The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather [rosie project .txt] 📗

“Well, send him a line and tell him to come in again. I like to hear him. Of all the crazy prospectors I’ve ever known, he’s the most interesting, because he’s really crazy. It’s a religious conviction with him, and with most of ’em it’s a gambling fever or pure vagrancy. But Jasper Flight believes that the Almighty keeps the secret of the silver deposits in these hills, and gives it away to the deserving. He’s a downright noble figure. Of course I’ll stake him! As long as he can crawl out in the spring. He and that burro are a sight together. The beast is nearly as white as Jasper; must be twenty years old.”

“If you stake him this time, you won’t have to again,” said T. B. knowingly. “He’ll croak up there, mark my word. Says he never ties the burro at night now, for fear he might be called sudden, and the beast would starve. I guess that animal could eat a lariat rope, all right, and enjoy it.”

“I guess if we knew the things those two have eaten, and haven’t eaten, in their time, T. B., it would make us vegetarians.” The doctor sat down and looked thoughtful. “That’s the way for the old man to go. It would be pretty hard luck if he had to die in a hospital. I wish he could turn up something before he cashes in. But his kind seldom do; they’re bewitched. Still, there was Stratton. I’ve been meeting Jasper Flight, and his side meat and tin pans, up in the mountains for years, and I’d miss him. I always halfway believe the fairy tales he spins me. Old Jasper Flight,” Archie murmured, as if he liked the name or the picture it called up.

A clerk came in from the outer office and handed Archie a card. He sprang up and exclaimed, “Mr. Ottenburg? Bring him in.”

Fred Ottenburg entered, clad in a long, fur-lined coat, holding a checked-cloth hat in his hand, his cheeks and eyes bright with the outdoor cold. The two men met before Archie’s desk and their handclasp was longer than friendship prompts except in regions where the blood warms and quickens to meet the dry cold. Under the general keying-up of the altitude, manners take on a heartiness, a vivacity, that is one expression of the half-unconscious excitement which Colorado people miss when they drop into lower strata of air. The heart, we are told, wears out early in that high atmosphere, but while it pumps it sends out no sluggish stream. Our two friends stood gripping each other by the hand and smiling.

“When did you get in, Fred? And what have you come for?” Archie gave him a quizzical glance.

“I’ve come to find out what you think you’re doing out here,” the younger man declared emphatically. “I want to get next, I do. When can you see me?”

“Anything on tonight? Then suppose you dine with me. Where can I pick you up at five-thirty?”

“Bixby’s office, general freight agent of the Burlington.” Ottenburg began to button his overcoat and drew on his gloves. “I’ve got to have one shot at you before I go, Archie. Didn’t I tell you Pinky Alden was a cheap squirt?”

Alden’s backer laughed and shook his head. “Oh, he’s worse than that, Fred. It isn’t polite to mention what he is, outside of the Arabian Nights. I guessed you’d come to rub it into me.”

Ottenburg paused, his hand on the doorknob, his high color challenging the doctor’s calm. “I’m disgusted with you, Archie, for training with such a pup. A man of your experience!”

“Well, he’s been an experience,” Archie muttered. “I’m not coy about admitting it, am I?”

Ottenburg flung open the door. “Small credit to you. Even the women are out for capital and corruption, I hear. Your Governor’s done more for the United Breweries in six months than I’ve been able to do in six years. He’s the lily-livered sort we’re looking for. Good morning.”

That afternoon at five o’clock Dr. Archie emerged from the State House after his talk with Governor Alden, and crossed the terrace under a saffron sky. The snow, beaten hard, was blue in the dusk; a day of blinding sunlight had not even started a thaw. The lights of the city twinkled pale below him in the quivering violet air, and the dome of the State House behind him was still red with the light from the west. Before he got into his car, the doctor paused to look about him at the scene of which he never tired. Archie lived in his own house on Colfax Avenue, where he had roomy grounds and a rose garden and a conservatory. His housekeeping was done by three Japanese boys, devoted and resourceful, who were able to manage Archie’s dinner parties, to see that he kept his engagements, and to make visitors who stayed at the house so comfortable that they were always loath to go away.

Archie had never known what comfort was until he became a widower, though with characteristic delicacy, or dishonesty, he insisted upon accrediting his peace of mind to the San Felipe, to Time, to anything but his release from Mrs. Archie.

Mrs. Archie died just before her husband left Moonstone and came to Denver to live, six years ago. The poor woman’s fight against dust was her undoing at last. One summer day when she was rubbing the parlor upholstery with gasoline⁠—the doctor had often forbidden her to use it on any account, so that was one of the pleasures she seized upon in his absence⁠—an explosion occurred. Nobody ever knew exactly how it happened, for Mrs. Archie was dead when the neighbors rushed in to save her from the burning house. She must have inhaled the burning gas and died instantly.

Moonstone severity relented toward her somewhat after her death. But even while her old cronies at Mrs. Smiley’s millinery store said that it was a terrible thing, they added that nothing but