Where does it come in? she asked.
Up past the boundary, Pete said. "Through the pines, off Hollis's ground."
Then we follow it, Clara said.
Elias opened his mouth to say it was a waste of time, and then he closed it, because he had watched this woman be right twice in a week and he was beginning to understand that his pride was the most expensive thing on the ranch.
They followed the creek up through the pines, the ground rising under them, the air sharp with resin and cold. The pines stood close here, and the light fell between them in thin shafts, and the only sound was the horses' feet and the thin thread of water over stone. Elias remembered this creek as a boy, remembered it running full and fast after the spring melt, remembered lying on his belly on the bank with Caleb and watching minnows dart in the clear water. The memory came back with a force that surprised him, because he had not thought of it in years, and it made the trickle at his feet feel like a personal insult.
Then they crossed the Ward boundary onto Hollis's land. And there it was.
A ditch. Fresh-dug, straight as a ruler, cut through the bank above the creek. At its head stood a low dam of earth and timber, logs laid across the stream bed and packed with dirt, turning the water aside into a channel that ran down toward Hollis's lower fields. The timber was new. The earth was dark and ungrassed. A man did not need to be a surveyor to read it: this was weeks old, not years.
Clara dismounted without a word and walked the length of the dam, her boots sinking in the fresh earth. She measured it with her stride. She noted the timber — pine, cut green, the axe marks still bright. She drew it in her book: the creek's course, the ditch, the dam, the distances back to the boundary, all in careful lines.
Elias stood beside his horse and felt two things at once, hot and cold together. Anger, because his water had been stolen out from under him while he stared at the sky. And shame, because he had ridden past that trickle all autumn and called it a dry year, and his wife of one week had found the truth in a single morning.
That's our creek, he said.
Yes, Clara said. She did not look up from her book. "And this is the proof of where it went."
She closed the book and tucked it into her coat, and the wind came down off the pines smelling of snow, and Elias knew that the winter was no longer the only fight the ranch had coming. He looked at the dam, and at his wife's calm face, and he understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that he had two choices now: he could be angry at the man who stole his water, or he could be grateful to the woman who found it. He chose, for the first time in a long while, to be grateful first.
They rode to Hollis's ranch the next morning, and Elias spent the first mile rehearsing the things he would say, and the second mile discarding them, because every version ended with his fist in Garrett Hollis's face and that was a satisfaction he could not afford.
The ride itself gave him time to think, and thinking did him no favors. He and Hollis had been neighbors for twenty years, and for most of those years the relationship had been a careful truce: nods at the store, no visits, no favors asked and none given. Hollis had money and land and a way of smiling that made smaller men feel small, and Elias had always answered that smile with silence, because silence was cheaper than a feud. Now the silence had cost him his creek, and he wondered, riding through the cold morning with Clara beside him, whether a feud would have been cheaper after all.
Hollis's place announced itself before they reached the house: a painted barn, fences straight as a plumb line, cattle fat on grass that had no business being so green in late October. Elias looked at that grass and felt his jaw tighten. It was his water making it green. Every blade of it was an argument, and Hollis had been winning the argument all autumn while Elias stared at the sky.
Hollis himself came out onto the porch as they rode up, a big man in a heavy coat, his face red from the cold or from good living, his laugh already starting before he had anything to laugh about.
Ward! he called. "And the new Mrs. Ward. Come to admire the place, have you?"
He ushered them in with a broad gesture, as if the house were a stage and he its owner, and Elias took in the parlor in a glance: a rug thick enough to lose boots in, a stove polished black, curtains at the windows that had never known a ranch kitchen's grease. It was the house of a man who had never worried about a winter, and Elias felt his own house — plain, worn, honest — rise up in comparison and find itself wanting, and then he caught himself, because comparison was Hollis's game and he refused to play it.
Whiskey? Hollis offered, already reaching for a bottle.
No, thank you, Clara said, and her voice was as polite as Sunday. "We've come about the creek."