"I am perturbed in my mind, and that's the truth," he said. "There is something strange along the branch of the river which flows into the Moat. I walked home that way yesterday, and I wish for your presence and assistance. Two can do so much more than one. Also, you know the locality, as well I know. I look to you to help me to solve the mystery which, to my mind at least, hangs over Brom Water."
CHAPTER XI
THE IRON TRAPDOOR
The Hayfork Minister, who had laboured with equal determination to save the crop of a true-blue Presbyterian and to make me a good Churchman, evidently knew his way about the precincts of the Grange. He stepped through a gap in the hedge, jumped a half-dry ditch, and wound his way through the scattering brambles and underbrush as if he had been in his own garden plot.
No coward, the Hayfork! It took me all my time to keep up with him, and I am a good jumper, too—nearly as good as Elsie.
We went down the side of the Moat Backwater. It is a curious place. It is not, you understand, the Brom Water itself. That comes down from the hills and wimples away across the plain, full of good fish, both trout and salmon, according to their season. But the Moat Backwater connects the pond or little loch which lies in front of the windows of the Grange with the Brom. Whether the connection is absolutely natural, or whether it was originally made by the hand of man, I cannot tell. Neither, so far as I know, can anybody else. But in some places it certainly looks like the latter.
At any rate, whenever the Brom is in flood, it "backs up," as it were, into the Backwater, and so runs into the pond. It fills the Moat itself like a tide, and I believe on a few occasions it has even been known to overflow the greensward where the clumps of lilies are, right up to the steps of the front door!
There is, of course, always some water in the Lane, which trenches the meadows and runs canalwise through the fringing woods. But at ordinary times the water in the Lane, as much of it as there is, finds its way toward the Brom, owing to the feeding of the Grange Pond by local streamlets. But in times of rain the current runs the other way. Then the Backwater runs brown and turgid into the pond till the lilies tug at their green anchor chains and the Moat itself is lipping full of black, peaty water from the hills.
To-day as we plunged into the shadow of the woods along the side of the Backwater, it held no more water than a burn in the summer heats—little and still clear, the minnows and troutlets balancing and darting, joggling each other rudely from beneath favourite stones, or shouldering into well-situated holes in the bank, like people scrambling for seats at a play. Then a few yards farther on would come a deep brown pool with a curious greenish opal sheen lying like a scum on the surface, for all the world like two-coloured silk. This was the reflection of the leaves above. Very dense they were, so that the light could hardly filter through between. Along the burnside it was generally lighter. But the trees clustered deep and thick about the pools, as I suppose they do all the world over, whenever they get the chance.