“And if I'm not?”
“Then I'll buy the coffee.”
For a moment, Sam looked away.
He hadn't expected kindness that afternoon.
Certainly not from a man who had stood among the people laughing at him.
Wesley placed one hand on his shoulder.
“I should've told them to stop.”
Sam looked toward him.
“Don't worry about it.”
“I do.”
For several seconds, neither spoke.
Then Wesley nodded toward the tractor.
“My father had a machine like that. I used to think he kept it because he was too stubborn to let anything go.”
Sam smiled.
“Maybe he was.”
Wesley looked toward the rusted iron wheels.
“Or maybe old things have stories we haven't bothered to hear.”
He left as evening settled over the farm.
Sam remained in the barn.
The tractor occupied nearly the entire center bay, surrounded by hay dust, old tools, and wooden shelves that hadn't been painted in decades.
Its rusted body seemed strangely familiar.
Sam remembered sitting beside his father in this same barn when he was seven.
Henry had been repairing an old cultivator.
The boy asked why some machines were worth keeping when they no longer worked.
His father answered without looking up.
“Because a machine can carry more than the work it did.”
At the time, Sam thought that meant sentimental memories.
Now he wondered what Henry had really meant.
He walked toward the tractor and placed his hand against its corroded side.
For a moment, the years seemed to disappear.
He could almost see Peter Walker standing beside Edwin Vale in 1924, proudly examining the new machine they'd purchased for their cooperative.
He could imagine his father as a young mechanic, discovering the hidden compartment decades later.
And he could hear the warning written in the letter.
Never let the engine be destroyed.
Sam closed his eyes.
Then whispered, “You kept your promise, Dad.”
Behind him, a car door slammed.
“GRANDPA?”
Sam turned.
His granddaughter, June, hurried through the barn entrance.
She was sixteen, with dark hair tied back in a ponytail, blue eyes, and the same stubborn expression Sam remembered seeing on his daughter at that age.
Her mother followed.
Rachel Walker was forty-four, worked as a school office manager in Ashford, and had spent much of the previous year trying to convince her father that preserving the farm shouldn't cost him his health.