They let him stay the night under Joseph's eye, and at first light Silas Hart walked out of camp with nothing in his hands but his father's cracked compass and a willow wand he had cut fresh by lantern light.
"You said the ground would speak," Joseph said, following at a distance with his rifle cradled easy. "I see a man walking in circles, looking at dirt."
"The ground speaks low," Silas said. "A man has to walk slow to hear it. And it lies, Joseph. That is the first thing my father taught me. The ground lies to a thirsty man most of all, because it tells him what he is aching to hear."
He walked the valley as a reader walks a page he does not yet trust. He knelt and pressed his palm flat to the earth, counting his breath. He broke open dry stalks and looked at their hearts. He studied the long, pale roots of a dead greasewood, searching downward as roots will when water has gone deep. Twice he shook his head over likely hollows and walked on, and Joseph's scorn grew warmer with every step.
"There," Joseph said at one greenish patch, pointing with his chin. "Even a child can see it. Dig there."
Silas knelt and dug a little way, then sat back. "Salt," he said, and touched his tongue to the soil, and spat. "That green feeds on alkali. A well dug there would kill your horses quicker than thirst would. That is lying ground, and it has buried more hopeful men than any bullet."
By midmorning Taklish himself had come out, leaning on his staff, with Saya beside him carrying a water skin. She watched Silas's hands the way she watched a fever patient, for signs.
"You were a scout for the soldiers," Taklish said. It was not a question.
"I was. In Kansas, and down on the Gila. I left that service when I had seen enough of what followed after the finding of water and the finding of men." Silas turned the compass over in his hand. "My father, Thomas Hart, scouted this country before me. He taught me earth is an honest book to a patient man. Stone tells where water has run. Plants tell where it lingers. Bees tell where it stands open, for a bee will not fly far in a straight line home unless she is carrying water or the memory of it."
"Words," Saya said. "Our scouts know bees and birds also, well-digger. They came home yesterday with empty skins."
"Your scouts sought water that shows itself," Silas said, without heat, "because a man on a blown horse must. I am seeking water that has hidden itself. It is slower work, and I make no promise at the end of it."
It was near noon, in the dry wash on the valley's western edge, that he stopped at last. The wash was a broad bed of sand and gravel, bone white under the sun, as dead as every other acre. But Silas crouched and worked his fingers down through the hot sand, an inch, then two, then a hand's breadth, while Joseph watched and Saya, against her own resolve, leaned closer.
The sand at the surface burned the skin. Below, it merely warmed. Below that, at the depth of a forearm, Silas's fingers slowed.
He brought up a handful and held it out, first to the chief, then to Saya.
"Feel it," he said.
Saya took it, expecting a trick, and her face changed. The sand was cool in the palm in that furnace day, darker than the sand above it, and when she squeezed it, it clung together for one heartbeat before it fell.
"Damp," she said quietly. "There is damp in it."
"Damp is not water," Joseph said, but his voice had lost its edge, and he crouched and dug with his own hands and felt it too.
"No," Silas agreed. "Damp is a footprint, not the deer. Somewhere under this wash, water moved once and may move yet, following the stone below like a road. It may have sunk too deep for digging. But it is the first true thing this valley has said to me, and I have been listening since dawn to lies."
Taklish took the cool sand and let it run slowly through his fingers onto the white bed of the wash.
"My fathers drank from a creek in this wash when I was a boy," the old chief said, "before the years turned hard. I had thought that water dead and gone to the spirit world."
"Water rarely dies, Grandfather," Silas said gently, using the camp's own word for him, and no man corrected him for it. "It goes down, and sideways, and waits under stone where the sun cannot steal it. Give me leave to follow this sign, and I will show your council tonight every mark I found today, the false ones and the true, and let them judge whether I am a madman, or a man who can still read the book his father put into his hands."