Sweet Thunder Read Online Free Page B

nearly had to pinch myself into believing my own senses, for the view ahead stretched like no other in America, with the winter-capped Rocky Mountains rising to the Continental Divide seemingly just beyond the city limits, and every manner of dwelling place and work spot of a hundred thousand people jumbled in between here and there. It was as if a section of Pittsburgh had been grafted onto an alpine scene, the power of industry and that of nature juxtaposed. The contest between the two was in the air, literally. You might think a city dominated by smokestacks and dump heaps would look its best under a covering of snow, but logic did not always apply to Butte. The weather could not keep up with production on the Hill, its low industrial rumble lending to the illusion that the humpbacked rise simmered like a volcano, belching constant smoke and venting muck from dozens of mineshafts, so that the snow being shoveled from paths and doorways as we passed was a mushy gray. “We need a good blizzard,” Sandison prescribed as we made our way down the sloping streets toward the business district. Once again I marveled at my benefactor-cum-boarder, as wintry himself in his silvery wreath of beard and breath as Father Frost of the nursery rhyme. How did it go—
King of the whitened clime, ever there / Leaving tokens of wintertime everywhere.
Season in, season out, Samuel Sandison was like no one else I had ever encountered or expected to.
    Conversation was a sometime thing with this uncommon man, I knew from experience, and so to keep matters going I pitched in with topics ranging from the weather to politics. As ever, Sandison’s responses varied from grunts and silences to pronouncements that snapped a person’s head around. As the saying was, life was serious when it made him; in all the time I shared his office, the only real mirth he showed was when he spotted a bargain in a rare-book catalog and would let out a “Heh!” and smile in the deeps of his beard. Yet there was almost no other person, save Grace, whom I found more compelling.
    Just now he was grumbling about the recent national election, which had picked as president the most wooden member of the U.S. Senate. “Warren G. Harding is barely bright enough to operate an umbrella. Damn it, what’s this country coming to?”
    â€œHistory reminds us that worse has happened, Sandy. You will recall that Caligula elected his horse to the Roman Senate.”
    â€œHah. The American electorate has chosen the north end of that animal going south.”
    As we talked on, our breath wreathing our beards, that feeling of being in the company of fate came over me, perhaps just from nearness to Samuel Sandison, a figure monumental enough, Janus-like, to have “The Earl of Hell” inscribed on one side of him and “Progenitor of the Finest Book Collection West of Chicago” on the other. And somewhere between, the unlikely genie who bestowed a mansion as if giving away an old suit of clothes. Impetuously I told him he must inform me or Grace if there was anything we could do to cushion his life at the house. “I know you must miss Dora greatly.”
    â€œAbout like losing one eye,” he said simply.
    Glancing at me and then away, he turned gruff again. “The natural order of things turned upside down somehow, Morgan. Who would have thought you’d be the married man and I’d be the tangle-foot bachelor.”
    By now we were approaching his domain, his realm and his scepter, the Butte Public Library, and my heart skipped at the first full sight of it. How I loved that castle of literature, a granite Gothic extravaganza, with its welcoming arches like the entranceway of a cathedral and a balcony neatly cupped above and a corner tower with its peak inscribing the sky. The library’s holdings were the even greater glory, with beautiful first editions of the output of authors from Adams, Henry, to Zola, Émile,