We heard some sort of commotion going on outside of the Crescent Grange, and the horses were neighing wildly. So Hurk McHurk and his brother Kirk quickly ripped off their robes and pulled down one of the tapestries to expose a set of steps leading to an outside cellar door.
I remember thinking, “Why did they bring us here through that whole maze when we could have just entered through the cellar doors?” But that thought faded as soon as we got outside and I could tell that something was seriously wrong. The horses were so frantic they were in danger of hurting each other. And the air didn’t smell right.
“Fire!” Stumpy yelled, pointing over to the trees behind the pickle factory.
Myself, Stumpy, and a few of the men of the Benevolent Order of the Broomsquatch who were not busy calming the horses, ran over towards the flames. Stumpy and I ran as fast as we could, and we soon pulled well ahead of them.
As we got closer we could see that there were two men tied to the tree that was closest to the fire. And they didn’t look like very nice men, either. Reflexively, I went to untie them.
“Hold up!” Stumpy yelled. “Help me stamp out this fire, first. Leave those men be. They look like they’re tied up for a reason.”
“Shut up, kid!” Amos, the first bandit, yelled at Stumpy. And then to me he said, “Yeah. Untie me, quick!”
I stepped away from the captive men and began stamping the fire out with Stumpy. The fire around the men had been doused already, but the flames further away from them were starting to pick up in the breeze. As we stamped out the flames there was an unmistakable tang of pickles and vinegar in the smoke.
The men arrived quickly and helped us stamp out the rest of the smoking embers.
Seeing that the grass fire was under control, Kirk McHurk turned his attention to the two men. Just like Stumpy, Kirk was in no hurry to untie them, either.
“Maybe,” Kirk said to the two men, “maybe you can tell us who you two are? I’d also be interested in knowing how it is that you find yourselves tied to a tree behind a pickle factory.”
True to Grandma’s instructions, the men faithfully retold their plans to set fire to the grain silos. They spoke about how they were thwarted by a great, hairy man on a great, black horse. But through all of this, there was no mention of Grandma or her threats.
“Well, that’s a good description of what you did,” Kirk McHurk replied. “But that doesn’t exactly explain why you did it. Someone paid you to do this, I take it?”
“Yessir,” the second bandit replied. “Mr. R. H. Peabody of the Amalgamated Mining Trust. That’s who paid us.”
Kirk was shocked to hear this. As a lawyer, he was well aware of Mr. Peabody and the role that Amalgamated Mining played in the state. But he was equally shocked to hear his name coming out of the mouth of a common criminal like the one tied up in front of him. Why, Mr. Peabody owned his own Pullman car.
The men from the Benevolent Order of the Broomsquatch asked no more questions about how the bandits had come to be tied up to this tree next to a grass fire. But the questioning continued about the role that Mr. R. H. Peabody played in all of this. And the bandits were more than happy to tell them all that they knew about it.
Just then I noticed Grandma standing outside the back door of the pickle factory, looking directly at Stumpy and myself. She threw her head a little bit to one side to beckon us us over. As we started walking toward her, Grandma very slightly nodded at the galvanized bucket that was lying on the ground near the bandits. Written on the side of the bucket in paint worn thin from years of use were the words, “BROOMFIELD PICKLE FACTORY” and a faded yet accurate painting of a dill pickle. This labeling served to clearly identify the owner of the bucket to both those who could read and those who could not.
As Stumpy and I casually walked toward the back door of the pickle factory I snatched the bucket from the ground and carried it back over to Grandma. None of the men noticed a thing.
“Thank you for retrieving my bucket, boys.” Grandma said.
“Were you over there, Granda?” I replied. “The bandits didn’t say anything about you. But this bucket is from the factory.”
“Never mind about that right now.” Grandma said. “This town is in trouble, and those two idiot bandits are just the beginning. So we’re going to need all the help that we can get.”
“We can help!” Stumpy cried back to Grandma. “We can help fight the bandits right alongside the Broomsquatch!”
I was worried we’d get a lecture from Grandma because of this exclamation from Stumpy. Grandma never like to hear us talk of the Broomsquatch. But her response wasn’t what I expected.
“That’s right,” Grandma said directly. “You both will need to fight next to the Broomsquatch if we want to save the town. Are you willing to do that? It might be dangerous.”
I don’t think that Stumpy and I had ever heard anything more wonderful than this in our entire lives. “It might be dangerous” was exactly the kind of excitement that we were looking for that summer.
“We’re ready,” I responded. “Ain’t we, Stumpy?”
Stumpy cried, “Yes!” and nodded vigorously.
“Then I need you to leave right now, boys. The way might still be open.” Grandma spoke quickly and more quietly than before. “I need you to follow the exact path that the Broomsquatch rode when he left. Look carefully for the tunnel entrance to the mine just over that rise.” Grandma pointed to a small hill to the west of the pickle factory.
“But there’s no mine entrance over there!” Stumpy replied.
“You go quickly and look carefully, Stumpy,” Grandma responded. “And you’ll find it. Believe me on this, boys. You’ll find it. Once you get inside, you need to follow it west as far as you can go. He’ll take care of the rest.”
“What are we looking for, Grandma?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you, exactly, boys,” Grandma responded. “It’s different for different people. But you’ll know. Just remember to go west.”
“West,” Stumpy and I repeated in unison.
“And, here.” Grandma said, pulling something from her pockets. “This is the most important thing of all. Keep these in your pockets at all times. Whatever you do, don’t lose them!”
At this, Grandma handed us each three Coors Banquet Beer bottle caps. They were rusty and old and a bit scratchy on the sides. Stumpy and I jammed them deep down into our front pockets.
“Now go, quickly!” Grandma said, “while it’s still open.” And she pushed us off into the direction that the Broomsquatch rode. West.
The men from the Benevolent Order of the Broomsquatch took no more notice of us. They were busy interrogating the two bandits who were still tied to the tree. The second bandit was doing most of the talking at this point. And the first bandit, Amos, was starting to look bored with the entire situation.
Once we got over the rise and we could no longer see the pickle factory or the men, Stumpy and I began to look around for a mine entrance.
“There’s no mine entrance over here, Stumpy. We’ve been playing in these fields since we were five years old. We’d have seen it.”
“Just keep looking,” Stumpy said. “If your Grandma says it, I believe her.”
We stumbled down the hill toward the setting sun. We weren’t quite running, but we were letting gravity pull us down the slope without fighting it because Grandma had stressed how we had to hurry.
“There!” Stumpy said, pointing to some scrub oak at the bottom of the hill.
“That’s just a big old bush,” I replied.
“No, behind it!” Stumpy yelled, and he took off running.
There was something dark directly behind the stand of bushy oak. It was hard to see the trunks in front of it. It was definitely a hole. And it was so dark that it seemed to be pulling the light and color from the outside world directly into it, like an open drain at the bottom of a tub.
Stumpy ran at full speed, and I couldn’t catch up with him until we were nearly at the mouth of the mining tunnel. I stopped short to take a good look around, but Stumpy never broke stride and ran directly into the tunnel, brushing some leaves off of the scrub oak in the process. I quickly followed Stumpy in because I didn’t want to lose him.
Once inside, the air was much cooler and quite still. Stumpy didn’t stop running even when we entered the mine. The tunnel wasn’t straight. It made an immediate curve to the right, so I had to keep running as well so as to not lose sight of Stumpy. It became much darker once we rounded the curve and we could no longer see the mine entrance. So I yelled to Stumpy to stop.
“Wait up, Stump! I gotta let my eyes adjust,” I hollered.
At that, Stumpy finally slowed his pace. He stood there panting in the grayness. I don’t think I’d ever seen him run so fast in his life. And I don’t think I’d ever seen him so out of breath.
“It’s getting too dark. We’ll need torches,” I said as Stumpy took deep breaths of air to recover. “I’m going to walk back to the entrance and grab a few dead branches of oak and some dry grass. We can fix up some torches from that.”
“Good,” Stumpy said as he leaned against a tunnel wall almost recovered. “I’ll be right as rain by the time you get back.”
As I walked around the curve back toward the entrance of the tunnel, I was surprised by how far we’d traveled since we entered the mine. I thought it was just 40 or 50 feet -- enough to get inside and lose sight of the opening. As I walked back I lost sight of Stumpy around the curve, but I never saw the mine entrance. I must have walked 200 feet down the tunnel, and the grey light wasn’t getting any brighter. There wasn’t any sign of the opening anywhere.
“Hey Stump!” I yelled down the tunnel. “Can you still hear me?”
“Roger that!” Stumpy yelled back. He was just out of sight around the corner.
“Can you come here? I got something to show you.”
There was no response, but I could hear Stumpy’s footfalls crunching quickly on the loose gravel of the tunnel floor.
“What the heck?” Stumpy cried when he got around the curve so that I could see him. “Where’s the mine entrance?”
“It should be right about where you’re standing,” I replied. “I should be standing outside right now.”
Stumpy and I both looked for other passages to the left and right, but there was nothing. There were no other passages in this tunnel. Stumpy even looked up to see if we’d somehow fallen in from above. But there was nothing.
Still, it wasn’t completely dark even though there were no discernable sources of light. The entire mining tunnel was bathed in an even, gray light that seemed to come directly out of the walls. It wasn’t noticeably brighter in either direction. And there wasn’t any color at all. Stumpy’s red flannel shirt looked gray and my blue dungarees were just a darker gray. It was like we were in a Hollywood movie, but one of the scary ones with Frankenstein and the Mummy.
“Well,” Stumpy said, “Your Grandma said to go west. And I guess we’ve got no other choice at this point. I suggest that we start heading west before we get so confused that we forget which way west is.”
And with that, we set off down the mining tunnel in our original direction.
To be continued...