It was the Saint who hooked a leg over the arm of his chair and said diffidently, “Not that it’s particularly my business, but you make it sound like peculiar country. What makes it that way?”
Valmon turned with his flashing smile.
“Water,” he said. “I’ve got a spring on my side of the hills, but it goes dry every summer.”
“We do all right,” Reefe said quietly.
“I know.” Valmon’s smile was untouched. “But your stream rises on my land. Only it doesn’t stay there long enough to do me much good, especially when it runs low. To do any good, I’d have to blast a new channel — turn it around that shoulder up there, and let it run down my way to where I could build a dam. Of course, that’s the same as starving you out.”
“The law won’t let you do that,” Reefe said.
Valmon shrugged.
“I don’t know. The water comes from my property. The law couldn’t say much after I’d done it, and it wouldn’t take much doing. Just a few sticks of dynamite in the right places, and you’d be dry. Then I suppose you could go to court and try to get an order to make me blast it the other way again. But before you could do that, and make me do it, you wouldn’t have any stock. So where does it get you?”
He had divided his words between Reefe and Morland, and he was looking at Morland when he finished, but then his eyes went back to the Saint, as if somehow Simon was the only one that he was in doubt about. And curiously, the others seemed to wait for the Saint too, as though without any assertion he had become felt as the man who was the most natural match for Valmon.
And yet the Saint hadn’t moved. He only seemed to become longer and lazier in his chair as he lighted another cigarette with his eyes narrowed but still casual against the smoke.