The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode Read Free Page A

hole and hid them under the squash vines.
    "All set?" I said.
    "All set," he said.
    We adjourned temporarily to the tree house in the Fabians' yard to get the lay of the land, make sure we were not being watched. This was study time for some. School or not, we all had to keep up, and it was piano lesson time for Contamination Black-Eyes. She is the worst, the very worst, about not letting our least little move go unnoticed. Then, innocently (hah!) she brings it up when it will count the most, in front of a mom. She says, "Timmy. What were you and Nicky (that's us, remember) doing with shovels and things ... where were you going with them? You know Mommy and Daddy don't like you to take the shovel out of the cellar ... there's no snow to shovel ... unless you ask. Did you ask?"
    I said all that to Tornid.
    "I know," he said gloomily, hating to have to say this about one of his very own sisters.
    Well, luckily that Contamination girl was having her piano lesson. She takes from Lucy's mother, named Cornelia Crane, and was in there now; you could see the two of them through their dining-room windows in the house next door—Mrs. Crane and Contamination Black-Eyes, sitting side by side at the piano, arching their necks, bending their shoulders, like true musicians do. Every Fabian, except LLIB who is too little, takes piano from Lucy's mom, one of the nice moms. Lucy herself is too little to qualify for "contamination." There was no sign of the rest of the Contamination tribe.
    This tree house of the Fabians is not a real tree house made out of boards and nails and constructed in a big tree. Couldn't be. The only tree in the Fabians' yard is a peach tree Hugsy Goode planted when he lived here, and it's in blossom now. This tree house is a bought metal tree house on top of high metal poles, and it has a red and white striped tin canopy over it to keep rain out. It has a ladder to get up onto it and a slide to slide down from it. It's a neat place to give shows and circuses on, or to just plain sit and think, or to watch what's going on. LLIB and Lucy often give a circus on it and have their lunch there, even in the rain.
    Anyway, right now, nothing was going on anywhere that we could see, which was good for us. Because what was about to be going on was going to be done by us ... Tornid Nubsy Fabian and Copin Nubsy Carroll ... at the start of historic excavations.
    We slid down the slide, hurried to the hidey hole, lowered ourselves into it, checked our apparatus, felt the walls. They were made of brick, dark red brick, like the houses, and were covered with dried vine roots and twining thicker branches. The wall behind us was just plain wall, as were the walls to our left and right. But the wall toward the dining room had the two small cellar windows above the Fabians' washtubs that looked out on the hidey hole. But they were so dirty and vine-covered we felt safe from snooping eyes, those of the Contamination girls, especially, who otherwise might watch us from the cellar while we worked.

    We trailed some more of the squash vines over the windows and felt really out of sight.
    The wall we were most interested in was the one to our left under the kitchen. We felt all along this wall to see if there was a door, a trap door, maybe, gone unnoticed all these years. There wasn't. With a piece of chalk I drew a large circle on this wall where I supposed the best place to begin the chipping should be, at the very bottom of the hidey hole.
    On one side of the circle I wrote my initials, C.N.C., on the other, Tornid's—T.N.F. Inside the circle I wrote the word TRATS ...our code word for START . Sometimes our code names are the real word spelled backward. We got it from LLIB ... lucky he can't read. Too bad he and YNNAD (Danny) can't be in on all this. But they can't. I got out my map, studied it a second, put it back in my pocket. Each of us took out his hammer and chisel and ... one, two, three ... we chipped our first