He came another dozen feet. The others stayed behind him. "We've been looking at your field," he said. "I noticed."
"We've been trying to work out how it's staying green when nothing else in the valley is." "You know how it's staying green? I spent six weeks in April and May burying irrigation vessels in this soil. You watched me do it." Hiram looked at the ground for a moment, looked at the visible clay mouths in the nearest row, each one covered with its shale lid.
"That's what you say," he said. "What some of us are wondering is whether there's water being drawn from somewhere else, an underground source, something under this property that isn't under anyone else's." She stood very still. "Or," he continued, and she could hear him working through the phrasing carefully, "whether the arroyo feed underground has been diverted, directed toward this property instead of distributing the way it naturally would." There it was.
The thing Silas had told her was coming. In the territory, water theft was not a minor accusation. It was the kind of accusation that got settled in county courts or didn't get settled at all, and the process of either outcome was ruinous, regardless of which direction it went. She looked at him for a long moment.
"You're standing on my property," she said, "and you're accusing me of stealing water." "I'm asking a question." "You're asking a question you already know the answer to, and you're asking it in front of witnesses, which means you're making a public accusation with extra steps." She held his eye.
"Hiram, when those pots arrived in April, you spent 2 days making yourself the entertainment at my expense. I did not engage with it then, and I don't have a particular interest in engaging with this now, but I will not stand here and let you say what you're implying without showing you what is actually in the ground." She walked to the nearest corn cluster, second row from the fence. Three vessels in close spacing. Cornstalks thick and dark leaved above them.
She unlatched the tool bag at her hip and pulled out her short-handled excavating tool. "Come here," she said. Hiram and the others came closer. She knelt in the row and began digging with both the tool and her free hand, cutting through the surface soil in a controlled rectangle alongside one cornstalk. She worked efficiently.
This was her field, and she knew exactly how deep each vessel shoulder sat. And within 2 minutes, she had exposed the upper section of one buried pot. It was visible, rough, dun-colored, dry on its outer surface. The vessel sitting in close-packed dark soil that was noticeably cooler than the material she'd displaced. She sat back on her heels and pointed.
"That is what is in the ground, a fired clay vessel buried to the shoulder, mouth covered by shale, which I will now remove." She lifted the shale lid. The interior of the pot was at roughly 2/3 capacity water she had poured in 3 days ago, drawn from her own well, sitting in the dark below the soil surface. "There is your underground source," she said.