Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [112]
“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