The Affair at Grover Station
By Willa Cather
2009
First Published
3.00
Average Rating
25
Number of Pages
an excerpt from the beginning: 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 disc of the moon that was just rising and that drenched the naked, grey plains in a soft lemon-coloured 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 theorising 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 soubriquet ‘Terrapin’, he had kept what he knew to himself, and even the most accomplished reporter on the New York Journal, who had travelled half-way 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....
Avg Rating
3.00
Number of Ratings
33
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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