I drove off around the corner, parked where he could not see my truck, and I called the police, because twenty years of setting posts had told me that no honest man locks new hardware down a dry well and then pays a stranger to wall it up in a hurry.
The dispatcher kept me on the line. Two cruisers came quiet, no sirens, and I pointed them up the road to the house and told them what the auger had brought up. They asked me to wait at the gas station, and I did, and I will not pretend my hands were steady the whole time.
Here is what was down that well, and I am glad every day that it was not what my mind had jumped to.
It was money, a great deal of it, sealed in a chained case at the bottom of a dry Michigan well.
The man who hired me was not who he said he was. He had run off with the payroll of a company two states away, better than a quarter million dollars, and half the country had a description of his face. He had bought that empty house with cash, dropped the case down the old well the first night, and locked it with new chain because the well was the one place no one would think to look. He had hired me for the fence so that no meter reader or nosy neighbor would ever wander close to it.
He had not counted on an auger, or on a fence man who knows what the ground is supposed to give back.
They arrested him that same afternoon, calm, at his own kitchen table. No one was hurt. The company got their payroll back, every band of it, and it turned out a good many working people had been going without their wages while that money sat in the dark.
There was a reward for the recovery, and the company insisted I take it, and I did not argue too hard, because I have a daughter starting college and posts do not set themselves for free.
The detective told me later that most people would have finished the job. The man was friendly, the pay was good, and it is easier to tell yourself a story about kids and a dangerous old well than to make a phone call that might make you look like a fool.
But I have built fences for twenty years, and a fence is a thing you put up to keep the wrong on one side and the right on the other. I could not stand there and build one around a lie.
I finished a different fence that month, for a family with three real children and a real pond, and I did it slow and did it right. Some jobs you are glad to walk away from. Some you are glad to stay.