These were handed him, and he began to compare measurements, just as we had done before he came up; but the longer this comparison lasted, and brought no lurking error to light, the feebler grew the smile, and it had vanished entirely in the forest depths when a quarter of an hour later he went with the plans in his hands to the Technical Bureau, muttering in a surly tone that there must be some blunder in the cursed plans.
This had been my own idea at first, but I had changed my opinion. A suspicion began to dawn upon me that the drawings might be all correct, and the measurements exactly followed, and that the cause of the trouble lay deeper.
So I stood with my arms crossed upon my breast while the foreman, with the other workmen, and some few more who had come up to look on, as work was now over for the evening, exchanged opinions on the subject. Some thought that the thread of a screw on one of the shafts had been cut to an erroneous angle, and others had other suggestions to make.
"The thing must be simple enough," said Herr Windfang, of the Technical Bureau, who now entered with the troubled head-foreman.
There was nothing Cyclopean about Herr Windfang; on the contrary, he was an elegant young gentleman, with a touch of dandyism about him.
"It must be simple enough," he repeated; "try it again."
I cannot tell how many times they tried it, but the abominable driving-rod persisted in its false movement.
"Give me the drawings," said Herr Windfang. "Ah, here they are. The error must be in the work."
While they were once more making the comparisons and measurements, which the foreman and myself and then Herr Roland had made in vain, I had studied the matter further, and was so convinced of my view that when Herr Windfang, very much out of countenance, looked at Herr Roland, and Herr Roland, with a faint gleam of a smile playing in the left corner of his mouth, looked at Herr Windfang, I could no longer keep silent, and said:
"It is no use to compare measurements: the dimensions all agree: we shall not get at the error in this way, for it is an error of construction, and lies in the guiding movement."