The older farmer recovered enough to laugh again, but this time the sound came out uncertain.
“So it’s an old drain.”
The inspector did not look at him.
“No.”
“What else would it be?”
The inspector leaned toward the bubbling center.
“This isn’t draining.”
Clear water surged through the mud and spread another foot.
“It’s feeding.”
The older farmer frowned.
“Feeding what?”
The inspector finally looked up.
“The pond.”
Nobody said anything.
The young farm girl stared at the water.
For six months, nearly everyone in the county had told her she was destroying the best feature on the property.
For three generations, the pond had been treated as a natural pond.
Her grandfather believed it filled from rain and runoff.
Her father believed the same.
Every map showed it simply as a farm pond.
No creek entered it.
No obvious spring appeared around it.
But even in dry summers, the pond level dropped less than anyone expected.
That had bothered her.
Then it became an obsession.
And now water was rising from beneath the mud.
The inspector stood.
His boots made sucking sounds as he stepped away.
“You need to stop all excavation until we know what this is.”
The older farmer folded his arms.
“She drained a pond to discover water.”
Two men behind him laughed nervously.
The young woman looked toward him.
“You were laughing harder five minutes ago.”
That shut them up.
The inspector wiped mud from his hand.
“If this is what I think it is, she didn’t discover water.”
He looked toward the buried stone.
“She uncovered infrastructure.”
The neighboring farmer stared.
“What infrastructure?”
The inspector glanced toward the weathered red barn.
Then toward the farmhouse sitting beyond the rise.
“How old is this property?”
The young woman answered.
“The original deed goes back to 1874.”
“Any maps?”
“Some.”
“Old enough to show this pond?”
“I don’t know.”
The inspector pointed toward the iron pipe.
“That didn’t grow there.”
Nobody laughed anymore.
Water continued rising.
The young woman bent, picked her notebook from the mud, and carefully separated the wet pages.
The neighboring farmer watched her.
A few minutes earlier, he had torn it from her hand.
He had been irritated because she kept checking measurements while the excavator worked.
She had warned the operator to stay within marked areas.