“Bring that torch here!” he called to one of the men.
The torch was brought. Nash knelt down and examined the broken length of cast-iron pipe.
“Just as I thought!” he muttered. “It’s been smashed—probably with a sledge.” He turned to the subforeman. “Where’s the regular watchman on this job?”
The man was called and questioned. No additional light was shed upon the case; the watchman had seen no one in the vicinity of the pipe, and the sound of escaping water and falling concrete was his first intimation of anything wrong. Nash felt that the man was telling the truth.
These water mains had been laid long before the actual construction work on the aqueduct had been started; this undertaking, together with the stringing of telephone and electric-light wires—all preliminary to the main project—had cost the city of Los Angeles more than two millions of dollars. Water, to the different construction camps, was a valuable asset, since the great part of the work lay through arid mountains and vast stretches of the Mohave Desert.
While Nash was puzzling over the situation, a shout interrupted, and one of the men came running up with a sledge hammer he had discovered a couple of hundred feet up the slope.
“That’s the answer!” exclaimed Nash. “Find the owner of this, and we’ll have the man who smashed our pipe.”
Before leaving the scene, he spoke again to the subforeman:
“You’d better double your watchmen from now on. We can’t afford to take any risks. There’s five hundred dollars’ worth of a conduit ruined to-night. Tell your men to hold any suspicious strangers they may run across. If necessary, shoot first, and ask questions afterward.”