"Ah!" he said, "that, I think, will do!"
And he closed the iron sliding door carefully, as it had been before, and thrusting his fingers into the shallow pool, he lifted up double handfuls of oozy mud and plastered it all over the entrance.
"When that is dry," he said, "it will take a clever man to tell where you have poked your nose this afternoon, Joseph!"
This seemed likely enough and satisfactory, from his point of view. But, as for me, I wanted very much to be told what it was all about.
So I asked him what it was I had found, and why he wanted me to crawl up there, at any rate.
"You found some copper rings and a piece of dirty canvas," he said, "neither more nor less. And I asked you to go up there because I was too fat to go myself. Were you nearly at the end, think you?"
I told him no—that the passage seemed to widen as it went farther on. I think that at these words he was nearly replacing the rope, which he had begun to coil, round my waist again.
But he looked at his watch, and shook his head.
"We have not the time to do it safely," he said; "but—let us see—if it widens as you say, Joseph, it is very likely that it has another opening."
He took a small plan out of his pocket, a tiny little measuring scale, nodded once or twice, and then began slowly to pace through the wood at right angles to the course of the Backwater.