At three o’clock the rhythm of the hammer changed.
It wasn’t a sharp blow anymore; it was a heavy, dull thud, followed by the sound of iron sliding against iron.
Isabelle didn’t wait for the needle to hit sixty. She kicked the wooden prop out with the heel of her boot, grabbed the small hand-lever that shut off the main intake, and threw her weight against it until the brass valve shrieked and locked.
The engine didn’t stop at once. It gave three enormous, gasping heaves—*chunk… chunk… ch-unk*—then the piston rod slid into the housing with a long, wet sigh, and the silence of the Mokelumne foothills came rushing back in like cold water into an empty well.
For a long minute there was no sound from the pit except the dripping of the water-line and the crackle of the green oak dying in the coals.
“Jasper?” she called out. Her voice sounded thin and small, like a bird dropped down a chimney.
A head covered in wet soot and gray hair rose slowly over the edge of the iron framing. Jasper was holding his left arm against his ribs, and his spectacles were gone, leaving one side of his face pale where the grease hadn’t reached.
“The pipe held,” he said, and he spat a stream of dark, tobacco-stained water into the mud. “The fitting didn’t. We’ve got about three inches of water in the bottom of the ash-pan, but the eccentric’s pinned.”
“Is the iron cracked?”
“No.” He pulled himself up onto the platform, his movements slow and stiff, like an old man coming out of a freezing river. He stood beside her in the dark, both of them smelling of hot grease, burnt hair, and wet wool. “It’ll run till Friday. After that we’ll have to braze it properly or sell the boiler to the freight company.”
“We aren’t selling the boiler.”
“No,” he agreed, looking down at her with those pale, colorless eyes that didn’t need spectacles to see through the dark. “We’d have nothing to heat the water for the tea.”
He didn’t touch her, and she didn’t move away. They stood together on the iron grating of the dredge while the moon slipped down behind the western ridge, leaving the gully to the gray, shadowless hour before the dawn.
*
By ten o’clock the sun was back on the rocks, hot and dry enough to make the lizards sluggish on the stone walls.
Arthur Strickland did not come up the trail on a horse. He walked, leading a bay gelding by the bridle, because the lower bridge had washed out during the midnight melt when Jasper had opened the sluice-gate wide to clear the tailings.
He found Isabelle sitting on the salt-barrel by the cabin door, paring the skin off a very small, very hard yellow turnip with her father’s horn-handled penknife. Toby was down by the creek, trying to drown a beetle in a rusty tin can.
“Prescott’s machine is running,” Strickland said, stopping five paces short of the horse-trough. His boots were dusty, and he looked as though he had spent the morning arguing with a mule. “It shook the post-office window right out of its frame at eight o’clock.”
“It’s a very powerful engine,” Isabelle said without looking up from the turnip. A thin curl of yellow skin fell into her lap.
“The bridge is out.”
“The water was high.”
Strickland adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles, his mouth tightening into a thin, dry line that looked like a scratch made with a rusty pen. “The county commissioners are meeting on Saturday, Isabelle. If that dredge stays in the creek bed, the runoff will undermine the road before the summer freight starts rolling.”
“Let it undermine the road,” she said, finally raising her eyes to his. They were clear, flat, and entirely devoid of the desperation he had expected to find there. “The road only leads to your office and the land-office anyway.”
Strickland stared at her for a moment, then looked over toward the gully, where the steady, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* of the bucket-chain could still be heard, faint and regular as a pulse through the dry pine needles.
“You haven’t signed the quitclaim,” he said.
“No.”
“The taxes on the cove are three years overdue.”
“Then add them to the ledger,” she said, picking up another turnip. “We have plenty of ink left. We’ve been scratching out the tallow-dips since eighteen-fifty-six.”
Strickland didn’t argue. He wasn’t the sort of man to argue with someone who looked as though she had nothing left to lose, because people with nothing left to lose usually had a way of making county business very complicated at election time. He turned his bay gelding around with a short, angry jerk of the rein, the horse’s iron shoes ringing sharp and clear against the decomposed granite.
“Saturday, Isabelle,” he said over his shoulder as he started down the track. “With or without Prescott.”
“Bring your own pen,” she called after him. “Ours is nearly out of lead.”
She watched him go until the bay’s tail disappeared behind the manzanita thicket. Then she got up, picked up her basket of turnips, and walked down the path toward the machine-shop.
Jasper was sitting on an upturned keg of machine oil, trying to straighten a bent iron tooth from the dredge bucket with a cold chisel and a two-pound hammer. He looked worse than he had at dawn; his left hand was wrapped in a greasy rag where he’d nipped the skin against the anvil, and his shirt was torn across the shoulder where a bolt had grazed him.
She didn’t say anything about Strickland. She set the basket down on the corner of the forge-bench, pulled a tin cup from her apron pocket, and filled it from the canvas water-bag that hung from the roof-beam.
“He says the road’s washed out,” she said.
Jasper gave the iron tooth a tentative tap with the hammer, tested the edge with his thumb, and laid it down in the charcoal.
“It’ll be washed out again next November,” he said. “Roads are like that in the foothills. You build ’em, the water takes ’em, and the lawyers write about ’em. It keeps the economy moving.”
“Are we going to have enough gold to pay the miller?”
“We have enough for flour. We might even have enough for a pound of real salt pork if the tailings hold out through Thursday.” He looked up at her then, his pale eyes catching the blue-white glare of the sun off the iron boiler. “You got grease on your apron.”
“It’s machine grease. It doesn’t wash out.”
“Good. It matches my coat.”
He went back to his hammering, the rhythmic *clink-clink* starting up again against the steady, background thrum of the engine down in the pit. Isabelle didn’t go back to the cabin. She sat down on the edge of the second oil-keg—the one that was half-full of scrap iron and old washers—and picked up a small piece of emery cloth to help him scour the rust off the second bucket-tooth.
They didn’t talk about the cedar cove, and they didn’t talk about the mortgage, and they certainly didn’t talk about what would happen when the winter snows came back down into the gully. The sun climbed another hand-breadth over the Mokelumne ridge, the water in the flume ran clear and cold over the granite stones, and the engine kept on chugging—slow, steady, and loud enough to rattle the window-glass all the way down to the blacksmith’s shed.