"And if we got a pipe, an' could lay it, the marks uv the diggin' would bethray us. Don't the streets uv London prove it whin the County Council has been taking up the drains?"
"Unless we could cover them in some way. That might be managed. A greater difficulty is the natives. They've worked very well, but we don't know yet how far they can be trusted; and if they knew of this water-pipe we propose, they might blab the secret and undo all our work."
"And where's the pipe, sorr? There are no gas pipes or drain pipes in this haythen counthry."
"No, but there are plenty of bamboos. We could make an excellent pipe of them. The digging is the difficulty. We can't get the natives to do it without giving our plan away, and we can't do it ourselves for the same reason. I shall have to think this out, Barney."
"Sleep on it, sorr. Begorra, I remimber two more lines from that same poetry book—
'Sleep, sleep, it is a blessed thing
Beloved from pole to pole';
an' no wonder at all, for many a time I've gone to me bed bothered about wan thing or another, and bedad, the morn's morn 'twas all as clear as the blessed daylight, sorr."
"Well, I'll sleep on it, Barney, and let you know to-morrow what the result is."
It was close thought, however, before he fell asleep that gave Jack the solution of the problem. All the natives now knew that the object of the white man's presence here was to search for gold; they knew also that to obtain the gold the soil had to be excavated. Why not turn their knowledge to good account? Instead of laying his conduit in a direct line from the spring to the nearest point of the stockade, he would lay it along, or rather in, the side of the gully; it would thus be more likely to escape observation, and the disturbed ground could be planted with quick-growing creepers or covered up with boulders. As a blind to the natives, he would have a number of excavations made at the edge of the gully, both above and below the waterfall, and one of these could be used for the bamboo pipe without anybody being the wiser save the few who must necessarily be in the secret.
Next morning, accordingly, Jack, under pretence of continuing the search for gold, set the men to make a series of shallow excavations. Most of these were cut below the cataract, and, using the prospector's pan, Jack obtained what he hoped his uncle would consider good results from the soil. He carefully noted the places along the exposed bed of the stream in which the best returns were found. But the excavations were abandoned one by one, and attention was not unduly directed to any of them.