Half the valley had come. They came on foot and on horseback and in wagons, and they stood along the ditch banks and the fence lines, talking in low voices, and the children from the schoolhouse came too, because Selma had told them that this was their lesson for the day, and that they should watch how a question is answered when it is answered properly, with instruments and not with shouting. Eben stood beside her, his hands in his pockets, his orchard journal tucked under his arm, and he looked, to Selma's eye, like a man trying very hard to appear calm while his heart did something else entirely underneath his ribs.
Ivo Ketchum arrived at nine o'clock, driving a wagon with his instruments in boxes in the back, and he set up his work the way a man sets up a table for a meal he intends to take seriously: slowly, carefully, with everything in its place. He had a measuring weir, a wooden frame with a notch cut in it, that he set into the ditch at the headgate, and he had a chain and a rod and a level, and he had a book of his own, bound in canvas, in which he wrote every number twice, once in pencil and once in ink, so that no one could later say he had changed a figure. He did not hurry, and he did not explain himself to the crowd, and Selma, watching him, felt a gratitude she had not expected, because here at last was a man who treated measuring as a kind of honesty, and who did not care whose side the numbers fell on. She thought about the spring meeting, when her numbers had been waved away without ever being looked at, and about how different this morning felt, with instruments in the open and figures called aloud for anyone to hear.
Lars Halden arrived at half past nine, on a good horse, with his son Rolf riding beside him, and he did not dismount at first. He sat on his horse and looked at the pond, and at the ditch, and at the crowd, and his face gave away nothing, which Selma had learned, over the spring, was his way when he was most displeased. Then he dismounted, and he walked to where Ketchum was working, and he said, in a voice pitched to carry, "I hope, Mr. Ketchum, that you intend to measure both fields the same way. The upper ranches have been watered the way this valley has always watered, and I would not want a new method to be flattered by a new measure."
Ketchum looked up from his weir, and he said, "I measure water, Mr. Halden. I do not flatter it. The weir is the same weir for both fields, and the rod is the same rod, and the book is the same book. If you doubt the weir, you are welcome to stand beside it and watch every figure go in."
Halden nodded, as if that were all he had wanted to hear, and he took his place at the edge of the crowd, with his arms crossed, and Rolf stood a little behind him, quiet, watching the trial field the way a young man watches a thing he has already begun to think about in private.
The measuring took all morning, and it was not the quick, careless business that some in the crowd had expected. Ketchum began at the headgate, where he set his weir into the ditch and read the water as it passed the notch, calling out each figure to a boy with a slate, and then he walked the trial field with his rod, driving it into the soil at twelve marked points that he had staked out the day before, and at each point he read the depth of dampness aloud, and Selma, standing beside him with her own notebooks open, wrote the figures down as he spoke them, so that there were two records of every number before the morning was out. Then he crossed to the comparison field, a strip of Eben's upper ground that had been watered in the old way, by flooding, and he did the same work there,