When Larry announced supper, all the company admitted that they “had their appetites with them”; but Cal did not at once “fall to” as the others did. Instead, he went into the woods a little way, secured a dry, dead and barkless stick about five feet long, and drove it into the bottom of the excavation. Pulling it out again after waiting for twenty or thirty seconds, he closely scrutinized its end. Then, measuring off a part of it with his hands so placed as to cover approximately a foot of space at each application, he tossed the stick aside and joined the others at their meal.
Nobody interrupted the beginning of his supper by asking him questions, but after he had devoured two or three rice birds the size of marbles and had begun on the hind leg of a broiled squirrel which lay upon an open baked sweet potato, he volunteered a hint of what he had been doing.
“As nearly as I can measure it with my hands, we’ll come to water about three feet further down, boys. We’ve acquitted ourselves nobly as sappers and miners, and are entitled to take plenty of time for supper and a good little rest afterwards—say till the moon, which is just now coming up out of its bath in the sea out there, rises high enough to shine into our hole. That will be an hour hence, perhaps, and then we’ll shovel sand like plasterers making mortar. It won’t take us more than an hour or so to finish the job, and we’ll get to sleep long before midnight.”
“How did you find out how far down the water was, Cal,” asked Tom, who was always as hungry for information as a school boy is for green apples or any other thing that carries a threat of stomach ache with it.
“Why, I drove a dry stick down—one that would show a wetting if it got it—till it moved easily up and down. I knew then that it had reached the water-saturated sand. I pushed it on down till the upper end was level with our present bottom. Then I drew it out and measured the dry part and six inches or so of the wet. That told me how far down we must go for the water.”
“It’s very simple,” said Tom.
“I’ve noticed that most things are so when one understands them,” said Dick. “For example—”
What Dick’s example was there is now no way of finding out, for at that point in his little speech the conversation was interrupted by a rather oddly-dressed man who broke through the barrier of bushes and presented himself, bowing and smiling, to the company.