A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton by Michael Phillips Page A

Katie looked around with a shudder.
    “Except for getting Emma settled this morning,” she said, “I haven’t been here since … you know, since the night before you came. I’ve been afraid to even look down here again. I didn’t want to look around this morning, but I guess I can’t really help it now.”
    I set down the lantern and waited a bit while Katie collected herself.
    The floor was hard-packed dirt, but it was dry and had a few things on it. I don’t know why it should have been spookier now, in the middle of the night. The cellar looked the same in the middle of the day as in the middle of the night. But something about it was different and gave me the creeps. I know Katie felt it too. The silence was deeper, the shadows longer. I kept expecting something to jump out at us from one of the darkened corners. Just knowing that the sun was gone above us made the darkness more fearsome down here too.
    There wasn’t much in the place except for a few small pieces of furniture that must have been put down here to store them out of the way. How Katie’s father had got them down here I couldn’t imagine, unless they’d been down here since the house was built. There was a dresser, a small wardrobe, and one other big chest of some kind sitting on the ground.
    “Do you know what’s in those?” I asked Katie.
    “No,” she said. “I was only down here a time or two, for tornados and then … you know.”
    I nodded. “Were the drawers of that one open like that,” I asked, pointing to the dresser, “when you were down here before?”
    “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”
    “Emma must have been looking through them. Do you suppose that’s where she found the gold pieces?”
    “I don’t know. It’s hard to blame her—she must have been down here an hour or more.”
    “She was probably scared silly.”
    We went to look closer. Katie opened all the drawers. There were a few old clothes that smelled of mildew, some papers, but no more gold coins in the drawers. We looked in the wardrobe too, but it was empty. Then Katie walked over to the chest on the floor.
    “It’s locked,” she said.
    “Do you have any idea where the key might be?” I asked.
    Katie thought a minute, then both of us seemed to remember at the same time.
    “The keys in my mother’s secretary!” said Katie. Again we bolted for the stairs.
    I don’t know how we kept from waking up the other two girls, but even in our excitement, somehow we didn’t. Five minutes later we were again descending into the cellar. This time a ring of keys was jingling from Katie’s hand. We hurried back to the chest, and one by one Katie fumbled with the keys to find one that would go into the padlock of the chest. When she found the one that opened it and then lifted the lid back, our hearts really started pounding. I think both of us were hoping it would be full of gold and jewels like a pirate’s treasure.
    But it wasn’t. There were just a bunch of men’s shirts and trousers, a pair of boots, and one dress-up coat that had probably been real nice once. Everything in the chest was worn and old and didn’t smell so good.
    Disappointed, we stared at it a minute, then Katie started rummaging through it.
    “I wonder if what you said earlier’s true,” she said, “about those coins being my uncle’s. I wonder if these are his clothes.”
    “ Didn’t you say he was here once?”
    “I think so. I think that’s how I got the idea into my head that he had gold. I once had a dream about it, though I imagined gold nuggets or something, not coins. But my memory of it is vague now.”
    She held up a second pair of trousers that was stuffed in the bottom. As she threw it back in with the rest, we heard a faint metallic sound. Katie grabbed them up again and shook them in her hand.
    “There it is again!” she exclaimed.
    She stuffed her hand into one of the pockets and pulled it out, holding another four coins.
    “Look,” she said, “they