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silver with age.
    He was tall, six foot, and broad-shouldered, and though he had a thick, powerful neck, his head hung slightly forward, a manifestation of a life of deference. His skin was patched and uneven from exposure to the elements, but his eyes were clear and quiet and said all that society would not allow spoken.
    He walked with a limp, which increased with his age. The adult spectators of his daily march called it a Negro shuffle,ignorant of the Spanish bullet still lodged in his inner left thigh, a souvenir from the Spanish-American War.
    Lawrence had belonged to the Negro Twenty-fourth Cavalry, a “buffalo soldier” so named by the Indians who feared the black soldiers, convinced that their black, “woolly” hair and beards were evidence that they were mystical beings: half men, half buffalo. He had come to Utah when the Twenty-fourth was transferred to Fort Douglas, cradled on the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley, and remained behind when, four years later, the cavalry was re-stationed in the Philippines.
    Lawrence’s entry into clock repair was happenstance. He had been the army’s supply and requisition clerk, and, naturally gifted with his hands, had a knack for repairing rifles, wagons, and whatever the post required fixing. On one occasion, he repaired a pocket watch for one of the officers, who, in appreciation, made Lawrencea present of a manual on clock repair and nicknamed him “the horologist,” a title Lawrence clung to, as it made him feel scientific.
    Salt Lake City had few horologists, and as word spread of Lawrence’s expertise, civilians began bringing him their timepieces as well.
    When he left the cavalry, his clientele followed him to his new shop. His clock-cleaning-and-repair business grew into a trading post of sorts, as people left notes of clocks they wanted to acquire or sell, and estate auctioneers found Lawrence to be a good wholesaler of their wares.
    David met Lawrence through the purchase of a Black Forest cuckoo clock and instantly liked the man. There was a calmness in his motion; the temperament of one suited to repair the intricate. “Slow hands,” David called it. But there was more. There was something comfortable in his manner that reminded David of earlier days. Growingup in the womb of the Eureka mine, David had worked and lived with black men, listened to their stories of injustices and enjoyed their company. In the depth of a mine, all men were black, and he had learned to appreciate people for their souls. The two men spent hours talking about clocks, California, and the cavalry.
    Though both were fascinated by clocks, they were so for vastly different reasons. Where David saw immortality in the perpetual motion of the clocks’ function, Lawrence was fascinated by the mechanism itself, and for hours on end, he would lose himself in a brass clockwork society—a perfect miniature world where all parts moved according to function. And every member had a place.

    As the falling sun stretched the remnant shadows of the day, David rapped on the door of Lawrence’s shack.
    â€œLawrence?”
    A soft, husky voice beckoned him in.
    David stepped inside. Lawrence sat on a cot in the corner of the darkened room, a single candle cast flickering slivers of light across the man’s face. In his hand was a smoldering pipe, which glowed orange-red.
    â€œSit down,” he said. “Sit down.”
    The dwelling consisted of one room divided by function: the living quarters toward the east and the shop toward the west, separated by a plethora of clocks and a heavy table covered with clockwork, candles, and dripped wax.
    Lawrence was proud of his humble furnishings: a small, round-topped table, splintered and worn in parts with odd-lengthed legs to hold it steady on the shack’s unlevel floor. Around the table were three chairs, each of different manufacture. His bed was a feather mattress set on a home-built wooden