Smith's Monthly #4

by Smith, Dean Wesley

The city had been the state’s capitol for only a short time at this point in history. As they neared what seemed to be a downtown area, with the three-story Boise Hotel dominating a large intersection, Ryan moved his horse up beside hers and pointed off toward the foothills to the north.

  “Construction on the capitol building about five blocks from here won’t even start until 1905,” he said in a whisper only loud enough for her to hear. Then he pointed in the other direction down a wide road with a bridge over a river. “See the hill? That’s where the Union Pacific Depot will be built in 1925.”

  All she could do was shake her head. The town looked faintly familiar from the one she had come to know, yet so much was missing and different. Now, where large bank buildings would someday stand, a China Town district covered four blocks.

  Where a wonderful old theater would be built, a saloon now sat with the doors open and piano music ringing out over the street, playing a song she did not recognize.

  They kept going on through town and along the river out Warm Springs Avenue, now only a wide dirt wagon road cutting through the tall poplar and cottonwood trees.

  They rode along in silence for a few minutes, April doing her best to catch any glimpse of furnishings or fixtures. Then Ryan eased his horse again up beside hers.

  “Our office will be down there,” he whispered.

  He pointed toward a field and swampland beside the quickly flowing Boise River.

  She knew from there the future university would be on the other banks of the river where a large grove of cottonwoods now grew.

  If she had ever doubted she was going into the past, this was impossible to refute now.

  They rode for a little longer and April knew exactly where they were.

  Up ahead would be a wonderful home that she and Ryan had walked past many times. It was one of the old estate homes built on the bluff overlooking the river. They had talked about how wonderful it would be to buy the old Queen Anne style home some day.

  Or if nothing else, just take a tour inside it.

  An architect and an interior designer daydreaming together. She had really enjoyed those walks in this neighborhood.

  Finally, the wide wagon road was down to only wide enough for one wagon to go by when Duster pointed ahead and turned toward a large house sitting on a bluff overlooking the river.

  The home was huge, even from a distance, with tall steep roofs and four towers. A wide covered porch ran all the way around the three front sides of the home and a stone staircase led up to the front porch.

  April recognized it as well as the neighboring estate to the one she and Ryan had talked about and admired in the future.

  But the house they liked wasn’t there yet. It hadn’t been built yet.

  “This is ours?” Bonnie asked Duster, smiling at her husband. “It looks like the Sandford House in San Francisco.”

  April instantly realized Bonnie was right. The Sandford House was built into a hill and was tucked tight between other large homes on the street. This home sat on flat ground and was all by itself.

  In the future, it would be surrounded by a high hedge and trees and she had never really noticed the resemblance before.

  “I know how much you love that home,” Duster said. “I also bought the two estates on either side of it.

  Duster turned and smiled at her and Ryan, but April had no idea why. She was sure that in the last two months neither she nor Ryan had mentioned their few walks past this neighborhood.

  So what was Duster up to? The man never seemed to stop surprising her.

  They went past the large two-story plus towers mansion that seemed even larger up close than from the main road, then on down a hill on a wide trail toward a stable building. The Boise River ran past about thirty feet down the hill and on the other side of some cottonwood trees that were now clearly in full spring growth.

  The stable building matched the style of the large house and inside it had stalls for all their horses, plus the four that were already there. And clearly there was an upstairs to the building as well. More than likely living quarters for stable hands.

  They spent the next half hour taking care of their horses and getting them bedded down and fed and brushed. Then together, carrying their saddlebags and supplies, the four of them headed back up the path toward the back door of the large home.

  The sun was still in the clear sky and the air almost warm. April couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the river below and the slight rustling of the leaves on the trees in a light breeze.

  It was wonderful, simply wonderful.

  Ryan was staring at all the details of the big home as they approached. Finally he asked Duster, “Who built this?”

  “Madison and I did,” Duster said. “This last year, with the help of a couple local architects and a construction crew of about forty men. We used it to test who we wanted to work for us this summer on the lodge.”

  “Wow, nice work,” Ryan said, shaking his head.

  “We thought it turned out all right,” Duster said. “Bigger than it looked on the plans, though.”

  Then as they reached the back door, Duster smiled at April. “Dawn used your list of furnishings for the lodge to help furnish this place. Wait until you see.”

  Suddenly April was scared to death, more so than traveling in time.

  It was one thing to present furnishings in a holographic presentation for a big lodge made out of logs in the wilderness, another to actually buy the real items and get them to work together in a Queen-Anne style mansion.

  She was either walking into a disaster, or something amazing.

  And she was betting on disaster.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  May 7, 1900

  APRIL FOLLOWED Duster and Bonnie up the stairs and through a back door into a porch with light tiles on the floor. There were hooks to hang coats and wooden benches to sit on to take off boots and shoes. The porch had wide windows along one side that looked out over the back and the stable beyond.

  Duster took off his coat and hat and hung it on a hook and April did the same with her coat, tucking her gloves inside a pocket of the coat.

  Duster knocked and then went in to a large, high-ceiling kitchen that smelled faintly of bread. Tall, white cabinets covered two walls and a large metal stove sat on one wall and two large iceboxes on another. Oak trim for baseboard and chair-rail trim circled the kitchen and all the cabinet hardware was oak handles and brushed-brass trim.

  In the center of the room was a large butcher-block island with pots and pans hanging above it.

  On the right of the big stove, an archway with two swinging doors led out into the center of the house. Both doors had small windows about head high on them and the entire thing was framed in wide oak trim boards.

  Duster pointed at another plain wooden door on the far left of the room. “That goes down into a storage cellar and the other door beside it goes into private cooks’ and servants’ quarters. Three small bedrooms and a bathroom are back there, but we have no servants here.”

  To the direct left of the back door was a huge alcove with tall windows on three sides that looked out over the back yard and river beyond. April was impressed by the huge, oak kitchen table that filled the alcove. Ten people could sit comfortably at that table on the ladder-back oak chairs around it. Each chair had a hand-sewn brown pillow tied to the seat.

  It was almost an exact match of the table she had designed for the kitchen area of the lodge. Not the formal dining room, the work kitchen area. The lamp over it was electrical and ornate brass with beautiful imitation oil-lamp glass shades.

  Around the walls were actual oil lamps as sconces, more than likely to be used if they lost power. It was just as she and Ryan had designed in the lodge.

  Clearly the house had electrical. She hadn’t seen any wires leading out here from town as they rode out, so more than likely there was a generator somewhere. But in 1900 electrical to houses was still mostly in the center of the cities or for
the rich.

  There were four of them in this kitchen and they didn’t even begin to crowd part of it. There could be ten people in here and it wouldn’t feel crowded.

  “Where are Dawn and Madison?” Bonnie asked.

  “Horses were out there, so more than likely out for a walk or upstairs,” Duster said.

  “Amazing,” Ryan said, staring around at the detail trim along the ceiling and around the windows.

  “You’ve just begun to see the place,” Duster said as he went through the swinging doors and out into the main area of the house.

  It was a huge room, also with high ceilings. The room was divided by polished wooden Doric columns, two on each side that framed between them glass display cabinets on both sides. The columns and cabinets came out from each side wall, forming a sort of archway in the center, delineating the difference from the formal dining room and the formal living room.

  Through an archway on the other side of the living room between two other wood columns, April could see the main entrance foyer and a guest waiting room on the other side as was standard for this era of homes.

  A large river-rock fireplace filled one wall of the living room and a built-in mahogany hutch with mirrors and drawers filled the wall between the dining room and the kitchen.

  The formal dining room table had a dark-oak dining table with lion paw carved feet. The table was covered in a beautiful, white-lace table runner. A dozen Brittany carved oak chairs were tucked in around the table giving her an idea of how really large that table was.

  This entire home was huge.

  As April looked around at detail after detail, she suddenly started to understand just how fantastic the lodge was going to look when finished. She was speechless.

  “This is just stunning,” Bonnie said, kissing her husband.

  “How many bedrooms?” Ryan asked.

  “Two regular bedrooms downstairs here besides the servants quarters,” Duster said, pointing off to a door on the left side of the dining area. “A bathroom between them. “Four suites upstairs, all with their own bathrooms and fireplaces and furnished as April laid out the furnishings for the suites in the lodge.”

  “And you found a good crew to build this?” Ryan asked, walking over closer to one wall. “The workmanship is topnotch from what I can see.”

  “A fantastic crew,” Duster nodded. “Dependable and good.”

  Duster then turned to April. “And we found a distant relative of yours to help with all the stonework.”

  “Of mine?” April asked, surprised.

  “Buckley family owns a large part of Boise and the top of that flat mountain just above the town.”

  “Table Rock?” she asked.

  Duster nodded. “They have already lined up the contract with the State of Idaho to quarry on the back side of Table Rock all the sandstone needed to build the new Capitol buildings in the downtown area. And they are going to do a lot of the work as well. But Buckley and his crew have agreed to help us with the stonework on the foundation and fireplaces of the lodge before then.”

  Ryan went over to the large fireplace that dominated the living room. It was clearly made out of river rock and polished and fitted perfectly together. “They did this as well?”

  Duster nodded. “They did, and the foundation of the house and all the fireplaces and chimneys throughout.

  “Premium work,” Ryan said, nodding.

  “This entire place is amazing,” April said.

  Bonnie hugged her husband.

  Duster just smiled. “The lodge is going to work, isn’t it?”

  “It’s going to be amazing,” Ryan said.

  All April could do was smile and nod.

  If how this fantastically beautiful home turned out was an indication, the lodge would be something for the ages.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  September 21, 1900

  THE LIGHT SNOW blew over the lodge construction site, swirling in and around the foundations and piles of logs cut and ready to be fitted next summer, and then vanishing into the gray sky over Monumental Creek.

  The trail from the valley came up to his right and went past the lodge and down into a camp area over the hill they had built for the pack trains going in and out of the valley. This was the first big snowstorm of the winter and he had a hunch no one would be coming up out of the valley until spring after today.

  Ryan couldn’t remember working so hard physically for over four months. Even back when he worked construction in undergrad, he never worked this hard for seven days a week, every hour there was enough light to work.

  From everything he could tell, the construction was on time to finish by the end of next summer if they got a decent jump at it in May.

  He and the last of the construction crew were supposed to be heading down this afternoon, off the mountain and back to Boise. He had his camp struck and everything loaded on the mules and packhorses and ready down in the stables just off the summit. Those stables had been the first building they had built and they would replace it later with something larger and more secure.

  He so looked forward to getting off the hill and everything wrapped up here because he missed April more than he wanted to think about.

  When they first arrived in Boise back in May, they had spent two days in a wonderful suite in that fantastic house Duster had built on Warm Springs, making love at night and talking with Bonnie and Duster and Dawn and Madison about the lodge. As every day went by, he fell harder and harder for April.

  And he had come to accept that they were actually in the past. He was still having a hard time believing that only two minutes and fifteen seconds would go by in the cave. That would have to be proven to him he had a hunch.

  But then on the third day they had all gone to work.

  He and Duster and Madison had all gone with the Buckley stone crew up to the summit while April and Bonnie and Dawn had all headed for San Francisco to start the buying of the furnishings.

  And as April said, she really, really wanted to see the Sandford House in its original glory.

  She had kissed him goodbye that morning as he went out the back door. “That’s got to last you for a month or so.”

  He promised her it would, then kissed her back, telling her that had to last her. She promised that it would as well.

  They had talked about seeing each other before the end of June, but it hadn’t worked out that way. He had no time away from the construction site on the summit and from what Duster told him, she and Bonnie ended up going on to Denver and then Chicago while Dawn had returned to Boise and, with Madison’s and Duster’s help, set up the warehouse for storage of the interior lodge supplies that would start pouring toward Boise.

  So he and April hadn’t seen each other for the entire summer. He worked himself into exhaustion every day just to keep from thinking of that fact.

  But now, in two days, he would see April again and hold her and tell her everything and she could tell him everything about her shopping. And then they could spend the winter together in Boise, really getting to know each other even better.

  As he watched the last two of his crew secure a pile of logs, four horses and riders appeared out of the snow coming up from the valley below. He was amazed. He wouldn’t have wanted to try that trail up the side of that mountain in these conditions.

  As they got closer, he suddenly recognized one of the riders as she looked up at him.

  It was Janice.

  But Steven wasn’t with her.

  Ryan’s stomach twisted. Something was very wrong. She shouldn’t be here. She and Steven were planning on wintering in the valley.

  He had been so busy and tired, he hadn’t even taken the time to go down into the small but growing town of Roosevelt. He would next summer.

  He went to Janice and helped her down off her horse. She was wearing two or three layers of clothing and had a hat pulled down over her head and layers of gloves on her hands. But her face still look
ed wind-burned and she was shivering.

  She nodded to the man in the lead of the four and said, “Thanks!”

  “Take care,” the guy said back, his words carried off by the wind and snow.

  The guy nodded to her, then to him, and then the three horses continued on over the hill.

  Ryan signaled for his two men to finish it up quickly and meet him down in the stable. They needed to get down off this summit pretty soon as well, of that he had no doubt. This storm was growing worse by the hour.

  “You all right?” he asked Janice as he led her along the trail and to the stables where they could get in and out of the snow and wind.

  “Cold,” she said, he voice weak. “But otherwise I’m fine.”

  There was still a fire burning in the iron stove in the stable, keeping the insides at a decent temperature for the last horses. They got her horse inside and near the heat and he took care of it while Janice went over to the stove and started peeling off some layers of coats and gloves to let the heat in.

  Then she sat down on a bench and took off her boots and socks to let them dry near the stove.

  “What happened?” he asked after he made sure her horse was all right and ready to travel again.

  “Steven took a fall two days ago,” she said, shuddering.

  Ryan wasn’t sure it was from the cold or from Steven’s fall.

  “He slipped on some ice and went down and shattered his right wrist and I think broke a few ribs.”

  Ryan shook his head. “He has to be in pain.”

  “He is,” she said, nodding as she rubbed her hands together over the fire. “I have him on pain meds and in bed now. I got the store closed for the season and only those three know I came out alone.”

  Ryan looked at her, puzzled.

  She went on as if he understood. “They think I was coming up here to bring you back. No one knows that Steven is injured or that he hasn’t left yet.”

  “So what do we do?” Ryan asked, very puzzled.

  “We head to Boise and then Duster and Madison go pull the plug,” Janice said, still warming her hands and feet. “Get Steven out of there and healthy again.”