnie?” he asked.

Phil looked at Ronnie as if his brother had asked him to go to the moon. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “I wouldn’t go out in this weather if the house was on fire.”

Ronnie slipped the ledger under his raincoat where it would be protected from the weather. “Say,” Phil demanded, “what’s that?”

“Just a book,” Ronnie answered. He wasn’t going to take the time now to explain. Besides, Phil knew so little about what had happened during the past few days that Ronnie would have to start at the beginning if his brother were to understand how important the book was.

101 “Yea, but what kind of a book?” Phil persisted. Ronnie retreated toward the door, but Phil followed him.

“Oh, an old book I found in the padlocked building,” Ronnie admitted finally as he opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

“Say,” he heard Phil exclaim as the door closed on his words. “Something’s going on around here—”

Ronnie splashed through the puddles in the driveway and entered the orchard. The rain drummed down on his rubber hood. Little rivers drained from his shoulders. He held the book tight as he plunged down the soggy bluff and entered the trees at the bottom.

Down in the valley he breathed deep of the pungent odor of pine, released by the long rain. Off to the right, partially hidden by the ground fog that had been trapped beneath the heavy foliage when the cooler rain touched the warm earth, Ronnie saw the old bakery building. Its broken, crumbled walls and sections of rotting roof seemed unusually deserted and lonely in the faint light.

Ronnie shivered suddenly and continued down the narrow path. Wet branches snapped back against his raincoat and sprayed water into his face. He stopped a moment to shift the ledger higher up under his arm.

And then suddenly there was a movement in the bushes at the side of the path. Before the boy could turn, someone seized him from behind and, grasping his arms, pinned them behind his back. Ronnie felt the ledger slipping from his hold. It started to fall beneath his raincoat.

He struggled to free himself, but his assailant was strong. He tried, too, to twist his head about so he could see who it was. But his raincape blocked his vision on both sides.

102 “All right, kid!” A man’s voice growled close to the boy’s ear. “Let’s have it!”

“The book I saw you kids looking at yesterday in that shack of yours.” The man tightened his grip on the boy’s arms, and Ronnie winced. And just at that moment the ledger slipped to the ground.

“So you’ve got it with you, eh? Well, that’s so much the better!” The man loosened his grip somewhat. Then he gave Ronnie a terrific shove that sent the boy sprawling headlong into the wet leaves.

Ronnie was more angry than he was hurt. He had just one idea in his mind—to get a close look at this man now that he had the opportunity. No sooner had he struck the ground than he rolled over and pulled himself up to a sitting position.

The man was bending over to pick up the ledger. But when he straightened up he was facing directly toward the boy. Ronnie found himself face to face with his opponent.

“Mr.—Mr. Caldwell!” Ronnie exclaimed. The man’s thin summer clothes were soaked to the skin and his thick, straight hair was matted to his head on top and hanging over his forehead in ropelike strands.

But Caldwell paid no attention to the boy’s remark. Book in hand, he walked off down the path in the direction of the old bakery.

“Give me back my book!” Ronnie shouted after him. “Why, why—you—” He took off after the man, leaping onto his back and clinging there with all his strength.

But he was no match for Caldwell. With his free hand103 the man released the boy’s grip from about his neck. Then, still holding Ronnie’s wrist, he flung the boy from him. Ronnie sailed into the bushes, rolled over several times and came to a stop. By the time he had pulled himself to his feet Caldwell had disappeared.

Dejectedly the boy turned and made his way slowly toward their office to tell Bill the disheartening news.

Bill had the door unlocked, but closed, to keep out the rain and chill. Ronnie came inside, pulled off his raincape. He didn’t have to tell Bill that something unpleasant had happened. His friend read it in Ronnie’s face.

“You did everything you could have done,” Bill said to him after Ronnie had told him the story. “Don’t feel bad about it.” Bill went over to sit on the edge of the desk. “So it has been Caldwell all along—and him acting so sweet and nice. You sure, Ronnie?”

Ronnie nodded. “It was him all right. Of course, he looked a little different because he was as wet as a drowned rat.”

“Nope.” It did seem strange, now that Ronnie had time to think about it. Certainly Caldwell would have brought enough clothing with him for all kinds of weather. But hadn’t he seen Caldwell face to face? Raincoat or no raincoat, it was Mr. Caldwell all right! “Well, now what do we do?” he asked Bill.

“Why, just what we planned, of course!” Bill explained. “And maybe we’ve got the jump on Caldwell after all! Because why would he take the ledger from you if he had found the money and glassware, or knew where it was?”

104 “I see what you mean!” Ronnie exclaimed. “He wouldn’t need the ledger if he was close to finding the money and glassware.”

“Right! He’s probably getting desperate. He saw us with the old book and decided it might contain an answer to what he wanted to know. Maybe he even heard us reading parts of it.”

Ronnie walked over to the window. Streams of water ran down from the roof. The wind was lifting now and the trees were bending under its force. Ronnie turned to face his friend. “Bill, if I hadn’t seen Caldwell face to face, I don’t think I could believe he’s the man who’s been doing all this snooping. And you know, even while he was grabbing me back there on the path, I didn’t think it was him. He just didn’t talk like Caldwell—or act like him either.”

“Well, you never do really know a man until you’ve been around him a good long while—that’s what my pa says.” Bill pulled his raincape over his head. “We’re just wasting time sitting here and talking. Let’s get over to the padlocked building. I brought a flashlight. Did you bring the key?”

They closed the door to their office and started down the puddle-filled path. The rain beat against their raincapes and coats, and overhead the trees lashed wildly in the rising wind. A dead branch fell to the path behind them.

When they reached the cobblestone road they saw Phil coming toward them, huddled inside his raincoat and pushing against the wind. “I figured something was up,” he said to Bill and Ronnie when he had reached them. “Come on,105 out with it. What have you two got up your sleeves—and where’s that old book you had, Ronnie?”

Ronnie glanced at his friend. Bill nodded that as far as he was concerned he didn’t care if Phil was brought in on their venture. So while they walked to the padlocked building, Bill and Ronnie supplied Phil with whatever information he needed to bring him up to date.

When they arrived at the old Rorth Glassworks office building, Ronnie brought the key from his pocket and inserted it in the rusty lock. He tried to turn the key but it wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t turn for Bill or Phil, either.

“We’ll have to use Caldwell’s secret trap door,” Ronnie said, and they hurried around to the rear of the building.

Ronnie removed the wall section and the three climbed through. Bill lit his flashlight. Then Ronnie closed the trap door again because, as he explained to the others, “We don’t want Caldwell to know we’re in here.”

Bill was exploring the interior with the flashlight. He whistled. “Wow! Caldwell sure turned this place upside down!”

Ronnie nodded. Hardly a square foot of the floor was bare of paper or overturned filing cabinet and desk drawers. Even a few floor boards here and there were torn loose.

“We’ll never find a way down below with all this clutter,” Ronnie remarked. “Maybe we should clean up first.”

Bill agreed and the three set to work picking up the papers and stuffing them back in the drawers. Next they moved all the furniture to one side of the room and returned the drawers to their places in the desk and filing106 cabinet. “Now we’ll give this cleared side of the room a real going-over!” Bill said. “Then we’ll move everything to the other side and search that part. Come on, Phil, let’s get with it.”

Phil was lighting matches and peering under the floor boards Caldwell had loosened. “O.K.,” he mumbled.

They started in the corner and worked systematically back and forth across the room, taking a few boards at a time. It was Bill’s idea that Jacob Williams had made some sort of a secret trap door for himself, and that if the boys searched carefully enough they could find it. “Then we won’t have to tear up any more of the floor the way Mr. Caldwell’s done,” he said.

Bill was working with his penknife at the rear of the building toward the fireplace. He was jabbing into the wider cracks with the blade, and then prying upward, hoping to dislodge any loose section. Suddenly he let out a little cry of triumph.

Phil didn’t hear Bill because he was inside the fireplace lighting more matches while he explored. But Ronnie heard him and came over to find out what he had discovered. “Look, Ronnie,” he said. “I’ve got these boards up a little way. But I need something stronger. My knife’ll snap if I push any harder.”

“Hold everything!” Ronnie directed. During clean-up, Ronnie had seen a pair of old fire tongs leaning against the fireplace. He found them easily in the dark and brought them to Bill. Bill examined them by the light of his flashlight. The ends were flattened like the ends of a screwdriver. Just the implement they needed!

Bill inserted the flattened end of the tongs into the crack,107 removed the penknife, and pushed down with all his weight. Then he pried the tongs backward. A section of the flooring began to move upward. Ronnie grabbed the loose end and pulled. An entire section of the floor came free.

Chapter 14

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 floor109 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.”

Phil gulped. “That sounds like an awful lot of work,” he said. “And even harder to get up again.”

Ronnie went first, holding Bill’s flashlight. The others waited above in the darkness, peering over the edge to watch Ronnie’s progress. Ronnie had no trouble lowering himself to the ground level. Then he sent the light from the flashlight down into the hole Williams had dug.

The remains of an old ladder lay in pieces along the sides of the hole. Ronnie noticed, too, that steps had been110 made leading down to the top of the culvert—pieces of split log hammered into the earth but protruding far enough to provide a foothold.

The boy tried the first one. It sustained his weight. He tried another—and another. He looked up at Bill and Phil and grinned. Things were going just fine!

He smiled too soon. The fourth step broke under his weight. His feet flew out from under him and his back struck the side of the hole. He slid the rest of the way, carrying with him an avalanche of dirt and pebbles.

Luckily, he managed to keep himself from plunging through the opening in the brickwork and down into the culvert. “You all right?” he heard Bill calling down.

“I’m O.K.,” he answered. His voice echoed back hollow and distant from within the culvert.

He sat down with his legs hanging over the edge of the broken brickwork and flashed the light down into the darkness. The bottom looked sandy—silt carried there by the drainage water over many years. There was no way to climb in. He’d have to drop.

He tucked the flashlight under his belt beneath his raincoat and began to slip forward. Then, when he was on the very edge, he let his body fall forward.

He struck bottom on his feet, but the momentum threw him forward and he landed face first on a patch of slimy sand. Picking himself up, he found his flashlight and pressed the button. Light bored through the pitch-blackness. The brick walls were slimy and green, and water dripped through the bricks and dropped to the floor. In places sand and earth had seeped through the cracks in the masonry and had formed mounds and valleys along the culvert floor.

111 He looked up and saw Bill and Phil peering down at him under the light from his flashlight. “What’s it like down there?” Bill asked.

“Kind of—kind of spooky,” he answered. He heard his voice come back to him from both ends of the culvert.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Bill called. “Shine the light along the way.”

“Nice place to hold a Halloween party,” Phil commented. “I’m kind of glad now that I decided to come down to the village to see what you two were cooking up!”

Bill retrieved his flashlight from Ronnie and began to explore the culvert with it. “Wow!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Take a look over where the light’s pointing.”

Ronnie saw a crude shelf supported by sapling logs which rested on the culvert floor. The shelf ran for six to seven feet along the side of the wall, and on it were a number of wooden crates. Protruding from the excelsior with which the crates were packed, Ronnie could see a number of glass cannisters, goblets, decanters, and flasks of different colors.

“Oh, boy!” Bill exploded. He ran forward and removed one of the pieces, holding out a beautiful rose-tinted goblet of frail, delicate glass. Around the belly of the piece ran a band of men and women in eighteenth-century dress, etched into the surface like autumn frost.

The others had moved to the shelf, too. “Hey, pig,” Phil said to Bill, “how about sharing some of that light so we can get a look at some of this stuff, too!”

Bill laid the light on the shelf and pointed it so Ronnie112 and Phil could use it, too. Ronnie lifted another of the crates to the floor. One by one he removed a set of six wine-glasses and a decanter to match and placed them on the floor in a nest of excelsior.

Phil, however, had his eye on something different. He was interested in a small metal box at the end of the shelf. He took it down, brushed off the flakes of rust and tried to open the lid. It was rusted fast.

Bill had reached the bottom of his crate, and now he was carefully packing the contents back as he had found them. He turned to Ronnie. “It’s not going to be easy getting these crates out of here,” he said. “We don’t want to break any.”

Ronnie nodded. “I know. Yet we can’t leave them here for Caldwell to claim. One of us will have to go for a rope.”

“There’s one in the Glassworks building that we were using to haul junk outside. Maybe we can persuade Phil to go and get it.”

A sudden squeal of surprise and wonderment from Phil interrupted their discussion. Phil came over to them with the opened metal box in his hands. “Boy, oh, boy!” he exclaimed. “Have I hit real pay dirt. Just focus your eyes on what’s inside this box!”

Ronnie peered inside while Phil held the box so the light from the flashlight could reach the interior. “Th-the money!” Ronnie gasped.

“You bet it’s the money!” Phil echoed. He took out a roll of bills and a handful of gold and silver coins. “And plenty of it, too!”

“Wow!” Bill exclaimed. “Now we can save the village. We can build the dam! How much is there, Phil?”

113 The bills had been rolled and tied with a piece of cord. Phil opened the roll easily. Bill got the flashlight from the shelf and they crouched together in a group while, one by one, Phil laid the big old-fashioned bills in a pile. There were mostly twenties and hundreds, with a few fives and tens. Altogether, Phil counted over two thousand dollars.

They examined the gold and silver coins next. With these their total came to twenty-one hundred dollars.

“Put the money back in the box,” Ronnie directed. “We’ve got to work fast. I sure feel uneasy about Mr. Caldwell coming back.”

“You two get the crates over underneath the opening,” Bill said, “and I’ll run over to the glassworks and get the rope. We’ll have this stuff out of here and locked up in our office before Caldwell even knows what’s going on. Then I’ll ask Pa to come down with the truck and we’ll take it up to your house, Ronnie.”

Bill had some trouble getting back up to the padlocked building, but he finally made it. When he had gone, Ronnie set to work lifting the crates from the shelf and carrying them over to the floor beneath the opening. Phil seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of matches, and he left Ronnie to explore up the culvert. By the time Ronnie had finished, Phil was back. He had a sheepish look on his face, but he was a little pale, too.

“I—I just met up with Jacob Williams,” Phil answered. “I mean—what’s left of him.”

“You mean—you mean his bones are down there?” Ronnie asked, motioning in the direction Phil had just come114 from. It really shouldn’t surprise him, of course, he told himself. Great-great-grandfather Ezra had mentioned in his diary that he had found Jacob Williams’ body “down below” and that he didn’t have the strength to get him up.

When Bill returned with the rope, the three set to work bringing the crates up to the padlocked building. It was hard, exacting work. One end of the rope was tied to a rafter in the building and the other end fastened securely about one of the crates. Then it was a matter of pulling from the top and guiding the box along the way so that it didn’t crash against the sides at any time.

In all, there were six crates to be pulled up. The boys had removed their raingear and cumbersome boots, but by the time they had finished, they were dripping with perspiration and covered with dirt and grime.

But even Phil hadn’t complained. There they were at last—the six crates and the metal box, piled together in the center of the padlocked building. The rest seemed easy in comparison. Two trips for each of them and the crates would be safely stored in their office, ready for the truck to pick them up.

Ronnie was all smiles as he and the others stole a minute or two of their precious time to sit down and catch their breaths. “Golly,” he said, “I never once thought this would be such an exciting day when I got up this morning.”

“Neither did I,” Bill agreed. “When I saw the rain pouring down, I thought for sure I was in for a real boring day. The most I thought we’d get done was to maybe clean up another building.”

“And when I got up,” Phil added, “I told myself to turn around and go back to sleep.”

Ronnie got up. He was on pins and needles for fear something might happen before they got the money and glassware safely stowed away. He looked over at the crates. “Maybe we could each carry two of them,” he suggested, “and make it all in one trip.”

“Not me!” Phil protested. “After hauling them up from below, you’re lucky I’ll agree to carry one.”

“Phil’s right,” Bill agreed. “We wouldn’t want to drop and break anything. This glassware is pretty valuable, I’ll bet.”

They put on their raingear and boots. Then each selected a crate and moved it over to the trap door in the rear of the building. Ronnie set his down so he could remove the section of wall.

And there, framed in the opening, was Caldwell’s face and shoulders. He had a gun in his hand.

Chapter 15

Ronnie’s heart began to tap-dance inside his chest. He knew, too, that his mouth was open as wide as it would go and that he couldn’t do a thing to close it.

Caldwell stepped inside, holding the gun loosely in his hand. He brought a flashlight from his pocket.

“Y—yes, sir,” Bill managed to say. The light clicked off. Caldwell’s took its place. It was focused, not on the boys, but on the pile of crates left in the middle of the room.

“Now wasn’t that nice of you boys to find this stuff for me and to lug it up, too. Of course you had a slight advantage over me, in that you had the book longer than me. But I figured it out, too—and just in time, it appears.”

Ronnie was looking at a different Caldwell now as the man stood framed in the light from the rear trap door. This wasn’t the Caldwell he had known during the past days. This was a cool, deliberate, scheming Caldwell. This was the man he had tangled with on the path earlier in the day.

Caldwell backed around toward the crates, keeping the117 gun and light trained on the boys. With the gun in his right hand, and the flashlight tucked under his left arm, he threw back the cover to the metal box.

“Well, now,” he said, “this is just what I need! This will cover my traveling expenses very nicely—with plenty left over besides.” He picked up the bills and pushed them into his pocket, and then came back to scoop up the coins. “You boys have been very helpful. Very helpful. And since you’ve gone to all the trouble of carting this heavy stuff upstairs for me, I might as well take it along, too. There’s always some sucker antique dealer along the road who will give me a few bucks for it.”

Bill took a step forward, but stopped when Caldwell’s gun came up. “You sure have had us fooled, Mr. Caldwell,” Bill said. “And we sure were fools to have trusted you.”

“Yea, sure, kid.” Caldwell seemed a little puzzled by what Bill had said. “Well, enough of this. It’ll take me an hour to get loaded and hit the road.” He swung the light around, searching for something. It stopped when he found the open trap door leading down to the culvert.

“O.K., you kids,” he ordered. “Supposing you climb back down into the cellar.”

Ronnie’s eyes widened as he gathered the full intent of the order. “You—you’re not going to lock us up down there?” he gasped.

“I sure am, kid. You don’t think I’m going to turn you loose so you can bring the whole neighborhood after me, do you? I need plenty of time to get this stuff out of here and to hit the road. Now get moving—all of you.”

Ronnie stood his ground. “I won’t go,” he said stubbornly.118 “Why, we’d never get out of there. Nobody would ever find us,” he added.

“Well, now, isn’t that too bad!” Caldwell sneered. “Now move before I push you down—if that’s the way you want it.”

They filed dejectedly toward the opening in the floor. Bill went first and Ronnie followed. Before taking his turn, Phil turned to Caldwell. “How about paying us for bringing the stuff up anyway, huh?” he asked.

“Look, kid, I don’t care one hoot what your name is. Now shake it up before I help you.”

When Phil’s head was below the level of the floor, Caldwell dropped the trap door into place. Ronnie and Bill stood together below the opening watching Phil descend, Bill holding the light for Phil to see by. Above, they heard Caldwell driving several nails into the trap door. Each blow echoed down the long lengths of the tunnel with a hollow boom. Then suddenly it was silent again, a deep silence that told them how far away from escape they really were.

Ronnie shivered. Behind him he heard the steady, rhythmic dripping of water against the culvert floor. He thought he heard Bill’s heart beating too. Or was it his own?

“Anybody got a deck of cards?” Phil asked suddenly and Bill and Ronnie laughed. For the first time in his life Ronnie appreciated his brother’s wisecracking.

They decided then that the first thing they should do was to explore the entire culvert in hopes that there might be some other way out beside the trap door. Before they left,119 however, Ronnie climbed to test the strength of the trap door, hoping that perhaps Caldwell’s nails had not been well placed. It was an idle hope. The trap door was as solid as the rest of the floor.

Their explorations revealed that one end of the culvert ended in a cave-in. The other end, sloping rapidly, ran to the river and was flooded. “And that water’s rising, too,” Bill said to Ronnie as they made their way back. “All this rain is flooding the river. And the higher the river gets, the higher the water backs up in here.”

Ronnie was almost afraid to ask the question that had come to his mind. “Do you suppose—could the whole culvert get flooded?”

Bill took Ronnie and Phil over to the wall and showed them several lines of dried slime which had impregnated the brick. “Each one of those lines,” he told them, “I’d guess was a water level mark. That means the water has risen pretty high. One thing we can be sure of, though, is that the water has never reached to the top of the archway—not yet anyway.”

“Because if it had, Caldwell wouldn’t be walking off with that roll of money. It would have fallen apart.”

They reached that section of the culvert below the building. Here they selected a drier area of floor and sat down with their backs against the wall. Bill turned off the flashlight to save the batteries. “O.K.,” he said to the others. “So here we are—trapped. The only way of escape is nailed shut. The water’s rising. How far we don’t know yet. Now, what do we do?”

120 Phil’s voice came out of the blackness. “Just go to sleep and wait until somebody finds us.”

“You’ll sleep until doomsday,” Ronnie told his brother. “Because nobody’s ever going to find us here. Except for us, the only one who knows about this—this dungeon is Mr. Caldwell and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to tell anyone.”

“That’s right, Ronnie,” Bill agreed. “And with the padlock still on the door, who’s going to think of looking inside?”

“And nobody’ll hear us shouting unless they do come inside,” Phil added. “I—Yipes!”

“What’s the matter?” Bill demanded and switched on his flashlight. He picked Phil out of the darkness. Phil was rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Is that all?” Bill grumbled disgustedly. “Well for pity’s sake, put up your raincoat collar so you don’t scare me like that again. And don’t yell out again unless it’s something serious.”

“Cut it out, Phil,” Ronnie protested. “We’ve got to think. Can’t you get it through your thick skull that we’re in serious trouble?”

“Sure I can. I just want to die smiling. I think Jacob’s skeleton was smiling.”

Ronnie was tired of Phil’s chatter, and he was tired of staring into the blackness and seeing nothing, too. So he closed his eyes and rested his head back against the hard, uneven brick. He wanted to think. But he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he was all alone, a thousand miles down in the bowels of the earth. He put his hand out and121 found Bill’s shoulder and left it there because he felt some comfort in knowing that his friend was so close. Bill shifted his position closer to Ronnie. “Keep your chin up, Ronnie,” he heard Bill whisper. “I’ve got an idea. It might just work.”

Bill leaned over closer to Ronnie so his mouth was only a few inches from his friend’s ear. “Here’s the pitch,” he said. “Remember the first end of the culvert we visited—not the one by the river?”

“And remember how it was all cave-in, just a big mess of broken brick and dirt that had fallen in with it?”

“Well, when I was flashing the light about, I noticed one place big enough to crawl up into. It looked as if it went quite a way toward the surface. Now, I was thinking maybe we could dig through to the surface from there.”

“Hey, Bill, that’s a cool idea! Let’s try it! But what’ll we dig with?”

“I can jab away with my penknife. The dirt’ll keep falling down into the culvert.”

“Let’s go!” Ronnie exclaimed. He was tired of sitting. He wanted to do something to help them escape—anything.

Bill turned on his light. Phil was stretched out on the floor with his eyes closed. “Come on,” Ronnie nudged him. “We’ve got things to do.”

Bill explained his plan to Phil as they moved down the culvert. Phil agreed that it was worth the try.

They reached the end of the culvert. Bill played the beam of his flashlight about among the giant slabs of concrete and brick that had tumbled to the floor of the122 culvert. Inky black crevices ran upward between the pieces of rubble, and as Bill moved the flashlight about looking for the crevice he had in mind, the jutting ends of the masonry cast weird shadows upon the walls and floor.

“There it is!” Bill said suddenly, holding his light steady. “That’s the one. See how far up it goes?”

Ronnie saw a twisting passage, which gradually grew smaller toward the top. Halfway up, a giant slab almost sealed the crevice into two parts, but Ronnie judged that there would possibly be room for Bill to squeeze past.

Bill removed his raingear and handed Ronnie the flashlight. “Keep the light where I need it,” he instructed. Then he boosted himself into the opening and began to worm his way upward. Protruding edges of brick and mortar gave him support for his feet or a hold for his hands. Soon Ronnie saw him enter the narrow aperture.

Bill continued to edge forward, forcing his shoulders and arms between the two giant slabs. Then he stopped and began to struggle. Ronnie could see that he was wedged tightly between the two slabs.

Ronnie slipped out of his raincoat and boots and handed the light to Phil. Then he grasped the ledge of the lowest block of masonry and pulled himself up into the mouth of the crevice. From here he worked his way upward until his outstretched hands found Bill’s shoes. He took a firm grip about his friend’s ankles—and pulled. Bill’s body did not budge. Ronnie might just as well have tried to move the rubble.

123 “Keep your chin up, pal,” Ronnie answered. “I’ll think of a way. Just don’t struggle or you’ll swell up and then it’ll be even harder to get you free.”

Ronnie lay back against the cold stone and tried to catch his breath—and think. He had to find a way to free Bill. With help so far away it was up to him to save his friend.

A section of brick was jabbing into his back just under the shoulder blades. He shifted his position to ease the discomfort. His shoulders rubbed against a section of smooth, slimy moss—and an idea came to him. He’d read stories of how the bodies of trapped men had been greased, and then had slipped out quite easily. The nearest grease bucket was in the barn, but wouldn’t wet slime do just as well?

He twisted his body about so he could call down to Phil. “Get me a good, big handful of that slime down at the other end of the culvert. And hurry.”

Phil nodded that he understood. He turned quickly and started for the river end of the culvert, leaving Ronnie in the pitch-black. Ronnie lay back against the rock and rested. Above him he heard Bill’s forced breathing and an occasional groan. He heard the gentle dripping of water, too, and felt something crawling down the back of his shirt.

It seemed an eternity before Phil returned with both hands loaded with slime, the flashlight tucked under his arm.

Ronnie had to come down a way before the slime could be transferred to his own hands. And now he’d have to work his way up again to where Bill was caught, and he’d have to do it without the use of his hands. It wasn’t going to be easy. With both hands cupping the precious stuff, he had no way of holding on.

124 He managed it, however, using only his feet and elbows. Now his head was alongside Bill’s knees and he could reach up and force the slime between the rubble and his friend’s shoulders. Bill understood what Ronnie was attempting to do, for he worked his body about to spread the application. Inch by inch Bill squirmed his way backward—and suddenly he was free.

Then something happened that Ronnie hadn’t foreseen. Bill’s shoulders came free so unexpectedly that before either Bill or Ronnie could check the momentum, Bill had lost his balance. His body slipped backward, struck the side of a concrete slab and landed on the culvert floor with one leg doubled under him.

Phil was already kneeling beside Bill’s body by the time Ronnie had climbed down. The light from the flashlight was on Bill’s face. “My leg. Oh, Ronnie, my leg!” Bill groaned and grimaced from the pain. Sweat broke out on his forehead in large drops. His lips were purple-blue and his face was as white as the sweat shirt he was wearing.

“Ronnie,” Bill whispered, “Ronnie, please. Do something for me. Please, do something.”

Chapter 16

Ronnie stooped down beside his friend and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “Sure, Bill, we’ll have you fixed up in no time,” he said.

He took Bill’s raincoat and covered him with it, wrapping it around underneath as far as he dared without moving the injured leg. Then he set to work massaging Bill’s wrists and limbs to restore the circulation. And all the while he worked, he was glad for those hours of practice and study that he’d given to learning first aid at Scout meetings and at home. His first-aid merit badge was proving its worth!

He looked up at Phil. “Down the culvert I saw some boards that must have washed in one time or another. I’ll need a couple of splints. Go get them.”

Phil nodded. Ronnie handed him the flashlight, and his brother moved off down the culvert. Ronnie continued chafing Bill’s wrists in the dark. He could feel the rapid pulse and knew that his friend was in slight shock. He’d have to treat that first. The leg could wait. He continued to massage Bill’s limbs and arms.

Phil returned with an armful of boards. Ronnie signaled for him to drop them and to take over the job that he had been doing. The flashlight showed that the color was126 beginning to return to Bill’s face. His pulse was slowing down to normal now, too.

Ronnie got up and came around to kneel by Bill’s feet. He swallowed hard. This was going to be a real tricky job—straightening out Bill’s leg without compounding the fracture. Ronnie had done it plenty of times in practice, but then there had been no broken bones that could jab through the flesh if he made a wrong move.

He reached in under the raincoat and felt his way forward until he could get a hold on Bill’s shoe. When he was ready, he instructed Phil to grasp Bill around the armpits and to lift him gradually. As the weight of Bill’s body was removed from the leg, Ronnie took a firm grip about Bill’s ankle and began the slow, tedious task of straightening the leg. All the time he moved the leg out from under his friend’s body, he applied a steady forward tension to keep the broken bone from working into the flesh. Several times Bill cried out in pain.

Now the leg was ready for splinting. Ronnie selected several of the longer boards. He ripped sections from his own shirt and placed these against Bill’s leg and laid the boards gently on top. Then he tore strips of cloth and bound them about the boards and the leg until the splints were firmly in place.

Only then did he realize that he was soaking wet from perspiration and that he was shivering from nervous tension. “There,” he said to Bill, “I guess that’ll hold you until we get rescued.”

Ronnie turned to his brother. “Think we can carry him back to the spot where we came in?”

127 “We probably can,” Phil answered, “but I don’t think we ought to. You see, the river’s risen since you were there, and that part of the tunnel’s under a foot of water now.”

Ronnie tried desperately not to let Bill know how frightened he was. “Then—then we’ll put Bill up on that shelf where the crates of glassware used to be.”

“O.K.,” Phil answered. “That sounds like a good idea, because it isn’t going to be long before the whole culvert’s covered with water. It’s coming in fast!”

Ronnie wished his brother could see his face so Phil would know what he was thinking. Of all the stupid things to let Bill hear! It would be simple for Ronnie and Phil to climb to a safe level in the crawl space beneath the building, but never in a million years could they get Bill up there. And Bill wouldn’t know, of course, that Ronnie would never leave him behind—no matter how high the water rose.

They brought Bill down the culvert without too much difficulty and lifted him up onto the shelf where he could lie down. There was room for Phil and Ronnie to sit, too, and although they had their boots on, they preferred this to standing in the water.

Now that Bill had been taken care of, Ronnie had time to think about plans for their escape. He sat on the edge of the shelf with his feet dangling over the edge and watched the water swirl in from the river. He could go back and continue the plan that Bill had been attempting before his accident. But somehow Ronnie doubted the wisdom of this. There must be a better way.

Ronnie didn’t want to count too heavily on that! Phil had never been one for finding a way out of a scrape. Phil had always relied upon his brother for an answer—or he had just simply evaded the issue completely if that were possible.

Bill raised his head a few inches and placed his arm underneath to support himself. “Don’t try my idea,” he said, “it just won’t work. Nobody but the thin man from the circus could get through that opening.”

“I don’t intend to,” Ronnie answered. “Except maybe as a last resort.”

“Yea,” Phil said. “And by that time you’ll be thin enough to squeeze through.”

Ronnie smiled a little at Phil’s remark. He turned off the flashlight to save the batteries. “We’ve certainly made a mess of everything, haven’t we?” Bill’s voice reached Ronnie from out of the darkness. “Let the glassware and money slip right out of our hands. Got ourselves trapped down here. Me with a busted leg. And I guess we’re about as far from saving the village as we ever were. Well, my pa says it’s always darkest before the dawn. Maybe things will get better from here on.”

The silence closed in again, except for the steady dripping of water against the flooded floor. It sounded to Ronnie as if a hundred distant bells of different pitch were all ringing at the same time. It was hard sitting here in the darkness, waiting ... wondering if they’d ever get out again.

“Ronnie?” Bill asked. “You suppose our folks are out looking for us now?”

“Nobody’ll ever find us down here,” Bill continued. “They won’t even look inside the padlocked building because they’ll see that the lock’s still on the door. I wish we could attract their attention somehow.”

“I’ve got plenty of matches left,” Phil announced. “Want me to burn down the building? Nobody could miss seeing that!”

Ronnie wasn’t sure if Phil was being serious, or if this was another of his attempts at humor. Whichever it was, Ronnie couldn’t go along with his brother’s suggestion. With the building on fire, the culvert was sure to fill with smoke and fumes, perhaps to the point where it might suffocate them. “No, Phil,” he told his brother, “that’s too risky.”

“Then how about just burning through the trap door?” Phil added. “How about that?”

Ronnie found himself shaking his head. “No, Phil. It would never stop with the trap door. Besides, I don’t think we’ve got enough kindling to get it started. No, we’ve got to think of a better way.”

“Then how about you putting out with a few?” Phil demanded of his brother.

Ronnie rested his chin on his palm and braced his elbow on top of his leg. He stared into the blackness. There was some merit to Phil’s idea. Not fire, of course. That was too dangerous. But some kind of a signal that could be seen at a distance.

He thought over all the different ways of signaling he’d130 ever heard of. There were whistles and bells and horns. There were lights and radio beams, flags, hands, smoke.... The Indians had used smoke signals!

Ronnie stiffened, straightening up. He let out a little high-pitched sound of approval. “Ronnie?” Bill asked. “You all right, Ronnie?”

“Sure I’m all right! I just had an idea that might work. I guess I surprised myself with it!”

“Well, remember right after Caldwell nailed the trap door shut I went up to test how strong it was? While I was there I saw a little metal door in the base of the fireplace. You know, a door to an ash box.”

“Sure, Ronnie, sure,” Bill said excitedly. “We’ve got one in our fireplace—down in the cellar.”

“Well, my idea is to build a real smoky fire in the box. It’ll travel up to the fireplace and then on up the chimney—I hope!”

“That’s a great idea!” Bill exclaimed. “I sure wish I could help you with it.”

“We’ll need kindling,” Ronnie went on. “There’s more of that where Phil got your splints. But the real problem is finding something that’ll give a lot of thick smoke and won’t burn up too quickly.”

“Say, Phil, you’re really using your brains at last!” Ronnie exclaimed. “And rubber’s something we’ve got plenty of! Three raincoats, three pairs of boots, and the soles off our shoes, too, if we need them.”

“I’ve got a penknife,” Bill said, his enthusiasm mounting131 as the pain in his leg subsided. “You can cut the rubber into chunks and then feed them into the fire. Why, with the supply we’ve got we can keep a signal fire going for hours and hours!”

They set to work immediately. Bill found he could help, too, after he had pulled himself up to a sitting position. He used the knife to cut up the heavier pieces of boots. Phil and Ronnie worked at the raincoats, ripping the fabric, first into strips and then into smaller pieces. Soon they had a large pile between them in the middle of the shelf.

Phil waded down the culvert to gather kindling. In the meantime Ronnie took off his torn shirt and, tying a knot about the neck end, used the piece of clothing as a sack to carry the chunks of rubber while he climbed to the crawl-space above.

Phil joined him in front of the ash box a few minutes later. “All I could find was wet wood,” he told Ronnie. “The floodwater has picked it all up. We’ll need something dry to get the fire started.”

Ronnie inspected the wood Phil had brought. “Yes, I guess you’re right. We’ll have to take part of the shelf. Suppose you go down and rip off a few boards. You take the flashlight. I think I can manage in the dark.”

It wasn’t easy breaking up the wood in the darkness. He was continually hitting his head on the low floor beams. But by the time Phil returned with the flashlight and several pieces of dry wood, Ronnie had most of the work done.

Then suddenly there were sounds overhead—footsteps creaking across the floor, a muffled murmur of voices. Ronnie drew a deep breath and let it all out in a shout. “Dad! Dad! We’re down here!”

132 “Bust a hole in the floor if you can’t find the trap door!” yelled Phil.

Ronnie’s heart beat wildly as he heard the screech of nails being pulled from the wood. The trap door was lifted. Phil uttered a soft groan of relief. And then an all-too-familiar voice said harshly, “O.K.! Down you go!”

For a moment the two boys stood frozen. Then, with a swiftness amazing for him, Phil pointed the flashlight at the trap door. Caldwell was standing near the opening, motioning with his gun to someone in the shadows behind him.

As the light struck him, Caldwell made a low, snarling sound and whirled around to level his gun at the boys below. “Put out that light!” he commanded.

Phil obeyed hastily, but in the split second it had taken him to find the switch, a second man had stepped into the light. Ronnie gasped. He knew, from Phil’s simultaneous gasp, that he had not been dreaming. There were two Mr. Caldwells!

Chapter 17

Huddled together in the dark, the two boys and the man heard the thud of the trap door as it was dropped, the ring of a hammer against the nails being driven back into the wood. Nobody spoke. Ronnie was conscious of the heavy breathing of the man who had joined them in their prison, of Phil’s shoulder pressing against his as though for reassurance.

In the building above there were footsteps again, an occasional thump and scrape as though something were being dragged across the floor toward the opening in the wall. For several moments there would be silence; then the sounds would begin again.

Suddenly Ronnie was angry. He grabbed the flashlight from Phil and turned it full on their companion. “Who are you?” he demanded furiously. “And who’s that guy upstairs?”

Caldwell winced, then put his hand firmly on the flashlight and lowered it so that the beam would not blind him. “One minute,” he said softly. “Losing our heads won’t134 help. You know me. The man upstairs is my twin brother; the black sheep of the family, I guess you’d call him.”

“Oh,” said Ronnie and Phil together. Ronnie saw the whole picture now. He had felt all along that the man who had attacked him on the trail and stolen the ledger couldn’t be the Caldwell he knew. He’d felt the difference at the time, but what was he to think? The two men were identical in appearance.

“Larry arrived the same time I did,” Caldwell went on. The sounds above had ceased and the cut-out piece of wall had been put back into place. “But until today I had no idea that he was here. He appeared at my cottage late this morning and demanded the keys to the station wagon. When I refused, he threatened me with a gun.”

“Something went wrong with Larry,” Caldwell answered seriously. “He’s been in trouble all his life. In fact, he escaped from the state penitentiary last week.”

“He did!” Phil exclaimed. “Golly, a convict right here in the village, and we never even guessed!”

“I figure he had two things in mind,” said Caldwell. “First, since the deserted village has been opened to tourists, nobody would think of looking here for an escaped convict. If he saw anybody coming, there would be plenty of buildings to hide in. Second, Larry was obsessed all his life by that old story about the stolen Rorth glassware and the money and the murder. He said he knew the glass must be hidden somewhere, because it had never showed up on the market.”

135 “Well,” said Ronnie glumly. “He was right. He’s got it now, and the money, too, and the old diary that proves Great-great-grandfather didn’t murder his partner.”

Mr. Caldwell wasn’t interested in the murder or the money. “Glass!” he exclaimed. “Rorth glassware! You mean Larry found some here?”

“Crates of it,” said Phil. “Only Ronnie and Bill and I found it. That’s how come we’re down here, so we can’t tell on him.”

“Rorth glass!” moaned Caldwell. “And here we are where it won’t even do us a bit of good to think about it. I guess that’s why Larry put me down here, too. He knew I’d move heaven and earth to get it out of his hands.”

The mild-mannered Caldwell suddenly turned and gripped Ronnie by the shoulders. “Look!” he said fiercely. “We’ve got to get out of here. It was nearly midnight when Larry brought me here. He had me driving him around for hours looking for a road he could use to get through the police road blocks. Then, after we found an old abandoned logging road, he had me drive back here so he could pick up the loot and put me down here where I couldn’t contact the police. It will be daylight soon. Folks will be up and about before long. Isn’t there any way we can let them know we’re here? If we all yelled at once, do you think they’d hear us?”

“The smoke signal!” Ronnie exclaimed, and at once began to break up the dry wood Phil had brought. At the same time he explained their plan to Caldwell, who thought it a good idea. “They won’t miss it,” he said. “The whole136 town’s been looking for you kids since yesterday afternoon. They’ve scoured the village for you twice, to my knowledge, but, of course, nobody thought to look underground.”

Ronnie grinned, despite his anxiety. “Boy!” he said, “will we have a story to tell!” Then he sobered. “If only that guy hadn’t gotten away with the glass and the money!”

“I’ve a feeling he won’t get far,” said Caldwell. “There’s been an alarm out for him ever since he escaped. The police don’t fool around in cases like this. My main concern is how we get out of this place. What can I do to help?”

“Nothing, frankly,” said Ronnie. “Phil and I will tend to the smoke signals. There’s nothing else to do, unless you want to go back and keep Bill company.” He explained what had happened to Bill’s leg, and Caldwell was only too glad to do what he could to cheer the boy.

Phil held the flashlight while Ronnie showed Caldwell the best way down to the culvert. Then the two boys turned back to their work. Phil held the flashlight against the ash box while Ronnie inspected it. The iron door was rusted, but not enough to prevent Ronnie from swinging it open. It squealed and protested and showers of rust flakes fell to the ground.

Ronnie poked the light inside and held his face to the opening. “There’s an opening at the top,” he said to Phil. “It must go all the way up into the fireplace, or else how did the ashes get down to the box?”

Using Bill’s knife, Ronnie shaved some of the kindling wood into tiny splinters. He placed these in the ash box first, arranging them carefully so there was sufficient air137 space between each piece. Over these, in tepee style, he placed the larger pieces of dry wood. “All ready for the match,” he told Phil, reaching for one.

“Let me do it,” Phil insisted. “They’re my matches, and where would we be now if I hadn’t grabbed a pocketful this morning?”

Ronnie didn’t argue the point. He watched his brother apply the flame to the kindling and saw the fire creep upward into the larger pieces.

“So far, so good!” Ronnie exclaimed. The orange light from the fire was reflected in Phil’s face. “Let’s put all the dry wood on first and get as hot a fire as we can. Then we’ll use the wet stuff.”

Soon they had quite a blaze going in the ash box. It crackled and sputtered, and the metal banged every once in a while as it expanded from the heat. The wet wood dampened the fire considerably after it was applied, but as the pieces dried out from the heat, they too caught and burned fiercely.

“Now we’re ready for the rubber!” Ronnie announced later. He tossed the first piece into the fire. It sputtered for a moment, melting about the edges. A thick cloud of inky-black smoke filled the ash box and crowded into the opening at the top.

Ronnie threw in a few more pieces and then slammed the door shut to keep the smoke inside. “Now all we can do is wait,” Ronnie said to his brother.

“—and maybe pray a little,” Ronnie said. If this didn’t work, what else was there left for them to try?

Phil must have been reading his mind, Ronnie thought. He’d been asking himself the same question. “Seems to me I read that people live longer without food than they can without water.”

“That’s good, because we have plenty of water.” Phil switched off the flashlight. Some light leaked through the cracks around the door of the ash box.

“Seems to me we ought to purify the water before we drink it,” Ronnie said. He opened the door a bit to peer inside at the fire. The rubber was burning slowly and the pieces that were now in the fire should last for quite a while.

“The heck with all that trouble,” Phil answered. “In an emergency like this we can drink the water the way it is.”

“Well, I’m dying of thirst right now,” Phil said. He panted like a dog to illustrate to Ronnie how much he needed a drink. “Think I’ll go down and get one.”

“Try to hold off for a while, huh, Phil?” Ronnie asked him. “Maybe we can boil some water over this fire.”

“Sure!” Phil growled. “I’ll hold it in my cupped hands while it heats up! Be sensible, Ronnie. You know we’ve got nothing to heat it in.”

But despite his arguing, Phil apparently decided to follow Ronnie’s advice. He made no move to go below. Instead he switched the flashlight on again, and picking up Bill’s penknife, began to jab at the floor boards over his head. “Who knows,” he said, “maybe I can cut a hole through and we can climb out.”

139 But after five minutes of jabbing and poking and scraping Phil had made a hole no bigger than a fifty-cent piece, and hardly as deep. “Darnedest wood I ever cut into,” he complained.

“Oak maybe—or chestnut,” Ronnie answered. He opened the door to the ash box and threw in another piece of rubber. “Lumber was cheap in those days, Phil. They didn’t skimp on buildings the way Dad says they do today. I’ll bet those boards are an inch and a half thick. And you’d need a hole a foot across before we could slip through.”

“I’d need one a foot and a half!” Phil grinned. He went on working with the knife, doubling his efforts by jabbing at the wood from a greater distance and with more speed.

“Now I went and did it!” he said disgustedly. The knife blade had snapped near the hinge. He threw the broken piece of blade on the hard, dry earth and stomped on it in anger. “Why the heck did I have to try so hard?” he asked. “I’m always messing things up.”

Ronnie wanted to scold his brother for being so careless with the knife, but he bit his lip and kept quiet. They still had the small blade, if as a last resort they needed a knife. And the way things were going, it looked as if they were going to have to think of some other way to free themselves. At least an hour had passed since Ronnie had thrown on the first piece of rubber and the black smoke had rolled up the chimney. Why hadn’t someone come? Was the smoke finding a way to the top of the flues, or was it rolling out into the room overhead?

They decided then that they’d take turns at keeping the fire fed. They drew splinters of wood to see which of them would go first. Phil drew the short one. “You’ll need more140 kindling from time to time,” Ronnie told Phil as he prepared to go below and stretch out a bit on the shelf and maybe talk to Bill or get some sleep. “Want me to bring some up?”

“I’ll get it when I need it,” Phil replied. “There’s still some of this wet stuff left. Say, who gets the flashlight?”

“So I’ll light your way for you from here. Look, Ronnie, if I don’t get the light, I don’t tend the fire. Then when you take over, you’ll get the light.”

The long hours dragged by. With each one that passed, Ronnie’s faith in the smoke signals he had devised grew less and less. Twice he relieved Phil. More wood had to be taken from the shelf, and now there was barely room enough for Bill to sit upright. The water pouring in from the St. Lawrence had risen another three feet. Soon the top of the shelf would be awash. And still worse, their supply of rubber was getting low. “Soon we’ll have to cut up the soles of our shoes,” Ronnie said. “Why doesn’t someone come?”

“I think it’s probably still dark out,” Phil said, “and no one can see the smoke unless they’re close by.”

Ronnie had lost all sense of time, and no one among them had a watch. He’d slept a few times when he wasn’t tending the fire, short naps during which he was more awake than asleep.

Sometime later they used the small blade of Bill’s knife to cut the heels and rubber soles from their shoes. Phil went up with Ronnie to feed some of it into the fire. They lay on their sides before the ash box. Phil picked up some141 of the soft, powdery earth and watched it sift through his fingers. “I wish I could eat this stuff,” he said. “I wish I could eat something.”

Ronnie nodded. “I’m hungry too,” he admitted. “It seems like days and days that we’ve been down here.”

Ronnie dropped off to sleep for a while, waking only long enough to place another piece or two of the rubber into the fire. Soon the last piece was gone. “That’s it,” he said to Phil. “That’s all there is.”

But Phil didn’t hear him. He was asleep. Ronnie sat up, and opening the door of the ash box, watched the last piece of rubber burn away to nothing. Soon nothing remained within the box but a few black, cold cinders.

Now what, he asked himself? What was there left to try? If only he had a tool of some kind—a pick or a shovel. With the pick he could smash a way through the stout floor boards. With the shovel he could dig to the surface. But he didn’t have a pick or a shovel. All he had was Bill’s broken penknife. The little blade was left, of course, but it wasn’t strong enough for such a giant job as cutting through the trap door or the floor.

But perhaps it would be better than doing nothing, better than just waiting and hoping. It would take a long, long time. One little splinter of wood after another. Minute after minute. Hour after hour. Being very careful not to get angry as Phil had done and break another blade.

He chose a spot where there were no knots and the wood looked softest. Chip after chip he removed, each no longer or thicker than a needle. “I’ll never get through,” he thought. “Not ever.”

142 And then, like something in a dream, he heard voices overhead, muffled and indistinct. Then he heard a louder sound—the crash of an ax breaking through one of the walls. A section of the siding gave way and crashed to the floor. The voices were louder now, and Ronnie heard footsteps, too, crossing the room.

“That was a smoke signal we saw from the chimney.” It was his father’s voice speaking! “As sure as I’m standing here, it was a signal.”

A wide grin broadened Ronnie’s face and lit up his eyes. The sound of his father’s voice was the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard in his life. “Dad! Dad!” he called. “We’re down here.”

Then Ronnie turned and gently shook his brother. “You can wake up now, Phil. Dad’s here,” he said.

Chapter 18

A burning, August sun scorched the long stretches of the St. Lawrence River Valley. For two weeks it had blazed down from a cloudless sky, evaporating the last remaining moisture from the soil. Ronnie came out of the house and crossed the barnyard, his bare feet stirring dust clouds that hung behind him and marked his path. The powder-dry dust felt as soft as talcum against the soles of his feet.

Ronnie made his way toward the orchard. Here it was cooler, for the earth was wet from days of irrigation.

Ronnie spied his father’s blue overalls and white T shirt among the peach trees to the right. “Pa?” he called.

“Yes, Ronnie?” Mr. Rorth was reeling out a section of rubber hose, a feeder line to connect to the main metal pipe that ran to the brook.

“I got a call from Mr. Mercer just a while ago. You know him—he’s the president of the historical society in town. He wants Bill and me to come to a meeting tonight. He says the Seaway people will have a big official there to discuss the village.”

144 “Tonight?” Mr. Rorth thought it over. “I think so. In fact, I’d kind of like to sit in on that meeting myself. Maybe Gramps would like to go, too.”

“Yes, I know. But when it comes to the village, Gramps would go from here to Timbuktu in the hottest weather.”

He left his father then and swung off toward the village. He’d been there only a few minutes when he saw two men approaching. One of them was carrying a transit. They set up the transit on a level spot at the top of the east side of the gap. One man stayed with the instrument, while the other climbed to the other side of the stream and held up a long measured stick. Ronnie went over to him. “What’re you doing, mister?”

“Because the boss sent me here, that’s why.” He looked over at the boy and saw that Ronnie was more than just idly curious. “Well, it seems there’s going to be a meeting tonight and the boss wants some figures about whether it’s possible to build a cofferdam across this gap,” he added.

“Do you think it can be built?” Ronnie asked—and held his breath while he waited for the answer.

The man looked about him, examining the narrow valley with its steep, tree-filled slopes. “Sure,” he answered. “Of course, that’s only my opinion. Now beat it, kid. You’re taking my mind off the job.”

Despite the heat, Ronnie began to run. He felt light all over. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. The dam145 could be built. Now, if only the Seaway would agree to have it done. If the meeting tonight was a success, he vowed, then there would be nothing more he could ask for.

He broke out of a thick clump of hemlock saplings and came out on the riverbank just as his brother swung himself off the fallen tree trunk on the end of their “ducking” rope. Phil arched out over the water with his legs curled up against his body and then, letting go, dropped like a bullet. He came up sputtering and spitting water and brushing his hair from his eyes.

Ronnie undressed quickly and soon he was in the water beside his brother. Bill appeared minutes later. His leg was still in a cast. “Darn old doctor!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “I sure wish he’d let me go in.”

However, Ronnie had devised a way by which Bill could at least get cooled off. After Bill had undressed, Ronnie and Phil bound his cast with a strip of canvas they had on hand for this purpose. Then the two bombarded Bill with bucketful after bucketful of water. “O.K.! O.K.!” Bill called for mercy. “Enough!”

The three lay down on a moss bank to dry, while Ronnie described his meeting with the surveyors. “And, Bill,” he went on, “we’ve been asked to a meeting tonight with the historical society, and Dad says he’ll drive us into town.”

Bill grinned. “It’s really beginning to look as though we might save the village after all!” he exclaimed. “We made over a hundred dollars exhibiting the glassware. Altogether, counting the money we found down in the culvert, and what we earned during the past two months taking tourists around the village, and what we got from selling the gold146 and silver coins to a collector, plus the exhibition money—why, we’ve got over three thousand dollars!”

Exhibiting the glassware had been Ronnie’s idea, but it was Mr. Caldwell who had done a great deal to make it a success. He had sent announcements to antique dealers throughout the vicinity, and many of them had come. Curious townspeople had come, too, and each visitor had been charged an admission fee of fifty cents.

“I wonder when Mr. Caldwell will be back,” Bill said as he struggled to get his pants over the cast and metal support. “He’s been gone almost two weeks now.”

“I guess it takes time to work out all those legal matters,” Ronnie answered.

Ronnie thought about Mr. Caldwell as he and Phil started for home. The day after Mr. Caldwell and the boys had been rescued from the culvert, Caldwell had paid a call on Grandfather. “I want to get a lawyer to make out papers that will relinquish all Jacob Williams’ claims to the deserted village,” he had announced. “Then I’ll go up to the penitentiary and have my brother sign them, too.”

Caldwell had smiled. “I don’t think he will. He’s got ten years of his old sentence to finish—plus whatever he gets for escaping. I think if I offer him a small amount of money, he’ll see my way!”

“Well, now,” Grandfather had said, “that’s very decent of you, Mr. Caldwell. But why should you go to all this trouble and expense?”

“I was hoping, sir,” Caldwell had answered, “that you and Ronnie might consider letting me select a few pieces of the Rorth glassware. That would more than repay me.”

147 Caldwell left a week later with the papers the lawyer had drawn up. He promised to return as soon as he’d visited his brother. “I’ve got plenty of work left on my book,” he had told Ronnie, “so keep my place cleaned and ready for me!”

When Ronnie and Phil reached the house, supper was already on the table. Grandfather was dressed in his best summer suit with a white shirt and necktie. “How come, Grandpa?” Phil asked.

“How come? Why, you don’t think for one minute I’m going to miss that meeting tonight. Thunderation, they won’t get anywhere unless I’m there to lend a hand.”

Grandfather did lend his hand that night—and his voice, too! But it was Ronnie’s plea, perhaps, which did the most toward convincing the Seaway official that the village had to be saved. “Mister,” Ronnie told him, sitting on one side of the long conference table, “every building down in the village has got a story to tell about its past. Gramps told me all of them when I was a boy, and I’ve never forgotten a one. Lots of these stories I’ve told to the tourists who have come to see the village. And do you know what so many of them have said to me when they left? They said they’d never been anywhere that helped them so much to understand how people lived and worked back in the last century. And if the village can be saved, you know what we can do? Well, we’ve got enough of the old furnishings left from the general store, for instance, to fit it out just like it was a hundred years ago. And Gramps says that with some fixing up we can do the same thing for the gristmill, the smith shop, and even the main glassworks. Can’t we, Gramps?” Ronnie asked, smiling across at his grandfather.

After the meeting Mr. Mercer, Ronnie’s grandfather and father, a lawyer whom the historical society had hired, and the official from the Seaway went into a smaller room in the back of the building and closed the door. Ronnie, Phil, and Bill waited in the car. It was almost an hour later before Gramps and Dad joined them.

Grandfather was smiling. “Well, we did it, lad!” he said to Ronnie and the others. “We’ve got ourselves a proposition that’ll save the village.”

During the ride home Gramps did most of the talking. “You’ve got to put in the money you boys have earned and the money you found,” he explained the terms of the agreement. “The historical society will lend another three thousand—you’ve got to pay that back, Ronnie, from money you get showing people around the village. The Seaway will pay the rest of the bill, build the dam, and maintain it.”

“I’m right proud of you, Ronnie—proud of all you boys,” Grandfather added. “That Seaway fellow told me that it was what you boys have done this summer that convinced him. He said any youngsters who would put their hearts and souls and time into something worthwhile like this, why, they deserved to get what they were working for.”

Late that night a thunderstorm broke. Thunder boomed incessantly, and the lightning was so vivid that Ronnie’s room was as bright as noonday. But twenty minutes later the storm had stopped and when Ronnie opened his window again a cool breeze blew through.

When Grandfather came into the kitchen for breakfast149 the next morning he was as full of life and pep as a puppy. “Prayed for this cool weather, I did!” he exclaimed. “Prayed for cool weather and I prayed for the village, too. Seems like I got both my wishes.”

After breakfast Ronnie and Grandfather took a walk. “I want to see the village again,” Grandfather said. “I want to see it again knowing that it’ll be here after I’m gone, and even after you’re gone, Ronnie.” He stepped along briskly as if suddenly he’d found a new pair of legs.

They stood at the top of the bluff near a large bull hickory tree. Below, the village lay peaceful and quiet in the early morning light. The red brick of the glassworks caught the sunlight and reflected it, glowing like molten lava.

“I’m proud of you, lad.” Grandfather was talking again. “I’m proud of you for helping to save the village and bringing back honor and respect to the Rorth name. And you know, boy, you took to yourself a little bit of what we Rorths stand for, just from the working and fighting you’ve been doing. Folks become what they believe in and fight for. You understand what I’m trying to say to you, boy?”

“Well, you will some day. Yes, sir, boy,” he said, “we’ve had everything pretty much the way we wanted it, haven’t we? Everything I wanted anyway. All but one thing, that is.”

“Well, darned if I didn’t lose the chess game to that old fox Donavon! But then, guess I can’t hog the whole barrel of apples, can I?”

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystery of the Deserted Village

The Mystery of the Deserted Village

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

	Page
Chapter 1	1
Chapter 2	15
Chapter 3	23
Chapter 4	30
Chapter 5	38
Chapter 6	50
Chapter 7	57
Chapter 8	65
Chapter 9	72
Chapter 10	79
Chapter 11	87
Chapter 12	96
Chapter 13	104
Chapter 14	113
Chapter 15	121
Chapter 16	130
Chapter 17	138
Chapter 18	148