Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [122]
“You could have a lonesome summer.”
“I’ll manage, I’m sure.” He looked so solemn, responsible, and concerned that she skipped up to him and hugged his arm.
“It’s only women we’re short of. Plenty of perfectly presentable men. Plenty of other kinds too. Plenty visitors likewise. I think Conrad and Janin are coming through. Every mining man has to see Leadville once.”
The thought of Oliver’s elegant brother-in-law in that cabin started her giggling. “Can you imagine entertaining Conrad here? Cooking him a steak on the Franklin? Walking around that table with a bottle of wine in a napkin?”
“Do him good. He’s got effete.”
“Anyway, by the time he comes we’ll be fixed up. Can I buy some calico for curtains?”
“I’ll take you to Daniel and Fisher’s tomorrow.”
Just then she looked out the window and saw a man running hard up the ditch bank. Below the standing team he jumped the ditch, and his corduroy coattails flew out behind. “Someone’s coming in a terrible hurry,” she said, and turned in time to see the doorway filled by a very tall young man, panting, ablaze with some news.
“Frank,” Oliver said, “you’re just in time to meet Mrs. Ward, our civilizing influence.”
She thought she had never seen a face more alive. His brown eyes snapped and glowed, he was hot from running, the smile that he produced for her, swallowing both his panting and his news, showed a mouthful of absolutely perfect teeth. “Ah, welcome to Leadville!” he said. “What kind of trip did you have? How’d you like Mosquito Pass?”
“Not as well as I like it here,” Susan said. “It must have been you who had a fire going for us. That made it nice and homey to arrive.”
“I hunted around for flowers,” Frank said. “I wanted to put our best foot forward, but I couldn’t find any feet. Nothing’s out yet. I was going to be here to greet you, too, but they started . . . You almost ran into something, you know that? Did you come through town?”
She saw, or half saw, a look from Oliver that checked him. She said, “We heard a lot of shouting. What was it?”
“A town like this is full of drunks,” Oliver said.
“No!” Susan said, and she may have stamped her foot. “You shan’t protect me from everything! Tell us, Mr. Sargent.”
“Oh, it was . . . nothing much. Little . . . business.”
He looked, breathing hard still, at Oliver. Oliver looked expressionlessly back, and then moved his shoulders as if giving up.
“Tell us,” she said.
He looked at Oliver one last time for confirmation or authority. “They, ah, just hanged a couple of men. Out in front of the jail.”
She heard him with a surprising absence of surprise. It was more or less the sort of thing she had learned to expect in mining camps from reading Bret Harte and Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Examining herself for horror or disgust, she found only a sort of satisfaction that now she had really joined Oliver where he lived his life, some corroboration of her notions of what the wife of a mining engineer might have to expect. “Who?” she said. “What for?”
Sargent spoke directly to Oliver. “One was Jeff Oates.”
Oliver took the word without expression, thought a few seconds, flattened his mouth under the mustache, lifted his blue steady eyes to hers. “Our claim-jumping neighbor. He was a little crazy, like a dog that can’t stand to see another dog with a bone. It didn’t call for hanging.”
“If you ask me,” Sargent said, “he got just what he deserved. You can’t simply go around . . .”
“Who was the other one?” Oliver said.
“A road agent that shot up the stage on the grade yesterday. They had him before he got to English George’s.”
“And he’s dead before another sundown.”
“It had to happen,” Frank said earnestly. “There had to be an object lesson or two. If it isn’t stopped it gets worse and worse.”
But Susan was looking at her husband. “You knew it, didn’t you? You saw what was happening. That’s why we turned up the side hill.”
“It didn’t look good. I couldn’t tell what it was.” Wry-mouthed and squinting, he held her eye. “It’s not the pattern. So far as I know, it’s never happened before in Leadville. If it had,