Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [123]
“I suppose,” Susan said, confused. Frank took the rebuke with an exaggerated cringing gesture, protecting his head with his arms as if blows were falling on him.
Oliver said, “At least now you know why that stage driver was coming hell for leather down the pass and would have run over us if we hadn’t got out of his way. You know why I wouldn’t stop for the boys in the bogged-down ore wagon. The way for you to live in this place is to stay out of it.”
Frank took the team to the livery stable for them, waving energetically from the buggy while they stood in the door. “What a nice boy,” Susan said “And handsome. He looks like Quentin Durward. Do you suppose he’d let me draw him sometime?”
“I expect he’d let you do about anything you wanted. He is a nice boy, stays away from women and bottles, knows his business, works hard. You can depend on him. He’s only got one weakness. He’s a warrior, that kid. The worst thing that ever happened to him was that he missed the war. He likes excitement a little too well, he won’t take anything from anybody.”
“No more should he. I’m sure he’s many cuts above the average here.”
“I never doubted it,” Oliver said drily. “Now why don’t I get you a bucket of ice water from the ditch and you can take your bath and then I’ll take you down to supper at the Clarendon. I can’t wait to hear that pandemonium fall silent as I walk you in.”
She was struck by an appalling thought. “Is it near the jail? Would they have . . . ?”
“Cleaned up?” Oliver laughed. “Oates was a Mason. They’ll have him all laid out for a lodge funeral by suppertime.”
She went with him to get the water. “Why do you dip with the current instead of against it?”
“Get less junk in it that way.”
“You know so much.”
He did not reply, only held up his hand. Down below she heard the brassy chords of a band. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “A half hour after they get through the hanging they tootle out the old band and march up and down as if nothing had happened.”
Standing on the ditchbank looking down over the skinned gulch where the town lay fuming, she was face to face with the Western range. The late-afternoon sun rayed out through piled white clouds. Sweetened and mellowed by distance, the music rose up toward them, suggesting order, grace, civilization, Sunday afternoons on green commons. When the music paused, she heard at first only the whisper of the ditch, and then a deeper, farther sound, compounded of boots on hollow planks, stamp mills, voices, rumbling wagons–the sounds of Leadville’s furious and incessant energy. She was thinking of Oliver associated with that productive frenzy, herself as an ally of the music, the two of them together as part of something new and strong.
With the dripping pail in his hand, Oliver watched her, smiling. “Now tell me the truth. Can you manage here, or shall we take you to the Clarendon?”
“Oh, here!”
“You don’t think you’ll get lonesome, away from other people.”
“I’ve got my work. And you said they aren’t people I should live with.”
“We can ride, it’s grand country. Frank or Pricey can take you if I can’t.”
“Who’s Pricey?”
“My clerk. Oxford, don’t you know. Penniless incompetent Englishman.”
“Why it sounds absolutely social. Can we have evenings?”
Squinting against the flattening sun, his eyes were crinkled at the corners like the most flexible leather. The smile hid under his mustache. “How about one tonight?”
Maybe she would have blushed, maybe they would have had a great exchange of speaking looks on the ditchbank, maybe she would have silently rebuked him for unseemly intimations, maybe she would have become giddy, and run, and got him chasing her on that wide-open bench lighted like the stage for a pageant. How would I know? The altitude does peculiar things to people. The one thing I do know is that the misunderstanding