"The Affair at Grover Station (1900) by Willa Cather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

The Affair at Grover Station
by Willa Cather
The following is a Gaslight etext.


I heard this story sitting on the rear platform of an accommodation freight that
crawled along through the brown, sun-dried wilderness between Grover Station and
Cheyenne. The narrator was "Terrapin" Rodgers who had been a classmate of mine
at Princeton, and who was then cashier in the B---- railroad office at Cheyenne.
Rodgers was an Albany boy, but after his father failed in business, his uncle
got "Terrapin" a position on a western railroad, and he left college and
disappeared completely from our little world, and it was not until I was sent
West, by the University with a party of geologists who were digging for fossils
in the region about Sterling, Colorado, that I saw him again. On this particular
occasion Rodgers had been down at Sterling to spend Sunday with me, and I
accompanied him when he returned to Cheyenne.
When the train pulled out of Grover Station, we were sitting smoking on the
rear platform, watching the pale yellow disk of the moon that was just rising
and that drenched the naked, gray plains in a soft lemon-colored light. The
telegraph poles scored the sky like a musical staff as they flashed by, and the
stars, seen between the wires, looked like the notes of some erratic symphony.
The stillness of the night and the loneliness and barrenness of the plains were
conducive to an uncanny train of thought. We had just left Grover Station behind
us, and the murder of the station agent at Grover, which had occurred the
previous winter, was still the subject of much conjecturing and theorizing all
along that line of railroad. Rodgers had been an intimate friend of the murdered
agent, and it was said that he knew more about the affair than any other living
man, but with that peculiar reticence which at college had won him the sobriquet
"Terrapin," he had kept what he knew to himself, and even the most accomplished
reporter on the New York Journal, who had traveled halfway across the continent
for the express purpose of pumping Rodgers, had given him up as impossible. But
I had known Rodgers a long time, and since I had been grubbing in the chalk
about Sterling, we had fallen into a habit of exchanging confidences, for it is
good to see an old face in a strange land. So, as the little red station house
at Grover faded into the distance, I asked him point blank what he knew about
the murder of Lawrence O'Toole. Rodgers took a long pull at his black briar pipe
as he answered me.
"Well, yes, I could tell you something about it, but the question is how much
you'd believe, and whether you could restrain yourself from reporting it to the
Society for Psychical Research. I never told the story but once, and then it was
to the Division Superintendent, and when I finished the old gentleman asked if I
were a drinking man, and remarking that a fertile imagination was not a
desirable quality in a railroad employee, said it would be just as well if the
story went no further. You see it's a grewsome tale, and someway we don't like
to be reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than our systems
of philosophy can grapple with. However, I should rather like to tell the story
to a man who would look at it objectively and leave it in the domain of pure
incident where it belongs. It would unburden my mind, and I'd like to get a
scientific man's opinion on the yarn. But I suppose I'd better begin at the