"I have a schoolteacher's understanding of men," she said. "I have watched them for six years, and I have written down what they do."
The next morning she went to find the county surveyor. Ivo Ketchum kept an office in town, above the store, a small room with a map of the territory on the wall and a shelf of instruments — chains, and compasses, and leveling rods — that he kept oiled and ordered, the way a careful man keeps the tools of his trade. He was forty-eight years old, a lean, weathered man with a graying beard and hands that were steady from years of holding a rod still in the wind, and he listened to Selma's proposal without interrupting, which was, she thought, the mark of a man who measures for a living: he did not argue with a proposition before he had heard it whole.
When she had finished, he leaned back in his chair, and he looked at her draft, and at the map on his wall, and at the creek, which was visible from his window, running full in the spring light, and he said, "Miss Ivers, I measure land for the territory. I measure ditches, and roads, and claims. I do not take sides in valley quarrels, because a surveyor who takes sides is no longer a surveyor. But a measurement is a measurement, whoever asks for it, and if you want a weekly gauge at two headgates, kept in duplicate, I can do that work, and do it honestly, and sign my name to it."
"That is all I ask," Selma said.
"Then there is one more thing," Ketchum said, and he opened a drawer and took out a small iron-bound box, the kind used for holding deeds and money in trust. "If your wages are the stake, they must be held by someone who is not a party to the trial. I will hold them, in this box, in my office, and I will give a receipt for them, and no one — not you, not Mr. Halden, not Mr. Yates — will touch them until the season's measuring is done. That is the only way a wager is honest."
Selma agreed at once, and she counted out her summer term's wages, coin by coin, onto his desk — money she had earned teaching thirty-two children through a winter, money that paid her rent and her store account and the coal for her stove — and she watched him place it in the box, and lock the box, and write her a receipt in his careful hand, and she felt the weight of what she had just done settle on her, not as regret, but as seriousness, the way a person feels the weight of a promise once it has been spoken aloud and cannot be taken back.
Ketchum walked with her to the door, and he said, almost as an afterthought, "Miss Ivers, I have measured this valley's ditches for twelve years, and I have never once been asked to measure whether the water was shared fairly. I have been asked to measure where a ditch runs, and how wide it is, and who owns the ground beside it. You are the first person who has ever asked me to measure whether the sharing itself was just. I do not know how your trial will end. But I am glad to be the man who measures it."
She thanked him, and she walked back through the town with the receipt folded in her pocket, and she thought about the fact that the county surveyor — a man who answered to the territory and to no man in Cedar Valley — had just agreed to be her witness, and that the trial now had what Eben had said it needed: a field, and a witness, and a stake. There remained only one thing: the signature of the man who was certain she would lose.
Lars Halden received her in his own house, in the upper valley, in a room with a large desk and a window that looked out over his ranch, and he listened to the terms with the air of a man being shown a curiosity — polite, attentive, and entirely unconvinced. His son Rolf was there, standing by the window, saying nothing, and Selma was aware of him in the way she had been aware of him at the schoolhouse, as a quiet presence who listened more than he spoke. She laid the paper on Halden's desk, and she read the terms aloud, slowly, so that there could be no misunderstanding about any of them: one season, one field, two ways of watering, weekly measurement by the county surveyor, her wages held in trust, adoption of the rotation if the trial succeeded, silence from her if it failed.