I take Miles Morgan’s little stone out of my pocket and kneel down next to the drill head. I’m so used to feeling the stone’s hard little shape, I think I could recognize it with my eyes closed. I put my hand under the drill and open my fingers, and the stone flies onto the bottom of the drill the same way it did onto the big rock. Metal to metal.

Lincoln waits until I move back from the drill head before he turns on the rig. I put on the ear protectors he tosses over to me. The rig is very loud, making a constant grinding noise as the drill bores into the ground.

I’ve seen enough wells drilled to know what to look for. Lincoln watches to see what kind of cuttings come up around the drill. First there’s dirt, then clay, the cuttings changing color the deeper the drill goes. Pipe after pipe is attached to the drill and pushed underground.

I watch.

Twenty feet.

Dirt.

Forty feet.

Clay.

Sixty feet.

Granite.

Eighty feet.

I see a small trickle of water. I can’t tell if it comes from the well or from the tanker truck that’s lubricating the drill. Lincoln waves and points to it, so I guess it must be coming from the well.

One hundred feet.

Water shoots out in all directions, immediately overflowing the runoff ditch. I never saw water coming so fast from a drilling site.

“It’s a gusher!” Lincoln yells over the noise of the drill.

He throws his hat in the air and doesn’t bother going after it. The people watching from Main Street are dancing around and shaking their hands over their heads.

“Wow!” is all I can say. “Wow!”

I wish Mom and Dad and Nana were here to see it, and Birdie, and especially James, and even Braggy.

“I’m gonna go down another twenty feet, just to be sure,” Lincoln says. He attaches another pipe, and it spins round and round as it pushes down. Then he goes over to where the water is still gushing, checks his watch, watches the water fill bucket after bucket, checks his watch again, and yells, “Unbelievable! The flow rate is measuring twenty-five gallons a minute!”

“Is that a lot?”

“Most I’ve seen in this area is eight gallons a minute.” Lincoln comes over and pats me on the back. “Looks like we got us another dowsing Bower boy in the family.”

“So this will be enough for the town and the school and the car wash?”

Lincoln doesn’t even pause before he answers, and he speaks as fast as I’ve ever heard him.