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Show 99 strangely silent on the issue, but Jim had a better argument. It would cost! Papa and Bob Ross had an older water score to settle. Bob's father and Papa's father had a similar dispute about water in Kanosh. Grandpa's water stream had to come down through the Ross orchard. He would no more get it there than it would stop running. He would follow it up and find it running in the Ross orchard, whereupon he would accuse neighbor Ross of stealing it. Ross would deny the charge, and say the dam had burst by itself. One day Grandpa caught him breaking the dam and a fight ensued. Grandpa was a slender man, no match for his adversary, who got him down and stomped him in the stomach. Grandpa never recovered from this beating. His stomach swelled up and got hard. He died six months later. The family always thought it was from this fight, so there was very bad blood between them and the Ross family from then on. It was ironical that when Papa moved "over on the river" that Bob moved also, and that he would buy the next field but one from Papa's twenty acres. The campaign was bitterly fought, a tempest in the little Joseph teapot, and Papa won. He had State engineers come and sample water from both the wells and from the available springs up in the mountains. The wells tested out very polluted, as he had suspected, but the springs were ninety-nine one hundredths pure. There was no question Joseph needed purer water, but the money to pipe it was another matter. It was only resolved by Papa, Walt and John each signing their personal note to underwrite it. These notes were eventually paid off by the men |