Or well enough to be a good one, Elias said. "A liar who works badly gets sent away. A liar who works well gets kept, and kept close to the thing he came to learn."
Mara looked at the line of new posts running toward the rocky hills, straight as a plumb line, and she felt the unease settle deeper rather than lift. "Then we keep watching," she said.
And that night, as Elias lay on his pallet and listened to the sisters breathing and to the wind in the pines, he thought about Deke Marlow asleep in the barn, patient as a man with all the time in the world, and he thought that help arriving with a question mark over it was still help, but it was not yet trust. Trust, he had learned in this house, was built the way fences were built: post by post, in daylight, with your hands where people could see them. Deke had laid his first posts well. Elias would wait to see what he built on them.
The days that followed gave Elias little to fault and much to watch. Deke rose before the sisters, fed the horses without being told, and took his place on the far line as if he had always belonged there. He asked Mara, once, about the way Silas had set his corner posts, and he listened to her answer with a respect that seemed genuine, and he set his own corners the same way, deep and braced, as if he were honoring a dead man's work rather than merely copying it. June, who brought water out to the fence line at noon, found herself talking to Deke about the horses, and he answered her plainly, without flattery, and she came back to the cabin saying that perhaps they had judged him too harshly. Mara said nothing to that, but she watched June's face, and she watched Deke's hands, and she kept her own counsel.
Elias, for his part, began to keep a quiet record in his head, the way a tracker keeps sign. Deke never wandered after dark, that was true. But Deke also never wasted a walk. When he went to the creek for water, he went by the longest way, past the corral and past the garden, as if he were learning the ground. When he mended a rail, he looked not only at the rail but at the whole line, at where it ran and where it thinned. When Mara spoke of the winter stores, Deke listened a beat too long. None of it was proof. All of it together was a pattern, and Elias had learned, in ten years of reading country, that patterns were how trouble announced itself before it had a name. He said nothing to the sisters yet, because a suspicion is not an accusation, and he would not poison a house that had only just learned to speak honestly. But he began to sleep lighter, and to check the barn at midnight, and to note, each morning, whether Deke's boots were dusty from a walk he had not taken in daylight. So far, they were clean. So far, the question mark held.
The creek went wrong on a morning that began clear and hot, with a wind that smelled of dust and distant rain. June noticed it first, because June noticed water the way Mara noticed fences. She went down to Willow Creek with a bucket for the garden, as she did every morning, and she stopped at the bank and stared. The water was low — not the low of late summer, which they knew, but a thin, sulky trickle over stones that should have been covered, and the pool where she fished was shrinking, its edges rimmed with drying mud.
Mara, she called, and her voice carried up to the cabin. "Come and look at this."
Mara came, and Elias came behind her, and the three of them stood on the bank and looked at the creek that had run past the garden since Silas Ellison built the cabin, and that now ran as if someone had put a hand over its mouth upstream.
Upstream, Elias said at once. "Not a drought. Drought dries a creek slow, from the edges in. This is cut off."
They followed the creek up past the garden, past the pasture, past the willows where Elias had talked to June, and into the narrower part of the valley where the water came down between rocks. Half a mile up, where the creek bent around a stand of alder, they found it: a dam, built in the night, of brush and stones and packed mud, laid across the creek bed with a care that was almost workmanlike. It was not a beaver dam, and it was not an accident of a fallen tree. Someone had chosen the narrowest place, and had piled the stones in courses, and had woven brush through them to catch the silt, and had done it quietly enough that no one in the cabin had heard.
Mara knelt at the dam and put her hand to the mud, and her face went hard. "This is Kline's war now," she said. "Not cattle through a fence. Not a threat at the door. Quiet and mean. Take their water, and their garden dies, and their horses go thirsty, and by winter they will be glad to sell."
June's hands were shaking, not from fear but from anger, and she had to set her bucket down to keep from throwing it. "Our garden," she said. "The beans are just coming on. The squash —"
We will clear it, Elias said. "Together, now, before the sun gets higher. And we will look for what else they left."