Now the lower wash lay dry.
Mara led them off the usual trail and through a tight passage between two sandstone shelves. She dismounted beside a stand of willow trees that looked impossibly green compared with the country around them. Beyond the trees, Corvin heard a sound he had not heard in weeks: running water.
Freshly cut posts, packed clay, and a narrow stone spillway had redirected nearly all the spring's flow into a ditch running west. The ditch curved away behind a ridge toward a large holding pond on Voss's grazing land. The original bed of the wash was almost completely dry below the barrier.
Sheriff Bell stood staring. "Who built this?"
Nobody answered at first. Then Corvin pointed at a mark burned into one of the timbers. A small V was stamped beneath the number of a work crew. He had seen that mark on feed wagons and fence posts hauled out of Voss's supply yard.
"Looks familiar," Corvin said.
Voss swung off his horse. "It's flood control. We were protecting the lower pastures from erosion."
"In a drought?" Mara asked.
"The ditch is temporary."
"You turned the water away from people who needed it," Corvin said. "You sent it to your pond."
"I own that land."
"You don't own everybody downstream."
The sheriff crouched beside the spillway. When he lifted a handful of mud, water squeezed out between his fingers. The clay had been packed recently. A narrow wheel track ran along the bank. Voss's worker stared at it, and Corvin noticed he was holding his horse's reins so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.
"Peter," the sheriff said, recognizing him, "were you working up here?"
The young man looked at Voss.
"Don't be a fool," Voss told him.
Bell straightened. "I asked Peter a question."
Peter Wicks was barely twenty. Corvin had seen him hauling fencing supplies through town and had never thought much about him. Now he looked like a man who had been living with something heavy enough to bend his back.
"I helped put in the barrier," Peter admitted. "Mr. Voss said the county had approved it. He said the water was being wasted downstream."
"When?" Bell asked.
"Three weeks ago."
Mara's jaw tightened. "Our gardens began drying three weeks ago."
Peter looked down. "I didn't know about the gardens."
"You knew about the water," Corvin said, not unkindly.
"I was trying to keep my job."
There it was, the answer that had made so much trouble possible in Red Wash: a man needed a paycheck, another needed feed, a third feared losing his land. Everyone knew a piece of the wrong thing. Everyone told himself he could survive by keeping that piece quiet.
Sheriff Bell took out his notebook. "We're going back to town. I'm going to find the survey papers, the road record, and whatever approval Mr. Voss claims to have. Until then, nobody touches this barrier."