Amos moved toward the front axle.
He wiped dirt from a casting.
Then toward the engine.
Then the rear housing.
Each part carried small hand-stamped marks.
Prototype assembly marks.
“Noah.”
“Yes?”
“Don't let anybody start this.”
“Why?”
“Don't change anything.”
Graham laughed.
“It’s still rusty.”
Amos looked at him.
“Original rust can be more valuable than new paint when you're dealing with something historically significant.”
Graham stopped smiling.
Auctioneer Hal picked up his fallen gavel.
“What exactly is it?”
Amos stood.
“Morrow Agricultural Engineering built a handful of experimental tractors around 1952.”
“How many?”
“Nobody knows for certain.”
He pointed at the brass plate.
“But their surviving engineering notes refer to numbered pilot units.”
Everyone looked at the four.
Amos continued.
“Numbers one through three were documented as dismantled after testing.”
Noah felt his throat tighten.
“And four?”
Amos looked at him.
“Listed as missing from company inventory when Morrow was liquidated.”
The barn became completely silent.
Hal asked:
“Missing?”
“Yes.”
Graham immediately said:
“Then it might not belong to the estate.”
That was the first intelligent thing he had said all afternoon.
Amos nodded.
“Exactly.”
Noah’s stomach dropped.
He had spent everything.
Now someone might tell him the tractor was not legally his at all.
Sarah stepped forward.
“Then nobody touches it.”
Amos looked at her approvingly.
“Correct.”
The auctioneer agreed.
Lot Eighty-One remained Noah’s, but they temporarily isolated the unusual tractor pending title research.
The other five machines were ordinary.
Two old Farmalls.
A damaged Ford.
A badly worn Allis-Chalmers.
And one homemade tractor assembled from truck and farm parts.
Graham made sure Noah knew.
“Five piles of junk and one tractor you might not even own.”
Noah was too worried to answer.
For the first time that day, he wondered if everyone had been right.
The ownership question took eleven days.
Those eleven days felt like eleven months.
Amos contacted an agricultural museum in Des Moines.
The museum contacted a corporate archive containing records acquired from one of Morrow’s successor companies.
A historian named Dr. Rebecca Sloan drove to the Ransom farm.
She photographed every casting.
The brass plate.
Fasteners.
Engine.
Transmission housing.
Even the underside of the seat.
Then she asked Noah:
“Why did you bid?”
“My grandfather saw it in 1958.”
She looked up.
“He knew what it was?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“He knew it wasn't normal.”
Rebecca smiled.
“That may have been enough.”
Four days later, an archivist found the first major document.
A field-testing sheet.
MORROW PROJECT 37
PILOT UNIT 4
Assigned to field engineer Warren Ransom.
Testing region: Iowa.
The tractor had been used to test a new hydraulic system, steering geometry, rear-axle configuration, and transmission ratios.
It had never entered production.
Then came another document.
Morrow requested all experimental units be returned.
Units One, Two, and Three returned.
Five was destroyed after a transmission failure.