Elise came up beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her in the cold canyon air. "Three years," she said quietly. "My father found this. He stood right here, probably. Looking at the same water."
"He'd have wanted to break it himself," Caleb said.
"He'd have wanted someone to." She checked the Winchester's action with hands that didn't shake. "I'm glad it's us."
Hiram was already moving, the oilskin bundle under his arm, his limp barely slowing him on the uneven ground. "You two jaw all night, the sun'll come up and spoil the surprise. Base of the crib, like we planned."
It rose out of the darkness ahead of them: a timber-crib dam, maybe thirty feet high, built across the narrowest throat of the canyon — squared logs pinned with iron, the spaces packed with rock and clay, a whole reservoir held back by carpentry and greed. On the far side the water lay black and still and enormous, starlight skimming its surface. On the near side, the creek bed below the dam was bone-dry dust.
Caleb's throat closed. Three years. Three years this water had sat here while children drank mud.
"Base of the crib," Hiram whispered, unpacking the dynamite with hands that had handled blasting powder for thirty years and still had all their fingers because he respected it. "Two charges, low and central, where the water weight does the rest of the work. Timber's old. She'll go like a drunkard's promise."
"How long?"
"Ten minutes to set, if nobody bothers us." Hiram's grin was a white slash in his blackened face. "Everybody always bothers us."
Elise took the uphill side with the Winchester. Caleb took the downhill. Hiram waded into the shallow seep at the dam's foot, feeling along the timber with his fingertips the way a doctor finds a pulse, and began packing the charges into the crevices where log met rock.
The first seven minutes were perfect. The only sounds were water shifting against timber, Hiram's breathing, and far off, a night bird calling once and then thinking better of it.
In the eighth minute, a match flared on the dam crest.
"Hold it right there, Barlow."
The voice belonged to Dorian Kane, and it carried the particular laziness of a man who has already decided how the conversation ends. Lantern light bloomed along the crest — four, five lanterns, men spreading out along the top of the dam with rifles. One of them laughed, low. Caleb counted shapes against the starlight and didn't like the arithmetic: five rifles on the crest, Rafe in the middle, and the three of them caught at the foot of the dam like fish in a barrel.
Hiram froze with a stick of dynamite half-seated in the crib. "Evening, Rafe."
"You're a long way from your forge, old man." Rafe's silhouette moved along the crest, unhurried. "And you've brought the schoolmarm and the dowser. Whitmore said you were getting bold. He didn't say suicidal."
Up the slope, Elise had gone perfectly still behind her rock, the Winchester trained on the crest. Caleb could feel her waiting — waiting for him, the way people had been waiting on him all his life, and the way he had failed them once before in another town with another dry well. Not tonight. The thought came up out of him like water from a struck spring: not tonight, not here, not these people.
Caleb stepped out from the shadow of the abutment into the open, his hands visible and empty, and every rifle on the crest swung toward him. "Let him finish, Rafe. Then we'll talk."
"Oh, we'll talk." Rafe stopped directly above them, his lantern throwing his shadow down the face of the dam like a thrown spear. "We'll talk about the Hartwell well. You want to know what happened to Elias, dowser? Ask the bottom of it. He's still down there keeping the secret."
Elise's voice came out of the dark uphill, steady as a metronome. "My father didn't fall, Rafe."
"No," Rafe said. "He didn't."
It was an admission and a taunt at once, and something cold and final settled in Caleb's chest. He had known. They had all known. But hearing it said aloud, here, in the dark, with the water groaning behind the timber — it turned knowledge into a debt.
"Light it," Caleb said.
Hiram's match was already moving. Rafe shouted, and the crest of the dam erupted in muzzle flash.
The first volley went high — the shooters were firing down at shadows, and shadows are hard to kill. Caleb fired back twice, not to hit but to make them keep their heads down, and then he was moving along the base of the dam toward the near abutment, where the rock sloped up toward the crest. Elise's Winchester cracked from uphill, once, twice — disciplined shots, and one of the lanterns went spinning off the crest and shattered on the rocks below, taking its light with it.
"Caleb!" Hiram roared. "Charges are set! Two minutes on the fuses!"
"Then run!"
"I set them, I stay till they're lit proper!" The old blacksmith's voice cracked with something between fury and joy. "Go on! Get up there and keep them off me!"
Caleb went up the abutment like a man climbing out of his own grave. Loose rock slid under his boots. A bullet cracked past his ear close enough to stir his hair. He reached the crest as Rafe turned to meet him, and for a moment the two men stood facing each other on top of thirty feet of stolen water, with the whole black reservoir breathing behind them.
Rafe was bigger, and he knew it. He'd left his rifle slung and come in with a bowie knife, the way men do when they want it personal.
"You should have kept to dowsing, Ward," Rafe said. "Whitmore offered you work. Good money."
"Whitmore offered me a leash."