as big around as I was. A big strip of snow had melted off the roof on either side, and I heard one of the men say it was a good thing the dragon had come in winter or the buildings would have caught fire.
I didn’t stay long. It was too cold to stand around watching the backs of people’s coats, and I’d already seen more of the dragon than I’d wanted. I couldn’t get away from it, though, because even when I got home, it was all anyone could talk about. When the alarm started, Nan and Allie had been almost home, and Robbie and Jack had already arrived. Robbie was in a temper because Mama hadn’t let him go out to look after the alarm was over. I didn’t tell him I’d actually seen the dragon, even though it was just from a distance. I thought it would only make him cross.
Keeping quiet didn’t help, though, because when Papa and Lan got home, Robbie found out that Papa and Professor Graham had been among the magicians who’d brought the steam dragon down. He started complaining right off, but what really made him pitch a fit was that Lan had been allowed to go along, on account of his double- seven training. Even though Lan hadn’t actually done anything but watch, Robbie was furious. He kept saying that he was two years older than Lan and it wasn’t fair, until Mama sent him to his room for the rest of the evening. He was grumpy for days afterward.
In the end, everyone who wanted to get a good look at the steam dragon had all the chance they wanted, because it took the best part of a week to move its body from the place where it had fallen. Some of the men got it coiled up and mostly out of the street and off the roof before it froze too solid to move, but then the argument started.
Mr. Stolz, who owned the feed store, said that the dragon belonged to him because it had landed mostly on his property. He wanted to sell the body to a circus. The Settlement Office wanted to have it stuffed and mounted and put on display for people who wanted to be settlers, to give them some idea what they’d be in for. The North Plains Territory governor wanted to send it to Washington. And the Northern Plains Riverbank College wanted it to study.
In the end, the college won, since it was the college magicians who’d brought the dragon down before it did more than eat a horse and dent Mr. Stolz’s roof. Also, President Grey convinced everyone that letting the magicians study up on a brand-new, fresh steam dragon would be the best thing for all of them. The Settlement Office went along with it right away, because they thought the magicians might find better ways to deal with the dragons, or at least tell when they were coming in time to get livestock indoors. The hardest one to convince was Mr. Stolz. He’d really wanted that circus money to fix his roof with, but in the end, even he gave in.
So they got four teams of horses and a special flatbed wagon and most of the students and professors and handymen, and moved the frozen steam dragon over to the wildlife experiments building. It was too big to fit inside, so for a while there were crowds of people outside staring at the dragon and the professors working on it. After a bit, though, folks got tired of watching the naturalists climbing around with their measuring sticks and slide rules, and things got quiet again.
After the naturalists finished, the magicians started in. All the college students—and Lan—were in the thick of it. Over half of the magic students were planning to go for settlement magicians or do fieldwork on the wildlife when they graduated, so they were even more excited about having a brand-new steam dragon to study than the professors were.
The college made regular announcements in the paper of what they’d found out, mostly to reassure people. The steam dragon had been a female, probably blown east by a freak storm. None of the settlements west of the barrier had reported attacks or other sightings, so we weren’t likely to be seeing flocks of them come spring. There was some unpleasantness when the weather warmed up and the dragon began to thaw out.
“It’s because we didn’t expect it to go bad and smelly all at once like this,” Lan told Robbie and William and me. “We thought we’d have a couple of weeks when the inside would still be frozen, even though the outside was thawing out. But Papa says that it has enough magic, even dead, to warm up fast all over.”
“Yuck,” Robbie said with considerable relish. “I bet it’ll stink up the whole college. Maybe even half the city. Hey, Eff, your bedroom is on that side of the house. Better not open your window ‘til you’ve had a good sniff of the wind!”
“Don’t be dumb,” Lan told him. “Papa and Professor Graham already have teams of students doing preservation spells on different sections of the body.”
“My father said they couldn’t have the whole neighborhood complaining about the smell,” William confirmed.
“I wish they’d let me help more,” Lan said crossly. “They wouldn’t need such big teams if they let me do one of the preservation spells.”
“Are you doing preservation spells already?” I said, impressed.
“Well, no,” Lan admitted. “But I bet I could if Papa would let me. I sneaked a look at the next study book, and they don’t look that hard.”
“You aren’t thinking of trying them on your own, are you?” I said.
“Of course not,” Lan said loftily. “I know better than that.” He grinned. “Besides, Papa’d know in a minute that it was me. That’s the problem with being a double-seven—nobody else’s magic feels the same, so it’s too easy to get caught.”
I didn’t find that particularly reassuring, but in the end, it wasn’t Lan who got in trouble over the steam dragon—it was Robbie. Late in the spring, when the snakes came out, he went down to the meadow and caught himself a dozen garter snakes. He dipped them in gray milk paint and then told the boys in his class they were baby steam dragons, hatched from eggs the dead steam dragon had laid before the magicians got it. He sold all but two of them for a quarter each before Mrs. Bertelstein came calling on Papa, all indignant because he’d dare let his own son spread such dangerous creatures all over town. She was even more indignant when Papa called Robbie in and made him admit what they really were. Robbie had to pay back all the money, and explain and apologize to all the parents, and on top of that he had extra chores for weeks.
Papa wasn’t so upset by the fake steam dragons as he made out—I heard him telling Dean Farley about it later, and laughing. Mama was upset, though. After Mrs. Bertelstein’s visit, Mama was the one who had to smooth down the neighbors and the other mothers, and while she was plenty good at smoothing, she didn’t much care for having to do it. A week after it all came out about the painted garter snakes, Mama gave Robbie a talking-to. None of the rest of us heard what she said—Mama never yelled, even when she was mad as fire—and Robbie wouldn’t talk about it to anyone afterward, but it must have been something to hear, because Robbie shaped up and didn’t so much as pull the girls’ pigtails in the school yard for nearly a month.
CHAPTER 11
ONCE MAMA’S TALKING-TO STARTED TO WEAR OFF, ROBBIE WAS pretty impressed with all the fuss his fake dragon babies had caused. Mrs. Bertelstein wasn’t the only one who’d believed the painted garter snakes were really baby dragons, so a lot of rumors got started. The college and the Settlement Office had to issue announcements, and Papa and the other professors had to spend a lot of time talking to the Mothers’ League and the police and the Firemen’s Association and a lot of other people. Most of the other boys admired Robbie’s cleverness, too, except for the ones who’d bought the painted snakes. And William.
William was almost as cross with Robbie over the fake dragons as Mama had been. I thought at first that it was because of all the extra work his father had to do on account of the snakes. Professor Graham had to go around to almost as many reassuring meetings as Papa, so he wasn’t home much for a while. I knew that having his father gone so much bothered William, but when I tried apologizing to him for my brother’s behavior, he got cross with me instead.
“
“But he’s my brother.”
“That doesn’t make you responsible for everything he does,” William shot back. “Why are you always apologizing for things that aren’t your fault?”
I stared at him, speechless. William had been my friend for so long by then that I’d clean forgotten that I’d never told him about me being an unlucky thirteen.
“Come to think of it, that big steam dragon last winter is the first thing I can think of that you didn’t find
