“You see who's over at the Mercer place?”
Gus was busy repairing a fence.
“No.”
“The schoolteacher.”
Gus chuckled.
“That kid's got himself a science project now?”
Hank didn't laugh.
“She was out there measuring something.”
Gus shrugged.
“So?”
Hank looked toward the Mercer property.
For a moment, his jaw tightened.
Then he said something that surprised his friend.
“Daniel Mercer spent forty years poking around that field.”
Gus paused.
“Yeah.”
“And he never explained what he was looking for.”
The line went quiet.
Then Gus asked, “You still worried about that old spring?”
Hank didn't answer immediately.
He looked toward the distant cottonwood trees.
Finally, he muttered, “No.”
Gus laughed.
“Then what's the problem?”
Hank's face hardened.
“The problem is that boy's mother could get a fair offer for the land and walk away before she loses everything. Instead, she's letting a child waste time hauling rocks.”
Gus sighed.
“Hank, it's their land.”
For several seconds, Hank said nothing.
Then he answered.
“For now.”
He ended the call.
And for a long time, he remained on the porch staring toward the field where Eli Mercer was trying to keep his grandfather's watermelons alive.
It wasn't the stones that bothered him.
It was the possibility that Daniel Mercer had finally taught somebody how to read the land.
Because Hank knew something the boy didn't.
Thirty-four years earlier, Daniel had discovered a narrow seep beneath the North Bed.
And Hank had helped him find it.
Hank Barlow had not always been Daniel Mercer's enemy.
In the spring of 1991, when both men were younger and their families still shared equipment during harvest, Hank had helped Daniel clear an old drainage ditch near the North Bed. They were working after a wet winter, trying to redirect standing water away from a patch of ground that repeatedly turned muddy while the rest of the property drained normally.
Daniel noticed something strange.
Even after several weeks without rain, a shallow depression near the cottonwood trees remained damp.
The water wasn't flowing visibly across the surface.