Angle of Repose (37 page)

Do you remember, by chance, a family named Sargent on Staten Island? General Timothy Sargent? Their son Frank, who is Oliver’s assistant here, believes that his family and yours are slightly acquainted. You can imagine the feast of talk we had, the first time we sat down before our fire.

Frank is a splendid boy. He extravagantly admires Oliver, “the best man to work for in Colorado,” and he is indispensable to me when Oliver’s business keeps him in the office or sends him off on some inspection trip. Frank chops my kindling, carries in my wood, comes (at six!) to build my fire, burns my rubbish, fetches my bundles from town, runs my errands, takes me riding. It is of course quite out of the question that I should go alone.

Such a gentlemanly boy Frank is, for these circumstances. Not that he isn’t capable of dealing with anything that arises–he is six feet three and as limber as a blacksnake. He is intensely excited about the West, loves the adventure of it, delights in the strange people and the queer situations. But he has been gently reared, and is not inclined to sink to the level of life in these mountains. Every month he sends a third of his salary to his widowed mother, and when I asked him what he did for entertainment in Leadville–fearing the answer–he said there was not much to tempt him. He and Pricey, with whom he shares a shack, are both readers. The other night we had quite an earnest talk. He is consciously keeping himself
pure
, both as to the awful women he might meet in this place, and as to liquor, which he has seen destroy several of his friends. Liquor is a terrible temptation to lonely men cut off from their wives, or fighting for success they cannot attain. It is exhilarating to see someone like Frank determined to stand above it. On the other hand, Oliver tells me, he is manly to a degree, and only a little while ago had to put down a bully who presumed to think Pricey, with his English accent, amusing. The bully suffered a broken jaw, and is not yet quite able to speak again. Can you imagine knowing, and liking, a man who engages in fist fights? Yet here at least they are something a man of honor cannot entirely avoid.

I sister him, and flirt with him (a little). It is amusing and harmless since I am nine years older. The devastating thing about him is that he has those darkly glowing brown eyes like yours. His devotion is so open that of course Oliver has observed it. He understands, just as he somehow understands about thee and me.
How
he understands, I don’t know. He is wise for his age, my nice husband. Actually he and Frank are much alike. They have the same eagerness for Western experience, and the same coolness, and the same worshipful way of looking at your frivolous friend. But Frank is less self-contained, and more addicted to talk. I have already drawn him into Miss Alcott’s novel.

Isn’t it queer, at my age and in this altitude, to discover what it means to have power over men! It gives one a twinge of understanding of the sort of woman one has never met, the sort who choose to
exercise
their power. I have three men around me, almost the only society I see, and all three would walk barefoot over coals for me. Do I not strike you as a sad adventuress? But how innocent and pleasant and harmless too, to have one man to cherish and one to sister and one to mother!

The one I mother is Ian Price, Oliver’s clerk, whom we call Pricey. Oliver says he is a duffer, but keeps him on because he is so helpless and lonesome. I cannot fathom why he ever came to Leadville, unless it was that he was miserably unhappy where he was before. He is as little like a Western fortune hunter as you can imagine. His flesh seems to have been put on his bones by the lumpy handful. He stammers, blushes, falls over his own feet, and when he is being teased, or when something amuses him, he has a way of coming out with a great, pained, long-drawn “hawwww!” But in his way he is good company, for he is an even greater reader than Frank, and when we are alone he sometimes talks about books in a way that quite obliterates his usual embarrassment. He loves to sit in our rocker, before our fire, and read–not taking part in the conversation but somehow taking comfort from it, with an air of great content. Seeing him thus, I can’t help thinking what his alternatives would be were we not here to give him a sort of home: the Clarendon’s loud lobby, or the shack he shares with Frank, where he might lie reading in his bunk by the light of a lantern hung on a nail. . . .