“Oh! I beg your pardon,” said I. “No, I don’t know him.”
“Well, I’ve been having a go in at the same kind of job,” continued Dicky. “You know what a drop there is at the end of the pond, where you saw me yesterday, in the shrubbery? Well, it struck me it wouldn’t take much engineering to empty it.”
“What!” I exclaimed, “empty the pond! You’ll get in an awful row, Dicky. Don’t think of it.”
“Think—it’s done, I tell you,” said the man of science. “That was what I was at when you saw me.”
“I thought you were digging up primroses.”
“Digging up grandmothers! I was letting in a pipe to drain it. It was a rare job to shove it in from the bottom corner of the pond through the bank into the shrubbery. But I managed it. It was coming through like one o’clock when I left. I expect the pond will be empty by this time.”
I quailed with horror. If so, I should be discovered. I was tempted to turn tail: but that would be even worse. The only thing was to stay and see it through.
I confronted myself with the reflection that Dicky’s experiments so rarely succeeded, that in all probability the pistol still lay safe under four feet of water. If not—
“Hooray!” exclaimed Dicky, as we came in sight of the place; “it’s done the trick this time. See, Tom!”
I did see. In place of the water I left there in the morning was a large empty basin of mud, with a few large puddles of water lying at the bottom, and a few hillocks of mud denoting the places which had once been shallows.