Soren smiled, and then he went back down to the street, because the noon check was a public thing and someone had to be there to meet the depot agent and to stand beside the tower while the town watched. He had not expected a crowd. He had expected the agent, and Maren, and perhaps a few curious souls. But by half past eleven, the street in front of the town hall had begun to fill, slowly, the way a creek fills after rain: first one man, then a woman with a basket, then a group of boys who had been told to stay away and had come precisely because of it, then the storekeeper, wiping his hands on his apron, then the clerk from the hall, then more, until there were thirty or forty people standing in the sun, looking up at the tower face, talking in low voices, waiting.
Soren stood among them, and he felt strangely exposed, as if he were the thing being tested and not the clock. He was a carpenter. He was used to being judged by his work after it was done, in private, by the person who had paid for it. He was not used to being judged in public, all at once, by a whole town. But this was Maren's trial, and it was his tower, and so he stood there, and he kept his hands still, and he waited for noon.
The depot agent came up from the station at five minutes to twelve, a lean man in a dark coat with a silver watch chain across his waistcoat. He did not announce himself. He did not need to. Everyone in Fox Creek knew the depot agent, and everyone knew what his watch meant: railroad time, the time the trains ran by, the time that did not belong to any one town and therefore could not be accused of favoring one. He stopped in front of the hall, took out his watch, opened it, and looked up at the tower.
The tower hands pointed to twelve. The agent's watch, when he held it up so that the nearest people could see, showed twelve as well, to the minute.
A murmur went through the crowd, small and surprised, as if the people had expected the clock to fail at once and were not quite sure what to do with it succeeding. Soren felt his shoulders come down a fraction. He had not realized they were up around his ears.
"True to the minute," the depot agent said, in a voice that carried without shouting. "Day one."
He snapped his watch shut, nodded to Soren, and walked back toward the station. The crowd stayed a moment longer, looking up at the tower, and then it began to break apart, people going back to their shops and their houses with something new in their faces: not triumph, not yet, but a small, cautious willingness to believe. Soren watched them go, and he thought about how little it took to change a town's mind: not a speech, not a petition, but a pair of hands pointing at twelve when twelve was true.
That evening, Maren sat on the bench in the tower room with her case closed beside her, and Soren sat on the staging with his legs hanging over the edge, and they talked about the day the way work partners talk: plainly, without ceremony.
"One day," Maren said. "Six to go."
"One day true is better than no days true," Soren said.
"Yes," she said. "But Fallon will not be quiet for six days. He has a press, and a press does not rest."
She was right, and Soren knew it. The next morning's Gazette carried a short editorial, which Soren read standing outside the print shop window, his jaw tightening as he read. Fallon did not say the clock had failed. He could not say it, because the whole town had seen it succeed. Instead he said that one day proved nothing, that any clock could be right once, that a clock kept true by a woman who had a personal interest in the tower was no proof at all, and that the town should wait for the full seven days before it let sentiment overrule safety. It was clever, Soren thought, in the way a fox is clever: it did not attack the fact, because the fact was standing in the middle of the street for everyone to see. It attacked the meaning of the fact, and meaning was a softer target.
He carried the paper up to the tower room and laid it on the bench without a word. Maren read it, and her face did not change, and that steadiness of hers did something to Soren's own temper that nothing else could have done. She folded the paper once, set it aside, and said, "He is afraid of the seventh day. That is why he is writing about the first one."