His private monologue stopped as reality caught up with him. He adjusted his eye patch and pulled down his floppy hat and continued cutting fence posts in silence.
* * *
While everyone was busy around the farm, Luke dug a pit in the floor of one of the empty loose boxes. He lined the base and sides with boards treated with wood preserver, then brought the T"ang horses from the cottage and packed them carefully in a solid-sided box. He lowered the box into the pit and re-floored the entire loose box with paving slabs that he had found lined up in a corner of the barn, bought years ago for some forgotten purpose. He got Bennett to help him as soon as he had finished his work on the smoothly running tractor.
"Why are we doing this?" Bennett asked. "An earth floor will do, won"t it?"
"We"r
