After a time they passed from sun into shadow, warmth into chill, and did not come out again. The edge of sun climbed the left-hand canyon wall. From time to time they had met or passed ore wagons of every size and kind from farm wagons drawn by a pair of mules to great arks, sometimes double, pulled by six, eight, ten, a dozen animals, driven not by lines but by a rider who rode one of the leaders. Now they came upon one of these arks up to its hubs in a mudhole, and two men down in the road working on the six-horse team. There was barely passing room between the wagon and a fifty-foot dropoff to the creek.
Prompt, almost fierce, Oliver stood up in the democrat. “Hang on.” She took hold of the dash and braced her feet. As they squeezed by, rattling stones over the edge, she had a long, passing look at a man’s bearded face, panting and distorted, and at the same time innocent, curious, fascinated, floating the long instant between the time when he stood up from his efforts and the time when he would renew them. His face hung like a jack-o’-lantern in the twilight of the mountains while an unlikely Eastern lady drove by. She read his face in complex ways—it was an expression she would have liked to draw. And she saw the horse, one of the leaders, that lay with its forelegs bent under it and its nose resting as if thoughtfully on the doubletree. Then they were past.
“Shouldn’t we have stopped to help?” she asked.
“You can’t be sure of the company.”
“Would it have been dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t take the chance.”
“That poor horse!”
“You’ll have to get used to that. In this altitude they get lung fever. Three hours after you notice they’re sick, they’re dead. I expect that one had it—he didn’t look able to get up, much less pull.”
The chilly dusk, the sight of that hopelessly mired, heavily laden wagon with its sick horse, the taciturnity with which Oliver devoted himself to his driving, made her feel small, awed, and dependent. Pulling the blanket around her, she moved as close to him as she could without interfering with his handling of the reins. He took them in his left hand and put his right around her, and they rode like lovers.
“Getting tired?”
“It seems a long time since I got up.”
“I’ll bet. How about another of those delicious sandwiches?”
Crawling at a walk up the darkening gulch, they ate. Right and left she saw the light orange on the peaks, the canyons almost wiped out in shadow. There was a sense—not a perception so much as an illusion or hallucination—of dark fir forests. Then there was a paleness of white trunks and bare delicate branches as they passed through aspens along a slope. Ahead, one pure star was shining through a V of dark mountains. She sagged, she almost dozed.
Then she roused up again. “Hang on again,” Oliver said. “Here’s the stage.”
In an unearthly pink light the stage labored on the grade ahead of them. It looked like something out of Mother Goose. There were men hanging all over the top of it, at least seven or eight of them. “Always room for one more,” Oliver said. “Here we go now.”
He whipped up the horses, the buggy pulled abreast in a brief wide place. No more than ten feet away, faces looked down into Susan’s, and she realized that the smell that enveloped the whole stage, moving with it as its own special atmosphere, was whiskey. The men above her stared, they visibly doubted their eyesight in the pink dusk, they said things, one or two, that she did not choose to hear as the horses pulled her past them.
Then she was even with the driver braced against the dash and seesawing his web of lines. He stared, he threw back his head in glad greeting and opened his mouth. For a moment she wondered if he thought he knew her, if by some miracle he could be someone from home, or Almaden. But Oliver pulled back on the lines and they bumped along side by side, and the stage driver yelled happily, “Hey there, Mister Ward! How’d you like a swim in the Old Woman Fork tonight?”
“Dennis,” Oliver said. “Is that you? What’re you doing on the Leadville road? You’re lost.”
“What’s anybody doing on it?” Dennis said. “What’re you doing on it?”
“Bringing home my wife.”
“Uh?” His eyes touched Susan’s in the near-dark, and she made a little smile. He was momentarily deprived of speech, and the passengers beside him, on top of him, behind him looking out the windows, were most interested spectators and listeners. Beyond them the distances between the peaks were blue, the gulfs of the canyon soft charcoal black. The buggy bumped and lurched, she hung on, Oliver lifted the whip in farewell and stung the rumps of the horses. They pulled out ahead, went over a crest, and drove hard for fifteen minutes to put the stage well behind them.
“Who was that?” Susan said, when it appeared he was not going to tell her without being asked.
“Dennis McGuire. He drove the stage from Cheyenne to Deadwood last spring, that famous thirteen-day ride over a four-day road.”
“What did he mean, swim in the Old Woman Fork?”
“We got hung up by floods. Didn’t I write you about that?”
“You never write me about anything. All you said was that it took a long time, you didn’t say why.”
“We were there two days waiting for the river to go down, but it was raining, it just got deeper. Finally a fellow named Montana and I got on the off swing and the near leader and rode them in, they wouldn’t take it otherwise. All six horses were swimming in ten seconds. Cold? Oh my. I looked back and saw that old coach awash, with men swarming out onto the roof like rats out of a burning silo. Kind of lively.”
“But you made it.”
“No,” he said. “I was drowned in the Old Woman Fork at the age of twenty-nine. Body never found.”
The sky past his profiled head had gone slate blue above a jagged paleness of snow. She could not see his smile—she seemed to hear it. “It’s a good thing you didn’t write me about it,” she said. “I’d have been frightened to death.”
“I doubt you scare as easy as you make out.”
With dark, or rather starlight, she stopped trying to see. Tiredness ached in her bones, she sagged and rocked, hunched in her blanket with the buffalo robe around her feet. At a washout she sat in a cold stupor while Oliver lit the lantern and looked the place over. She put herself utterly in his hands, she got out obediently and floundered behind the buggy while he led the team through. “Just as well it’s too dark to see,” he said. “This is a Leslie’s sort of place. Two wrecked rigs and three dead horses down the cliff.”
“How much longer?”
“No more than an hour to Fairplay.”
He drove with one hand and held her with the other arm. The wind sighed and whispered like something lost. There were shapes of spruces rising to constrict a sky full of great cold stars. The horses plodded, patient and interminable.
“Remember Old Funeral Procession?” she said once.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Elliott’s horse.”
He laughed. “These are bad, but not that bad. Stay with it, it won’t be long now.”
One minute they were plodding on the dark road that wandered through the raw material of creation, and then they turned around some screening trees and were confronted by lights and sounds. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of people in the street. Every third door, it seemed, was a saloon that threw trapezoids of light across plank sidewalks raised above the mud. She heard, of all things, a piano. Open doors let out a deep commingled rumble of men’s voices.
Oliver said, “Whoa.” His lifted lantern shone on the rounding surface of a log wall, the edge of a hay roof. He put the reins in her hands. “Stay here.” He jumped heavily down. She sat in the high seat listening to the town noise back of her in the street, the sounds of animals moving in some unseen corral. When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been before, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.
A door opened on lantern light, another lantern bobbed toward her, throwing the shadows of moving legs. The sigh of one of the horses was like the breath of her own relief.
The stable boy unhooked the tugs and led the team away. Oliver helped her down, hauled the bags after her, put the lantern in her hand. “Can you carry this?”
“Of course.”
“Just a little way back to the hotel.”
The street was muddy and rutted, but he steered her down the middle of it, and she understood gratefully that he was avoiding contact with the men on the sidewalk. Where lamplight threw the shadow of a potted palm across the planks and revealed the hatted heads of men sitting inside, a sign said HOTEL. He led her in: a smoky room, an American flag on the wall, half a dozen men in chairs, smoking, others in the bar in the next room, brass spittoons that rounded the light. Diffident, stupid with fatigue, she stood blinking. She heard the talk pause, and felt the eyes on her. She let Oliver take the lantern out of her hand.
Behind the desk that angled across a comer a young man in striped arm garters rose and laid down a newspaper. His eyes photographed Susan in one unblinking look. He said, “Sorry, folks. Full up.”
“I’ve got a reservation,” Oliver said.
The clerk’s full-lidded eyes met Oliver’s in pleasant denial. Smiling his public smile, he looked first at Oliver, then at Susan, then back at Oliver. He spread his hands. “I wish I could. I filled the last room two hours ago.”
With the slightest indulgence, the sagging disappointment in Susan’s muscles could become panic. Where would one sleep, in this wild place full of rough men? The stable? A hayloft or manger? Probably there were as few accommodations for horses as for people. She hung onto Oliver, who was looking with hard insistence at the clerk.
“If you did,” he said, “you gave away the room I reserved for my wife and me two days ago. The name is Ward. I put five dollars down.”
At the word “wife,” Susan felt the clerk’s eyes again, like the flick of a moth’s wing against her face. For the first time it occurred to her what the clerk thought she was, and in a chilly passion she said, “Is there no other hotel? I think I should prefer it if there is.”
“Wait,” Oliver said. To the clerk he said, exaggerating the patience of his explanation, “I came through here day before yesterday and reserved a double room from a fellow with a twitch in his face. Do you recognize him?”
“Remple, yeah. But ...”
“I put five dollars down. I signed the register. Have you got it there? Let me see it.”
“Sure you can see it,” the clerk said, “but I’m telling you, Mr. Ward, we haven’t got a thing open. There has to be some mistake.”
“You bet there has to be.”
Oliver took the register and turned it around. He flipped back a page. Reading past his elbow, Susan saw his name, the familiar signature, with a pencil line drawn through it. “There it is,” Oliver said. “Who crossed it out?”
“I don’t know,” the clerk said. “All I know is we haven’t got one single solitary bed. The best I could do for anybody would be to give you bedroll space in the hall.”
“That’d be fine,” Oliver said. Watching him, Susan saw the fury come up so suddenly into his face that she was afraid he was going to lean over the desk and slap the clerk. The clerk thought so too—she saw his eyes widen. She said again, “Oliver, perhaps there’s another hotel.”
“There isn’t.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” the clerk said. Susan thought he might really be. She did not forgive him for what he had assumed about her, but she thought he might really be sorry. “There’s the boardinghouse,” he said. “I could send the kid down to see if they’ve got a bed.”
“Don’t bother,” Oliver said. “Where is it?”
“Next block up, on the left. Look, Mr. Ward, I can have the kid run up, you folks sit down a minute.”
“Just give me back the five dollars and forget it.”
Surprising her with his promptness, the clerk opened a drawer and got a five-dollar gold piece out of it. He laid it in Oliver’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
Outside, Oliver pushed her with angry haste to the next comer. She stumbled and tripped, holding the lantern out awkwardly to keep it from her skirts. “What do you suppose happened?” she wailed. “What can we do if there isn’t something up here?”
“What happened was that somebody crossed a palm with some money,” Oliver said. “Somebody needed a bed and the clerk fixed it. If you hadn’t appeared, he’d have got away with bedding me down in the hall.”
“But where will we bed down? Can we go on to Leadville?”
“Not a chance.”
They reached the comer, turned left, found the boardinghouse. A man sitting in his undershirt, drinking coffee, said yes, they had a bed. It wasn’t much for the lady—just curtained off. Oliver looked at her once and took it. The undershirted man picked up his lamp and led them up bare stairs and along a hall whose blue muslin walls waved and crawled with the wind of their movement, to a door that had no key. After she was inside, and sinking down on the bed, Susan saw that the room had no walls, either—only that same blue muslin, called Osnaburg, nailed to a frame that went no more than six feet above the floor. Under the one broad roof every eight-by-ten cubicle in the place shook to the same cold drafts, and glared the same sick blue in the lantern’s light. She could hear the sounds of sleeping all around. It was so cold she could see her breath.
Oliver knelt at the bedside and took her in his arms. His lips were on her cold face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, echoing the clerk. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I think I could sleep anywhere.”
“I wish we were already home.”
“So do I.”
“In this place we can’t even talk.”
“We can talk tomorrow night.”
He kissed her, and she clung to him, tired and tearful. Right at her ear, it seemed, a man cleared his throat. Oliver let her go and blew out the lantern.
Too tired to be appalled at this thing called a room, but too tired to be amused by it either, she got out of her dress and crawled into bed in her shift. If she had literally carried sixty pounds all the way from Denver, and had been driven along the road with a club, she could not have ached more. Oliver’s weight sagging into the other side gave her something to cling to and warm herself by. For a while they clung and whispered, then she heard that he was asleep.
But she could not sleep. After a while she rolled away and lay on her back with her scratchy eyelids stretched open. Beside her Oliver breathed evenly. The sounds of communal slumber murmured and sighed through the cloth walls. Someone had a persistent, wracking, helpless cough that went on for minutes, and quit out of pure weakness and lack of breath, and in a little while broke out again. Supporting that sound of debility and failure there were orchestrated snores. For a while a man ground his teeth horribly, only feet away. Later still a voice cried out, cracking with fear or menace, “Fred! God damn you!” She froze, expecting shots or the sounds of struggle, but the crisis tailed off into a sigh, the groaning of springs. Still later there was an unidentifiable noise like a dog biting and snorting at an inaccessible itch.
She lay tensely listening and interpreting, refusing her attention and willing herself to relax, only to find herself in ten seconds tight with alert awareness again. Phantasmal adjustments to the road lurked in her muscles.
It seemed a week since she had awakened in the berth and pulled the curtains to see dawn on the peaks of these mountains. It seemed a month since she had embraced her parents and Bessie and kissed her son’s sleeping face. She felt swallowed and lost; her mind kept bending back to the room where Ollie might now be beginning another fever cycle. She tried to imagine Augusta and Thomas in this crude place, their fastidiousness cheek by jowl with all this coarse humanity, and couldn’t. The very effort made her laugh. For a time she lay phrasing the day’s experience in co
lorful and humorous fashion, as if for the pages of Century, and almost persuaded herself that under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
And that made her think, with failing nerve, that whatever it was, it was to be her life. It was what she had deliberately chosen. As soon as he was well enough, she would be bringing Ollie out to grow up in it. Wanly she adjusted herself to Oliver’s unresponsive warmth.
It seemed to her that she heard every noise from midnight until near morning—dogs, drunken men in the street, footsteps that came down the hall and, it seemed, stopped before her door, so that she lay listening fearfully for a long time.
Then someone in the next cubicle sat up, yawning and squeaking the bed. He lighted a lamp whose glow shone blue through the cloth wall and threw huge windmill shadows among the rafters. She heard him stamp into his boots. The light rose and moved and receded down the hall. Outside, a rooster crowed some way off, and right underneath her someone split kindling with a quick thunk thunk thunk. Exhausted, frazzled, wide awake, she turned in the bed, fighting for covers, and found that Oliver’s eyes were open. He always woke that way, as quietly as if he had been lying there waiting.
“Can’t we get up?” she whispered.
They were on the road to Mosquito Pass by seven. For the first hour she hunched within her blanket with her breath congealing on the wool held across her face. A cold wind searched out the openings in her wrapping, her feet were cold under the buffalo robe. The dropped dung of the horses smoked in the road. As they climbed through the snags of a burned spruce forest, tatters of cloud blew out of the overcast. In all the shadowed places there was snow.
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