Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [169]
“More or less. He’s a little more bullish. He might even recommend that his people take a chance, if they can get the option cheap enough. He knows they haven’t found the old rich vein, but he’s half inclined to think they might break even with this one, and hit the old one later.”
“What you’ve been doing in the Adelaide.”
“More or less.”
“Why would you do it there and recommend not doing it here?”
“The Syndicate didn’t send me down here to find another Adelaide.”
“But if Mr. Simpson is willing! Isn’t it just what his people were hoping for? It looks better to them than to you? So they can buy cheap?”
“I don’t know he’s willing, I’m only guessing.” He frowned, and a sort of slow meanness came into his face. “What are you suggesting? That I sweeten the report? Make it more encouraging? Tell ’em what they want to hear?”
They stared at each other almost in anger, until she rose and touched his arm. “I know thee can’t. But if Mr. Simpson reports favorably his people will want to buy, won’t they?”
“Depending on what the Syndicate wants for its option.”
“And if they bought, wouldn’t they ask thee to run it?”
Sulky, resistant to what she was edging toward, he grunted. “After I’ve said I don’t really believe in the mine?”
“But why do they have to see your report at all? You won’t be reporting to them. Why do Mr. Simpson’s people even have to know what you said?”
“Because I’ve talked it over with Simpson.”
“You just . . . blurted it out?”
He watched her with his head slightly turned. Almost absently he unbuckled the belt and tossed it, heavy with revolver and bowie, onto the bed. His eyes were on hers as if he were concentratedly bending something. “I just blurted it out,” he said. “I’m just a big green boy too honest for his own good. I’m not smart enough to play these poker games with grown men. I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut profitably.”
“Oliver, I didn’t mean . . . !”
He was stooping, unbuckling the spurs. One after the other they lit on the bed beside the revolver belt. He pulled over his head the buckskin shirt, releasing a stronger odor of sweat and dust, but when his face and rumpled hair emerged he would not look at her. She felt like shaking that closed, mulish expression off his face.
Tightly she said, “Won’t it look odd if the Syndicate’s engineer turns in a negative report and the other people’s engineer is more favorable?”
Blue and cold, his eyes touched hers and went indifferently away. She felt that somehow he blamed her for this. And he would refuse to talk about it, he would retreat into wooden silence. “Yeah,” he said. “I expect Ferd may think it’s kind of odd.”
“So it’s certain that he at least isn’t going to ask you to do any more in Mexico.”
“I guess you’ve got it about right.”
He sat on the bed, pulled the bootjack from under it, fitted a heel into the jack, and pulled. The boot came off. He wiggled his stockinged toes. Everything about him, from his sulky face to his animal odor, was offensive to her. Under his eyebrows he looked up, groping absently with the other foot for the jack. “I’ll tell you something else. If the Adelaide ever settles its troubles with the Argentina and the Highland Chief and gets to be a working mine again, I’m not likely to be running that, either.”
For a moment she took that in. “You mean we not only can’t stay here, we can’t go back to Leadville either.”
“That’d be my guess.”
“Then where do we go?”
“Honey, I don’t know.”
He pulled loose the handkerchief knotted around his throat. He concentrated on the bootjack until the second boot slid off. In her bare feet Susan went quietly around the room. She touched with her fingertips the cool carved wood of the footboard, the embossed leather of the chest, the tipped edges of the shutters, the mantel’s cold stone. “I wonder,” she said.
She turned and saw him sitting on the bed, still feeling criticized. And he would not bend, that was what made her so resentful. He would not defend himself or justify himself. When she questioned him, wanting to be on his side, wanting to help work out a future for them both, he acted as if she were accusing him of deliberately, out of some stupid notion of honesty, throwing away their chance. His honesty was not stupid, that was not what she meant at all. Only . . .