Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [111]
“You’ll have to do all your talking to me.”
“Poor you.”
“I can put up with it.” He had not let go of her arms, he waggled her shoulders with a slow, insistent motion. She had forgotten how warm a smile he had. The thinness of his face accentuated the fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. The crowd thinning around them, the wind that blew dust and papers past could not interrupt their looking at each other.
Then the porter picked up her bags and carried them a few feet closer and set them down. Oliver let go of her to lay a silver dollar in the pink palm, and picked up both bags in one hand and steered her with his left arm. “Tell me about Mosquito Pass,” she said. “Is it as horrible as it looked in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper? Dead horses and wrecked wagons and frightful precipices?”
“Horrible,” he agreed. “You’ll be paralyzed with fright. But it won’t be quite as bad for you as for German Hausfraus and Leslie’s correspondents.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, I shouldn’t have to put more than forty-fifty pounds on you. For another, you know all about those people who draw terrific Western pictures to scare Eastern dudes.”
She had taken it for granted that they would spend the night in Denver. Even a genteel Quaker lady, after a year’s separation, may dream of a second honeymoon, especially if she arrives all braced with resolves about being a model wife. But they had no time even for a proper dinner. The Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge that would take them to Fairplay would leave in less than an hour. Waiting for a lunch to be put up for them, they almost missed it, and came panting aboard to find only one seat unoccupied–a broken one. Oliver spread his field coat over it and braced it from underneath with her carpetbag, and she sat eating a great sandwich of tough beef and too much mustard while the train dug into the mountain beside a torrent that Oliver said was the South Platte. The roadbed was rough, the train’s grip on the rails precarious. She was thrown around, bouncing between Oliver and the window and having trouble getting the sandwich to her mouth.
“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