Free The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode by Eleanor Estes

Contamination off ... perhaps even take a bath..."
    "Oh, no ... not me," said Tornid. "No bath. It's not bath time, yet.... Hey..." he said.
    "What?" I said.
    "I bet it was the raccoon.... Hey, yeah ... last night or this morning while we were at school..."
    "Of course, ya cluck!" I said. "It was the raccoon. Had a very busy night, building a home and digging our diggings."
    After I had implied that I'd had that raccoon idea first, I looked at Tornid through the lower part of my glasses and pursed my lips together. I said, "You may get to be a Rapid Advancement boy, like the
grils
are R.A. girls, when you get bigger ... you have so much ESP."
    Tornid laughed his funny husky laugh.
    "There's more of a mystery here than we'd thought, Tornid," I said. "You don't get raccoons doing unusual things, digging around a place named TRATS where there is probably an opening into a lost tunnel. Perhaps he, being a raccoon ... raccoons are famous for their curiosity—your zizter (I imitated black-eyed
gril
) told uz that—well, he may already know more about this tunnel than you and me put together with all our ESP thrown in. Or, he may be a something—a smoogman—in disguise. On a mission from below, maybe, to find out who, or what, is chipping into the T.N.F. office that we hope is down there."
    So we began to dig, claw, and chip away furiously with our hands, shillelaghs, ice picks—all our tools—spurred on by this unexpected helping hand of the raccoon's, be he friend or be he smoogman foe. We longed for the breakthrough. "Where are Nicky and Timmy now?" the moms would say. "Over at Myrtle Avenue again?" they'd say. "Never fear, moms. We'll never do that again. Where we are, there's no rule against it," we'd say. "Down in the tunnel of Hugsy Goode, moms, the alley under the Alley. If Alley above is allowed, then so is alley below," we'd say.
    Tornid and me laughed very hard at the idea of the funny times lying ahead. But we're not down there yet, and there's plenty to do. We should be nocturnal like raccoons—we'd be down there by morning.
    Just then Tornid's dad came to their back stoop and called in his perfectly ordinary plain-speaking voice, the way he always does, as though his children can hear him though nowhere in sight, "Billy! Danny! Timmy! Come get your hair cut." He cuts everybody's hair, the
grils',
too. My mom does ours. The moms have hair-cutting shears they share, one of the good tools bought at Job Lots.
    We got out of the hidey hole in a hurry before LLIB and Danny or anyone else could see us. "Try and save some food," I told Tornid. "Tomorrow is T.N.F. day, and we may need food. Ah ... tomorrow! Nothing to be scared of, Torny, old boy, old boy ... nothing coming at us ... I hope..."
    "No Minotaur," said Tornid, laughing
    His mom is reading the Greek myths to them all before bed ... they always read at least an hour, all the Fabians, the mom or the dad reads out loud ... all on the big bed in the front bedroom. Now it's Theseus, and Tornid has gotten our maze plans and tunnel plans all mixed up with the labyrinth on Crete where Theseus sought the Minotaur. Tornid worries for fear that, once down there, if the tunnel really turns out to be a complicated labyrinth instead, we'll never be able to get out.
    "Don't worry," I said. "The way I have it figured, in our maze or tunnel, whatever it turns out to be, there's a way in and a way out." And Tornid went in to the hair-cutting ceremony. Do you dig that? Everything is a ceremony in the Fabian house. I sat in the tree house a while mulling this over, mulling over all our plans. Then I jumped down and went in because the cow horn blew.

Chapter 12
On Our Way to Somewhere
    Next day, no school again, another holiday for Tornid and me. Early in the morning I went over to Tornid's backyard and went up into the tree house. I looked up in Miss Alderman's tree for the raccoon. No sign of him. His nest was still there, but its vines were wilting and