Work Song - Ivan Doig [73]
“Mr. Morgan, there’s something I’ve been puzzling about,” Rab broached during one of those pleasant noontimes when we were alone. “I noticed it all the way back at Henry Adams and his Education . That was published only last year.” She had her old look of a schoolgirl circling what might be a trick question. “Aren’t the Sandison books supposed to be what he collected when he was on the ranch, ages ago?”
That had tickled my interest, too. By now we were at Kafka, Keats, and Kipling. The romantic poet was sadly gone, but the other two were up and writing and I had just catalogued recent contributions to literature by both that also carried the SSS bookplate.
So as not to heat up Rab’s instinct for intrigue, which never needed encouragement, I shrugged past the matter of newly minted books among the old: “An occasional stray may have wandered into his literary herd, large as it is. Isn’t there a ranching word for that?”
“Maverick, you mean? An unbranded cow that someone slaps their own brand on?” Rab wrinkled her nose as if sniffing something spicy. “Oh, that’s so funny.”
It was more so than she knew. Possibly Sandison, from long habit, was simply buying valuable books out of his own pocket and folding them into his collection, as he had every right to do. But the more tantalizing possibility, I sensed, was that those Miscellaneous purchases drawn from the library’s payroll budget were being cunningly mingled into his earlier holdings. If I knew anything about Samuel S. Sandison by now, it was that he never saw a thing of worth that didn’t look better to him with SSS on it.
Brushing away lunch crumbs as though that took care of the topic, I told Rab, “We had better get back at it, there’s a shelf of Longfellow ahead.”
“HOW’S THAT INVENTORY COMING?” Sandison rumbled when I passed by the office that afternoon.
“Sandy, you are to be commended for your buying eye,” I stuck to what I could honestly say. “The books you have gathered amount to a financial fortune as well as a literary one.”
“They damn well ought to,” he said as he hunched over an antiquarian catalogue and some notations to himself which, I was quite sure, added up to more books for the Sandison collection.
“Oh, by the way,” the issue of expenditure reminded me, “a cyclopedia salesman this morning left us a sample of his newest.” I stepped to my desk for the brochure as Sandison groaned at the distraction. “Here you go, the sales pitch for Prominent Figures of Montana, Past and Present. He assured me no self-respecting library should be without such a volume. As an added inducement, he told me you will find yourself prominently in it, Sandy.” I passed the brochure to him for inspection.
He took one look, informed me it was nothing more than the usual attempt by some robber to steal names and sell them back to flattered fools, and tossed it aside. “Bury it in Section 37,” I thought I heard him mutter as he turned back to what he had been doing.
“Excuse me, please”—by then I thought I knew every corner of the library—“but you’ll have to tell me where that section is.”
“Eh?” His head jerked up and around as if I had been eavesdropping. Catching up with himself, he waved me off the subject. “Never mind. Get back to the inventory and making eyes at Miss Rellis, why don’t you.”
NOT LONG AFTER, I was met at the breakfast table by two long faces. Griff asked mournfully, “You heard what they’re doing to us now?”
“I am barely out of bed, Griff, how could I?”
“They’re cracking down,” said Hoop, equally doleful.
I waited, but both informants were too overcome to provide anything more. Mystified, I had to look to Grace for an explanation.
“The police