Free Cottonwood by Scott Phillips Page A

again with her thumb, and to my absolute and total shock the dainty, pointed toe of her shoe slid its way under the cuff of my trouserleg and up my shin, which it rubbed very delicately.
    That slight friction had what I presumed was its desired effect upon me physically. Moments later when we first heard shots fired into the air and the bell began ringing I found it somewhat inconvenient to have to stand and open the door. Now the sounds were joined by shouting in the street, but Kate seemed not to notice, as she was babbling away with her eyes still closed, and Maggie sat there looking confused and culpable. The prick-stand she’d inspired had softened somewhat by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, Marc at my heels, and when I got outside and saw what the commotion was about it melted away completely: the forge, my second home for all the long months since I’d opened my saloon, was burning.
    To be more precise, the loft was what was burning. White smoke poured out the back of the building, filling the sky to the south; men were running into and out of the lower portion, and orange flames danced obscenely through the blackening boards of the upper part of the structure. Marc and I took our places and ran buckets of water back and forth with the others from the well at the end of Main Street in an attempt to douse the flames, but by the time the fire was discovered the loft was already well ablaze, and before long it was all we could do to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent buildings.
    We were lucky that day in that there was no wind to speak of, and we managed to control the blaze until it had burned the forge down to a smoldering, blackened frame surrounding the anvil itself and the chimney. We continued to splash the charred wood with water well into the early part of the evening, and it was decided that we would watch the ruins through the night in shifts. It was then that I first spoke to Otis, beside whom I had been fighting the fire for several hours.
    “For a change I got a little ahead of myself and I thought by God I’ll for once go home for lunch like the wife wants me to. Ten minutes after that I heard the bell ringing.” He shook his big head and looked like he wanted to cry.
    We stepped into the smoky shell, and for the first time it came to me that I had nowhere to lay my head that night. Otis examined the forge itself in an effort to determine whether it or his tools were salvageable, and beneath the spot where the loft had hung I found the remains of my larger camera. Its brass lens barrel was warped by the heat and its glass elements had bubbled and were now clouded to the milky white of a cataracted eye. Its case and lensboard and bellows had been consumed by the heat down to a blackish gray ash, festooned with useless and misshapen metal fittings.
    “Loft went up first, Otis,” Tim Niedel said, standing behind us. “Seems odd, don’t it?”
    “It does,” I said, and Otis nodded, though he didn’t look as though he was giving it much thought. Something made me turn, though, at that very moment, and behind us I spied Hattie, her eyes brimming with tears, staring at me defiantly. Once she’d gotten my attention she lifted her skirts and ran up the street toward the hotel, and in the confusion I didn’t think of her again that night. I relieved Gleason at the back of the wagon and announced a round of free drinks for all the firefighting volunteers.
    The next morning I rose early, awakened by the cold beneath a thin comforter in a second floor room at the hotel and sorely missing my buffalo robe and fur coat. Around eleven, after my work at the farm was done and before opening up the booze wagon, I prepared to print the stereo views I had taken the day before. I secured the paper and plates within a pair of printing frames and set them out on the roof of the hotel to print out. Even in the negative state I could see that my instincts regarding the first pose had been correct,