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sure that’s the staves settling?” Thorn said.
    Hal cast an impatient look at him. “It was a dry, empty barrel,” he said. “They always do that. The wood expands, the staves creak against each other.”
    “I’ll take your word for it,” Thorn said. “My experience has been more with full barrels in the past.”
    “You did your share of emptying them, though,” Stig said. He grinned to make sure Thorn knew he was joking, not criticizing. Thorn took the comment philosophically.
    “That’s true,” he said, shaking his head in regret over some of the excesses of his past.
    The cask was Hal’s latest brain wave. He had decided to install a running-water system in his mam’s kitchen. A zigzag pipe ran down from the cask to the kitchen bench. A spigot at the base of the cask would allow water to run out through the pipe and down to the basin.
    “You’ll never need to fetch water from the well,” he had told his mother, not noticing her dubious expression. “Thorn can fill the cask for you each morning.”
    He had constructed all the components in his work shed and waited for a day when Karina had gone down the coast to a market some ten kilometers away. Then he’d summoned Thorn and Stig and began to install his new system for her.
    After mounting the cask on a bracket he had already set high on the kitchen wall, and attaching the piping, they had begun filling the cask with buckets of water pumped from the well.
    Now that the cask was a little over half full, impatience got the better of them.
    “Why don’t we try it?” Thorn suggested. He was eager to see the new system working.
    As if in response to being mentioned, the cask gave another of those ominous creaks that had been worrying Thorn. He glanced at Hal, who shook his head impatiently.
    “It’s the staves settling,” he said. “That’s all.”
    He stepped forward, placing a large basin under the end of the pipe. He pulled on a cord attached to one side of the spigot and turned it. The action was a little stiff and the wooden peg squeaked in protest. They heard the soft gurgle of water running out of the cask. It zigzagged down the piping until a silver stream of liquid splashed out of the lower end and began to fill the basin.
    Stig and Thorn applauded and Hal beamed.
    “It works!” he said triumphantly. Then, realizing that such a reaction might imply that he had feared it might not work, he nodded to himself and said, in a more matter-of-fact tone, “Yes. Excellent. Well done. Just as I thought.”
    The water was nearing the brim of the basin and he reached up casually to tug on a second string that would shut off the spigot.
    It stuck. The spigot refused to turn.
    Water began to spill over onto the surface of the table. He tugged the string again, harder this time. The spigot remained stuck. Water continued to flow. And now it was slopping off the edge of the table and onto the kitchen floor.
    He tugged harder.
    There was a creaking sound once more.
    Thorn frowned doubtfully. “Sounds like those staves are still settling.”
    In his haste to drill holes into the wall beams, Hal had gone slightly off line with one. As a result, the nail supporting one side of the bracket and the cask had missed the timber wall beam. It was supported only by the weak plaster covering. As the weight in the cask grew, the nail had lost its tenuous hold. The bracket was gradually tilting to the side, causing the groaning noise that they had all heard. It was now held in place by only the weak, crumbling plaster and Hal’s final attempt to switch off the spigot was enough to break it free.
    “Look out!” Thorn yelled. He grabbed Hal by the front of his shirt and heaved him bodily over the table, away from the path of the toppling cask. Stig, sitting to one side, let out a shrill yelp of terror and dived headlong under the sturdy table.
    With a resounding crash, the cask hit the edge of the table and disintegrated into its component pieces. Staves and iron