Merl looked at the old connections, then back at Glenn.
He offered no dramatic criticism.
He simply drove home.
From his perspective, the numbers told the story. Glenn had uncovered an ancient water line, spent time reconnecting it, and ended up with a supply that could not operate the cattle waterers.
But Glenn was not ready to quit.
He drove to a hardware store in Boone and purchased a fiberglass drain rod, the kind plumbers used to clear blocked lines. The rod came in ten-foot sections and could extend to approximately one hundred feet.
Glenn believed he could feed it into the old conduit and break through the mineral deposits.
Back at the springhouse, he inserted the rod into the wooden bore.
It moved forward.
Ten feet.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The rod continued sliding through the line, bending slightly as it followed the buried route.
Glenn felt encouraged.
At eighty feet, it stopped.
He applied gentle pressure.
Nothing.
He withdrew the rod slightly and tried again.
Still nothing.
The obstruction felt solid.
Glenn assumed he had reached a particularly heavy accumulation of calcium.
He pushed harder.
The rod bent.
The resistance increased.
Then, suddenly, something gave way.
The rod lurched forward.
For a brief instant, Glenn thought he had broken through the blockage.
Then he heard a sharp crack.
The sound came from farther down the buried line.
He froze.
It was the same kind of sound he had heard when the tractor blade split the first log.
Only now the damage was underground, beyond his sight.
Glenn immediately stopped pushing.
He slowly withdrew the rod.
The resistance had not been caused entirely by calcium. At approximately eighty feet, the fiberglass rod had struck a corroded iron sleeve joint whose opening had narrowed to less than an inch. When Glenn applied more force, the rod punched through the weakened fitting.
It then continued forward, bending as it moved, until it struck the interior wall of another wooden section approximately thirty feet farther down.
The impact split the old chestnut along its grain.
Glenn had started with one damaged log.
Now he had additional failures.
The joint at eighty feet had been broken.
The section near 110 feet had split badly enough to allow soil into the conduit.
And the water line was in worse condition than before he attempted to clear it.
He stood beside the springhouse, staring at the rod.
For the first time since the discovery, he seriously considered abandoning the entire project.
The old system had survived 116 years underground.