The Unplowed Sky (9 page)

“Be glad there's a cottonwood,” Rory said. “You're sure an old crank before breakfast, Baldy.”

“That's on account of it's so dang long till breakfast,” retorted the fireman. “Besides, we had that split flue.”

“Lucky we caught it before the fire was going,” Rory said. “Pulling a bad flue and roll-fitting a new one is a real dirty job when the engine's fired up, Miss Hallie. Baldy has to crawl into the smokebox to tighten that end of the flue.”

“But I got a real nice even bed of coals goin' in the firebox, Jackie,” Baldy said. “It's time to open the firebox door and chuck in more coal—see, I do it fast, but keep the coal spread out level to all four corners, not heaped up in the middle.”

“See that boiler sweat?” Rory asked. “If it's just sweat—water vapor condensing on the tubes—it'll dry up as the boiler heats. If a tube's leaking, it'll get worse. Now, laddie, while the boiler heats, I'll oil the wheels and valves good and fill the grease caps with grease.” He hoisted Jackie to the iron seat. “You sit up there and keep an eye on the water glass and steam gauge.” He indicated a mark. “When the needle gets to that twenty-five, Jack, be sure and tell me.”

Sobered at this responsibility, Jackie nodded and watched the gauge as if his life depended on it while Rory used his oilcan and grease. “Pressure goes up to fifteen pounds pretty fast,” Rory said as he worked expertly. “That's just air driven out of the water. It bleeds off fast through the blower. The pressure will have to get up to one hundred forty pounds per square inch before we can thresh. It's a sixty-horsepower engine. Can you guess what that means, Jackie?”

“It's strong as sixty horses?” Jackie's eyes were big with wonder.

“Right you are—and it won't get tired like a horse or have to rest or get tormented by flies or have heatstroke—though the men may.”

Jackie stroked one of the big levers in front of him and laughed. “Engine eats a lot of coal and drinks lots of water, though!”

“Right again. Meg filled the boiler up last night—it takes two hundred fifty gallons, which is an awful lot of water. A whole ton!”

Jackie yelled, “Mister Rory! The gauge says twenty-five!”

“Good lad! But you just call me Rory. Time to check the hand holes—we use them to wash the inside of the boiler. See, I just make sure the plugs fit snug and the gaskets don't leak.”

A singing began like a giant teakettle coming to a boil. Baldy opened the smokebox and tapped the flues with his long reamer. When he nodded and shut the door, Rory climbed up on the platform and explained that he was opening the draft and the blower. A cloud of soot puffed out, and Hallie was glad the wind wasn't sending it her direction.

“Now, Jack,” Rory instructed. “Keep your eye on that gauge, but you need to watch that tube of water even closer. It's what you might call my life insurance.”

“Not that any company would insure you!” Baldy teased.

“Or you.” Rory chuckled. “Now see, laddie, Miss Hallie, I have the water glass marked to show where the water in the boiler just comes over the crown sheet. That's the roof of the firebox, a five-eighths of an inch-thick chunk of steel. If water doesn't cover it, it'll get red-hot. The boiler explodes. If the flash steam doesn't kill you, a piece of the boiler or crown sheet will.”

Hallie shuddered and thought privately that only men would invent anything so dangerous and exult in working with it. Every summer, the Hollister paper carried accounts of grisly—often fatal—steam-engine explosions.

Yet the power! Sixty horses. She closed her eyes and pictured that many huge, straining Clydesdales or Percherons. For one man to control that energy! No wonder Rory brimmed over with breezy self-confidence!

“The other mark on the water glass shows where there's an inch of water over the crown sheet,” he went on. “The water drops real fast after that, so it's time to get more water in the boiler or get set to cool it off.”

“
Someday there'll come a thunder sound

And scattered far and near

O'er hill and dale and all around

Will be our Rory dear
.”

Baldy spread his arms wide as he sang the ditty raucously.

“I expect you'll scatter right along with me,” Rory said. He dropped his hand on Jackie's shoulder, as if advising a fellow crewman. “If you have any suspicions about the crown sheet, the thing to do is stick your shovel in the firebox. If that crown sheet gives a red shine to the shovel, you better open the safety valve, close the draft, and quiet that fire down.”

“I'd run!” Jackie said.

Rory shook his head. “Surest way to die next to injecting water onto a cherry-red crown sheet. Only chance you have is to cool that boiler down. Now, we're at fifty pounds of steam. So we'll just open this main valve real easy and crack the throttle a wee bit, start warming up the engine.”

Uneasily aware that she wasn't being paid to admire Rory's skill and that Shaft must be busier than a one-armed paperhanger, Hallie said, “I'm really glad to know more about the engine, Mr. MacLeod, but I've got to help Shaft. Thank Mr. MacLeod, Jackie, and let's—”

The child's lip quivered but he started to clamber down. Poor kid, he was probably scared if he didn't mind slavishly, she'd desert him, too. “Look, I'm
not
Mr. MacLeod,” Rory protested. He shot his older brother a devilish glance. “Not even Garth is, not while we're working.”

“Then you'd best call me Hallie.”

“Delighted.” Rory bowed and then held Jackie on the seat. “Why don't you leave Jack here? He can help me get up steam and blow the whistle—”

“
Can
I?” burst out Jackie. “Blow the whistle?”

“Sure. If your sis says it's all right.”

Dark eyes looked at Hallie so beseechingly that it was all she could do not to hug him tight and tell him how much she wanted him to be happy, that he could trust her, that she'd never abandon him. But Words wouldn't mean much to him. She had to prove her love. That would take time. But how lucky it was that Shaft and Rory were befriending him and that he had so many exciting new things to fill his mind.

“He won't be in the way?” she asked.

“No, because he'll stay where he's told and do exactly what I say. Won't you, Jack?”

“Yes, sir!”

“We'll be along for breakfast pretty quick,” Rory assured her. He eyed Hallie as if seized by sudden inspiration. “Say, Hallie, how would you like to learn how to run the engine?”

“
What
?”

“You could.”

“Oh, no, I couldn't possibly.”

“It's all in how you think.” He shrugged. “Quite a few twelve-, thirteen-year-old boys run engines for their dads.”

“I'd be terrified of causing an explosion.”

Why was she even arguing about such a ridiculous prospect? Maybe because Garth's shoulders and back, which he seemed to keep deliberately turned to her, looked all tensed up with disapproval.

Rory's eyes danced. “Shucks, you could explode that kerosene stove, too. Blow everything to smithereens.”

“Thanks for reminding me!”

“You're welcome.” He sobered. “Cross my heart, Hallie, with a good fireman like Baldy, you could learn to do everything else, learn to do safe—”

Garth set down the oilcan and swung around with a clank of the tools that stuck out of his pockets. “That's about the harebrainedest notion I've heard out of you, Rory, and I've heard some wild ones! Women just don't understand machinery. Anyhow, I hired Miss Meredith to cook, not be a blamed nuisance.”

Hallie's face blazed. She glared at him, too angry and humiliated to speak without bursting into tears. She wanted to run the engine now, to make him eat his scornful words.

“Shaft wanted her to come have a look,” Rory reminded his brother. “Besides, wouldn't it be handy to have someone who could run the engine in case I get bunged up?”

“Jim Wyatt can.”

“Sure, but he thinks he'll have enough saved to pay down on his own outfit next year. Probably won't be back with us.”

Garth's eyes brushed Hallie, chill and gray as a winter sky. “Who says Miss Meredith will?”

She shot Jackie a worried look and was relieved to see that he was so engrossed in watching the water glass and the steam gauge that Garth's sharp query apparently hadn't registered.

Rory drew himself out of his lazy stance and stared at his brother. Their eyes met almost on a level, Rory a fraction taller, Garth broader-chested, heavier-muscled, a man in his full prime. “I wouldn't blame Hallie for looking for another job next season, Garth, sour as you're acting.”

Did his older brother redden? “A woman's got no business around a steam engine,” he maintained stubbornly.

Hallie couldn't restrain a snort. “Your own daughter fills the boiler!”

“She's just a kid.”

“Not for long,” Hallie shot back. “So you'd better start trying to understand women a little bit instead of acting like you wish they didn't exist!”
That
made him blink.

Rory plunged on. “Garth, you know doggone well it's a good thing to have someone else trained to the engine. Hallie can't pitch grain or run the separator, but she could handle the tractor—and it might come in handy some day.”

Defeated but unreconciled, Garth scowled at her. “Reckon I won't stop you if you're daft enough to try, so long as you don't shirk your cooking. But you can't wear skirts around the engine.”

“More than likely Ernie Brockett's grown out of some overalls, the way he's shooting up,” Rory said. “Miz Brockett's always glad to squeeze out an extra dime or two bits anywhere she can.”

Hallie gasped. She didn't want to run the engine. She was scared of that hissing steam, the glowing fire, all those sixty horses she wasn't sure she could keep harnessed. But now that Garth had capitulated, she'd feel foolish to admit it. How in the world had she gotten into this predicament? She couldn't, though, just couldn't, let Garth have the satisfaction of thinking he was right about women's capabilities.

She took a deep breath. If twelve-year-old boys ran engines, surely she could. And if she succeeded—well, then she'd feel that she could do absolutely anything!

“Don't worry,” Hallie told Garth in her frostiest tone. “I won't leave the cookshack unless Shaft says it's all right and I'm sure it is.” She beamed at Rory despite the fear knotting her stomach. “It's kind of you to take the trouble.”

“My pleasure.” He laughed and jumped back on the platform. She started to hurry away.

“Wait a minute,” Garth called.

Had he changed his mind so fast? Quelling her relief, knowing she had to conquer the engine or lose her self-respect and confirm this insufferable man in his woman-deriding beliefs, she paused. “Sir?”

“Wear this, Miss Meredith, when you're out in the sun.”

He held out a ruffled blue sunbonnet figured with darker blue flowers. It looked brand-new. She gazed at it in such amazement that he colored beneath his sun-browned skin. “Miz Brockett just happened to have made a new one,” he said. “It'll keep your face from blistering. A cook with a bad sunburn's not worth a hill of beans.”

Of course. That was all he'd care about—that she didn't get in such a state that she couldn't work. But she did need it, and she knew the colors would become her. “Thanks very much indeed,” she said starchily. “Be sure to keep what you paid for it out of my first wages.”

She snatched the bonnet from him. Their fingers brushed—just a whisper, but a tingling shot up her arm as if it had been asleep and the circulation was returning painfully. Their eyes met with a shock that reverberated through her.

No man had ever made her feel like this. Hallie had gone to dances and parties and movies with carloads of other young folks she had gone to high school with, and she'd received several lighthearted, kisses but she had never kept private company with any man. The ones who had asked her out didn't make her heart beat faster, and the few who had that effect were courting other young women. Now Garth MacLeod turned away from her, stiffness in the set of his head and shoulders. She felt a wrench of her heart as if it strained to follow him.

“Be good, Jackie,” she told her brother and hurried across the field. Though the sun was just tipping the boundless horizon and she didn't need the bonnet yet, she put it on anyway, because he had given it to her, because he had touched it.

Then she yanked it off and hurried along with it dangling from her fingers. This wouldn't do! Wouldn't do at all to moon around over a man who bore such a grudge against women.

Still, it was his somber face—not Rory's gay one—that kept rising before her as she stirred the big kettle of oatmeal, flipped thick slices of ham, and set the table.

“Now what about that old steam engine's given you such a frown?” Shaft demanded. He frowned himself, bristling his thick gray brows. “Rory get fresh with you?”

“No, he was real nice. He put Jackie up on the seat, and he's going to let him blow the whistle.”

“Garth, then?”

“I don't know why he gave me a sunbonnet if he just detests the sight of me!”

Shaft sighed. “My guess is he likes the sight of you a heap too much for comfort, Hallie girl.”

“Like it or not, he's going to see more of me. I—oh, Shaft, it's crazy, but he and Rory started arguing over whether or not I could run the engine, and somehow it wound up that I've got to learn, or that hateful Garth will say he knew a woman couldn't do it!”

“Well, well, well,” Shaft murmured softly. “Well, well, well!”

“I won't throw my work off on you,” Hallie quickly assured him.

“Bless your heart, I know you won't.” Shaft grinned hugely. He put an eighth loaf of bread to raise in the warming oven and covered them all with a clean towel. “But it'd be almost worth doing all the work myself to see you set Garth back on his heels. He's so dadburned stubborn that he'll never look at a woman fair and square till he gets hit good and hard between the eyes. He's like a mule. You got to get his attention.”