She dropped the bucket and ran back down the street screaming, and by the time the sun cleared the ridge half the town was standing in the creek bed in their nightclothes, laughing and crying and cupping water in their hands like it might vanish if they blinked.
By eight o'clock the whole town knew the dam was gone. By nine, everybody knew who'd broken it.
Sheriff Samuel Crowe rode out to the schoolhouse at midmorning, and found Elise Hartwell sitting on the steps with her father's Winchester across her knees and a look on her face like a woman who had finally stopped holding her breath. Caleb Mercer sat beside her, his coat still damp, a bandage on his forearm where a timber splinter had laid it open. Amos Barlow was asleep in the schoolroom with his boots off, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows.
"Morning," Crowe said, dismounting. He looked older than he had a week ago, and younger too, the way men look when a weight comes off. "I hear the creek came home."
"It did," Elise said.
"And Dorian Kane went with the water."
"He did," Caleb said.
Crowe nodded slowly. He took off his hat and turned it in his hands. "I've been sheriff of this town for eleven years, Ward. Eleven years of knowing things I couldn't prove and watching men I couldn't touch. Whitmore owns half the mortgages in this county and the other half's afraid of him." He looked at Elise. "Your father came to me once, you know. About the creek. I told him I needed more than a feeling."
"He's past needing your help now, Sheriff," Elise said, not unkindly. "But I'm not. And neither is this town."
"I know." Crowe put his hat back on. "That's why I'm here. I need everything you have. All of it. Today."
---
What they had was this: the tally page from the canyon, in Elise's hand and in Caleb's, and the copy Elise had hidden in the schoolhouse stove the night before the dam-breaking — "in case we don't come back," she'd said, and now she drew it out of the cold ashes with hands that shook only a little. What they had was Amos Barlow, awake now and furious, ready to swear under oath that he'd seen Dorian Kane's horse tied behind the Hartwell well-house on the night Elias died — "Saw it with my own eyes and said nothing for a year, and I'll carry that to my grave, but I'll say it now." What they had was Caleb's testimony about the dam, the reservoir, the water wagons running at night.
What they didn't have, yet, was the tally book itself — Whitmore's private ledger of every extortion sale, every dry farm bought for pennies.
"He keeps it in his office," Elise said. "Second drawer, left side of the desk. My father told me once — back when they were still speaking, back before. He said Whitmore writes everything down because he doesn't trust his own memory, and doesn't trust anyone else's either."
Crowe looked at her for a long moment. "That's a search of a banker's office, Miss Hartwell. I need a warrant, and the judge in Prescott — "
"The judge in Prescott is a hundred miles away and Whitmore will be gone by sundown," Caleb said. "He was on the canyon rim at dawn, Sheriff. He watched his dam die. You think he's sitting in his office waiting for paperwork?"
Crowe's jaw worked. Then he stood, settled his hat, and checked his revolver the way a man does when he's decided to stop being careful. "Then we'd better hurry."
---
They found Silas Whitmore in his office above the bank, which surprised everyone except Elise. "He'll want it to look orderly," she'd said on the ride over. "He'll want to walk out like a businessman, not run like a thief." And there he was: sixty-two years old, silver-haired, calmly packing papers into a leather satchel while his clerk hovered white-faced in the corner. A carpetbag stood by the door. Through the window, his carriage waited in the street, driver up, horses restless.
"Going somewhere, Mr. Whitmore?" Crowe said from the doorway.
Whitmore didn't look up from his papers. "Tucson. Business. Is there a law against it, Sheriff?"
"There will be." Crowe stepped inside, Caleb and Hiram behind him filling the doorway. "I need your tally book, Whitmore. The one in the second drawer, left side."
For the first time, Whitmore's hands stopped moving. "I don't know what you're — "
"Elise Hartwell told me where it is." Crowe crossed the room, pulled open the drawer, and lifted out a leather-bound book, thick as a Bible. "And Amos Barlow is prepared to testify about what Dorian Kane was doing at the Hartwell well-house the night Elias died. And Caleb Mercer is prepared to testify about the dam in Hollow Canyon, the reservoir behind it, and the water you've been selling this town at gunpoint prices for three years."
Whitmore's face did something complicated. "Rafe acted alone in — whatever happened to Elias Hartwell. I never — "
"Save it." Crowe opened the tally book at random. "'J. Abernathy — forty dollars — two barrels.' 'The Kline widow — twenty-five — one barrel.' Page after page, Whitmore. Three years of it." He looked up. "You dammed a creek, starved a town, and bought it back acre by acre. That's not business. That's war."
It was Hiram who found the letters. While Crowe read the charges, the blacksmith — who'd been standing by the desk with his arms crossed — noticed the false bottom in the top drawer, the kind of thing a man who works with his hands spots the way other men spot a lie. He pried it up with his pocketknife, and out came a packet of letters tied with twine, the seals broken long ago.
Crowe read the first one, and his face changed. "Commissioner Malcolm Reed," he said softly. "'My dear Cornelius — the Copper Creek complaints are buried. See that the quarterly arrangement continues.'" He looked at Whitmore. "Your partner in the territory office. Every complaint this town ever filed died on his desk."