"I asked what you want for it.""You're growing rice in the 21st century. This thing's older than me. Come harvest, it'll grind breakfast for one chicken.""The shaft still turns.""So does my grandmother's rocking chair. A modern mill does in minutes what that thing needs an hour for.""Then name a price.""Fine. I was going to cut it up anyway. Scrap weight for the frame and both stones. Cash, and you load it yourself. Scrap price for scrap, kid.""It's not scrap." Elijah stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. "You just never looked long enough to know what it is."Hank's grin thinned. "40 years I've been looking at iron. That's a boat anchor with a pulley bolted on. You haul it off, don't come crying back in August.""I'll be back," Elijah said.He'd come to Mercer Salvage for a pulley, a motor, and bearings for a 46-acre farm too small to get priority at harvest. Hank's price would eat most of that month's repair budget and leave enough for two bearing rings. Elijah counted out the cash anyway.The gearbox was oversized, built to slow the stones. The grooves in their faces were cut on purpose. A rusted chute ran out from between them. Why would anyone build a stone mill this slow, and what did Elijah see that Hank didn't?It took a borrowed flatbed, two come-alongs, and most of a hot late-May afternoon to winch the mill out of Hank's shed. Hank watched from a lawn chair and contributed nothing but commentary. By sundown, the frame sat in the Brooks equipment barn, rusted and ugly.The next morning, Elijah bought the two bearing rings at the farm supply store and set them on a shelf.The Brooks place was 46 acres of rice and a few rotation fields, which in the Delta made it small. The farm to the east ran 3,000. Elijah was 20, and this was his first season running nearly everything himself. He already knew how the year would end if nothing changed: whatever he grew, somebody else would set the price.The crop was aromatic specialty rice the family sold direct. Like Caleb Foster and a handful of other small growers around Cypress Bend, the Brookses paid Whitmore Delta Milling to toll mill it. They got the whole grains back to bag and sell. They also got the broken grains: clean, dry, and perfectly edible, with nowhere to go. Four big totes of it sat against the barn wall waiting for harvest, when Whitmore's truck would come buy it back at feed-grade price.Elijah walked past those totes every morning. He had grown up under tractors with his uncles and taken an ag tech course at the community college, so he could usually find what was wrong with a machine. A market was harder to take apart. He'd tried selling small bags of rice at the farmers market in town, and it hadn't moved the needle.He called Nolan Price that night. Nolan had been a millwright most of his life before he retired, and he didn't drive out to look at junk."Send me a picture of the nameplate first," he said, "if it's got one."