Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [114]
“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.
Oliver said, “Whoa.” His lifted lantern shone on the rounding surface of a log wall, the edge of a hay roof. He put the reins in her hands. “Stay here.” He jumped heavily down. She sat in the high seat listening to the town noise back of her in the street, the sounds of animals moving in some unseen corral. When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been before, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their