Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [151]
“Asleep.”
“Have you felt his head?”
“I’ve about worn his skull out, feeling his head. He’s cool, he’s fine.*
“Did you give him his eggnog?”
“Three times.”
“Three times! What time is it?”
“A little after two.”
“Oh my goodness! How long have I slept?”
He consulted his watch. “About sixteen hours.”
She was awed. “What on earth did that doctor give me?”
“Just what you needed. What you ought to take every time you get wound up like that.”
“Oh no,” she said, “no, I couldn’t.” Groggily she turned her head to look at the brightness outside, the brown hill sloping up to aspens that wavered as unstable as water. “You should have waked me up. I’ve kept you from going to the mine.”
“Frank’s there. There’s nothing to do but wait anyway.”
“Ah,” she said sympathetically, “I haven’t been paying enough attention to my husband. Is everything still all snarled up?”
“Still snarled up.”
“I keep hoping you’ll run into a rich ore body.”
“We won’t do that unless they give us some money to operate with.”
“And they won’t do that till the suit is settled.”
“Maybe it’ll be settled by 1883 or so.”
She put out a hand. “I’m sorry it’s so hard for you. How’s Frank? He’s been such a lamb about helping out, and I’ve hardly said good morning or good evening. We’ve got to have him up for supper. Tonight. Let’s get the Wards and some others and have an evening again.”
“That’d be good. Frank would like that.”
“And Pricey. How is Pricey?”
He had opened his knife and was working at the horny callus on his palm. His eyes lifted, without any movement of his head, he looked up at her over half-moons of white, so apologetic, ashamed, angry, or embarrassed that he scared her. “Pricey’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“England.”
“Did they send for him?”
“No. I sent him.”
The tears that welled weakly to her eyes made him swim and flow, fluid and out of focus in his faded blue shirt and blue jeans. “Oh, Oliver, why?”
“Why?” He sat with his jaw bulging. His knife clicked shut, he stretched his leg to slide it into the tight pocket of his jeans. “Why,” he said, thinking. His eyes came up again, the pupils coldly furious. Every gentle and good-natured line in his face was hardened and coarsened. “Why!” he said a third time. “Because we couldn’t look after him. Because he was in the road.”
As if the expression on her face maddened him, he moved his shoulders and flattened his mouth. She stared at him through her tears. “If you’re going to ask why we didn’t take him to the mine with us,” he said, “we did. He remembered, he shook like a dog, he was scared to death. I tried taking him along when I had to ride anywhere, but he held me back. Frank tried setting him up in their shack with all the books he could borrow. You’d think that would be Pricey’s dish, but Frank would come home and find him gone, and then he’d have to hunt all over Leadville for him. Once he was in jail–where else would Leadville put a fellow that can’t look after himself? He kept wanting to come up here. I told him Ollie was sick and you were swamped and there wasn’t any room, he’d have to stay with Frank. Where do I find him–not once, three or four times? Hiding behind W.S.’s privy, just hanging around and looking down here like a mongrel dog waiting for scraps to be thrown out the door.” He brushed nothing off the tight thighs of his jeans. “Do you think I liked sending him home?”
“No. Of course not.” She could not help the weak tears that kept welling to her eyes. They broke through her lashes and ran down both cheeks and she did not wipe them away. “It’s just–he was so helpless. It’s like kittens being put in a bag to be taken to the river. How could he travel?”
“Frank took him as far as Denver and put him on the Santa Fe and paid the porter to look after him to New York. I wired the Syndicate to have somebody meet him and put him on the boat, and cabled his father to meet him at Southampton.”
“I wish you’d told me so I could at least have said good-bye.”
The fiery cold eye touched her, held a moment, looked out the window. “I didn’t think you needed anything else.