Wolf and Iron

Wolf was now in the habit of curling up, and stepped into the area that would be the smithy.

There was nothing here yet but some stones he had already gathered, and a large pile of clay. He had found a clay deposit after searching down the bed of the larger stream for some distance and brought what was there back, load by load, in a couple of the buckets from the ranch.

The two full buckets each time had been a good load to carry that distance, but it was invaluable. The stone, mortared by clay, would make an excellent firepit. But it struck him now that he had better get the clay to the inner room before it froze where it sat. Or else he would never be able to break it into chunks to warm up, soften, and mix with added water for use as mortar.

The two buckets were still here. He got a shovel from the inner cave, where he kept the tools so that Wolf would not chew their handles to bits, and went out to load buckets and start bringing the clay inside.

“What’s that?” Merry demanded when he brought in the first two buckets.

He told her briefly.

“And you were worried about me filling up the space in here!” she said.

That was all she said, however. He managed to transfer the clay before the food was ready. He made a rough pyramid of it against their innermost wall of sand, the one wall of the cave that he would be excavating further once he was confined to the cave by weather and could only work inside.

The rabbits were tender and tasty.

“A change for the better, from beef all the time,” Merry said as they were eating, “don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” Jeebee answered.

The truth was, however, the change did not make a great deal of difference to him. Sometime since he had left Stoketon, appetite had become unimportant to him. Hunger was important, and food was good when he ate it. But he did not miss any particular taste, or regret things that he used to be able to eat that were no longer available.

The fact of the matter was that the feeling he looked for was that of a full stomach rather than the satisfaction of a particular taste.

But Merry had gone to some trouble with the rabbits, including using some of the spices she had brought back up. Jeebee did not want to hurt her feelings. But privately, he would have been as happy with anything else that was meat, along with the vegetables.

That evening, as they sat before the fire, she began for the first time to tell him about some parts of the last few days of her search for him.

Most of the people she had stopped with had been very helpful. Some had been indifferent. Some had been hospitable only out of a sense of obligation, or a consideration of the future contact they might want to have with Paul and the wagon.

Nearly all of them had thought Merry was foolish to go looking for someone who had probably vanished. Somebody, who under the new conditions of the present time, was not likely to be found. But until she passed out of the area in which she, Paul, and the wagon were known, the visiting had been pleasant.

What struck Jeebee as she talked was a sense of wonder. Not just a wonder that she should venture on such a search for him, but that she should stick so single-mindedly to the goal of finding him. There was a driving force in her he had never really appreciated.

“You know,” she told him as they finally banked the fire and started to bed, “we ought to change places for a few days. Let me take over the hunting. You work up here, or down at the ranch, whichever you want. Which do you want, by the way?”

“There’s things I ought to get started on here, like building the forge,” he said, because that was at the top of his thoughts, “before it gets too cold out there. The clay’ll freeze on me, if I wait too long.”

“It’s strange you didn’t find some kind of forge down there in that outbuilding you said must have been a blacksmithing place for the ranch,” said Merry. “A forge wouldn’t burn.”

“They may have used a portable forge, and the looters took it with them,” said Jeebee. “Nick told me about the portable forges. Sears, or Montgomery Ward’s, used to sell them, once upon a time. Maybe they still do—I mean, did right up until the Collapse. It was a sort of three-legged metal bowl that you could pick up and carry, and build a coal fire in. It wouldn’t be hard to carry that off.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Merry.

The next morning she left with the two horses and the rifle.

She did not take the trailer, planning to use Sally as a packhorse instead. The weather was still good, if crisp, and the sky was clear. Jeebee worried about her, in spite of himself. Still, she had said she would stay close to the foothills.

Left alone at the cave, he began work on the forge. It was a matter of building up a round, well-like affair out of stones he had gathered. They were all about six inches in diameter, and as close to roundness as he could find. He built a small, circular wall with them, packing the spaces between with mortar. The sides went up around a log that he had laid in at an angle when the walls were about six inches off the ground so that its upper end would project into the firepit at the top.

The space left by the log when he took it out would be the channel for the draft of forced air he would provide with the foot bellows he planned to build later.

In the next few days, while Merry gathered meat, he built the wall up until it was about three feet off the ground. Then filled it with the remaining rocks to the level at which the angled log came out and the firepit had its bottom.

He pulled the log out, finally, and coated the firepit and the inside of the air passage with a smooth coat of clay.

By the third day, the forge itself was done and the clay of it drying. Meanwhile he was hard at work building his bellows. These he made simply of two large triangular pieces of plank, joined together along the sides with leather that widened from some three inches at the wooden nozzle that fitted into the air channel, to a good twelve inches around the broad end of the back, where he had attached two solid handles ten inches long, each to one plank side.

Pulled apart by the handles, the bellows sucked air in through the leather valve on the underside of a hole in the top wooden side of the bellows, then forced the air up the channel in the forge when the two sides were pushed together again with the handles.

He had planned to fasten one handle and side by staking it into the earth floor, and pump the bellows by stepping on the top handle to force the two wooden sides together, once the bellows had inflated. For that, however, he needed some mechanism that would pull the upper side away from the lower to inflate it.

He solved that by attaching to its top side a rope that ran up and through a pulley screwed tight to one of the two-by-four rafters of his slim roof. The far end of the cord through the pulley was counterweighted.

Now he could push the top handle down to the floor with his foot, collapsing the bellows, and the counterweight would pull it up again, inflating them, when he took his foot off the handle. He could now pump air into the fire, once he had one going in the forge, while still having both his hands free for work.

All this took a little better than the three days. Every evening, after Merry had gotten home, they ate; and after, as they sat with the fire, Merry spoke a little more freely about her long trip to find him. It was as if she could not leave the trip alone, but at the same time he had the feeling that she was dodging around a part of it, something to do with it that she found hard to tell.

Jeebee began to feel uneasy about what might be bothering her. But he had now grown so unused to asking questions that he could not push her to tell him.

The day after he finished the forge itself, he rigged a hood over it with a length of leftover stovepipe to carry the vapors from the fire out the front wall. He could not remember, and his one course in undergraduate chemistry was not good enough for him to figure out, what kind of dangerous vapors his homemade charcoal might put out.

But with a draft from the bottom and the stovepipe open to the outside above the forge fire, most of its gases ought to be carried out, and the unchinked walls around him should let plenty of air in. At last, he built a small fire with wood in the forge, and when it was going well enough, added the charcoal.

He was both excited and pleased at the way the charcoal caught from the small wood fire. He had brought up the anvil from the ashes of the ranch’s smithy some days before. He had kept it ready by the forge; and now simply as an experiment, he tried heating and bending a piece of angle iron, using the six-pound hammer from the ranch