Angle of Repose (33 page)

“This is an adventure,” she said.

“Good.”

“The train’s so little, after the Santa Fe. If I should draw us now, I’d take a position away behind and above, and show us as a teeny little toy disappearing into these enormous mountains.”

“Hang around a while,” Oliver said. “When we get to Slack’s and pick up the team we’ll be an even teenier speck disappearing into even bigger mountains.”

“Deeper and deeper into the West. They call Leadville the Cloud City, don’t they?”

“Do they?”

“That’s what
Leslie’s
called it.”

“Good for
Leslie’s.”

“You’re no fun,” she said. “You won’t let me gush. Tell me about our cabin on the ditch. Is it really logs?”

“Really logs. A dollar a log.”

“Long logs? How big is it?”

“Short logs. What do you expect for a dollar?”

“Has it got a view?”

“The only way you could avoid a view up there is to go underground.”

“Are there neighbors?”

He laughed, smoothing breadcrumbs out of his mustache and brushing them off his coat and lap. He kept watching her with a delighted, sidelong smile as if she constantly astonished him. Other men in the car were watching them too, and the near ones were listening. She could not look up without encountering some gaze that immediately withdrew. The admiration of two dozen magnetized eyeballs exhilarated her. She supposed it
would
be pleasant for men deprived of the company of ladies to see one on this improbable little train, headed toward places where no lady had ever ventured. When the car hit a smooth spot and her chattering spread further than she intended, she understood that ears away out of earshot were strained to catch what she was saying.

“No neighbors unless the bird who jumped my first lot has built himself a house since last week,” Oliver said.

“Jumped your lot!”

“Stood me off with a shotgun.”

“But what did you do?”

“Went down to the office and picked out another.”

“You just
let
him?”

“It wasn’t worth much blood. I got a better lot the second time.”

“I should think it would have made you mad.”

“Sure.”

“I should think you’d have had him arrested.”

“In
Leadville?
Anyway, what for?”

“For theft. And now he’ll be our neighbor.”

“I doubt it. By now he’s off jumping somebody else’s lot or claim. He’s got a kind of gift that way.”

She studied him curiously. “You’re queer, do you know? You let yourself be imposed on and cheated, and you don’t seem to care.”

“I don’t like trouble, not about anything that small. I’ve got too ugly a temper when I do get mad, so I try not to get mad.”

“Have you really got an ugly temper? I don’t believe it.”

“Ask my mother.”

“She said you were stubborn. She said you refused to defend yourself when anybody put you in the wrong.”

“I hold grudges.”

“I should think you’d hold a grudge against Horace Tabor, then.”

Amused, he came up from adjusting the carpetbag under their tipping seat. “That was the biggest joke in camp.”

“Joke? You call it a joke? You make this gentleman’s agreement, as he called it, though it doesn’t sound as if he’d know what the word meant. You’re to inspect his mine for the customary fee and testify about it in court, and you study that mine for three whole months, and make a glass model of the vein that everybody in Denver admired, and you win him his case–didn’t his lawyer admit it was your testimony that did it?–and then he hands you a
hundred dollars!
You could have made more washing dishes.”

“That was the joke. Everybody knows Horace. He may own mines worth five or six million dollars, but his hand doesn’t get into his pocket very often. The moths aren’t disturbed more than once a month.”

“Five times that would have been too little. Ten times. That’s what Conrad or Mr. Ashburner would have asked.”

“All right. Next time I can ask it. Horace’s payoff made me pretty famous.”

“I hate to have you famous as the man who only smiles if you cheat him or jump his claim.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said comfortably, and covered her folded hands with one of his. “It won’t break us. There’s no problem about making money in Leadville. Matter of fact, I’m making it hand over fist.”

 

Slack’s, at the end of the steel, was as ugly as proud flesh, a gulch of shacks and tents and derailed cars, its one street a continuous mudhole, every square foot of flat ground cluttered with piles of ties, rails, logs, rusty Fresno scrapers, wagonbeds, spare wheels, barrels, lumber, coal. Dejected mules and horses stood hipshot in corrals knee-deep in muck. The canyon walls, skinned of trees, were furrowed and gullied between the stumps. Three great ore wagons full of concentrate from the Leadville smelters were being loaded into flatcars by a gang of men.

Watched with interest by this gang, and by trainmen, teamsters, Chinamen, loafers, in fact by every eye in Slack’s, Oliver carried Susan through the mud and left her treed on a pile of ties while he waded through the deeper mud up the street to get the buggy and team he had left there the day before. He kept turning to keep an eye on her; twice she saw him look out the stable door to see that she was alone, and where he had left her. The audience gave her its full attention while she waited, and during the whole operation after he came driving back in a democrat wagon, stowed her bags and parcels, lifted her to the seat, laid a buffalo robe under her feet and a gray blanket in her lap, and started her up Kenosha Pass.

‘Isn’t there a stage?” she asked. ”Wouldn’t that have been cheaper and easier?”

“There’s a stage, but not a stage I’d let you ride on.”

Though it was nearly five o’clock, the glare of the day blazed in their faces. The road was mud, rock, mud again, dirty snow. Then they tipped down to the creek, the horses braced back in the breeching, Oliver’s hand rode the brake, and where the shadow of the wall fell across them they passed instantly into chill. The smell of water burned in Susan’s nostrils, she heard the wheels clash among rocks and the water rushing through the spokes, but in the abrupt transition from glare she was as blind as if they had entered a tunnel. Hardly had she begun to see again when they tipped upward, the horses dug in, the wet wheel beside her rolled up with a felt of red mud on its tire, and the sun was in her face again like a searchlight.

After a time they passed from sun into shadow, warmth into chill, and did not come out again. The edge of sun climbed the left-hand canyon wall. From time to time they had met or passed ore wagons of every size and kind from farm wagons drawn by a pair of mules to great arks, sometimes double, pulled by six, eight, ten, a dozen animals, driven not by lines but by a rider who rode one of the leaders. Now they came upon one of these arks up to its hubs in a mudhole, and two men down in the road working on the six-horse team. There was barely passing room between the wagon and a fifty-foot dropoff to the creek.

Prompt, almost fierce, Oliver stood up in the democrat. “Hang on.” She took hold of the dash and braced her feet. As they squeezed by, rattling stones over the edge, she had a long, passing look at a man’s bearded face, panting and distorted, and at the same time innocent, curious, fascinated, floating the long instant between the time when he stood up from his efforts and the time when he would renew them. His face hung like a jack-o’-lantern in the twilight of the mountains while an unlikely Eastern lady drove by. She read his face in complex ways–it was an expression she would have liked to draw. And she saw the horse, one of the leaders, that lay with its forelegs bent under it and its nose resting as if thoughtfully on the doubletree. Then they were past.

“Shouldn’t we have stopped to help?” she asked.

“You can’t be sure of the company.”

“Would it have been dangerous?”

“I wouldn’t take the chance.”

“That poor horse!”

“You’ll have to get used to that. In this altitude they get lung fever. Three hours after you notice they’re sick, they’re dead. I expect that one had it–he didn’t look able to get up, much less pull.”

The chilly dusk, the sight of that hopelessly mired, heavily laden wagon with its sick horse, the taciturnity with which Oliver devoted himself to his driving, made her feel small, awed, and dependent. Pulling the blanket around her, she moved as close to him as she could without interfering with his handling of the reins. He took them in his left hand and put his right around her, and they rode like lovers.

“Getting tired?”

“It seems a long time since I got up.”

“I’ll bet. How about another of those delicious sandwiches?”

Crawling at a walk up the darkening gulch, they ate. Right and left she saw the light orange on the peaks, the canyons almost wiped out in shadow. There was a sense–not a perception so much as an illusion or hallucination–of dark fir forests. Then there was a paleness of white trunks and bare delicate branches as they passed through aspens along a slope. Ahead, one pure star was shining through a V of dark mountains. She sagged, she almost dozed.

Then she roused up again. “Hang on again,” Oliver said. “Here’s the stage.”

In an unearthly pink light the stage labored on the grade ahead of them. It looked like something out of Mother Goose. There were men hanging all over the top of it, at least seven or eight of them. “Always room for one more,” Oliver said. “Here we go now.”

He whipped up the horses, the buggy pulled abreast in a brief wide place. No more than ten feet away, faces looked down into Susan’s, and she realized that the smell that enveloped the whole stage, moving with it as its own special atmosphere, was whiskey. The men above her stared, they visibly doubted their eyesight in the pink dusk, they said things, one or two, that she did not choose to hear as the horses pulled her past them.

Then she was even with the driver braced against the dash and seesawing his web of lines. He stared, he threw back his head in glad greeting and opened his mouth. For a moment she wondered if he thought he knew her, if by some miracle he could be someone from home, or Almaden. But Oliver pulled back on the lines and they bumped along side by side, and the stage driver yelled happily, “Hey there, Mister Ward! How’d you like a swim in the Old Woman Fork tonight?”

“Dennis,” Oliver said. “Is that you? What’re you doing on the Leadville road? You’re lost.”

“What’s anybody doing on it?” Dennis said. “What’re
you
doing on it?”

“Bringing home my wife.”

“Uh?” His eyes touched Susan’s in the near-dark, and she made a little smile. He was momentarily deprived of speech, and the passengers beside him, on top of him, behind him looking out the windows, were most interested spectators and listeners. Beyond them the distances between the peaks were blue, the gulfs of the canyon soft charcoal black. The buggy bumped and lurched, she hung on, Oliver lifted the whip in farewell and stung the rumps of the horses. They pulled out ahead, went over a crest, and drove hard for fifteen minutes to put the stage well behind them.

“Who was that?” Susan said, when it appeared he was not going to tell her without being asked.

“Dennis McGuire. He drove the stage from Cheyenne to Deadwood last spring, that famous thirteen-day ride over a four-day road.”

“What did he mean, swim in the Old Woman Fork?”

“We got hung up by floods. Didn’t I write you about that?”

“You never write me about anything. All you said was that it took a long time, you didn’t say why.”

“We were there two days waiting for the river to go down, but it was raining, it just got deeper. Finally a fellow named Montana and I got on the off swing and the near leader and rode them in, they wouldn’t take it otherwise. All six horses were swimming in ten seconds. Cold? Oh my. I looked back and saw that old coach awash, with men swarming out onto the roof like rats out of a burning silo. Kind of lively.”

“But you made it.”

“No,” he said. “I was drowned in the Old Woman Fork at the age of twenty-nine. Body never found.”

The sky past his profiled head had gone slate blue above a jagged paleness of snow. She could not see his smile–she seemed to hear it. “It’s a good thing you didn’t write me about it,” she said. “I’d have been frightened to death.”

“I doubt you scare as easy as you make out.”

With dark, or rather starlight, she stopped trying to see. Tiredness ached in her bones, she sagged and rocked, hunched in her blanket with the buffalo robe around her feet. At a washout she sat in a cold stupor while Oliver lit the lantern and looked the place over. She put herself utterly in his hands, she got out obediently and floundered behind the buggy while he led the team through. “Just as well it’s too dark to see,” he said. “This is a
Leslie’s
sort of place. Two wrecked rigs and three dead horses down the cliff.”

“How much longer?”

“No more than an hour to Fairplay.”

He drove with one hand and held her with the other arm. The wind sighed and whispered like something lost. There were shapes of spruces rising to constrict a sky full of great cold stars. The horses plodded, patient and interminable.

“Remember Old Funeral Procession?” she said once.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Elliott’s horse.”

He laughed. “These are bad, but not that bad. Stay with it, it won’t be long now.”

One minute they were plodding on the dark road that wandered through the raw material of creation, and then they turned around some screening trees and were confronted by lights and sounds. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of people in the street. Every third door, it seemed, was a saloon that threw trapezoids of light across plank sidewalks raised above the mud. She heard, of all things, a piano. Open doors let out a deep commingled rumble of men’s voices.