Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [118]
“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, I wouldn’t have let you come. This fireeater here thinks it ought to be repeated, but he’s wrong. If it is, I won’t let you stay. So you cool down, Frank, you hear? The longer we have vigilante law, the longer it will be before we get real law.”
“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.