When Alder finished reading, Halden stood.
"I'll speak against it," he said, "and I'll speak plain, because plain is the only honest way to speak about water." He looked around the room, and his gaze rested a moment on his son, and then moved on. "This valley was watered by flood before any of us were born. You open the gate, you let the water run, you trust the ground to take what it needs. That's how my father did it, and his father before him, and it fed this valley through years wetter and drier than this one. Now we're asked to trade that for a timetable. For hours and notches and a pond dug in a schoolteacher's trial field. I ask you this: when the creek runs low in August, as it will, do you want a timetable deciding who eats, or do you want a man at the gate who knows the ground?"
A murmur went around the room. It was not a hostile murmur, exactly. It was the sound of men hearing something they had believed all their lives said aloud by a man they trusted, and Selma felt the vote tilting in her chest like a scale with a thumb on it.
Then Halden did something she had not expected. He turned to Ketchum.
"Ivo," he said, "you measured both ways. You're an honest man, and I've never said otherwise. Tell this room, on your word as surveyor: is the trial field's showing enough to stake the whole valley on? One field, one season, one summer that happened to be kind?"
Ketchum stood slowly. He was forty-eight, lean and sun-darkened, with the careful movements of a man who has spent his life making sure his instruments are level before he trusts what they tell him. He looked at Halden, and then at the room, and he spoke in the flat, unadorned voice he used for reports.
"One field, one season," he said. "That's true. But it wasn't a kind summer. It was a dry June and a storm in July, and the pond held, and the lower end of the ditch ran when it usually doesn't. The trial field used less water and grew more. That's not an opinion. That's what the rod said, twice, by two different hands."
He sat down. The room was quiet. Selma felt her heart beating in her throat, and she thought, absurdly, of the gauge stake in the creek that morning, and the third notch from the bottom, and how the water had gone on running whether anyone in the room believed in it or not.
Halden was not finished. He tried the delay next, the way a man who knows he may lose a vote tries to move the vote to a day when he might win it.
"I move," he said, "that we table this until spring. Let the trial run another season. Let the pond stand a winter. No honest man stakes a valley on one summer, and no honest woman asks him to."
It was a clever move, and Selma saw several men nodding, because caution sounds like wisdom even when it is only fear wearing wisdom's coat. She stood before she had quite decided to stand, and the room turned to her, and she felt every eye in Cedar Valley on her face, and she heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt.
"Mr. Halden," she said, "with respect — another season is another summer of the lower farms going dry in July. The trial was the season. That's what the wager said, and you signed it. The wager said one season, measured by the county surveyor, and the season is done, and the measure is in. If we wait until spring, we wait because we are afraid of what the measure already says."
She had not meant to mention the wager. It sounded like a challenge, and for a moment she was afraid she had made it one. But Halden only looked at her, long and hard, and then he nodded, once, the way a man nods when a blow has landed clean and he will not pretend it hasn't.
"She's right about the wager," he said. "I signed it. I won't hide behind it now." He turned to the room. "Vote it, then. Vote it today. But vote it knowing what you're voting for. You're voting to put this valley's water on paper, in hours and notches, and to trust paper more than you trust your neighbor's eye. If that's what you want, say so. If it isn't, say that too."