Across the full width of the canyon, wedged between the red walls, stood a dam. Not a beaver's tangle or a prospector's thrown-together rock wall — a built thing, engineered: a timber crib of massive squared logs, cross-stacked and pinned, faced with fitted rock and sealed with clay, rising forty feet from the canyon floor. And behind it, black and still in the dusk, lay water. A lake. Acres of it, stretching back into the canyon's upper reaches, its surface catching the last light like a held mirror.
Copper Creek's water. All of it. While three miles downstream the town's children drank muddy seep and the cattle died in the ditches.
Caleb's hands curled into fists at his sides. He was a man who read water the way other men read scripture, and what he felt coming off that reservoir was obscene — millions of gallons penned in stone while Copper Creek choked.
"Whitmore's private lake," Elise breathed beside him. Her voice was thin with fury. "My God. My father found this. That's why—"
She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Caleb couldn't help himself — the well-digger in him had to read the thing the way a doctor reads a wound. He crept closer along the wall's shadow until he could see the dam's face plain in the last of the light, and what he saw told him a story Whitmore would never tell.
The crib was built of squared pine logs, each as thick as a man's thigh, cross-stacked in the old mining fashion and pinned with iron dogs. The upstream face was packed with fitted rock, and the whole of it sealed with puddled clay hauled up bucket by bucket — he could see the pale streaks where it had been smeared. Forty feet high, two hundred across. A structure like that didn't rise in a season. It took a full crew a year, maybe two, working steady.
"He built this before the drought," Caleb said, very quietly. "Elise — this dam is three, four years old. The drought didn't give him the idea. The drought was just the day he finally got to use it."
She stared at him. "He was waiting. All that time, while the town—"
"While the town prayed for rain, he was praying for it not to come." Caleb looked out over the black water, doing the arithmetic no man could stop himself from doing. The reservoir stretched back out of sight into the canyon's upper arm. At this depth, behind a forty-foot wall — he reckoned it in acre-feet the way other men reckoned dollars, and the number that came to him made his jaw tighten. "There's two years of Copper Creek behind that wall. Maybe three. Enough to float every farm in the valley through the worst drought in territorial memory — and he's letting it out one barrel at a time, at two dollars a barrel, to the same people whose creek it is."
On the far shore, half drowned in shadow, he could see the pale band on the rock where the waterline had stood even higher — last spring, maybe, before the selling season began. The lake had been fuller. It would be fuller again, if the rains ever came. Whitmore wasn't just hoarding water. He was farming drought the way other men farmed wheat: plant the dam, harvest the desperation.
A fish jumped out in the black water with a soft, incongruous plop — life going on, oblivious, in Whitmore's private sea. Somewhere up in the dark a nightjar called. The ordinary world, Caleb thought, going about its business on top of a crime.
They worked their way along the east wall, keeping to the shadows the cliff threw down, until they found a jumble of fallen boulders overlooking the dam's downstream face. From there they could see the whole operation laid out below them like a stage.
It was a working site, and a busy one. Lanterns moved along the dam's crest where men walked a patrol. Below the dam, at the base, a timber flume had been cut into the rock — a controlled spillway — and under it stood the wagons. Three of them, heavy freight wagons, unmarked, their beds stacked with oak barrels. Men rolled the barrels down a ramp from the flume house, and Caleb could hear, faint across the water, the hollow drumming of each barrel filling, the creak of the wagons' springs taking the weight.
"Night work," Caleb murmured. "They run it after dark so nobody on the trail sees the wagons coming down."
"Where do they take it?" Elise whispered.
"Whitmore's water wagons sell it in town at two dollars the barrel," Caleb said. "But three wagons is more than Copper Creek drinks. He's selling it somewhere else too. Or storing it." He watched a foreman check a paper against a lantern — broad shoulders, a gunman's walk. Even at a hundred yards, Caleb knew him. "That's Dorian Kane."
Elise went very still. The man who had cut her father's rope, walking a lantern line along a stolen lake.
They watched for an hour. The wagons filled and rolled out one by one, down the canyon trail toward town, their iron tires whispering in the dust. When the last wagon had gone and the crew thinned to the dam patrol, Caleb touched Elise's sleeve and pointed: near the flume house, where the second wagon had stood, something pale lay in the dirt — a paper, dropped and trodden, half under a barrel stave.
They waited until the patrol's lanterns moved to the far end of the crest. Then Caleb went down alone, fast and low, snatched the paper, and was back in the rocks before the lanterns turned.
It was a tally sheet, rain-wrinkled and boot-smudged, torn from a bound book. In a clerk's neat hand, columns ran down the page:
*Oct. 3 — 40 bbl @ $2 — J. Hara, delivered*
*Oct. 5 — 60 bbl @ $2 — town wagon*
*Oct. 6 — 80 bbl @ $1.50 — R. P.?*
*Oct. 8 — 100 bbl — held, V.*
And down the margin, in a different hand — bolder, impatient — a single line: *Dennison place folds Friday. Offer half.*
Elise read it over his shoulder by the thin moonlight, and her breath caught. "Dennison. The Dennison farm went to auction last month. Whitmore bought it for half its worth."