Walking across the common, the town’s patriarch trod on sweet emerald turf, grass growing luxuriously in the unseasonably cool summer temperatures and white light radiating from a polluted sky. Yellowstone ash, rich with fresh minerals minted deep within the earth, fed plant roots extravagantly, promoting a lush growth of grass. Trees ringing the common had managed to leaf out in spring and seemed to find just enough nourishment in the feeble rays of the sun. Abel stopped to refresh his brooding soul, a steady breeze flipping his collar about. A single leaf from a silver maple lost its grip on a branch and tumbled in the air before his eyes. He followed its course, the leaf coasting on the wind. It sailed across the entire width of the common and disappeared.
Watching it, the man was struck by a thunderous thought, flashing through his mind’s creative recesses in an instant. He turned on his heels and broke into full running stride, aiming for the Beaver Den, the little town’s industrial building.
A door in the wall of Maxwell Zimmerman’s busy enclave burst open to admit Abel on the run. He dodged metal turning lathes, drill presses and old metal-working machines that defied description in a frantic dash to find the manager of the place. Maxwell and several others labored, fabricating steam fittings for a small boiler to be bolted into a tiny lake-going, wood-fired steamboat. Abel hurtled down upon them.
“Max, Max, I need to talk to you,” Abel wheezed, wolfing down breaths.
“You need the doctor, by the looks of you,” said Max, rumpling up his nose at the intruder.
Abel dragged the engineer away from the work area. “Come on, we need to talk right this minute.”
Max closed the door to a small office for an audience with the community leader. He beheld Abel, wild-eyed, drumming his fingers incessantly on the surface of a desk.
“Max, what do you know about pneumatic devices, things that operate by negative pressure, you know, like at a bank?”
“You mean something like a mail tube chute?”
“Exactly. Do you know how something like that works?
“Of course. Very simple,” shrugged Max, scratching a bushy head of hair the color of ground pepper. “The first subway ever put in service in New York was a pneumatic train.”
“Huh, I didn’t know that,” said Abel.
“ Yeah, engineers built a perfectly round tunnel, and the cars they built for it were round, too, like huge tin cans. On one side of the cars they pumped out the air and created a partial vacuum. Normal atmospheric pressure pushing on the back end of the car sent the thing flying through the tube.”
“You could send anything through a pneumatic tube, couldn’t you?”
“Certainly. Anything.”
“Could you build a pneumatic system?”
“I think I could. All I’d need is a source of power, fabricate a vacuum pump, and hook it to some tubing. That would do it.”
“How big could you make it?”
“Size isn’t a problem: send a letter, send a subway car. It just depends on what you want to move and how far you want to move it.”
Abel rocked to and fro, lost in thought. “Tell me, Max, how fast could you put such a thing together, using any odd engine you’ve got laying around here for a source of power?”
“How big?”
“Oh, big enough to move something through pipe no larger than, say, a basketball is round.”
“How far do you want to push your basketball?”
“I don’t know. Maybe 200 or 300 feet.”
“That could be done. I think I could rig up something.”
“How fast?”
“Fast enough, a week or two, I’d imagine. Where do you want to set this up?”
“Sweetly.”
“Sweetly?”
“Could you fashion it so it fits into a canoe?”
“A canoe?” Max closed his eyes and rattled his head about. “I have to tell you, Abel, you’re one bloody odd duck.”
Chapter Seventy-Eight
An elderly Native American man, mouth agape and gasping for air, lay entombed in bandages. He cried out in pain, but there was no volume to his voice. Liz listened to the man’s ordeal from her bed and studied a face chiseled by age, as if it were desert sandstone eroded by ceaseless wind and storm water. She had not seen this individual before, but she sought to overcome her own injuries and go to his bedside to assist him in his agony.
Before Liz could push off from the bed, the Blackfoot doctor, Sinopa, rushed into the room with a small implement wrapped in packaging. She struggled to liberate the tool. The woman’s daughter, Petah, entered carrying a small basin.
The doctor pulled on latex gloves, poured disinfectant onto the man’s ribs and washed him down with it. She placed a small metal object against the rib cage and spent a few seconds probing with her fingers.
“White Elk, this will hurt for one second, but you will forget the pain right away.”
Sinopa raised an arm and slapped the object. An audible pop, like a balloon exploding, followed. Fluids erupted from White Elk’s body. Dark watery froth and blood spatter showered the bed and drained into the container. The elder gasped and drew a deep breath.
“Ah-eee, I can breathe.”
The body cavity drained of fluid, Sinopa worked quickly to sew up the wound, disinfect once again, strap bandages to the skin and cover the elder with his blankets. She administered a shot as well.
The doctor threw the clinic door back and gestured for tribesmen and women to come forward. The room filled quickly with Blackfoot, who spread out to line the walls and encircle the bedridden man as Sinopa bent over to listen to the patient’s breathing.
At the foot of the bed, a small table was set out, a heavy ceramic pot upon its surface. Into the pottery went a twist of sweetgrass. The tinder was lit with a match. Smoke curled into the room, filling the chamber with the ancient musk of prairie fire.
The many in the room set the walls vibrating with song, hoots and shouts. Two more individuals entered the chamber, a tall aged man bedecked in ceremonial tunic and a woman in fine weave and embroidery. On her shoulders she carried a rolled blanket, and this she brought to the bed and put it at the feet of the ailing one. One on each side of the bed, the two slowly unrolled the bundle exposing a three-foot reed and stone implement decorated with the head of a wood duck and many feathers of a golden eagle.
The tall aged one retrieved the long instrument from the bed and moved about the room, showing it to all in the chamber.
Blankets were brought to the room and spread about the floor. Several people moved onto them; they stepped lively, exaggerating their movements. They danced and twirled, moving with a purpose around the sick bed. Another joined the dance and another until the room drummed and vibrated with the slap of feet upon the floor.
Liz could not move her left leg easily, entombed in its cast. Damn the thing. It would not permit her freedom to join the dance. She so wanted to, though she had no idea why the festivities had erupted among the native people or if they would welcome her if she could join them. The stomping, whirling, and chanting were tonic for the eyes and ears. The monotony of quiet recuperation crawled off Liz’s bed, banished to the ward corners by the Blackfoot ritual playing out before her.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Tracing the southeast shoreline of Big Stone Lake, coils of black smoke intertwined beneath flat white skies tarnished by Yellowstone particulate. Men from Independency pulled on the oars of a flatwater canoe, plying southward, making for a column of smoke over Sweetly.