Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [119]
“How much farther?” she said. “Can he make it, do you think?”
“It’s going to be all right. Just up this last pitch and then it’s down. We could take him out and let the black pull it.”
He blew out his breath, with a down-mouthed, acknowledging look of relief. Then she saw his eyes change. “Wait. Listen.”
He cocked his head, with his hand raised, for only a second, long enough for her to hear something, she couldn’t tell what-perhaps only the empty roaring of the sky. He dropped his hand, he threw a look right, then left. The buggy sagged and rolled a half wheel backward as he leaped onto the step. At that instant appeared around the upper bend a pair of trotting horses, then another pair, then another, then the rocking cradle of the stage. She saw sparks clash from rock under the tires. To her horrified eyes it seemed a runaway, out of control.
Oliver’s whip cracked on the rump of the black horse, then the bay, the black again. Susan grabbed for the dash. They jerked wildly in toward the cliff, among the blocks of stone. And there was not room, she knew it with a certainty that froze her mind.
The sick horse, on the inside, floundered among the rocks and deep snow. Oliver lashed, lashed, lashed it–oh, how could he? She screamed and grabbed for his whip arm; he shook her off without even looking at her. The left wheels reared up, climbed, crashed down, climbed again; the buggy tilted so steeply that she hung on in frantic fear of sliding straight off under the hoofs and wheels. Oliver’s hand shot out and grabbed her. She screamed again, the air was full of a sound like a high wind. There was a smoke of horse breath, a roar and rumble, a close, tense, voiceless rush, and the stage passed her so close that if she had had her arm extended it might have been torn off. Glaring up into the dangerous shadow as it thundered by, she saw a lean, hook-nosed face, a figure with feet braced against the dash, lines that hummed stiff as metal. And she saw the stage driver’s queer, small, gritted smile.
Still hanging onto her arm, but leaning far inward toward the cliff like a sailor high-siding in a blow, Oliver guided the buggy up over a last rock to a bumpy landing in the road. The air still reeked with the hot smell of horse and the spark odor of iron tires on stone. The noise of the stage diminished behind and below them. They turned to watch it go.
“God Almighty,” Oliver said, and slid back into the seat beside her. “You all right?”
“I think so.”
“Too close.”
She was staring in pain at the sick horse. It tottered on its legs–she could see the deep trembling that ran from pastern to knee. Its nose went clear to the ground, it shuddered and began to sink. Instantly Oliver lashed it harshly with the whip, lashed its mate, leaped to the ground and kept on lashing. The horse tottered, strained, was dragged forward, the buggy crawled painfully upward. Susan sat white and trembling, hating his cruelty, hating the pain and exhaustion of the sick beast, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West.
Just at this point in Grandmother’s reminiscences there is a somewhat high-flown paragraph:
The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for