There was a silence, and then a murmur, and then a sound that Selma had not heard before in connection with her work, which was the sound of people talking about numbers as if numbers were something they could trust. Eben let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since spring, and the boy Nico, standing at the edge of the crowd, said, "I told you it walks like it knows where it is going," and nobody shushed him, which Selma took as a small and important sign.
Then Lars Halden stepped forward, and the murmur died, because everyone in the valley knew the sound of Halden stepping forward, and what it usually meant.
"Mr. Ketchum," Halden said, "I do not doubt your honesty. I doubt your method. A weir in a ditch measures what passes the weir. It does not measure what the ground keeps, and it does not measure what the sun takes, and it does not measure what a season will do in August when the creek is low. You have measured a spring. I am asking about a summer. And I am asking, further, whether a pond that holds water in June will hold it in August, or whether it will simply be a pretty hole in the ground with a name on it. And I am asking, further still, whether the trial field's greenness is the pond's doing at all, or whether it is Eben Yates's good ground and careful hands, which would make any field green, with any water, in any year."
Selma felt her hands tighten on her notebooks, and she opened her mouth to answer, but Ketchum answered first, and his voice was as plain as his figures.
"As to the ground," Ketchum said, "the comparison strip is Eben Yates's ground too, sir, and it was worked by the same hands, and it stands less green. That is what a comparison is for. As to the sun, you are right that a weir does not measure what the sun takes, which is why I measured the soil, and the soil says the trial field kept more of what it was given. And as to August, you are right again that a spring is not a summer. Then let us measure August too. The wager was for a season, Mr. Halden, and the season is not over. I will come back at the end of July, and again at harvest, and I will measure the same way, with the same weir and the same rod, and if the trial field fails in August, the figures will say so, and no one here will need to take my word for it."
Selma, listening, felt a rush of gratitude toward Ketchum that she had to swallow hard to keep from showing, because he had answered every one of Halden's objections without raising his voice and without once making it a contest between men. He had made it a contest between methods, and methods can be tested, and men, when they are tested, so often cannot. She thought about her six years of notebooks, and about the spring meeting when Halden had called her numbers "figures on paper, not water," and she thought about how far those figures had traveled since then: from a schoolroom sums lesson, to a proposal before the ditch company, to a wager, to a pond, to a morning of public measuring, and now to a second measuring, demanded by the very man who had dismissed them. It was, she thought, a strange kind of victory, the kind that does not look like victory at all, because it arrives wearing the clothes of your opponent's objection.
Halden looked at Ketchum, and then at Selma, and then at the crowd, and Selma saw, in his face, the calculation of a man who had just been given more time and was not sure whether more time would help him or hurt him. He said, "I want a measurer of my own. Not because I doubt you, Mr. Ketchum, but because a valley should not rest its water on one man's book. I will send for a man from the county seat, at my own expense, and he will measure beside you, and if his figures agree with yours, I will accept them."
Selma had expected a fight. She had expected Halden to call her numbers false, or her pond a trick, or her wager a piece of schoolteacher pride. She had not expected him to ask for a second measurer, and she understood, as she stood there with the sun on her face and the crowd watching, that a second measurer was both a challenge and a kind of surrender, because a man who truly believed the figures were false does not ask for them to be measured again. He asks for them to be forgotten. Halden had asked for them to be measured again, and that meant, whether he knew it or not, that he had already begun to believe them.