The Secret Passage

By: Callie H.

         The day before the forth of July, we left for vacation. We were going to go to Montana. The people that were going were my aunt Karen, my uncle Steven, my two cousins Autumn and Ashley, my Dad Jonathan, my two brothers Daniel and Nathan, and then myself April. It took about three days for us to get to Montana. While we were there we stayed with our uncle George.

The day after we got there we got to go horseback riding in the mountains. That is what we had all been waiting for. We started out riding at about 10:00 a.m. Our family decided to go last. Well, we were riding along when all of a sudden Autumn called out. “Stop you guys! Look what I found!” We hurried over too see what she found. When we got over there

we saw that she had found a very shallow and narrow passage. You would have to crawl to get through it. An adult would be able to fit through it, but barely. Karen, Steven, and our Dad thought that it probably just led to some animals’ home, but we weren’t so sure. We begged and begged until they finally let us go through. We weren’t so sure that we wanted to go alone, so they agreed to go with us. As we went on the tunnel got bigger and bigger. Eventually we were

able to walk. It got as big as a cave. We walked for about a mile when we came to a treasure chest filled with diamonds and many other valuable things. We were amazed. We started digging through the chest. At the very bottom of the chest we found a very thin book that had been very well hidden. The book was called Seattle in the 1800s. We opened up the book and all that we saw was a picture. That is all that was in the whole book. We had the book open for only about 30 seconds when the picture became life sized.

All of a sudden a very tall skinny man that was dressed in very fine garments appeared behind us. He glared at us and commanded us to take a step forward. We were very surprised. Our natural reaction was to take a step forward. When we stepped forward we found ourselves to be in the book. It was just like real life. We had gone back in time. We were in Seattle, Washington in the 1800s. We tried walking up to someone to talk to them, but we soon realized that they wanted nothing to do with us. We had no idea why. We looked at ourselves and then at them. We realized that it was our clothes. They were really different than theirs. They didn’t know who we were or where we had came from so they didn’t want to talk to us. We kept trying to talk to people to see if they would talk to us. Eventually we came to a man that wanted to talk to us. He took us to his house and gave us the right clothes for that time period. He told us that he had done the same thing that we had done, went through the tunnel. We asked him if he knew how to get back. He said that he did. He actually had a secret passage right inside his house. We asked him why he was there. We wondered why he wasn’t back in normal time. He said that he liked the people and everything else about that time. He said that he only went back once in a while to visit his family and friends. He said that we would probably like it too. We knew that we might like it there, but we wanted to get back to our time right away. He said that he would send us through the passage if that is what we wanted. We did, so he sent us through, but not before telling us to come back whenever we wanted. We told him that we would come back and visit. Then he sent us through. When we got through we saw that time had stopped while we were gone. We were mighty glad. We finished vacation, went back to see the kind man who helped us, and then went home to live happily ever after.