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 once the iron had turned a bright cherry red.
The angle iron bent. Not elegantly but more easily than it ever would have cold, it responded to the hammer blows.
He was full of triumph. Merry was not home yet, or he would have gone to get her immediately to show her that his smithy was now a working device.
He stopped pumping the bellows, and left the charcoal to die down by itself.
Theoretically, it should go out before it had burned itself completely to ash. He must remember to check, later. He had been making charcoal regularly by the old-fashioned method of getting a fire stoked with well-dried wood well started, then covering it with earth so that it burned slowly, away from the oxygen of the open air. The wood should have been from hardwoods like oak. Unfortunately, all he had to work with was pine, but dead wood, if it was firm and dry, seemed to make at least a usable charcoal.
Working this way, he had accumulated a fairly good pile of fuel for the forge. But, going out to look at the pile of it he had built up against the outside of the smithy wall, he realized that he would have to continue making it all winter long if he intended to use the forge at all regularly. With the bellows pumping air into it, the forge ate fuel.
He went back to work in the interior room of the cave. His plan since he had found Merry again, had been to dig back further into the sandy wall so that later on he would be able to build a somewhat larger inside room. Merry had not yet put down the layer of worn-out throw rugs she had planned, simply because he had told her that he intended to do this digging. There was no point in laying rugs and then strewing sand on top of them.
He worked as neatly as he could, but dust quickly accumulated in the air and fogged everything in sight under his dim illumination from the car-interior lights. He was tempted to use the yard floodlight he had found at the ranch. The solar blanket did an excellent job of charging up the rechargeable battery of that device. Some daylight was coming in through the front window of the cold room and the door of the inner room which he had left open, but it was not enough to help much. He needed to see exactly where and what he was digging.
He gave up at last to give the air of the inner room a chance to clear before Merry got home, and went out to his unending job of accumulating and chopping firewood for the fireplace.
They could not have too much of this and he was piling it ready against the outside wall of the cave, where it would act as an extra windbreak, if not extra insulation against the cold, later on. Merry came home eventually, with a good load of meat, as well as some light things from the ranch, to top out a fairly good-sized packload on Sally.
“I was lucky,” she told Jeebee as they were unloading and unsaddling the horses together. “I found a calf by itself, almost the minute I hit the flat down there. So I spent the rest of the time at the ranch. How’s the forge coming?”
“It’s done,” said Jeebee. “There’s no time tonight to rig lights in there, so if you can wait awhile in the morning before you go out, I’ll show you how it works.”
That afternoon and evening after she got home Merry did not talk about her journey to find Jeebee. She talked about everything else, about her hunting, about the ranch, about several dozen things. Her tone was excited and cheerful. She bustled about the interior of the cave. Finally, almost regretfully, she agreed that they should probably turn in for the night, since they were always up by dawn.
Jeebee fell asleep almost immediately, as had become a habit with him. He was roused to find Merry holding herself tightly against him and crying into his chest.
“What is it?” he said, putting his arms around her.
“Just hold me,” Merry choked.
He tightened his arms around her. She was crying very hard indeed. It was the kind of weeping that tears apart the one who weeps.
Once, Jeebee thought, his mind would have been flooded with a number of questions and guesses as to what was troubling her. But the past months had changed him in this, too. Her explanation would come eventually. There was no need to try to hurry it. She was being attacked by something, something her mind remembered; and all he could do was be a fortress about her and wait. So, he would wait.
He laid his cheek down tenderly upon the top of her soft hair and tried to encompass her as much as he could with his presence. For no reason at all, he thought of how Wolf had come to him in the river bottoms, and also when he had turned his ankle. Often Wolf had come when he was asleep, or when he was so caught between wakefulness and sleep that he was hardly conscious of the other appearing. Invariably, Wolf sniffed him all over and then nose-prodded at his arm or body. “Nose-lift,” he told himself, would be a better term, since essentially what Wolf did was slide the top of his nose under an arm or a leg and push upward, to see if Jeebee made any reaction.