Your correspondent kept a watch on the Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice on Thursday morning, at the lower sluice gate. The air was clear. The principal gauge stood at ten drakes, by the Deputy’s own brief note a quarter of an hour earlier. The hour was a little before the third honk. The water at the lower gate ran at the level the dog days have settled into as the season’s mark these last weeks, and her note, lodged in its customary place on the wall above the gauge, said the same.
Her business at the gate was the lower hinge. It is a small wooden piece of the sluice’s older furniture. It cannot be dated with any confidence. The Warden of the Sluice, when the matter has come up, has called it “of the sluice’s own time, not anybody else’s.” So much for the hinge. The Deputy went at it in the way your correspondent has lately come to know, these inspections of hers having become a fixture of the south reeds at that hour. She turned the hinge twice. She wrote in her notebook. She turned it once more, the other way, and wrote again.
What she wrote, your correspondent cannot tell you. The notebook is the Deputy’s affair and not the gazette’s, by long convention and her own settled preference. It is a small book. It is bound in something this desk has never managed to identify. And it is with her at the sluice every time she is seen there. Whether it is the same book each morning, or whether she keeps a run of them, one to a season or to a class of observation, is a question that has not been put to her. The long-resident frog says the Warden’s predecessors kept theirs that way.
The Warden of the Sluice was not at the sluice while she worked. By every record the gazette can assemble, from her three conditions reports and from your correspondent’s own watching since spring, he has not been seen at the sluice in person for a stretch one would have to call considerable. She did not look to be expecting him. Nor, and this is the thing your correspondent turned over on the way back to the reeds, did the work at the hinge look done for any review of his. She was, on the morning’s evidence, keeping up a duty that has, for want of anyone else to keep it, become hers.
The wall marking was visible over her shoulder as she made her last note at the gauge. It is the three short parallel lines, with a possible fourth, that she photographed on the twenty-sixth of June and that the gazette described in its column of that date. She did not attend to it, not while your correspondent watched, and does not, by all signs, need to. The marking has become, the way small landmarks do, a fixture of her station. She passes it as she passes the gauge, the gate, the hinge.
A little after the fourth honk she finished, closed the notebook, tucked it into the customary fold of her wing, and went off along the lower reeds toward the east bank. Of the Warden there was nothing to report, then or all morning. He was simply not there to be seen.
The water kept running. The morning was acceptable.