That flustered the militiaman a little, and he stammered and flushed before stepping back with a salute. "Pass, friend!"

Marian returned the gesture; she could hear him chattering excitedly in Fiernan as they heeled unwilling horses into a walk again and passed on into Irondale. Fame, she thought. Her mouth twisted ironically as they rode into the scattering of buildings, several streets of them on either side of the main road. A few were round huts and wood shacks from the early days, more small brick cottages with tile roofs and chimneys, with a scattering of big houses in what she thought of as the Nantucket Georgian style.

Half a mile up the S-shaped valley of the tributary stream a dam penned back the flow into an artificial lake, and sluicegates released it in a torrent of white foam onto the tops of half a dozen thirty-foot overshot waterwheels; they turned with a constant groaning rumble and splash, a querning undertone to the other noises. As the riders watched, a blade of fire lanced skyward from a blast furnace, white at its core and framed in red where it left the top of the sooty pyramid of brick, shedding a long plume of spark and cinder downwind. It was accompanied by an enormous shrill scream, like a wounded horse the size of a mountain. The living horses beneath them shied and skittered, then quieted as the sound stopped and their riders soothed them. A smell of hot iron and coal smoke drifted down through the wet along with the clangor of the works and multicolored volcanoes of sparks from the Bessemer converters.

Their horses' hooves clopped hollow on asphalt pavement; they passed schools, Ecumenical Christian church, public baths, library in a corner of the town hall, medical clinic where a pair of doctors from the Cottage Hospital healed and taught. Then the inn, a rambling brick structure two stories high, wings added on to an original modest core, with yellow lamplight showing behind its windows. That brought an inner groan of relief. She threw up her right arm, hand palm-forward.