"Now I walk the rest of that channel," he said. "Up to the canyon. And I find out whose hand it is."
He never got to the canyon that day.
He was coming back down the creek bed in the late afternoon, the sun hammering the white clay so hard it hurt to look at, when the rider came out of the heat shimmer ahead of him — walking his horse, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world and none of the mercy.
Dorian Kane was forty-something, lean as a fence rail, with flat gray eyes and a stillness about him that Caleb recognized the way a man recognizes a rattlesnake's stillness — not peace, but patience. His black coat was dusty, his hat was pulled low, and his right hand rested easy on his thigh, nowhere near his gun and somehow closer to it than any hand had a right to be.
"Mr. Ward," Rafe said, reining up. "The dowser."
"That's right."
"Mr. Whitmore doesn't like strangers walking his watershed." Rafe's voice was soft, almost pleasant. That was the worst thing about it.
"Your Mr. Whitmore owns the watershed now?" Caleb asked.
"Mr. Whitmore owns the bank that owns the notes on half the land this creek touches." Rafe smiled, and it didn't reach the flat gray eyes. "That's close enough to owning the watershed for most folks' purposes."
Caleb waited.
"Dig your wells, dowser," Rafe said. "That's honest work, and this town could use it." He leaned forward slightly in the saddle, and the pleasantness thinned like ice in spring. "But don't dig into other men's business. Men have gotten hurt confusing the two. A well-digger ought to understand the difference between a hole that gives water and a hole that gets a man buried."
It hung in the hot air between them — not quite a threat, the way a drawn knife isn't quite a wound. Yet. Behind Rafe, the white creek bed ran up toward the hills, and Caleb thought about chisel pits in bedrock and a dark high-water line cut off clean, and he made his decision standing right there in the open, the way he'd made most of the important decisions in his life.
"I dig where I'm asked," Caleb said.
"Nobody asked," said Dorian Kane, and turned his horse, and rode away up the creek bed toward the hills, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world.
Caleb stood in the white bed and watched him go, and felt the old familiar cold settle in his stomach — the cold he'd felt in towns before this one, the cold that meant the ground he'd been reading had started reading him back.
That night he sat at his camp in the creek bed, cleaning his rifle by firelight — an old Henry his father had carried, worn smooth at the stock — and thinking about chisel pits in bedrock and tarred hemp fibers and a girl drinking mud. He thought about Dorian Kane's flat gray eyes. He thought about Elise Hartwell's face when she'd said her father came home white as flour. He oiled the Henry's action with particular care, the way a man does when he expects to need it.
The shot came out of the dark without a muzzle flash he could see, without a sound before it but the crack itself, flat and vicious across the creek bed.
His hat spun off his head and landed in the dirt five feet away.
He was flat on his belly behind the fire before the echo died, the Henry up and tracking across the black bank, his heart hammering against the clay. Juniper squealed and lunged at her picket rope. Nothing moved on the bank. Nothing moved anywhere. The crickets, shocked silent, started up again one by one, like an audience deciding the show was over.
Caleb waited a full five minutes. Then he bellied forward and dragged his hat back with the rifle barrel.
One clean hole through the crown, dead center. A warning shot, placed by a man who could have put it through his skull just as easy — placed to say exactly that.
He sat with his back to the fire, the rifle across his knees, and looked upstream, where the black cut of Hollow Canyon split the stars in half.
"Message received," he said softly, to no one, to the dark.
He hung the hat on the camp pole where the hole showed like an eye. Then he kicked dirt over the fire, packed Juniper, and led her up into town through the dark — the livery stable had a loft, and a loft had walls. In the morning, he would walk the creek again.
The bullet hole in Caleb's hat sat a clean half inch left of where his skull had been.
He found it at dawn, turning the hat slow in his hands in the gray light of the livery loft. The felt was punched neat as a paper target, the edges scorched black. Whoever had fired out of the dark last night hadn't meant to kill him. A man who could put a ball through a hat brim at forty yards in moonlight could have put it through a head. The message was the thing. *Dig your wells, dowser. Don't dig into other men's business.*
Caleb set the hat on his knee and looked out through the loft door at Copper Creek waking up thirsty. A woman beat a rug on a porch rail and the dust of it hung in the air like smoke. Down at the schoolhouse, somebody was drawing the bucket up slow from the shallow school well, hand over hand, the way people handled water now — like it might break.
He'd been shot at for less, and he'd been paid to walk away for more. What he couldn't do was unsee the tool marks on the bedrock up at the bend, or the cut channel where Copper Creek had been beheaded like a man with a wire round his throat.
Hoofbeats, unhurried, in the street below. Then Elise Hartwell's voice, pitched low: "Mr. Ward? Are you decent?"