Chapter 1
The chestnut mare was impatient. She had stood still for Lizzy Lupo to take the old shoes off and trim and clean her hooves, but it was clear that she wanted to run now. Standing in the makeshift forge, the horse snorted and stamped, impatient to get this over with.
“Now, Stormy,” Kyle said. He was holding the mare’s head. “You know we gotta let Lizzy shoe you. So hold still.”
“I don’t know if she’s going to listen to you,” Lizzy said, shooting Kyle a grin as she hammered the horseshoe so that it would fit Stormy’s hoof perfectly. “She’s a feisty one.”
“Well, she does belong to Troy,” Kyle said with a sigh. “And it seems that everything that belongs to him is either feisty or complicated.”
“Feisty or complicated,” Lizzy muttered, speaking more to herself than to Kyle.
“Yes,” Kyle said. “You should know—you’ve been spending a lot of time with him since your recovery.” He waggled his brows at her.
Lizzy almost brought the hammer down on her hand. “What?”
“You and Troy,” Kyle chuckled. “Don’t get me wrong. I wish you all the luck in the world. I just always thought that he would make himself a woman out of clock pieces or something. He never seems to get along with people because they don’t have cogs and wheels and things.”
“That’s not fair,” she protested. “Troy is very personable. He’s just focused on his work.” Lizzy hit the horseshoe again. There, it was the perfect size and shape now. “Hold her steady,” she said.
Kyle did, rubbing the mare’s brown nose and whispering to her in a way that quieted the animal right down.
The nails went into the hoof without a hitch, and Stormy didn’t protest.
Lizzy began on the next one, heating it up, getting it the right shape.
“So?” Kyle pressed. “What is going on between you and Troy? Only I thought he was writing to a woman back east. You know about that, right?”
Lizzy nodded. “I know about it, Kyle.” She tilted the horseshoe, making sure the heat was evenly distributed around it. “Troy and I are friends. For heaven’s sake, we just met.”
“Over a month ago,” Kyle teased. “And you met me too, but no one is talking about us in that way. If you know what I mean?”
Lizzy sighed. She hit the shoe just a little too hard as it began to glow red hot, and had to spend a few minutes hammering it back into the right shape. Then she applied it to Stormy’s clean, trimmed hoof.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Kyle said, speaking while looking at the horse.
Was he talking to Stormy? Lizzy wasn’t certain. If Kyle thought Troy was tough to talk to, he should look at himself sometime, she thought with amusement.
“I was just wondering if you and Troy were stepping out together,” he went on, ever the cheerful camp gossip.
Lizzy stopped her work and regarded him.
“Kyle, let me make this easy for you. Until recently, I couldn’t go a day without having to take a nap in the afternoon.
After being sick for so long, it’s been a long road to recovery.
So, please forgive me if I’m not really concerned about stepping out with anyone. ”
It was pretty much a bald-faced lie, and Lizzy said a prayer for forgiveness. But at the same time, what business was it of Kyle’s, no matter how well-meaning he was?
He nodded, seeming abashed, and made no further comments about Troy.
They finished the work on Stormy while talking about other things.
The mine was coming on nicely. Ethan had set up a smelter not far from the forge, close to the creek that flowed nearby.
He needed easy access to the water, and Lizzy was glad for the increased distance between the mine and the smelter.
Getting the copper out of the rock was hard, loud work and distance made the noise more bearable.
Not that her own work was quiet, but still.
Both of them had set up shop on the edge of the newly forming town.
It was an exciting time to be there, at the beginning of everything.
They were finally starting to build some actual houses.
The foundations had gone up for three of them, one of which would belong to Andrew and his wife, Julie.
Lizzy was still drawing up plans for a house for her and her little brother, Timothy.
The two of them were some of the folks who had been rescued by the miners from a gang of greedy bandits.
Lizzy had about been on death’s door when Andrew and his friends had shown up.
Troy and Julie had saved her life, and Lizzy was so grateful that she’d offered to stay and be the new settlement’s farrier.
BANG!
The loud noise seemed to come out of the clear blue sky.
Lizzy dropped the hammer and looked at Kyle, whose eyes were round and huge like dinner plates. He clung to Stormy’s neck rein as the horse shied nervously. “What the heck was that?” she asked.
He was about to say something when another BANG filled the air.
“It’s the smelter!” he yelled, clinging to the now-panicked horse.
They tied Stormy to the hitching post and ran down the slope to the smelter.
As they came to a halt near the hastily constructed building, another bang rang through the air.
“Oh dear,” Troy said as he came running up too. “What have they done now?”
He smiled at Lizzy as he passed her, throwing the door open.
For a moment, all the panic and worry slid out of Lizzy.
Her world was full of one thing and one thing only lately—Troy Wellan.
He was tall and handsome, with unruly sandy hair that stood up at all angles no matter how he tried to smooth it.
But it was the look in his green eyes that sent Lizzy into the clouds.
She had heard that it was possible for someone to fall in love with the person who rescued them and that it was a fleeting and insubstantial attraction.
She wondered if that’s what this was. Troy had carried her, terribly sick and half unconscious, to the cart and then fought off the bandits that gave chase. Lizzy had been in a daze ever since.
“Are you coming in to help or what?” Troy asked as he poked his head out the door.
Lizzy blinked and hurried inside. The air in the shed was thick with the smell of the chemicals used to extract the ore from the rock pulp.
The vats were closest to the door, and men were agitating the strange syrupy goo with long sticks.
They looked up as she and Kyle entered and then went back to work.
Almost the whole space on the far side of the shed was taken up by a machine that she and Troy had built for Ethan and his handful of helpers.
By turning a handle, a man should be able to crush the rocks brought up from the mine.
The mechanism wasn’t difficult to operate and relied on gravity to do the hard work.
A person had only to turn the handle to raise the large block of iron-covered wood that Troy and Lizzy had rigged so it could then fall and crush the rocks and ore could be extracted from them.
“What happened?” Troy asked Ethan.
Ethan looked upset and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. The handle got stuck, and the more we tried to turn it, the more it got stuck and the less turning it did.”
The machine had four crushing plates that were designed to fall one after the other as the wheel was turned and the rocks were moved along a belt, turned by another handle.
But something had gone wrong. Two of the plates had collapsed, no longer attached to their arms. So that was the source of the loud banging sound.
“The crusher plates have come loose,” Lizzy said.
“That and the belt that is supposed to move things along stopped,” Ethan said.
He sighed. “Troy, this is a lovely design, but can’t we please do something else?
There has to be a better way to get the rocks small enough to extract the ore.
Ellis here almost lost his hand. He’s lucky he got out of the way as that block came falling down. ”
“But this is more efficient than anything else I can build,” Troy said.
“Look at the yields.” He took Ethan’s clipboard from him and flipped through the pages.
“You said yourself that this mechanism is crushing the rock finer than you had ever hoped. We’re getting more copper out per ton of rock than before. ”
“That doesn’t make much difference to me if my men are in danger of losing their limbs every time they use it,” Ethan said, sounding exasperated. “Please, Troy, don’t turn this into another elevator fiasco. Just make it work. Or make something else that will work.”
Ethan and his men walked away from the machine.
Kyle hovered. “Well, I guess you two don’t need me,” he said.
“Nah, but thanks for coming to check,” Troy said with a smile. “I’m sure Lizzy and I can handle it.” He winked at Lizzy, sending shivers through her.
Even Julie, the apothecary, said that it was possible that she was just imagining her feelings for Troy.
They hardly knew each other. And yet, as she set to work on the machine with him, Lizzy had to admit that she had never been happier.
Not only was he kind and handsome, but Troy didn’t judge her for being far more interested in mechanics than in the usual things women were supposed to enjoy.
Like cooking and sewing. Lizzy had yet to meet a needle or a frying pan she didn’t bend or burn.
She just wasn’t delicate. She couldn’t be, to survive her previous life, and she was happy with who she was now.
Thankfully, Troy seemed to agree that being strong and independent, with a mind for math, wasn’t so bad in a woman.
After a brief inspection of their crushing device, Lizzy and Troy found that some of the pins that were meant to hold everything in place had come loose.
“It’s because we’re using parts that are made for other applications,” Lizzy said, holding up a pin that had come out of the belt. “We should make what we need, shaped how we need it.”
Troy looked from her to the pin and back again with those enigmatic eyes. “Do you think we can do that?”
She nodded. Her father had taught her well. He used to design things and tinker all the time. He had improved on the coffee grinder they had back at home. Of course, that was before the bandits came through and ruined everything.
“Then let’s do what we can to get it up and running again. We can tinker later,” Troy said.
Together, they managed to fix the machine and, with much more difficulty, to convince Ethan to give it a try again. Goodness, Lizzy thought as they sweet-talked him. It wasn’t like the machine broke every other day! Just now and then.
With Ethan mollified and agreeing to give their invention another try, Lizzy and Troy left the shed and walked up the slope together.
“Are you done with the horses?” Troy asked. He walked close to her, their hands almost touching.
“Yes, all done,” Lizzy said. She smiled at him. Funny how tongue-tied she was around him sometimes. Especially when they were alone.
“Do you think that you could come and help me with the darn elevator then? It’s stuck again,” Troy said.
“Of course,” Lizzy said. The elevator was Troy’s pet project and was more the reason Ethan was aggravated than the smelter. It constantly broke down, and none of Troy’s considerable skills seemed to be able to isolate the problem. “What do you think has gone wrong this time?”
Troy shrugged. “It’s the pulley system. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I swear this thing will be the death of me.”
“I hope not!” Lizzy said hastily.
There was a moment’s pause between them, and she felt heat fill her cheeks. She looked down.
“I was making a rather bad joke,” Troy said, smiling, which only made Lizzy’s blush worse.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I feel foolish.”
“Don’t,” Troy said, “Michael is always telling me that I can’t make a joke worth a darn.”
“Well, he’s wrong,” Lizzy insisted. “I think you’re very funny. I was just wrapped up in all the repairs we have to do. Is it me, or does nothing seem to stay fixed around here?”
“It’s not you, Liz,” Troy said sincerely.
He looked at her and she held his gaze, a smile creeping across her lips. There was something in that look, and she really hoped she wasn’t imagining it.
“Well, we should get to the elevator,” Troy said.
They walked along the well-trodden path to the entrance to the mine. It was a hole in the ground over which Troy had built a large scaffolding setup that held the elevator in its wooden arms, so to speak.
The elevator was currently at its highest point, leaving the shaft beneath accessible by ladder and by another pulley system that allowed people and crates of rock to be lifted into or out of the hole by the turning of a handle.
It was ingenious, and Lizzy was irate that people like Ethan couldn’t be more grateful for Troy’s efforts to make life easier for the miners.
So there were some initial problems. That was to be expected with any invention!
“I’ll go up and take a look at the pulley on top,” Lizzy said. “Maybe it’s just sticking.”
Troy nodded. “Sure.”
That was another thing she liked about him. Other men would have raised a fuss if a woman had suggested she climb up so high, but Troy didn’t even blink. Just like he never complained that she wore men’s shirts and pants more often than dresses because it made her work easier.
Up she went, climbing the ladder affixed to the side of the scaffolding. She was easily thirty feet in the air when she reached the top. There was space up there for the rest of the machinery that would eventually become part of the elevator.
When she reached the top, Lizzy noticed that the pulley was dry. That was most likely why the rope was sticking and stopping the platform from moving smoothly. There was an oil jug nearby, and she reached over to pick it up.
As she leaned in, she lost her footing, slipped in some spilled oil, and went careening over the side.
“Lizzy!” Troy shouted.
Lizzy screamed, but the scream was cut short as something pulled tight around her right ankle and jerked her to the side. Suddenly she was flying at one of the sturdy posts of the scaffolding.
Her shoulder smacked into the pole and the breath left her body.
“Lizzy! Hold on! I’m coming!” Troy yelled.
She gasped for breath, dreadfully afraid that whatever was halting her fall would slip and let go and she would plummet to the ground.
Swinging back and forth, she tried to compose herself.
More than fear, there was an edge of irritation.
This was precisely why women were told not to go traipsing around ladders, even though it was an accident that could have happened to anybody.
Thank goodness her mother hadn’t lived to see her like this.
She would have been mortified. Well, in truth, her mother would probably have been mortified a lot by Lizzy’s antics, but she’d died bringing Tim into the world and so had missed a lot of her daughter’s more embarrassing, less than conventionally “womanly” moments.
“Just hang on. I’m coming to help you!” Troy yelled.
Lizzy hung from the scaffolding like an ornament on a Christmas tree and prayed.