The first silver fish shot out of the metal tank and landed in the muddy irrigation ditch with a splash.
Then came another.
And another.
Within seconds, dozens of small fish were tumbling through the rushing water, their silver bodies flashing beneath the bright Mississippi sunlight as the young woman held the heavy release lever open with both hands.
Behind her, a sixty-two-year-old farmer began laughing so hard he nearly fell off his tractor.
"Lord have mercy! She's finally lost her mind!"
The woman didn't turn around.
She was twenty-seven years old, with beautiful fair skin, expressive green eyes, and long copper-red hair tied into a thick braid. She wore a modest brown-and-beige plaid farmer shirt with rolled-up sleeves, faded blue denim overalls, and heavy brown leather work boots.
Her face was sunburned.
Her hands were blistered.
And every dollar she had left in her checking account had gone toward the fish now disappearing into a waterlogged ditch between two enormous fields of cotton.
Her name was Eliza Hart.
And what the men watching her didn't know was that she had spent the previous six weeks studying something they had ignored for almost twenty years.
The ditch was supposed to be dead.
The old irrigation channel had stopped carrying useful water long before Eliza inherited the farm. During heavy rain, muddy runoff collected inside it, but most of the year it lay nearly dry, choked with weeds and cracked clay.
For decades, neighboring farmers had said the same thing.
There was no spring beneath it.
No hidden water supply.
Nothing valuable enough to justify repairing it.
But Eliza had found something in her late father's records that made her question whether those men were right.
And now she was using a few hundred small fish to test an idea everyone else considered ridiculous.
The older farmer sitting on the tractor was Calvin Rusk.
He had spent forty years growing cotton in Harrow County, Mississippi, and he owned nearly six hundred acres surrounding the eastern side of the Hart property.
He wore a faded blue denim shirt, dusty work trousers, and a beige baseball cap pulled low over his gray hair.
His face was weathered from decades of outdoor work.
And he had never been particularly careful about hiding his opinion.
Beside him stood two older farmers who had come after hearing that Eliza was about to do something foolish.
One was Otis Pike, a heavyset man with a gray beard and a permanent expression of amusement.
The other was Raymond Bell, a thin, gray-mustached farmer who usually spoke less than the others but laughed just as readily.
All three believed Eliza was wasting her last money.
Calvin leaned forward on the tractor.
"Eliza, sweetheart, fish don't grow cotton!"
She tightened her grip on the lever.
"I know that."
Otis laughed.
"Then what exactly are you expecting them to do?"
Eliza looked toward the long ditch extending between the cotton rows.
"Find something."
Raymond shook his head.