But kneeling there with his ear against the warm metal, he let himself wonder. Walt's unfinished sentences came back to him. The way the old man would say, "You're not the first Callaway with those ears. " And then go quiet and reach for his cup. Arthur had always taken it for the loose talk of a man who had drunk too much.
Now, in the dark with his father's safe under his bleeding hands, it sounded like something else. It sounded like the edge of an answer. The first wheel found its line a little after midnight. He felt it more than heard it, a softening, a place where the dragging eased, and the wheel sat down where it wanted to be.
And he held his breath and turned slowly the other way to bring up the second. The second was worse. The warp grew deeper as the wheels stacked, and the second wheel fought him for the better part of an hour, throwing false catch after false catch, each one raising his hope and dropping it again. His knees ached against the floorboards.
The oil in the lamp burned low, and he trimmed the wick and went on. But it came eventually. A little after one o’clock in the morning, he felt the second notch line up behind the first, and now there was only one wheel left between Arthur Callaway and whatever 16 years had been keeping from him. And the last wheel would not move at all.
This was the thing he had been afraid of since he first put his ear to the door and heard the grinding. The fire had done its worst at the back of the stack nearest the door's outer face where the steel had been thinnest and the heat hottest. The third wheel had not just warped. It had fused very slightly to the post it rode on, welded by the fire into a single seized piece, and no amount of careful turning would bring its notch around to the line because it would not turn.
It simply would not turn. Arthur sat back on his heels in the failing lamp light, and for the first time all night, the patience went out of him. It went out all at once, the way air goes out of a thing that has been holding it too long. He looked at his hands, the broken blisters, the brass dust ground into the creases of his knuckles, and he looked at the safe that had cost him two years and every dollar he owned, and he understood with a terrible clarity that he might have just thrown away everything he had in the world for a box he could not open.