The girl looked to where his finger pointed. She could barely make out a black hole a few yards below the summit of a hill.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A coyote is the name we use for that little tunnel. You can barely make out the mouth of it from here. We’ve got to level off the top of that hill. To accomplish it, we send in a drift; then, at the end of it, we hollow out a big chamber. This is filled with dynamite—a half a hundred boxes probably. Wires are laid from it across the valley and to the top of another hill. At the proper time, an electric battery is attached to the wires, a button is pressed—and bang! The top of the hill goes up in the air.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, gripping her hands. “It must be a wonderful sight. May I watch it?”
“It won’t be ready for another week yet,” he answered. “But when we touch off the battery you’ll see the prettiest exhibition of fireworks this side of Manhattan Beach.”
In a little while they rode down the slope once more and along the busy line of operations. He explained everything to her, in the simplest terms; she appeared deeply interested, and asked a hundred questions, some of which puzzled Nash, not because of their difficulty, but rather because they were so unexpected. It seemed strange to him that a girl like Miss Breen, apparently in this part of the country for health and recreation, should manifest such a keen desire for technical knowledge.
She betrayed immediate interest in the humanlike electric shovels, and at the grinding, growling, dust-hidden cement mixers, and at the spiderlike derricks that picked up tons of steel with the ease of a man lifting a sheet of paper.
Finally he took her to where the first siphon was being erected.
“You see,” he explained patiently, “when we come to a valley, or to any depression, we’re compelled to use these immense steel mains. Through them the water is shot down one side and up the other. This one building is ten feet in diameter. In New York, if you remember, there is a siphon bored through solid granite, running beneath the Hudson River, and bringing water from the Catskill Aqueduct. With the exception of a small length of pressure pipe in use at Niagara Falls, our siphons are the largest and longest in the world.”
“I should think the force of the water would soon burst even the best of steel,” she announced suddenly.