The cattle drank.
And the farm no longer needed the expensive new well he had considered drilling.
One evening, as the light faded over the Cove Creek Valley, Glenn stood outside the barn and looked toward the upper pasture.
The ridge was dark against the sky.
The fields were quiet.
The cattle moved slowly near the fence.
Somewhere beneath the grass, cold water was traveling through the old chestnut logs.
Glenn could not see it.
He could not hear it.
But he knew it was there.
The spring was doing what it had always done.
The mountain was providing the pressure.
And the wooden conduit was carrying water along the route Ezra Trivet had chosen more than a century earlier.
Glenn thought about his great-great-grandfather.
He had never met the man.
He knew him only through family history, old records, and the land he had left behind.
But now Glenn had something more tangible.
He had touched the wood Ezra had prepared.
He had held the auger that matched the bore.
He had followed the route of the buried conduit.
And he had watched water flow through the system again.
For a moment, Glenn imagined the same hillside in 1887.
The forest would have looked different then.
American chestnut trees would have stood among the hardwoods.
The farm buildings would have been simpler.
The fields smaller.
There would have been no electric lines, no modern tractors, and no plastic water pipe.
But the spring would have been there.
Cold water emerging from the hillside.
And Ezra Trivet would have recognized its potential.
He would have looked at the slope, measured the distance to the barn, and understood that gravity could do the work of a pump.
Then he and his sons would have begun cutting and boring the logs.
They could not have known what would happen to the chestnut forests in the decades ahead.
They could not have known that electricity would eventually reach the farm.
They could not have known that their water system would be abandoned, forgotten, and rediscovered more than a century later.
They were simply solving a problem.
Their cattle needed water.
Their household needed water.
And the spring stood uphill.
So they built a line.
That was all.
Yet the solution they created had endured long enough to serve another generation facing the same problem.
Glenn looked toward the barn.
The pressure gauge remained steady.
The automatic waterers continued operating.