"How are you getting on?" clicked Ballard, when the time had been given.
"Fine," was the answer. "Everything lovely, and the goose honks high. Enthusiasm to burn, and we're burning it. Just now the baa-lambs are surrounding Mr. Pelham on the canal embankment and singing 'For he's a jolly good fellow' at the tops of their voices. It's great, and we're all hypnotised. So long; and take care of that pinched arm."
After Bromley broke and the wire became dumb, the silence of the deserted camp grew more oppressive and the heat was like the breath of a furnace. Ballard smoked another pipe on the bungalow porch, and when the declining sun drove him from this final shelter he crossed the little mesa and descended the path to the ravine below the dam.
Here he found food for reflection, and a thing to be done. With the flow of the river cut off, the ground which had lately been its channel was laid bare; and recalling Gardiner's hint about the possible insecurity of the dam's foundations, he began a careful examination of the newly turned leaf in the record of the great chasm.
What he read on the freshly-turned page of the uncovered stream-bed was more instructive than reassuring. The great pit described by Gardiner was still full of water, but it was no longer a foaming whirlpool, and the cavernous undercutting wrought by the diverted torrent was alarmingly apparent. In the cut-off tunnel the erosive effect of the stream-rush was even more striking. Dripping rifts and chasms led off in all directions, and the promontory which gave its name to the Elbow, and which formed the northern anchorage of the dam, had been mined and tunnelled by the water until it presented the appearance of a huge hollow tooth.
The extreme length of the underground passage was a scant five hundred feet; but what with the explorations of the side rifts—possible only after he had gone back to the bungalow for candles and rubber thigh-boots—the engineer was a good half-hour making his way up to the great stop-gate with the rising flood on its farther side. Here the burden of anxiety took on a few added pounds. There was more or less running water in the tunnel, and he had been hoping to find the leak around the fittings of the gate. But the gate was practically tight.
"That settles it," he mused gloomily. "It is seeping through this ghastly honeycomb somewhere, and it's up to us to get busy with the concrete mixers—and to do it quickly. I can't imagine what Braithwaite was thinking of; to drive this tunnel through one of nature's compost heaps, and then to turn a stream of water through it."
The sun was a fiery globe swinging down to the sky-pitched western horizon when the Kentuckian picked his way out of the dripping caverns. There were two added lines in the frown wrinkling between his eyes, and he was still talking to himself in terms of discouragement. At a conservative estimate three months of time and many thousands of dollars must be spent in lining the spillway tunnel with a steel tube, and in plugging the caverns of the hollow tooth with concrete. And in any one of the ninety days the water might find its increasing way through the "compost heap"; whereupon the devastating end would come swiftly.
It was disheartening from every point of view. Ballard knew nothing of the financial condition of the Arcadia Company, but he guessed shrewdly that Mr. Pelham would be reluctant to put money into work that could not be seen and celebrated with the beating of drums. None the less, for the safety of every future land buyer with holdings below the great dam, the work must be done. Otherwise——
The chief engineer's clean-cut face was still wearing the harassed scowl when Bromley, returning with the excursionists, saw it again.