Free The Black Train by Edward Lee

granted, Collier reflected. A pot to piss in.
    They passed the second wing—through a window Collier spotted the newest guests checking in, Lottie lugging their bags—then followed a path through the garden. A slight breeze shifted countless hundreds of colorful blossoms.
    When they arrived at the small clearing, Collier found the old furnace larger than it had looked from his room. Flat rocks fixed by mortar formed the large conical structure, which sported several vents at various heights.
    “This is incredible,” Collier said.
    “Yes, sir, it is.” Jiff pointed. “That there’s the charcoal chute, and there, the ore drop. That l’il one there is the outflow, and there a’course, is the airway,” he said, pointing to the pipe that extruded from a bellows the size of a refrigerator. “The smith’d yank this chain, to pump the bellows”—he demonstrated, and they could hear the device whistling air—“and the air’d shoot into the bed. It’d get up to 2,300 degrees in there, turn iron ore or damn near anything else into a red-hot puddle.”
    Now Collier noticed other features: a cooling barrel, a tool hanger, a grinding wheel and stand. The anvil, which he’d spotted earlier, had a date engraved: 1856. Collier was finding himself staggered by the nostalgia. These weren’t props; they were genuine relics of a longdead way of life. Real people built this thing, he thought. Some guy, in 1856, MADE that anvil with his own two hands.
    “Has anyone used it, I mean, recently?”
    Jiff scratched at a mortar seam with a penknife. The material was still hard. “For iron forging? Naw. But there’s no reason why it wouldn’t still work. You melt the ore against a wall of charcoal while pumpin’ the bellows. All we use it for now is cookin’ during holiday weekends. Sometimes we’ll hang a couple of pig quarters inside and smoke ’em for twenty-four hours with hickory. But way back when, they even had to make their own charcoal; they’d pile up twenty, thirty cords of wood, light the middle, then cover it all over with sod. See, when the carbon in the charcoal mixes with the pig iron, it becomes steel. They didn’t even know it back then, but that’s what they were makin’. All by hand.”
    Smart guy for a hayseed, Collier thought. “This is pretty specified information. How do you know so much about it?”
    “Grew up ’round all this stuff, so I asked. Most folks in these parts all have ancestors going back to even before the war. You learn a lot when you ask the right folks.”
    “That you do.” Collier was impressed. Behind the charcoal shed he saw a pile of blocks. He picked one up. “Oh, here’s another mold like the one your mother has displayed. A scissor mold.”
    “Shears,” Jiff corrected. “Probably took some poor bastard a full day just to chisel one of those things.”
    But Collier saw a veritable pile of them. “That’s an awful lot of molds,” he pointed out. “Two blocks for each single pair of shears? There must be enough there for fifteen pair.”
    “Yeah, that is strange. Shears were important tools, a’course, but I don’t know why the smith would make so many molds.”
    “Almost like a production line. I’ll bet he made hundreds of pairs with these blocks.” Collier thought about it. “I wonder why?”
    “Ya got me, Mr. Collier. But the funny thing is there was only one single pair of shears ever found on the property—the one in the display case.”
    It was an unimportant question but one that needled him. What the hell did they need all those shears for?
    “Nice, uh, nice car,” Jiff remarked when he got into the Bug. “What, it’s foreign?”
    Collier pulled out of the front court, chuckling. “I got stuck with it at the rental office at the airport. I know it looks ridiculous. It’s a woman’s car.”
    Jiff raised a brow.
    The horizon darkened as they drove down the hill, the air getting cooler. Collier saw the sign again— PENELOPE STREET —and