Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (12 page)

“Well, they used to own pretty much the whole town between the two of them and most of the property beyond until Morton up and disappeared a few months ago,” Sarah replied. “Utterly mad for inventing things, the pair of them, and small-minded with it. Such a rivalry you never saw—as if making a better spinning wheel were the be-all and end-all. If I had to guess, I’d say Halprin finally found some way to drive Morton off—or kill him and hide the body. The Lord knows they tried to get rid of one another often enough, though I’d have lief it were Halprin who vanished—he’s a vile man who kills sheep for his own amusement with his terrible inventions. And greedy beyond imagining, though he’s very rich from selling his murderous inventions to anyone as will pay—Union or Confederate. He and Morton fought for a whole year about where the rail right-of-way was going to pass, and the town was a mess because of it. Halprin only half won that argument.”

“And now the railroad may have to make a jog around Morton’s property,” the railroad man added, “since he ran off without leaving a clear deed to the land to anyone. We’ve tried to apply
eminent domain on the abandoned property, but Halprin is fighting us in court—ironically to ‘protect Morton from being taken advantage of while he’s missing.’ I suspect he’s just doing it to gain time until he can find a way to get the property for himself.”

“I wouldn’t put such a thing past him. He’s a cruel creature, is Mr. Halprin,” Sarah added.

The soldier looked back to Sarah. “What business is it that you’re wanting Halprin to do?”

“I’m wanting him to let us drill for a deeper well. We all know there’s an aquifer below the town—just look at how the cottonwood trees are still green even in the heat and dry: they must be getting water from below the topsoil. But Mr. Halprin won’t allow it. I’ve asked the council and I’ve asked him, and the answer is the same—which isn’t surprising considering the council is no more than Halprin’s puppets these days. And I wouldn’t countenance what Mr. Halprin suggested.”

The soldier raised his eyebrows, but it was the railroad man who asked, “Surely he didn’t impose himself…that way?”

“I’ll content myself with saying Mr. Halprin is no more a gentleman in that respect than one could suppose from his other dealings,” Sarah replied. “And he did not get what he wanted, though I very nearly had to run from the room to make it so.”

The soldier frowned and asked, “Why can’t you dig your own well?”

“I don’t own the land and Mr. Halprin has made it very clear none of us are to go around digging holes on his property without his permission—which he won’t give. So I tried to convince him we should drill for a public well, since that benefits everyone and we could use a bit of Morton’s property on the south side of the main road—since Mr. Morton can’t be found to say no to it. But Halprin refuses to consider it—same argument as he’s giving to the railroad, but really, it’s because he’d like some of Morton’s tenants to up and leave. Without water, it’s certain that some of them will. And soon.”

“Won’t he lose some of his own tenants?”

Sarah gave a wry smile. “Of course, but that makes no never
mind. Once the railroad is through, there’ll be plenty of people lining up to buy every scrap of land, built on or no.”

The soldier looked thoughtful and made a sound in his throat, nodded, but didn’t say any more.

After dinner, he retired to his bedroom, pacing and wondering if he could do anything to help, for he’d taken a liking to the widow Sarah and hated to see her and her neighbors so abused by both nature and a single, greedy man. He also regretted having killed Morton—though not much. His thoughts ran in circles and eventually he sat down on his bed, wishing he had some distraction such as music or cards, but as it was Sunday, the saloon was closed and he didn’t dare disrupt the house by going down to the parlor to play Sarah’s piano—badly. His eye fell on the music box he had brought out of the caverns, sitting where he had put it down months ago on his chest of drawers. He picked it up, but it had no key. He tried the key he always carried in his pocket. The fit wasn’t perfect, but he was able to wind the mechanism one turn before the cylinder began to revolve with a sudden chord that gave way to a strange tune.

Before the song had ended, he heard a scrabbling sound outside his window and when he opened the sash, he was confronted with the face of the smallest of the mechanical hounds from the cavern. He fell back, making room to do battle with the beast, but it only stepped delicately into the room and looked up at him with its flickering electric eyes.

After a moment of stilted silence the dog spoke: “What would you have me do, Master?”

Thunderstruck, the soldier sat down on the hard chair beside the door. “Who would have thought…?” he muttered.

“What would you have me do, Master?” the mechanical beast repeated.

“Can you dig a well?”

“I cannot, Master. But I can fetch the digging machine to you.”

“Can you, indeed, little dog?”

The gleaming metal dog nodded its heavy head.

“Then fetch the machine and take it to the field beside the last
building on the southeast side of the main road of this town. Bring it in darkness or someone may try to stop you, and we’ll drill a new well so deep the town will never run dry again.”

The mechanical dog nodded again. Then it bounded out of the open window and was gone from sight in a moment more.

Once darkness fell and the last lights of the town were extinguished, the soldier went out for a walk and strolled to the eastern edge of the town, where he sat on the edge of a dry horse trough, lit a cigar, and waited to see if the dog would turn up. Moonlight silvered the ground, and the earth sighed the day’s gathered heat into the air, swirling up eddies of fine grit that looked like fairy dust enchanting the cloudless prairie night.

In a while, the soldier could see something coming down the moonlit road from the woods. It marched along on six slim legs and in front of it ran the metal dog. The soldier stood up to meet the dog and its strange companion, which proved to be the walking augur machine he had seen in the cavern so many weeks ago. He pointed to what looked to be a good spot for the well, but the dog sniffed at the ground awhile and led the machine to a different location.

“Well, all right, then,” the soldier said. “Let the drilling begin.”

The machine began to drill into the ground, the dirt and rock spewing out and piling up around the edges of the hole as the bit dug in with a deep grumbling noise.

The soldier stood by and watched the machine. The augur dug steadily for hours with only a few adjustments by the soldier while the town slept on. After a while the sun started peeping over the eastern woodland, and the soldier could hear people stirring and beginning their morning chores.

He turned to regard the stalwart mechanical beast standing beside the tireless augur. “Best hie yourself home now, dog. I’ll look after the drill, but I think it better if no one gets a glimpse of you.”

The dog made a smart turn around and loped away, vanishing into the trees as the sun broke over their tops. The bright orb had barely sent its fingers down to touch the gleaming drill when a
geyser of water erupted from the hole it was digging, knocking the walking augur into the air and tumbling it end over end to the very edge of town.

The sound of the machine falling attracted attention, and in a minute a few men and women had gathered to stare at the spring that had appeared overnight in Morton’s field at the edge of town. It wasn’t long before a crowd had encircled the muddy ground and begun talking about the miracle and praising God for it. The soldier edged to the back of the crowd, but not fast enough to elude the eyes of two people who came running along the street to see the source of the ruckus: Sarah and a beanpole of a man wearing a very fine suit and an expression of fury.

The widow hailed him and the man came along. “What happened?” Sarah asked.

“A spring seems to have erupted from the ground while we slept,” the soldier replied.

The tall man scoffed. “It just…appeared here overnight?”

The soldier shrugged. “By the grace of God.”

But the man had already turned his sharp gaze to scour the landscape, and he spotted the broken augur lying like a crippled spider at the edge of the woods. Ignoring the wondering crowd, he ran to the machine and looked it over. When he returned, his expression was thunderous, but he said nothing, merely brushing past the soldier with a glare and ignoring the calls of “Mr. Halprin, Mr. Halprin!” that followed after him. A small number of men detached themselves from the gawking crowd and scurried after him.

Sarah let out an amused snort at the sight. “There they go, kissing Halprin’s backside, but I think they won’t let
this
be taken away. Even the city council needs water.” Then she turned to regard the soldier with a clear eye. “I suspect you have some idea how this ‘miracle’ came to be.”

“It’s hardly my place to guess at the motives of the Almighty.”

“I was thinking of someone closer to home,” she said, reaching out to take his nearest hand and turn it over to see the light smears of dirt and machine oil that smirched his palm and fingers.

The soldier cast his gaze down and pulled his hand back.

But Sarah was disinclined to let him get away so easily. “Why don’t you come home with me and fetch some buckets? Be a pity to let that water go to waste when there’s so much to clean and cook, and bathe….”

The soldier nodded and followed her, meek as a lamb, but with a smile on his face.

It took two days to build and cap a proper wellhead and most of another to mount the large, gleaming pump donated by Mr. Halprin, but the folks of Stone Crossing went to the job with a will. It took two more days before the city council had declared that there was enough water and pressure to consider Mr. Halprin’s suggestion of a proper civic plumbing project that would pipe water to every building on the main road by the end of the year. Sarah and the soldier both applauded the announcement, but Halprin himself, though hailed publicly as a great man—and privately as a miserly bastard—wore a sour countenance throughout the proceedings, turning a suspicious eye on the soldier and his landlady. But nothing came of his bitter looks, and the town reveled in its wonderful new water supply. The miraculous walking augur was repaired and a second well was drilled west of town to irrigate the fields so that they flushed again with greenery even in the heat, the railroad workers continued their din of industry, and everyone smelled a stretch more pleasant.

T
hings went on as they had before the drought, except that the soldier smiled once in a while and was seen on occasion strolling with the widow Sarah along the edges of the woods on Sunday evenings. The summer burned out the last of its fury, and the town was left adrift on the golden autumn sea of scythed fields.

As the trees dropped their leaves, red as garnets, on the ground now touched by the silver fingers of frost, the railroad moved west and the folks of Stone Crossing laid up stores for the winter. The soldier began thinking he should do something more
than smoke, gamble, drink, and read books in Sarah’s parlor, but what he might do eluded him, for he had known no other trade but war. Should he stay or move on? He grew more fond of the widow with every day that passed and he liked the town well enough, but he did not know what place there was for such a man as he. He pondered on it in the night and was, therefore, the first to see the dreadful ruddy glow that illuminated the western sky when all should have been blanketed in darkness.

The soldier threw open his window and leaned out to see what caused the light. A thread of smoke came on the wind and the whisper of a distant fire, crawling on its ravenous way across the stubbled fields toward the town. For a moment he was seized with a terror of this mindless, devouring thing and he thought to flee, but he knew he could not outrun such a conflagration even if it were not a coward’s act. Then he thought of the metal dog and plucked the music box from his dresser.

He turned the ill-fitting key in the mechanism, but the tune did not ring out after the first wind. He turned it a further revolution and now the cylinder rotated, starting up with a harsh chime of chords, one and then a second chord, before the queer little song began to play.

He slipped down the stairs and ran outside in his nightclothes to meet the dog. He gazed toward the woods and saw it coming, bounding across the ground in great leaps, but as it drew near, he realized it was not the knee-high beast that had come to his first call, but the larger dog that had guarded the second room and its machines of destruction. He stiffened his spine and waited, for he could no more run from this beast than from the fire advancing on the other horizon.

The massive hound stopped before him, its sides of copper and brass reflecting red in the distant firelight. “What would you have me do, Master?” the dog asked, its voice rumbling like a rockfall.

“Do you see the fire that comes toward this town?” the soldier asked.

The mechanical beast nodded its brass-bound head, red light flickering across the rivets as large as the soldier’s thumb that picked out the lines of the creature’s face.