OUT POPPED DAVID'S KITTY
Then they got into the trench again, and they took hold of the pipe and lowered it to the bottom.
David couldn't see what the men were doing then, and he went to the edge of the trench and squatted there and watched.
He saw the end of a pipe sticking out of the ground into the trench. It looked as if it had been in the ground a long time.
"What is that?" he asked the foreman.
The foreman said it was the end of the old pipe, and there was a place near his house where they could put a long iron thing into the ground, down as far as the pipes, and turn it and let the water into this pipe. The long iron thing was like a clock-key.
"And Davie," he said, "you see that one end of each pipe flares out bigger than the other end. The men put the small end of one pipe into the flaring end of the next. You'll see."
So David looked and the men fitted the small end of the new pipe into the flaring end of the old one, and they blocked the new pipe up with dirt and stones until it was just right.
Then one of the men took some things that were in the trench. All that David saw was what looked like some old frazzled-out rope, and he laid the things he had taken up around the new pipe in the joint, and he hammered them in tight with a kind of a dull chisel. That was so that the water shouldn't leak through.