Sweet Thunder Read Free

unimpressed baggage man about this trunk of ours having accompanied us uneventfully on railroads around half the world until this accursed one, when Grace tugged at the sleeve of my overcoat. “Morrie, never mind. I have my overnight case and you’ve your satchel, we can get by.”
    Resigned to the loss, evidently my own personal admission ticket to Butte, I sighed heavily and accompanied Grace out to the street. A jitney sat chugging at the snowy curb, and the bundled-up taxi driver poked his head out to ask, “Where to, folks?”
    I said with what I hoped was the air of a mansion owner, “Ajax Avenue, please.”
    â€œHorse Thief Row it is,” the driver said nonchalantly. “Hop in.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Probably since the villas of Pompeii, palatial homes are ornaments of wealth, and Butte had more than its share of fanciful big houses. Our route swung past the monstrosity built by the early copper magnate William A. Clark, a many-gabled Victorian monument to vanity that took up half a block. More ostentatious yet was the château his son had imported from Europe and reassembled to the last cubit. Housekeeper that she’d had to be in operating her own boardinghouse, Grace peered apprehensively through the frost-flowered windows of the taxi as we passed other West End behemoths, her gloved hand gripping mine harder and harder. “Grace, Sandy’s residence as I recall it is not as gargantuan as these,” I sought to reassure her. To no avail. More firmly, I tried again. “It’s only a house, remember.”
    â€œAround here, that’s some ‘only,’” she said with a swallow.
    Now I was the apprehensive one. “I hope you’re not getting—”
    â€œNo! I’m fine. Fine.”
    The driver called out, “This’s the street. Which shack is yours, pard?”
    I pointed over his shoulder to a stonework architectural mix with a peaked tower room predominating. Draped in snow and icicles, the three-story house looked like a polar castle.
    â€œThere, see?” I soothed Grace when the taxi left us off outside the gray granite manse. “Smaller than Versailles.”
    â€œA little,” she allowed doubtfully, as we negotiated the frosty front steps and porch. The second time I rapped the brass knocker in the shape of a helmeted warrior’s frosty-eyed visage, Ajax on guard duty, a familiar gruff voice called from somewhere inside. “Coming. Don’t wear out the door.”
    â€œMorgan,” the figure that flung it open and loomed there almost filling the doorway issued, as if identifying me to myself. As commanding as Moses, he rumbled, “It’s about time you stopped gallivanting all over the landscape. Heh.”
    Samuel Sandison himself was nearly geographic, the great sloping body ascending from an avalanche of midriff to a snowy summit of beard and cowlick. Glacial blue eyes seemed to see past a person into the shadows of life. Attired as ever in a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, and boots long since polished by sagebrush and horsehide, he appeared to be resisting time in every stitch of his being. Description struggled when it came to his mark on history, cattle king turned vigilante turned bookman and city librarian, who had bent every effort and not a few regulations to provide a rough-and-tumble mining town with a world-class reading collection. And always, always, the long shadow of the hangman’s tree followed him, carried forward from when he’d owned the biggest ranch in Montana. Having shared an office with him in something like companionable exasperation—the feeling may have been mutual—I always connected this outsize man with those lines of the poet Cheyne:
Greater than his age was he / Story and legend his legacy.
    Right now, he was some manner of unprecedented tenant ushering us into a sprawling residence newly