golems... final chapter I'm willing to share, after this, the romance try turned it sour.

The smell of doughnuts cooking made the class smile, as they all gathered around the table in the forge. With great care, and a gentle touch, the steel vertebrae were being connected with wire and special hinges to give a bit of the action the original bone spine held. Each bone placed into the matrix of the emerging skeleton, hanging from the frame above the workbench, took time to lock in. As Elisa had warned her class, the spine being the hardest parts, as well as the first, her silence should be understood as concentration, not arrogance.
Occasional questions came between each vertebra settling in and the next one coming into her hand. Elisa took those questions easily, relishing any extra time not working the spine. Now the holes made in the replicas and the time spent making banded metal cables became clear for the students. As did the other materials, including the rubber linings to sit between the metal pieces.
"So, it absorbs the majority of the force, still transferring energy, but not allowing the parts to rub with as much friction. This will save it from wear, and reduce the heat at the joints, increasing the life of the automata." The lecture part was not always as easy, some ideas seemed to elude the young apprentices, coming form a different culture. Others, they grasped more easily.
Today, when it came to materials only recently made commercially in the States, things were tough all around. Rubber of this composition was new to Elisa, but it was all her local suppliers could procure. A new alchemist made the compound in Omaha, a man up from Mexico, or so they said. His origins left her more concerned about the material. Too many times, Mexico was the enemy not the ally of the United States. Even since the terrible revolution that nation suffered after the ignomious defeat by a simple supply company of the Legion d'Entrangre.
The call of the steam whistle ended all discussion, as the students filed out, leaving Elisa holding the middle eighth vertebra, torn between her passion for finishing, or the special lunch Plum was making in celebration of their visitors. Fingering the wire pieces and rubber buffer, she set the wire down and again looked over the black shaped disk. The material was great, but she worried it would not take to the harsh conditions of the prairies in winter. Many such compounds came from the alchemy labs of Doctors Goodyear and Firestone in Akron. None were yet on the market for purchase, as the brittleness caused by cold proved nearly unsolvable.
Fingernails dug at it, trying the smooth surface it held, testing the elasticity and compression the material could take. It held against her flesh, but the metal, that left her worried.
In the corner of her eye, a simple figure stood. Taller than most folks in the town, even the other visitors, dressed in simple denim pants, white shirt, tie and the hat of a cattle drover. It was only as the broad brimmed hat came off, revealing snow white hair, and that beard running along the jaw line, that she recognized him.
"Mister President." Elisa's smile was warm, as she tossed the rubber onto the table.
"Now, Miss Felderov, you know I am just an Ambassador now." The gentle voice of the great man was more rough, yet the warmth and sincerity was still there. "Besides, I am incognito when not in my suit, or so our hosts here say." The smile still had that sad look to it, a legacy of the many deaths resulting from his election and the subsequent Southern Rebellion. Deaths that had even extended into the White House, costing him both sons and his wife when rebel sympathizers attempted assassinating him in Eighteen Sixty Two.