“Did you think of looking under the kitchen floor?” said Merry.
“Under the kitchen floor?”
“Of course,” Merry said. “Where else would you put foods that you might want to get at in a hurry, but wanted to keep out of the way in the kitchen? Someplace cool but dry, and sure not to freeze?”
“The kitchen… ” said Jeebee thoughtfully. “I didn’t notice anything in the kitchen that looked like it was a trapdoor to a place below it.”
“The trap door was in that little pantry area with all the shelves around it,” Merry said. “The people that went through it simply grabbed what they wanted off the shelves and never looked down. You did the same thing, didn’t you? You looked into the pantry, saw practically nothing there but these spice cans, and gave up. Right?” Jeebee nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t check the floor there. What made you do it?”
“I was just pretty sure that there had to be something like that. I’ve seen a lot of entries like that in the kitchens of houses off by themselves. It’s a natural thing to have. By the way, there’s a lot more still down there that we’d better pick up and take away before the really cold weather comes. Things that wouldn’t have frozen, ordinarily, because the house above them would be heated. But now it’s just a ruin, stuff will freeze as hard there as they will in our meat pit in the cold room, out front. There’re more cheeses for one thing. Oh yes, and more of this.”
It was then she had held up a large bottle full of long, dark tablets.
“Vitamins,” she said, “the one-a-day kind. We’re both going to take them from now on, as long as we have to live on so much meat. And the cheese’ll help. Good source of vitamins C and D.”
While the food cooked, Jeebee stepped into the outer room to see how far Merry had gotten with the freeze pit she had been digging in the floor of the cold room. It had occurred to him that he might use his time right now to finish it. But he saw that she had done remarkably well with the time she had. She was either stronger in some ways than he had thought, already, or else she had a particular pride in being able to do this bit of excavation. In either case, perhaps it would be best not to seem to step in and finish it for her.
Since he was outside and had the time, he went along the length of the cold room, past the corner where 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.