The first farmer refused to let Mara past his gate. Harlan Voss stood beneath a dead cottonwood with his hat in his hands, looking at the road behind her instead of her face. He had once helped Samuel Ellison rebuild a bridge after a spring flood. Now he seemed afraid even to remember the favor.
“I've got children,” he said when Mara explained the survey. “Three of them. Crowe holds the note on this place, and he can call it in whenever he likes.”
“He can't own the creek simply because you owe him money.”
“He doesn't have to own the creek. He owns the paper that says I owe him.”
Mara wanted to argue. Instead she asked whether his youngest daughter's cough had improved. Harlan's eyes flickered with surprise. “Some,” he said. “The schoolteacher brought medicine.” He looked at the envelope in Mara's hand, then stepped closer. “If you bring a petition, don't put my name first. My wife would never forgive me.”
At the second farm she found a locked house and a garden abandoned to weeds. At the third, an elderly widow invited her inside, poured chicory coffee, and told her that Crowe's men had taken two milk cows as security for an irrigation fee no one had approved. The widow would sign anything, she said, because there was nothing left worth threatening.
By sundown Mara had three signatures and seven refusals. The figures did not discourage her as much as she expected. She had heard the same fear in every doorway, but it had different shapes: a mortgage, a son employed at the quarry, a sick wife, a promise of better land downstream. Crowe had not conquered the valley through force alone. He had made each family believe its survival depended on remaining separate from the others.
At the Bell schoolhouse Ruth was dismissing her students. The children emerged with slates tucked beneath their arms, stepping around a puddle that had formed under the water barrel. Mara watched a little girl catch the last drops in her palm and drink them. Even here, water had become something to count.
Ruth invited Mara inside and read the petition carefully. “I can sign as a witness to the old channel,” she said. “But the board will ask why a schoolteacher knows more than a licensed surveyor.”
“Because your grandfather helped dig it.”
“Then we'd better find his notebooks.”
Ruth climbed onto a chair and reached for a battered wooden box above the blackboard. Inside were attendance ledgers, faded maps, and a notebook bound in blue cloth. Its pages contained rainfall figures, planting dates, and a rough sketch of the diversion before the first county courthouse had been built.
“My grandfather believed children should know where their drinking water came from,” Ruth said. “He made the older pupils measure the creek every spring. I thought it was an eccentric lesson.”
“It may be the lesson that saves us,” Mara answered.
They copied the measurements by lamplight. Near midnight, a knock interrupted them. The visitor was Tomas Vale, a bookkeeper from Crowe's freight office. His collar was damp with sweat, though the night had turned cold.
“I was told you had the original survey,” he said.
Mara did not move toward the drawer where she had hidden the copy. “Who told you?”
“A man who wants it destroyed.” Tomas swallowed. “I don't.”
He placed a narrow ledger on the desk. In it were columns of payments marked with initials and dates. Mara recognized Pike's name beside three large transfers. Other entries listed freight charges for timber delivered to the north diversion months before the county vote. The bookkeeper had circled one page in pencil.
“Crowe paid the assessment clerk to alter the acreage,” Tomas said. “And the sheriff was paid to keep anyone from questioning the transfer.”
“Why bring this to us?” Ruth asked.
“Because yesterday I saw the name of a family I know in a list of properties to be seized. Crowe says the liens are temporary. They aren't. He's selling the land to an eastern syndicate as soon as the titles clear.”
Mara studied him. A frightened man could be truthful and dangerous at the same time. “Will you testify?”
Tomas looked down. “If my wife and son can leave town first.”
“Where will they go?”
“My sister lives in Ash Hollow. I can put them on the morning coach.”
Mara closed the ledger. “Then we make copies tonight. You keep the original until your family is safe.”
He seemed relieved by the arrangement, but as he turned to leave he caught sight of a figure beyond the schoolhouse window. His face drained of color. Mara extinguished the lamp. Ruth pulled the curtain shut. Outside, a horse stamped once and then moved away.
They waited a full minute before anyone spoke. Tomas's hands shook as he retrieved the ledger. “They'll know I came here.”
“Perhaps,” Mara said. “But they won't know what you left.”