They drove through the clean, pleasant city of Kingston and over the bridge across the Esopus Creek and along the fine, smooth highway which parallels the Ulster and Delaware Railroad. A ride of half an hour or so brought them in sight of the vast, artificial lake which furnishes water to the distant metropolis.
“Pretty big drink of water, hey?” drawled Brent.
“They say it’s forty miles around it,” said Tom. “The dam is way over at the other end.”
They could not see the whole reservoir from the road, but they caught glimpses of it and could form an idea of its long, irregular extent.
Soon they came to the removed and rebuilt village of West Hurley near the shore of the reservoir. Close by, under the water as Tom knew, were the bones of the old dead village, traces of streets, odds and ends of demolished masonry, submerged memorials of the settlement which had once been there.
There was not much to the new village; it must have lost something in the process of removal and revival of the community life. Some of its simple buildings seemed comparatively new. The visitors looked in vain for any signs of actual reconstruction.
“Do you know,” mused Brent in his slow, dry way, “I don’t know why a reconstructed village shouldn’t be just as good as a new one—same as an automobile or a typewriter. I’d kind of like to get a squint under the water though. What do you suppose we’d see?”
“If we were here during a drought,” said Tom, “we’d see things on the sloping shore, that’s what Pop Dyker said.”
“Old village sort of pokes its nose up, hey?”
“Sort of like a ghost,” Tom said.