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down and make us some. I’ll be in shortly.”
    “All right,” Jake agreed as slow as honey. He’d have more energy to press the matter once the coffee kicked in.
    One of the advantages of being a natural-born card player is that patience came to Jake like swimming does to a fish. Jake closed the window, pulled the covers over the bed, and walked to the door, his heels thudding across the floor of Horace Tabor’s house.
    Jake was sort of on retainer for Tabor—long story—and the house came with the deal. Horace had given him a few houses to choose from, of course, but Jake liked the location. Ten miles southwest of Denver, it was both close and far enough away from what had rapidly turned into a bustling city—by Rocky Mountain standards anyway.
    Wearing only a long nightshirt, morning sunlight reflected off his clockwork legs and the exposed hand of his clockwork left arm. The polished brass glinted like flame around the room. The hacks and scratches from Quinn’s attack were already gone thanks to the magic imbued into his artificial limbs. He briefly considered getting dressed but was still groggy enough to be more interested in a cup of coffee than propriety. Besides, no one came out to visit them, and it was unlikely Marshal Sisty would show up over the Quinn affair. That was an open and shut case of self-defense. He decided to go downstairs as he was.
    Tousling his hair to get rid of a bad case of bed-head, he opened the door and thudded down the stairs, running his hand over the controls for the steam-powered lift as he went down. Another of Skeeter’s creations, the lift could carry three full-grown men between floors, but Jake wasn’t lazy enough to use the damned thing unless he had to move something heavy … or if he was drunk.
    Once in the kitchen, he grabbed the tin coffee pot off the counter, poured what was left of last night’s brew down the sink, and set it under the spigot of what he considered one of Skeeter’s greatest inventions. She called it the steamolator.
    The contraption had a small copper line running into one side from Skeeter’s boiler. It was a simple device, from what little Jake understood of the thing. It had a cylinder with a hand crank, a brass hopper with a swinging lid, and a spigot. To him it looked like an assortment of junk bolted and welded together, but it was a stairway to heaven. He twisted a lever, swung the cover open, and grabbed the copper mesh bowl from inside. The dark, gritty contents went out the window, and the bowl went back inside.
    Jake didn’t really care how the thing worked. All he knew was that it did what he needed it to. Two handfuls of dark beans went into the hopper. Closing the cover, he cranked the handle for about a minute, then turned a knob on the side. A fierce hiss of steam put a smile on his face. Coffee dripped and then poured out of the spigot, causing Jake to inhale deeply.
    When the pot was full, he turned off the steam and waited for the last few drops. Grabbing the pot and two cups, he turned on his heel and made his way out to the wide, covered front porch. He plopped down into one of the rocking chairs, set an empty cup on the deck, and filled his own.
    The pot went beside the cup on the porch, and he leaned back, rocking slowly as he contemplated the fight with Quinn. He really didn’t want to go to San Francisco and face down the Tong. But he also didn’t want to spend the rest of his life waiting for a blade to show up between his shoulder blades. He’d played the waiting game a few times before, having concluded in the aftermath of each occurrence that it’s a pain in the ass—in one case, quite literally.
    The front door opened with a bang. A painter’s easel and a large blank canvas frame passed by with a pair of sturdy legs pumping underneath.
    “Hey, Sam,” Jake offered. “Off to do some more painting?”
    “Hmmm?” a man’s voice replied as he stepped off the porch. He turned and faced Jake. Sam Morse was a