shelved along with lesser works. Again like a many-sided figure, Sandison as librarian was also the institutionâs prime benefactor by mingling these treasures on loan from his own collection with the libraryâs standard fare, an act of stupendous generosity that also made it impossible to fire him.
A block away, overtaken by so many memories good and the other sort, I was slowing to such an extent that Sandison looked over his shoulder at me. âComing in?â
âNot today, Sandy.â
âSuit yourself, if youâd rather loaf than improve yourself,â he drawled, lumbering off to where the staff awaited him as usual in a line at the top of the library steps. With a pang, I watched him count them in through the arched doorway as he had counted cowboys at the corral in his previous life.
On my way back to the house, it was only when I stopped at a newsstand to buy the
Sporting News
and what passed for a local paper, the wretched Anaconda-owned
Butte Daily Post
, that the odd fact occurred to me. Sandison in our wide-ranging conversation had not bothered to bring up the copper company and its mailed-fist grip on the city at all. Which was a bit like that Sherlock Holmes mystery of the dog that did not bark in the night.
 3 Â
I HAD NEVER BEEN DOMESTIC. Which is to say, a householder, owner of a home of any sortâlet alone a moose of a house up there with the most grandiose of them on Horse Thief Row, thanks to Sandisonâs quirky bequest. Back a decade and more ago, my brother and I and the love of his life necessarily dwelled under the same roof during the rise of his career, but the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, when we were in the money, was such address as the three of us had. Therefore, Ajaxâs pop-eyed stare each time I put a key in the big front door of what was now the Morris and Grace Morgan domicile was apt enough.
The house, the mansionâthe manse, as some imp within me couldnât help categorizing itâthis home-owning opportunity or burden or responsibility or whatever it constituted, made me look at myself in a new way. To be painfully honest about it, until then I amounted to something like a tourist excursioning through life. Episode followed episode, never uninteresting but somewhat lacking in basic design. I lived by my wits, sufficient company most of the time. But now there was Grace to be thought of. Didnât I owe her, if not myself and my page in the book of life, a more settled and assured existence? In a word, domestication?
It would have been less a test of my resolve if the most perfect example of carrying a house on oneâs back were something other than the snail.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
The pair of them were hard at it, Griff whanging away at a loosened stairway runner while Hoop handed him carpet tacks, when I returned later in the day after a trek around town scouting for employment, a discouraging exercise if there ever was one. With Montana again on hard timesâthe Treasure State, as it was known, seemed stuck in the mining-camp cycle of wild boom and precipitous bustâany jobs that I was more or less fitted for were scarcer than henâs teeth, which left me facing the prospect I dreaded. The C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home. âThereâll always be an opening here for you,â Creeping Pete, which was to say Peterson, long since had assured me amid the display of caskets with lids up. Briefly Iâd served as his establishmentâs cryer at Dublin Gulch wakes when I first alighted in Butte, but this time around, I would have to plead sobriety and confine myself to the undertaking parlor; the rest of the nation may have signed on to Prohibition, but in this city, three hundred saloons merely turned into three hundred speakeasies and bootleg liquor flowed so freely at wakes that the corpseâs brain wasnât the only one being pickled. I had no doubt that Creeping