“No, I was not. It must have been internal grumbling by yourself that you heard,” I retorted, sauntering back to the fire, which by that time we had begun to light daily.
“I daresay you’re right, Max; it has often struck me as a curious fact that, when one is cross or grumpy, he is apt to think all the rest of the world is also cross or grumpy. By the way, that reminds me—though I don’t see why it should remind me, seeing that the two things have no connection—that Coppet came to me last night saying he had discovered a slight leak in the dam. We’d better look to it now, as the rain seems to have moderated a little.”
We went out forthwith, and found Coppet already on the spot, gazing at a small rill of water which bubbled up from behind a mass of rock that jutted out from the cliff and formed a support for the beams of our dam.
“Something wrong there, Coppet,” said Lumley, inspecting the place carefully.
“Oui, monsieur—it is true.”
“Can you guess where it comes through?” I asked.
“Vraiment, monsieur, I know not, but surely the dam it is quite strong.”
“Strong!—of course it is, unnecessarily strong,” said I, looking up at its edge, over which the water, rendered muddy by the rains, flowed in a considerable volume. “What think you, Lumley?”
I asked my friend’s opinion somewhat anxiously, because I observed that he seemed to examine the place with unusually grave looks.
“Max,” he said at last, “your engineering is defective. It is true that the beams and stuffs of which the dam is composed could resist all the weight or force of water that can be brought to bear on them—even an untrained eye like mine can see that—but you had not observed that this mass of rock, against which the whole affair rests, has got a crack in it, so that it is partially, if not altogether, detached from the cliff. No doubt it is a large heavy mass, but the strain upon it must be very severe, and its stability depends on its foundations.”