The smithy's sign said H. DOBBS, and the doors stood open, the forge lit. The man himself was at the anvil — sixty-odd, forearms like fence posts, a leather apron over a shirt gone gray with sweat — drawing a shoeing nail out of the coals for no horse at all, just to keep his hands honest.
"Afternoon," Caleb said. "My mule could use water, if you've got any to spare."
Amos Barlow looked at Juniper — really looked, the way men who know animals do — and nodded once. He drew a bucket from a barrel inside, no more than half full, and set it down. Juniper drank like she'd been saving it up.
"On the house," Hiram said. "She looks like she's earned it."
"Caleb Mercer," Caleb said, offering his hand. "I dig wells."
Hiram's grip was dry and hard. "Amos Barlow. I shoe horses that ain't coming." A pause. "Wells, huh."
"Any work in it?"
Hiram glanced down the street toward the dry creek bed, then back. "Wells are dying faster than we can deepen 'em, mister. Best water in the county was the Hartwell well, and that's been sealed a year now."
"Why sealed?"
Something closed in Hiram's face like a shutter. "Ask the schoolteacher. It was her family's." He turned back to his anvil, then stopped. "Careful whose water you drink in this town, Mr. Ward."
It wasn't a threat. It was something worse. It was advice.
The schoolhouse door stood open when Caleb came back up the street, leading Juniper. Inside, five or six children sat at scarred desks in the heat, copying letters onto slates with the slow deliberation of the exhausted. The woman from the doorway stood at the blackboard, and when she saw him she set down her chalk and came out onto the steps, wiping her hands on her apron.
"You're the dowser," she said. It wasn't a question. "News moves faster than water here. I'm Elise Hartwell."
"Caleb Mercer." He touched his hat brim. "Ma'am."
"Mr. Barlow waters every strange animal that comes through. Don't mistake it for optimism." There was something almost like humor in it, tired as she was. She was thirty, maybe, with her dark hair pinned up and coming down anyway, and eyes that had done their crying a while back and moved on to watching.
"Is there work for a well-digger?" he asked.
"There's need," she said. "Work's another thing. Nobody can pay. The creek's been dead three years, the wells are going one by one, and Mr. Whitmore's wagon is the only water most folks can count on." A beat. "What would you find that the sky hasn't taken?"
Caleb looked past her, up the street to where the white creek bed cut behind the town and ran on toward the hills, a pale scar between the red rock. "Water doesn't vanish, Miss Hartwell. It goes down, or it goes somewhere. The sky's only half the story."
"My father used to walk a creek bed the way you're looking at that street," she said quietly. "Said water never lies. Only men do."
"Your father the one with the well?"
"The Hartwell well. Sweet water at forty feet when everybody else was digging eighty." Her mouth tightened. "It's sealed now."
"Mr. Barlow said to ask you why."
"Mr. Barlow talks too much." But she didn't sound angry. She sounded like someone holding a door shut with her shoulder. "Walk the creek in the morning if you want, Mr. Ward. Look at the wells after. One week — that's about how long hope lasts here before it starts costing people."
She went back inside. The children bent over their slates. Caleb stood in the street with Juniper's reins in his hand and the whole thirsty town ticking in the heat around him, and he thought about the dime he'd spent, and the forty dollars in his poke, and the two hundred miles of dust behind him.
He made camp that evening in the dead creek bed under the skeleton of a cottonwood, where the law couldn't call it vagrancy and the ground was free. He cooked beans and shared them with Juniper, who ate the leavings out of his pan with the dignity of a duchess, and he watched the sun go down the color of a fresh burn. Somewhere up in the hills, a coyote tried a note and thought better of it. The air cooled one degree, then stopped, as if even the night were too tired to bother.
That was when he saw the girl.
She couldn't have been seven. Barefoot, in a dress made over from something bigger, she knelt at the edge of the green-scummed seep puddle and drank with her cupped hands, mud on her chin, her throat working. Her mother came down the bank after her, took her arm — not unkindly, just tired beyond unkindness — and led her away up toward the dark houses, talking low, the way mothers talk when there's nothing good left to say.
Caleb sat very still for a long time.
Then he unwrapped the oilcloth from his bedroll and took out the forked willow rods, eleven years old, dark with handling. He didn't dowse — there was no point, not in the dark, not yet. He just held them, feeling the familiar weight, the way other men held a Bible.
"One week," he told Juniper, who flicked an ear. "We can spare one week."
The rods lay still in his hands. But his eyes were already reading the ground the way other men read scripture — the cracked plates, the white scar of the bed running up toward the hills — and the ground, he thought, had a story it wanted told.
The heat didn't leave at night. It just changed its posture — settling low over the creek bed like a animal lying down, breathing through its mouth.
Caleb slept the way he always slept in strange towns: lightly, with his rifle across his knees and one ear open. Juniper dozed standing up, her head low, her breathing slow. The cottonwood skeleton ticked as it cooled. And underneath all of it, for a long while, there was nothing.