Ada Calhoun kept time by the bellows. Evening settled in the town like a tired animal, slow and full of muffled sounds: the feedmill’s last wheeze, the cluck of hens heading under porch rails, the soft slap of a harness as a mule turned in its hitch. Her forge glowed low, a rump of embers in the belly of the shop, and she worked the iron until it sang with a note she liked — not bright, not thin, but honest. The anvil tasted of old strikes and a hand that had learned where to find answers in heat and shape. Outside, the horizon was a smear of ochre and bruised purple; a breeze scoured dust from the corral posts.
The town served its own small rituals. The trading post shut its creaky door five minutes after sundown, the merchant blinking at the light like a man warding off moths. Mrs. Etta on Main always slid a warm molasses cake into an empty plate left for the blacksmith; it sat on Ada’s workbench now, abandoned aside a coil of hobnails. People loved their little comforts: coffee boiled hard and thick, biscuits patted thin and buttered until they glistened. It was the sort of place where a rumor moved faster than a rider and held sway longer.
Ada finished setting a last shoe, sinking a punch into the clinch and rasping the edge until it looked as if it had been born ready. She wiped her hands on a scrap of leather and listened for the town’s evening gossip in the wind. Horses shifted in their stalls; one of them, an old mare with a white blaze, snorted as if she knew something ahead of the rest. Ada cocked her head and thought of the mare’s hoof she’d set two winters ago — the line of the frog, the way she had flared the heel a hair more than the book showed. Little adjustments like that were what kept a body from slipping into a ditch, or worse.
A shape came down the lane: a lanky boy with knees too big for his trousers, halting as if he was trying to slow his heart as much as his pace. He carried the mare’s lead rope in one hand and a small, nervous hope in the other. "Evening, Miss Calhoun," he said, voice thin as a brass wire. He tried not to meet her eyes, and failed by half. Ada put the leather down and let the glow from the forge lay its warmth across her palms before she nodded him in.