Marian stood up slowly and brushed the mud off her knees.
"Your side of the fence," she said. "Is that what you call this?"
"That's what the fence says."
She looked at the boundary fence fifty yards up the hill. Then she looked back at the spring.
"Mr. Holt, I was nine years old the summer my father set the corner post for this section," she said. "He used a cedar post because cedar doesn't rot, and he nailed a horseshoe to the top of it so the snow wouldn't hide it. I held the horseshoe while he drove the nail."
She pointed up the hill, past the fence, to a gray post standing alone in the sage. Even from there, she could see the rusty curve of iron on top of it.
"That's the corner. That fence you're standing behind was moved. This spring is two hundred feet inside Teague land, and it has been since 1919."
Holt did not say anything for a long moment. The sorrel shifted under him.
"Wes was sick," Holt said finally. "Last two years, he couldn't get up here. I figured he didn't know."
"He knew." Marian took the feed store receipt out of her coat pocket. "He couldn't climb up here and fight you. So he left it for me."
Holt looked at the receipt. Something in his face gave way.
He climbed down off his horse and stood with the reins in his hand, and for the first time he looked like what he was. A tired man in his sixties in a dry year.
"My wells went bad three summers ago," he said. "Drilled two new ones. Both came up salty. I've got a hundred and forty cows and a boy who wants to come home and run them, and a banker who calls me every Monday." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I told myself the water was just sitting there. Going to waste on a meadow that hadn't been cut in two years."
"That meadow fed this family for a hundred years," Marian said.
"I know it." He looked at the ground. "I'm not proud of it. I'll pull the pipe."
Marian could have called the water commissioner that afternoon. She could have called the sheriff in Rawlins. She had every right, and Holt knew it.
She thought about her father and Wes at the graveside. Thirty years of silence that started because two people decided they were right and the other one was wrong.
"Here's what's going to happen," she said. "I'm calling the water commissioner tomorrow, so it's all on paper and done right. You're going to put that fence back on the true line. And you're going to help me clean out my grandfather's ditch and build a new headgate, because I'm sixty-eight and I can't do it alone."
Holt waited.
"Then I'll lease you half the water. Every other week, all summer. At a fair price, written down."
He stared at her. "Why would you do that?"
"Because I need hay on my meadow, and you need water for your cows, and there's enough in that spring for both if we're not stupid about it." She put the receipt back in her pocket. "And because my brother would have done the same thing, if he could have climbed up here to tell you."
Holt looked at her for a long time. Then he put out his hand.
She shook it.
That evening, Marian drove into Sweetwater Junction to the little cemetery on the hill behind the Lutheran church. Wes was buried beside their mother and father, under a stone so new the letters still looked sharp. She stood there in the wind with her hands in his coat pockets.
"You could have called me," she told him. "You stubborn old goat. You could have just picked up the phone."
The wind blew. A magpie complained from the fence.
She thought about the receipt. About how hard it must have been for a sick man to write four words to a sister he had not spoken to in thirty years. Maybe that had been his way of calling.
"I found it," she said. "I counted."
She stayed until the sun went down behind the Ferris Mountains.
The water commissioner came out the next week and walked the line with them. The fence went back on the true corner. Holt's son came home from Laramie for Thanksgiving and spent four days in the old ditch with a shovel, pulling out tumbleweeds and laughing at his father's stories about Wes Teague.
They built the new headgate the first week of December. Holt welded the frame. Marian painted the date on it in white letters, the way her grandfather had done in 1919.
The day they finished, a hard cold front came in over the Ferris Mountains. Marian stood at the spring with her hands in her brother's canvas coat while Holt pulled the board and let the water into the old ditch for the first time in two years.
It went slowly at first, feeling its way along the dry bottom. Then it gathered and ran, silver and quick, down the hill toward the house.
Marian walked behind it all the way down, the way she had when she was nine. She did not have a shovel this time. She did not need one.
By spring, she figured, the willows along the old ditch would start to come back. In June, she would walk the ditch and count every one of them out loud, so Wes could hear.
