Read Online Vermilion Drift by William Kent Krueger - Free Book Online

old days, because of the ungodly noise in the stopes, most of the miners were hard of hearing.”
    Cork remembered something his own father used to tell him: You always knew when you were passing the house of a guy who’d worked the Vermilion One. You could hear his radio or television blasting all the way out to the street.
    They returned to the main drift and kept going.
    A few minutes later, their headlamps illuminated a sudden wall ahead, the official end of the tunnel, a construct of dark timbers that completely blocked the passage.
    “Do all tunnels end this way?” Cork asked.
    “Normally they just end in rock. This is unusual.”
    “Has Genie Kufus finished her survey of Level One?”
    “Yes.”
    “She say anything about this to you?”
    “She hasn’t shared any of her thoughts yet. She probably won’t until she’s completed the survey of the entire mine.”
    They stood before the wall, which had been constructed of six-by-six timbers laid horizontally, one atop the other. They’d been secured to the wall of the tunnel with bolted metal L plates. The wood had fared well in the dry cool of the mine. Then Cork noticed something.
    “Look here.” He knelt and ran his hand along a seam cut into several of the timbers a couple of feet from the right side of the wall.There was another seam cut two feet nearer the center. “These are fresh.”
    “Yeah,” Haddad agreed. He knelt beside Cork and gave the top cut section a push. It yielded and fell back into the dark on the other side of the timbers. He reached in and pulled the next section toward him, and, when it was out, Cork saw that an eyebolt had been screwed into the backside, which would allow it to be removed easily from the other side of the wall. One by one, Haddad cleared the next four sections of cut timber, which created an opening two feet high and two feet wide, large enough for a man to crawl through.
    Cork shot the beam of his Maglite into the dark on the other side, revealing a continuation of the Vermilion Drift. He saw no indication of a cave-in. He looked at Haddad. “You were right. Somebody lied in that official report a long time ago.”
    “Somebody who didn’t want it known that ore belonging to the Ojibwe had been taken.”
    “You game?”
    “Are you kidding?” Haddad crawled ahead through the gap.
    Cork followed and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The air on the other side reeked of animal decay. He stood up and shot his light into the darkness ahead. “Something died in here, Lou. And not long ago.”
    “Probably some animal came in and couldn’t find its way out. Which means you’re right. There’s another entrance. And do you feel that?”
    “What?” Cork said.
    “The temperature. It’s much warmer here than on the other side of that timbered wall. There’s air coming in from somewhere up ahead.”
    Haddad went forward with the Coleman lantern. They had to walk carefully because on this side of the wall the tunnel floor was littered with blocks of stone big as an ice chest.
    Cork glanced uneasily at the ceiling above him. “Any chance of a cave-in?”
    “I wouldn’t worry.”
    “What about all these rocks on the floor?”
    Haddad shook his head. “Should have been cleared during the mining. Poor workmanship.”
    They seemed to have walked forever in the dark, and Cork was uncomfortably aware how far behind them was the way out. He’d never been claustrophobic before, but now he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Maybe it was just the utter black around them and the fact that he didn’t really know where they were headed. The foulness of the air he breathed might also have had something to do with it.
    Haddad stopped suddenly, and Cork nearly ran into him. Haddad turned off his Coleman. “Kill your light,” he said.
    “Are you kidding?”
    “No. Turn it off, Cork. And your headlamp, too.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Just do it.”
    Cork didn’t like the idea. But when the lights were