The Case of the Dirty Bird Read Online Free PDF

controlled it, but then the main mass of weight caught up and—”
    “Amos.”
    “Right, it doesn’t matter. Be quiet. Got it.”
    “You work one way, I’ll work the other.” Dunc felt along the wall to the left, and Amos worked to the right. In moments they were back to the stairway.
    “Nothing,” Dunc said.
    “Just rocks and crumbling cement,” Amos said. “No tunnels.”
    “Maybe,” Dunc said, “there’s a secret passage and a hidden latch that makes a door swing open.”
    Amos snorted. “Only in movies.”
    “Then that means there isn’t a tunnel.” Dunc’s voice had a final flatness.
    “Yes, well, I told you not to believe a dirty bird.”
    “So we can go.”
    “Good. Light my way across the basement so I don’t hit that rake again. I’m afraid of that rake.”
    “How about under the stairs?” Dunc asked suddenly. “What did you find there?”
    “That was in your half.”
    “I thought it was in yours. Come on, let’s check it.”
    Dunc crawled beneath the stairway and halfway back the sliver of light caught it.
    There, so low that a person would have to stoop well over to get through it, was a small doorway set into the rock and concrete wall.

Amos kneeled next to Dunc. “Is it locked?”
    “Just a wooden peg through a hasp.” Dunc lifted the peg out and opened the door.
    To his surprise, the door swung open easily.
    And silently.
    He moved the shaft of light to the hinges. “Look—they’ve been oiled. Just like the hinges upstairs.”
    “So what?”
    “So somebody had to come and do that—they must have had a reason.”
    “So we go home?”
    Dunc snorted. “Not likely. Not now that we’ve found something.”
    He pulled the wooden peg and opened the door, crouched down, and crawled in. Amos held for a moment, but the basement was pitch black without the sliver of light from the flashlight, and he kneeled and followed Dunc.
    “Close the door,” Dunc said, “and I’ll turn the flashlight on full.”
    Amos closed the door, and Dunc took his hand off the light.
    The sudden brightness was blinding, and both boys closed their eyes for a second.
    “Oh, man, look at this.” Dunc opened his eyes and swept the light in front of them. It disappeared down a long tube of darkness.
    “It’s a tunnel.” Amos tried to see the end of it and couldn’t. “It must go on forever.”
    “Just like the parrot said.” Dunc flashed the light down and back up, trying to see the end, but the light didn’t penetrate far enough.
    “I wonder what it was for?”
    “Maybe they dug it out for a storeroom or something.”
    “It’s pretty long for a storeroom.”
    “Who knows? All I know is that it’s a tunnel like the bird said, and we’ve got a shot at buried treasure.”
    “Maybe it’s an old mine,” Amos said. “Maybe it goes to the center of the earth.”
    “It doesn’t matter. We go in eight paces and start digging for treasure.”
    “Tools,” Amos said. “We don’t have any tools.”
    “Oh—that’s right. How about in the basement? Weren’t there some tools there?”
    “A rake—that I know about for sure. But I didn’t see a shovel.”
    “Let’s go look.”
    He made a step, and there was a clunking noise from outside and above the tunnel entrance.
    “What was that?” Amos said.
    “Like before—it was just a rat or cat or something.”
    There was another thump, then the sound of something being dragged across the floor upstairs, then a thumping as if a heavy weight were being brought down the steps one step at a time.
    And then, distinctly, the boys heard a man’s voice say:
    “I don’t care how much we make, I think we should find something lighter than appliances to steal—they barely fit through the door into the tunnel.”
    “Smuggle,” a second man said. “We don’t steal—we’re smuggling.”
    Dunc and Amos stood frozen, but Amos broke first.
    “Run!” he yelped at Dunc and ran directly over him, headed down the length of the tunnel.

Dunc had