Sweet Thunder Read Online Free Page A

or animal, the pair could boil down a topic almost instantly. Grace had great affection for them—as did I, with reservations—and Griff, a lifelong bachelor, and Hoop, a widower, shared a near holy reverence for her; “Mrs. Faraday,” as they primly had insisted on calling her up until now, when their tongues were going to have get used to “Mrs. Morgan.”
    All at once, their speculations back and forth as to which ailment of the house merited most urgent treatment petered out as they looked past me down the hallway, and in unison doffed their hats and clasped them to their breasts.
    I scarcely had to turn around to the object of their respect. “Good morning, Sandy. I hope the accommodations”—he had taken over a back bedroom in what amounted to servants’ quarters, but handiest to his beloved library tower—“were up to expectation?”
    â€œIt’ll do. Hell, I’ve slept in bunkhouses before. What’s all the commotion?”
    Ceremoniously I introduced Hoop and Griff as new boarders, doubling as household staff. Sandison grunted a greeting to the bandy-legged pair, who returned the sentiment in hushed tones of awe. Reputation is a mighty thing, I was reminded again. Even in this city where justice not uncommonly was meted out by fist, gun, or dynamite, the legend of Samuel Sandison’s vigilante days stood head and shoulders over other such episodes. It was an old joke that civic uplift came to Montana with the lynching of the villainous sheriff, Henry Plummer, in the gold-strike town of Virginia City in 1864. Tradition of that grisly but effective sort found expression after Sandison’s summary way of dealing with cattle rustlers—hence his lurid nickname “the Strangler,” or sometimes simply “the Earl of Hell”—and here he stood before us, wild-bearded and filling a suit that would have held both Griff and Hoop. Practically kowtowing, they said they’d better get at things and disappeared to an inner room, where moments later hammering broke out.
    â€œYou keep some strange company,” Sandison commented in their wake.
    â€œThey’ll fit in,” I blandly replied.
    He gave me a look, but then grunted again and reached for his overcoat and hat. “Walk me to work, why don’t you. It’ll give you something to do besides idle your life away.”
    We set off in sunshine that did not take the chill out of the air, as though the sun’s warmth was waning with the year. The other residences along Horse Thief Row were as frosted as cakes, and I learned from Sandison’s rumbling commentary on the neighborhood that it had been his wife’s idea to move there when they left the ranch. “Dora wanted a fancy house for a change,” he said of the mansion I still had to get used to thinking of as mine and Grace’s. “Myself, I’ve never been keen about living on a street named for a two-bit soldier in the Trojan War.”
    â€œIt depends on the version of Ajax you believe in,” I protested. “In one telling of it, he was larger than life and a warrior of great prowess. In the other tale, I admit, he comes across as a bit of a peewee and thinking too well of himself. But—”
    â€œThat’s what I mean, oaf. If he was an unquestionable hero, he’d have his own epic poem, wouldn’t he.”
    â€œBut, I was about to say, if antiquity’s penchant for dualism has given us Janus, a god with faces looking in opposite directions, why can’t there be a twofold reflection of character in the myth, or myths, if you will, of Ajax? Perhaps representing mind and matter?” I thought I had him there, but Sandison just snorted.
    â€œPah. I said he was a two-bit soldier, didn’t I? A bit of this and a bit of that. You should learn to listen, rattlebrain.”
    About then we rounded the corner toward downtown, leaving mythology behind. Like Grace, I