Soren thought about that all through the second day, while he worked on a fence for a farmer on the edge of town and listened to the tower clock strike the hours in the distance. The second noon came, and the depot agent came up from the station again, and the crowd was larger this time, and the hands were true again, to the minute. A farmer Soren knew, a man who had signed Fallon's petition in the first week, took out his own pocket watch, compared it to the tower, and said, loudly enough for his neighbors to hear, "Well. It is right again." He said it the way a man says something he is not yet ready to believe but is no longer able to deny. Soren watched the man's face, and he saw the beginning of a change there, small as a crack in ice, but real.
That evening, after the second check, Soren did something he had been thinking about since the first noon. He went to the clerk's office and asked for a blank ledger book, the kind the town used for recording council minutes, and he carried it up to the tower room and laid it on the bench beside Maren's case.
"A log," he said, before she could ask. "Every noon, every check, written down while the crowd is still standing there. The agent's word, and the tower's hands, and the names of whoever saw it. If Fallon says later that the trial was rigged, or remembered wrong, we will have the days in ink."
Maren looked at the blank book, and then at him, and Soren saw something cross her face that he had not seen before: not surprise, exactly, but a kind of recognition, as if he had said aloud a thought she had been carrying alone.
"A clockmaker's habit," she said softly. "My father kept a log for every clock he repaired. Date, fault, fix, and the name of the person who watched him test it. He said a repair without a record was only a story, and stories could be argued with, but a record, kept honestly, could not."
"Then your father and I agree," Soren said.
He opened the book to the first page, and in his careful carpenter's hand, the hand that wrote measurements and cut lists, he wrote the first two entries: Day One, true to the minute. Day Two, true to the minute. Maren dictated the words while he wrote, because her wrist would not hold a pen steady for long, and he wrote exactly what she said, without adding anything of his own. When he was done, he read the entries back to her, and she nodded, and he closed the book and set it on the bench beside the movement, where it would be safe and where anyone could see it.
They sat then for a while in the tower room as the evening light went gold through the narrow window, and Soren found himself talking in a way he did not often talk: about the first tower he had helped build, in a town across the sea of prairie from Fox Creek, when he was twenty and newly arrived from Denmark with his tools and very little English. He had been the youngest carpenter on that job, and he had carried beams until his shoulders ached, and when the tower was done, the whole town had gathered to watch the clock start, just as Fox Creek had gathered to watch it start again. That tower still stood, as far as he knew. He had never gone back to see it. He had come west instead, town by town, building what people asked him to build, and he had learned that some towns kept what they built and some did not, and that the difference was never in the timber. The timber was always good. The difference was in whether the people believed the thing was theirs.
"Fox Creek believes it now," Maren said quietly. "Three days ago it did not. That is something."
"Three days is not seven," Soren said, echoing Fallon before he could stop himself, and then he shook his head. "Forgive me. I did not mean to borrow his words."
"You did not borrow them," Maren said. "You answered them. There is a difference."
Soren looked at her then, at the bandage on her wrist and the steady way she held herself, and he thought about what trust actually was. It was not a feeling, he decided. It was a record. It was a logbook, kept honestly, day after day, and a ladder built rung by rung, and a clock that said twelve when twelve was true. He had spent his life building things that could be trusted because they were