For the next ten minutes, the kitchen of the River Lantern Inn was a blind, steaming purgatory of white salt-vapor, wet wood-ash, and stinging grey smoke.
No one spoke a single unnecessary word.
Now that Alden Bram’s four-shovel plug of fused rock salt and wet river sand had sealed the fourteen-inch breach in the subterranean brick flue—eliminating the lethal danger of a steam explosion over the north cellar arch—water was once again the carpenter’s weapon of choice.
Jon Hale and Elin Hale took the two wrought-iron handles of the twenty-gallon oak wash-tub, braced their boots against the sound floorboards on either side of the four-foot hole, and tilted the heavy tub in slow, measured surges rather than dumping it all at once.
Instead of pouring the cold well-water down onto the hot salt crust in the bottom of the pit, Jon guided the oak rim with his scarred right hand so the water sheeted sideways along the charred, glowing undersides of the two load-bearing heart-pine cross-joists and down the base of the upright cured-oak shoring post under the south summer-beam.
SHHHHHH-CRACK.
A geyser of scalding white steam boiled upward between the joists, burning Jon’s throat and making the sweat pour down his soot-blackened cheeks as the cold spring water bit into the glowing pine charcoal. Beneath the surface char, the eight-by-ten-inch heart-pine beams were still five inches thick with solid, unburned yellow timber; as the water soaked into the checked grain, the creeping yellow flames sputtered, turned to dark red…
