Angle of Repose (43 page)

But at the moment of arrival at Buena Vista she did not see him as plainly as she had drawn him on the glass. She had herself and Ollie bundled up long before the train stopped, and she was the first one down the step into a whirl of steam, wind, and blowing snow. Turning, half blinded, from helping Ollie down, she saw the familiar height, the gleam of eyes and teeth from the face nearly obscured by fur hat and sheepskin collar. With a cry she threw herself into the figure’s arms, and found herself kissing Frank Sargent.

“Oh, my goodness!” Aghast and laughing, she fell back, grabbing for Ollie’s hand to keep him from blowing away. Frank, who had responded to her embrace with enthusiasm, was laughing harder than she was. His eyes looked at her with delight. The touch of his mustache –that was new, he didn’t use to have one–prickled on her lips. “Oh, Frank, I’m glad to see you! I thought you were Oliver, that’s why . . . Where is he? Isn’t he here? Is something wrong?”

“You’re darned right something’s wrong,” Oliver said out of the whirling air behind her. “Man comes to meet his wife and finds her kissing the hired man.”

She was muffled in arms and cold cloth, her lips prickled with another mustache. They held hands hard while they looked at each other. She saw that he was thinner even than last year. Despite the cheerful good nature of his expression, he looked to her in his hooded coat like an El Greco ascetic. And she realized why she had made her mistake. Frank had modeled himself so completely on Oliver in dress, mannerisms, walk, mustache, everything, that they might have been brothers, a lighter and a darker.

Oliver squeezed her hands and dropped them. Very quietly he knelt down beside Ollie in the cinders and snow. She saw how unfrighteningly he moved, how reassuringly he came down to the child’s size. The love in his face could not have been misunderstood or undervalued. He had always been that way with the child. Even when Ollie was an infant, he would see his father across a room and chortle and beam and kick and hold out his arms. She had been faintly jealous of that baby love affair–her child took her for granted but loved his father with a passion. Now, watching them meet gravely in the blowing snow, she saw that there was going to be no period of reacquaintance such as she had had to go through last November. After two years Ollie might not know his father, but he trusted him instantly.

“Ah, now!” Oliver said, squatting. “Here’s a young fellow I want to meet. Is your name Oliver Ward?”

Not quite certain of his ground–after all, his mother had kissed the other man first–Ollie said, “Yes?”

“You know something? That’s my name too. Do you suppose you’re my little boy? I’ve got one, somewhere. Ollie Ward. You suppose you’re the one?”

The child’s grin wavered, his eyes moved over his father’s face. “Aw,
you
know!” he said. An arm and a gust of laughter lifted him up. He perched triumphant. “I said good-bye to the elk,” he said. “We rode on a train.”

“You did? I’ll tell you something else you’re going to do. You’re going to take a buggy ride all wrapped up in a buffalo robe, with a hot sadiron to keep you warm. Frank’s been heating a couple on the stove in the station there for an hour.”

“Ah, Frank, you haven’t forgotten how to be thoughtful,” Susan said. “I remember last time you had a fire burning for me.”

“I had to think of something to stay even with Pricey,” Frank said. “He’s back there in Leadville stoking the fireplace so you can come home to a house with a lot of hate in it.”

 

They were both pressing drivers, unsparing of the team. They said they didn’t trust the weather not to get worse, and so they aimed themselves toward Leadville through the notch of a horse’s ears, and whenever there was a choice between a smooth ride and a fast one, they chose the fast one. The whip was in hand more often than in its socket. Every half hour or so the one driving passed the reins across her to the other, and sat on his cold hands. Between them, sheltered by one and then by the other as the road turned them in the wind, Susan did not at first feel cold. Her feet were on the warm iron, her hands in her muff. Snuggled down behind the seat in his robe and quilt between the two lashed trunks, Ollie showed his nose like a seal at a blowhole.

It was such a day as she had left the mountains on months before. The wind was pebbled with dry snow, the valley was black and white, without a rumor of spring, the peaks were blotted out. Milton and its opening apple blossoms were part of another, gentler creation.

The questions she asked got laconic answers.

The winter had been bad, one blizzard after another.

No ladies back yet.

The town not so much on the boom as last year–troubles underground, the price of silver down to $1.15. Some mines had been stripping highgrade to boost the price of their stock. As a stunt, the Robert E. Lee had produced $118,000 in silver in one seventeen-hour day. The principal stockholders of the Little Pittsburgh, who had paid themselves $100,000 in dividends every month for half a year, had just unloaded 85,000 shares at an enormous price and left the new owners with a gutted mine. The Chrysolite had labor trouble, had locked out its miners and was standing twenty-four-hour armed guard against possible dynamiters.

“Did Ferd Ward pay back what his son stole?”

“What he took from the payroll. Not what he borrowed from Frank and me.”

“Did you make a claim?”

“I mentioned it twice.”

“But he never paid you.”

“Not yet.”

“He never will!” she cried into the wind. “Oh, Oliver, why must it always be you who gets cheated?”

He seemed amused. “Your guess is as good as mine. You have any idea, Frank?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“You’re as bad as he is,” Susan said.

“Worse,” Oliver said. “Sneaks up and kisses the boss’s wife.”

“I thought it was nice,” Susan said. “There! At least he doesn’t borrow money and not pay it back, or rob the payroll.”

“Just waiting my chance,” Frank said.

“Matter of fact,” Oliver said, “if it wasn’t for the Staten Island Kid we wouldn’t have a mine.”

“Who?”

“The hired man there.”

“Really? What did you do, Frank?

“Foiled the wicked claim jumpers. Just like Diamond Dick.”

“No, tell me.”

“I told you about the trouble we were having with the Argentina,” Oliver said. “Also the Highland Chief.”

“You never tell me about anything. Honestly, if I had to depend on your letters to know anything, I’d be . . . uninformed.”

“Well, that sure wouldn’t do.” He heaved back, creaking with clothes, and pulled aside the buffalo robe and looked down in. “Asleep,” he said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t smother, down in that hotbox. You warm enough?”

For answer she raised her hands in their muff above the blanket. He touched the fur with a gloved finger. “Beaver?”

“Yes, those you sent me from Deadwood.”

“Good,” he said, pleased. He looked across her at Frank, who was driving. “Aren’t you going to tell her?”

“Not much to tell. They tried to come in, we shut ’em out.”

“He’s modest,” Oliver said. His nose was leaking, his eyes were ice blue and teary, he touched the back of his glove under his nose. “They’ve been claiming for months we’re running over the line. I made that survey, I know we’re not. But our best ore body is close to the Argentina’s claim. While I was in Denver a couple weeks ago they thought they could sneak in and take over our drift. They had a tunnel driven right up close to ours, and one Sunday they broke through.”

“But what . . . ?”

“Possession. Nine points. Especially when it takes a year to get anything into court. They could have cleaned it out before we could get a judgment. But the Kid there got a tip, and he and Jack Hill were waiting for them with rifles. So now there’s a door on their tunnel, barred on our side, and we’ve still got possession.”

Their tone left Susan uncertain whether to be appalled or amused. They acted like boys playing robbers. Frank, a self-conscious juvenile, flapped the reins on the horses’ rumps. “Why Frank,” she said, “that sounds
heroic.
How many men?”

“And they had guns?”

“We’ve got ’em now.”

“Ugh,” she said, shivering her shoulders. “Weren’t you frightened?”

“Scared to death. But as Jack says, a Winchester is mighty comprehensive.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It sounds
grim
, it sounds like war. What are they doing now? Did they give up?”

“They’re the ones who have to take it to court,” Oliver said. “Right now, all they can do is sit on the porch at the Highland Chief boardinghouse and give us hard looks as we ride past. So we carry six shooters and carbines. They’re so scared of the Kid they don’t dare do anything.”

“Don’t you believe him,” Frank said. “He’s the one they’re scared of. The boss is a very good shot, did you know? Under all that trusting good nature is a very tough hombre. Every day or so we hold target practice outside the shaft house at noon, so Oliver can knock off a few cans at fifty yards. The word gets around.”

Laughing, baring his perfect teeth into the wind, he pounded a hand on his thigh. “Here,” Oliver said, reaching. “Let me spell you.”

Studying her husband’s face curiously, Susan decided that he did not look like a tough hombre. He looked like a man without either meanness or impatience. But he did look tired. She supposed the strain of being constantly on guard had worn on him. It all sounded unpleasant and dangerous, but there was always the possibility that they were playing an old Western game, telling bear stories to the tenderfoot. “Goodness,” she said lightly, “and all the time I thought I was married to a mine manager, not a gunman.”

The hooded head turned slightly, the wind-reddened, tear-glassy blue eyes looked at her sidelong. A strange, almost unpleasant smile lurked under the soup-strainer mustache. “Well,” he said, holding her eyes, “that’s Leadville. That’s what we chose.”

Shocked, she stared back at him while her mind translated for her: That’s what
you
chose. Was that what he meant? He looked embarrassed, and heaved around to check on Ollie. On the way back from adjusting the buffalo robe, his right arm hugged her briefly. “Hi-up, there!” he said, and plucked the whip from its socket and laid it on one haunch, then the other.

Susan, huddled into herself, kept still. It had stopped snowing. The meadow they were crossing was as bleak as midwinter, scratched like an etching with gray and black trees. The shore boulders of the black, swift creek they forded were shelled in ice. The wind searched out the cracks in her covering and froze up her will to talk. Her mind was as torpid as her limbs. She would be worrying as soon as she thawed out, but she couldn’t worry when she was so cold. Perhaps she had imagined that look of blame, that unpleasant smile. After a while she pulled the blanket clear over her head, and took her dismay into the dark.

Brief words passed above her, separated by long silences. Several times Oliver’s arm braced her shoulders when the road got rough; she wondered if he were being especially protective because of what he had let slip. From the careful quiet with which he occasionally leaned back to check on Ollie, she knew that her son still slept.

A long time of stupefying cold. The wind came through her blanket as if through cheesecloth. She hunched her shoulders and clenched her jaws and endured.

Then she realized that the lurch for which she was braced had no returning lurch. The buggy had stopped. Oliver’s weight left the springed seat, she heard him grunt as he hit the ground. Her hands lifted at the blanket, and working her cold cheeks she emerged into gray late afternoon. There was her cabin, above it W. S. Ward’s house, above that another only half completed. The ditch rushed by, edged with ice into which brown grass was bent. The sky was dull pewter, smudged to the south by smelter smoke. The wind blew her a tremble of Leadville’s incessant sound, and blew it away again.

“Ooooh!” she said, moving her stiff shoulders and icy hands. Then she looked again, and said, “I thought Pricey was going to have the house full of hate. There’s no smoke.”

“Boy, he’d better have a fire,” Oliver said. “I’ll lift his scalp. Maybe he got to rocking.”

“Don’t you joke about Pricey.” She gave him her hand to be helped down. “If he said he’d be here, he’s here.”

Her buckling legs would hardly hold her. It seemed to her that Oliver was especially solicitous, with his arm around her. To Frank he said, “Don’t try to muscle those trunks. I’ll help you in a minute.”

Frank handed him down mummied Ollie, still sleeping. “Some April weather,” he said. Oliver steered Susan toward the door. The latchstring was out, and she pulled it for him so that he could kick the door open. “Pricey?”

Empty room. The change that she felt in the air was not from cold to warmth, not the lovely prickling and burning of a chilled skin in a hot room, but only a change from wind to stillness. The cabin was stone cold. Carrying Ollie, Oliver went to bedroom door, kitchen door. “Pricey?” No answer.

He gave Susan one look. Then he set Ollie into the rocker and said, “Stay under the covers for a couple of minutes, Old Timer. It’s cold. I’ve got to start a fire.”

While Susan stood close, stamping her feet, he crumpled newspaper and pyramided kindling. The outside door opened and Frank walked a trunk through it on his thighs. Surprised, he said, “Isn’t he here?”

“Hasn’t been here,” Oliver said. “The fire’s dead out.”

He scratched a match, flame jumped upward, a wind blew down the chimney and puffed out into the room a smell of shaving smoke. He leaned split lengths of pine above the flame. The kindling began to crackle with such a sound of comfort that Susan edged closer, though there was yet no heat, only light. “It just isn’t like Pricey.”

“No.”