“What made you think that?”
“I dont know. You can just tell somehow.”
“No, we’re not. I hope you dont mind, since we’re going to live in the same house together.”
“Why should I? Me and Buck wasn’t married for a while either. But we are now all right.” Her voice was not triumphant, it was smug. “And I’ve got it put away good too. Even Buck dont know where. Not that that would make any difference. Buck’s all right. But it dont do a girl any harm to be safe.”
“What put away?”
“The paper. The license.” Later (she was cooking the evening meal now and Wilbourne and Buckner were still across the canyon at the mine) she said, “Make him marry you.”
“Maybe I will,” Charlotte said.
“You make him. It’s better that way. Especially when you get jammed.”
“Are you jammed?”
“Yes. About a month.”
In fact, when the ore train—a dummy engine with neither head nor rear and three cars and a cubicle of caboose containing mostly stove—reached the snow-choked railhead there was no one in sight at all save a grimed giant upon whom they had apparently come by complete surprise, in a grimed sheep-lined coat, with pale eyes which looked as if he had not slept much lately in a grimed face which obviously had not been shaved and doubtless not been washed in some time—a Pole, with an air fierce proud and wild and a little hysterical, who spoke no English, jabbering, gesturing violently toward the opposite wall of the canyon where a half dozen houses made mostly of sheet iron and window-deep in drifts, clung. The canyon was not wide, it was a ditch, a gutter, it soared, swooping, the pristine snow scarred and blemished by and dwarfing the shaft entrance, the refuse dump, the few buildings; beyond the canyon rims the actual unassailable peaks rose, cloud-ravelled in some incredible wind, on the dirty sky. “It will be beautiful in the spring,” Charlotte said.
“It had better be,” Wilbourne said.
“It will be. It is now. But let’s go somewhere. I’m going to freeze in a minute.”
Again Wilbourne tried the Pole. “Manager,” he said. “Which house?”
“Yah; boss,” the Pole said. He flung his hand again toward the opposite canyon wall, he moved with incredible speed for all his size and, Charlotte starting momentarily back before she caught herself, he pointed at her thin slippers in the trodden ankle-deep snow then took both lapels of her coat in his grimed hands and drew them about her throat and face with almost a woman’s gentleness, the pale eyes stooping at her with an expression at once fierce, wild and tender; he shoved her forward, patting her back, he actually gave her a definite hard slap on the bottom. “Ron,” he said. “Ron.”
Then they saw and entered the path crossing the narrow valley. That is, it was not exactly a path free of snow or snow-packed by feet, it was merely that here the snow level was lower, the width of a single man between the two snow banks and so protected somewhat from the wind. “Maybe he lives in the mine and only comes home over the week-end,” Charlotte said.
“But he’s got a wife, they told me. What would she do?”
“Maybe the ore train just comes once a week too.”
“You must not have seen the engineer.”
“We haven’t seen his wife, either,” she said. She made a sound of disgust. “That wasn’t even funny. Excuse me, Wilbourne.”
“I do.”
“Excuse me, mountains. Excuse me, snow. I think I’m going to freeze.”
“She wasn’t there this morning, anyway,” Wilbourne said. Nor was the manager at the mine. They chose a house, not at random and not because it was the largest, which it was not, and not even because there was a thermometer (it registered fourteen degrees above zero) beside the door, but simply because it was the first house they came to and now they had both become profoundly and ineradicably intimate with cold for the first time in their lives, a cold which left an ineffaceable and unforgettable mark somewhere on the spirit and memory like first sex experience or the experience of taking human life. Wilbourne knocked once at this door with a hand which could not even feel the wood and did not wait for an answer, opening it and thrusting Charlotte ahead of him into a single room where a man and a woman, sitting identical in woolen shirts and jeans pants and shoeless woollen socks on either side of a dog-eared pack of cards laid out for a game of some sort on a plank across a nail keg, looked up at them in amazement.
“You mean he sent you out here? Callaghan himself?” Buckner said.
“Yes,” Wilbourne said. He could hear Charlotte and Mrs. Buckner where Charlotte stood over the heater about ten feet away (it burned gasoline; when a match was struck to it, which happened only when they had to turn it off to refill the tank, since it burned otherwise all the time, night and day, it took fire with a bang and glare which after a while even Wilbourne got used to and no longer clapped his mouth shut just before his heart jumped out) talking: “Is them all the clothes you brought out here? You’ll freeze. Buck’ll have to go to the commissary.”—“Yes,” Wilbourne said. “Why? Who else would send me?”
“You—ah—you didn’t bring anything? Letter or nothing?”
“No. He said I wouldn’t—”
“Oh, I see. You paid your own way. Railroad fare.”
“No. He paid it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Buckner said. He turned his head toward his wife. “You hear that, Bill?”
“What?” Wilbourne said. “What’s wrong?”
“Never mind now,” Buckner said. “We’ll go up to the commissary and get you fixed up for sleeping, and some warmer clothes than them you’ve got. He didn’t even tell you to buy yourself a couple of Roebuck sheep coats, did he?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “But let me get warm first.”
“You wont never get warm out here,” Buckner said. “If you sit over a stove trying to, waiting to, you wont ever move. You’ll starve, you wont even get up to fill the stove tank when it burns out. The thing is, to make up your mind you will always be a little cold even in bed and just go on about your business and after a while you will get used to it and forget it and then you wont even notice you are cold because you will have forgotten what being warm was ever like. So come on now. You can take my coat.”
“What will you do?”
“It aint far. I have a sweater. Carrying the stuff will warm us up some.”
The commissary was another iron single room filled with the iron cold and lighted by the hushed iron glare of the snow beyond a single window. The cold in it was a dead cold. It was like aspic, almost solid to move through, the body reluctant as though, and with justice, more than to breathe, live, was too much to ask of it. On either side rose wooden shelves, gloomy and barren save for the lower ones, as if this room too were a thermometer not to measure cold but moribundity, an incontrovertible centigrade (We should have brought the Bad Smell, Wilbourne was already thinking), a contracting mercury of sham which was not even grandiose. They hauled down the blankets, the sheep coats and woollens and galoshes; they felt like ice, like iron, stiff; carrying them back to the cabin Wilbourne’s lungs (he had forgot the altitude) labored at the rigid air which felt like fire in them.
“So you’re a doctor,” Buckner said.
“I’m the doctor,” Wilbourne said. They were outside now. Buckner locked the door again. Wilbourne looked out across the canyon, toward the opposite wall with its tiny lifeless scar of mine entrance and refuse dump. “Just what’s wrong here?”
“I’ll show you after a while. Are you a doctor?”
Now Wilbourne looked at him. “I just told you I was. What do you mean?”
“Then I guess you’ve got something to show it. Degree: what do they call them?”
Wilbourne looked at him. “Just what are you getting at? Am I to be responsible to you for my capabilities, or to the man who is paying my salary?”
“Salary?” Buckner laughed harshly. Then he stopped. “I guess I am going about this wrong. I never aimed to rub your fur crossways. When a man comes into my country and you offer him a job and he claims he can ride, we want proof that he can and he wouldn’t get mad when we asked him for it. We would even furnish him a horse to prove it on, only it wouldn’t be the best horse we had and if we never had but one horse and it would be a good horse, it wouldn’t be that one. So we wouldn’t have a horse for him to prove it on and we would have to ask him. That’s what I’m doing now.” He looked at Wilbourne, sober and intent, out of hazel eyes in a gaunt face like raw beef muscle.
“Oh,” Wilbourne said. “I see. I have a degree from a pretty fair medical school. I had almost finished my course in a well-known hospital. Then I would have been—known, anyway; that is, they would have admitted publicly that I knew—about what any doctor knows, and more than some probably. Or at least I hope so. Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes,” Buckner said. “That’s all right.” He turned and went on. “You wanted to know what’s wrong here. We’ll leave these things at
