a chip of wood over a measured distance, and the whole entered twice, once in his own book and once in a copy that would be kept at the schoolhouse, where anyone in the valley could come and read it.
"A measurement that only one man holds is a rumor," Ketchum said, as he wrote the first entries. "A measurement that two men hold, in two books, is a record. And a record is a thing that can be checked."
He took the baseline readings then, with the creek running full and both gates closed: the depth at each board, the flow in the ditch, the moisture of the ground at the trial plot and at the upper rows, judged by the simple test of a spadeful of earth squeezed in the hand. He wrote each number twice, and he signed the baseline page, and he asked Selma to sign it also, and Eben, so that the starting point of the trial would carry all three names, and no one could say later that the ground had been chosen to favor anyone. The baseline, he said, was the most important page of the whole season, because every reading after it would be compared to it, and a trial without a true beginning was only a story.
Rolf Halden came while they were working, on horseback, saying he had been riding the upper ditch and had stopped to see how the measuring was done, as Selma had told him he might. He did not interfere. He stood back, and he watched, and after a while Ketchum, who was a man who liked an extra pair of hands when they were offered honestly, asked him to hold the leveling rod steady while he took a reading at the trial headgate, and Rolf held it, carefully, with both hands, the way a man holds something he does not want to spoil. When the reading was done, Rolf asked Ketchum how often the boards would be read, and Ketchum said weekly, at the same hour, and Rolf nodded, and said, "Then I will know when to come," and Selma, hearing that, wrote his words in her notebook too, beneath the baseline figures, because she had learned that a witness who comes of his own accord is worth more than a witness who is summoned.
Eben, meanwhile, walked the line where the holding pond would be dug, at the end of the ditch, on the lowest ground of the lower field, and he drove small stakes to mark its corners, pacing the length and breadth with his own stride, and muttering figures to himself about how much water the pond would hold when it was full, and how long that water would last a row of trees in the evening, when the sun was low. He had dug ponds before, in his younger years, and he knew the work of it, and he did not seem daunted by the digging ahead, only thoughtful, the way a man is thoughtful when he is planning work he believes in.
When the measuring was done, and the boards stood white against the dark earth at both headgates, and the baseline page was signed three times over, Ketchum packed his instruments, and he said to Selma, "Miss Ivers, the trial is now a real thing. It has a beginning, written down, and two boards, and a witness. Whatever happens from here, it will be measured, and the measuring will be honest, because I will do it myself, and I answer to the territory."
Selma thanked him, and Eben walked him to the lane, and Selma stood alone for a moment between the two gauge boards, looking first at one and then at the other, and thinking about how strange it was that two painted boards in a ditch could feel, suddenly, like the most important things in the valley — more important, for this season, than any speech or vote or schedule, because they did not argue, and they did not take sides, and they would say, week by week, in inches and numbers, what the water had actually done.
At the lower field, as the light failed, she stopped, and she looked at the ground where the trial would run, and at the ditch, and at the creek beyond it, and she drove a single wooden stake at the corner of the trial plot with her own hands, using a stone for a mallet, because the plot needed a mark, and because she wanted the first mark of the trial to be one she had