IN THE TUNNEL AT NIGHT
The narrow tunnels far beneath the din of this vast city’s streets were
built in the main to serve great enterprises. The steel cars that rattle
on and on through the night carry coal to factories and many-floored
department stores. The lighter cars, with frames of wood, transport
shipments of goods from the stores to outlying districts where they are
loaded on trucks and delivered. Manufactured goods are hurried away to
warehouses and depots.
Thus it happened that Johnny, entering as he did at the dead of night,
found men still toiling in these narrow burrows where the light of day
never comes.
There are many entrances to these tunnels. Most of these are elevators
wide enough to lift two or three cars from the depths below to the
street level above.
The one chosen by Johnny that night led through a soap factory. There
the air was heavy with the clean, perfumed scent of soap.
A man in a shabby sheepskin coat received him in silence, motioned him
to a place at the corner of a loaded elevator, clanged an iron gate, and
set the elevator to sinking into the earth.
There is something deeply depressing about being lowered beneath the
natural surface of the earth. Whether it be a well, a mine, a cave or a
tunnel, it is all the same. Johnny Thompson was not free from this
feeling of depression. Indeed, so powerful was its influence that it was
with the utmost difficulty that he resisted an impulse to go straight
back to the surface. As you will see later, he was to have reason to
regret resisting this impulse.
However, once he had accustomed his eyes to the weird green and red
lights of the place, and his ears to the great din when a train passed
and the vast silence when there was no train, he found himself feeling
more at home than he had imagined possible.
“One can see,” he told himself, “why men might even enjoy working here.
The air, circulated by powerful fans, is pure. It is not hot in summer
nor cold in winter. There is no glaring light and no real darkness.”
He was taken to the portion of the tunnel which he wished to inspect.
This portion was the one nearest the museum.
“There will be no trains on the spur leading to the museum,” the
trainman told him. “On that track you’ll be safe enough. If you wait for
the green lights, you’ll be fairly safe on other tracks.”
After imparting this information the engineer threw on his switch and
went rattling away, leaving Johnny to the silence of a night in a
tunnel.
Night in a tunnel. What strange life exists here to come creeping boldly
about at night. A black bat, snapping his teeth at who knows what
insect, goes whirring by. A mouse comes creeping forth to munch some
morsel that has fallen from a workman’s lunch box. Two squealing rats go
scurrying away.
“Night,” Johnny murmured. “Night, half darkness, bats and rats. And who
knows what greater perils?” He shuddered, then hurried on. In his right
hand he gripped a large revolver, a relic of one of the raids made by
Drew Lane.
“I’d hate to have to fire it,” he murmured. “Wow! What a rumpus it would
kick up down here!”
He did not know that ere the night was over he would hear an explosion
which would make the sound of his gun seem but the low pop of a
pea-shooter.