with the same weir and the same rod, and the same slow care, and the crowd, which had begun the morning talking, grew quiet as it watched him, because there is something about a man doing careful work in the open that makes even a doubtful audience hold its tongue.
He measured the height of the crops next, walking the rows with a measuring stick, and he counted the green leaves and the dry ones on twenty plants chosen by lot, and he had Selma read aloud from her notebooks the dates and amounts of every release from the pond, and he had Eben read aloud from his orchard journal the years when the lower field had been flooded and the years when it had been left short, and the two books, laid side by side on a plank across two barrels, told the same story in different hands: that the trial field, which had taken less water, was holding more of it in the soil, and that the comparison strip, which had taken more, had already lost much of it to the low end of the field, where it stood in a shallow, stagnant sheet and did no crop any good at all.
One of the big-ranch farmers, a man named Coburn who farmed three hundred acres above the creek and had never had a kind word for Selma's proposal, pushed forward and said, "A rod in the ground proves nothing. The ground is wet near the ditch and dry further off, and any man can pick twelve points that suit him." Ketchum did not argue. He handed Coburn the rod and said, "Then pick twelve points yourself, Mr. Coburn, and drive it yourself, and read it yourself, and we will write down what you find." Coburn, to his credit, took the rod, and he drove it at twelve points of his own choosing, some near the ditch and some far from it, and he read the dampness himself, and his own readings agreed with Ketchum's within a finger's breadth, and he handed the rod back without another word, and walked to the back of the crowd, and stood there with his arms crossed, saying nothing more, which Selma took, rightly, as the closest thing to agreement that a man like Coburn was capable of giving in public.
A neighbor woman, Mrs. Albright, who kept a kitchen garden and had six children in Selma's school, came forward next, shyly, and asked Selma to show her the notebooks, and Selma opened them, all six years of them, and showed her the columns of dates and creek levels and rainfall, written in a schoolteacher's careful hand, and Mrs. Albright turned the pages slowly, and said, "You have been writing this down since my oldest was a little boy," and Selma said, "I have. It began as a sums lesson, and it became a habit, and then it became this." And Mrs. Albright nodded, and said, "Then it is not a new idea at all. It is an old observation, finally spoken aloud," and Selma felt her throat tighten, because that was exactly what it was, and no one in the valley had ever put it quite that way before.
Through all of this, Rolf Halden stood a little behind his father, quiet, watching the trial field the way a young man watches a thing he has already begun to think about in private. He did not speak, and he did not step forward, and Selma, who noticed such things, noticed that his eyes kept returning to the green rows of the trial field, and to the figures in Ketchum's book, and she wondered what he was thinking, but she did not ask, because some thoughts need to ripen in silence before they can be spoken, and she had learned, in six years of teaching, to give a quiet pupil room.
At noon, Ketchum stood up, and he wiped his hands on his trousers, and he turned to the crowd, and he said, in a plain voice, "The trial field has taken less water than the comparison field, by a third, and it holds more water in the soil at a depth of six inches, and its crop stands greener by eye and by measure. I have the figures here, and anyone who can read may read them."