Page 15 of Ellen Found
Charles held out his hand slowly. Plato sniffed but did not hiss, and turned away. “He’ll be your friend too, Papa,” Gwen assured him. “I know it. Give him time.”
Give me time too, Ellen thought.
Life and death can turn on a dime. I owe Ellen more than I can ever repay. More later.
GWEN PENROSE PROVED a welcome addition to the “kitchen staff,” as her father described them. When the cook scoffed, he wagged a finger at her. “Mrs. Quincy, when I work with one other carpenter, it’s the two of us. When I add another, it’s a crew. Staff sounds nicer for ladies.”
Ellen could tell when Mrs. Quincy was amused by how hard she tried not to show it. “You might as well add Plato to the staff,” she replied, which made Gwen nod seriously.
With the men working inside the inn, the whole building reverberated with noise thatMr. Reamer stated was music to his ears. “June is coming, so the louder, the better,” the architect announced after breakfast one morning.
Interested, Ellen stood in the kitchen doorway as Charles Penrose took everyone through the day’s tasks. The architect was there too, sketching designs and plans on the underside of leftover shingles. When he finished, the shingles went into the kitchen ranges.
“By the end of next week, every room on each floor will be roughed in,” Charles told her as they finished their morning coffee. “We’ll close the big doors off the second-floor mezzanine and finish those rooms after the lobby is done.”
As if aware of the need, winter held itself at bay, teasing with snow flurries and an overnight addition of a few inches, easily swept away from the porch and off machinery. Plato remained ever vigilant, perhaps mindful in his cat brain that cold weather meant mice were seeking warmer shelter too.
“You’re getting a bit of a belly on you,” she told him one night, as she prepared to blow outthe light in her glorious bedroom. Plato assumed his usual place, curled up by her feet. He still ignored the men who trooped in and out of “his” hotel, hammering and sawing, but he didn’t hiss at them.Even alley cats can change, Ellen thought.Maybe someday he’ll let Mr. Penrose pet him.
She felt herself changing, too. At the Mercury Street Café, her usual morning routine was a quick swipe at her hair and then an old shoestring to pull it back. If she could fix Gwen’s hair into French braids every morning, she could do hers, too.
She didn’t think anyone noticed, but Charles Penrose did. She saw it in his eyes, which pleased her more than words. Corporal Dan Reeves of the Old Faithful soldier station noticed too. One morning he gave her a string of Indian seed beads. “You could weave these in,” was all he said, but it warmed her heart for a week.
On orders from Major Pitcher, acting superintendent at Fort Yellowstone, Dan and his three privates took over a corner of the hastily built boardinghouse, closer than their regular soldiers’ station. Mr. Reamer madenote of the addition. “They’re here to protect us from bears and poachers,” he announced one morning after breakfast.
Maybe it was the good coffee and biscuits. Maybe it was the tablecloths, or even the warmth from the two Majestic ranges. No one rushed off in silence anymore. “Things are different now,” Mrs. Quincy said, and Ellen heard no irritation.
“Plato, we have landed in a good place,” she announced one night as he turned around a few times on his woolen square that Gwen had given him and plumped down on her bed.
Ellen sighed with contentment, thinking of the chaotic order around them as twisted tree limbs, cast-offs of lodgepole pines, filled in the spaces below the handrails on the stairways up from the lobby. “Nature is naturally chaotic,” Mr. Reamer said one morning. “Visitors want the rustic experience. Here it is.”
Other chaos came home one morning when, elbow-deep in bread dough, Ellen heard shouts and carpenters running. She looked around, but there was Plato, slumbering between the warm Majestics, not guilty of a single hiss.
Followed by Gwen, she opened the glass-paned door between the lobby and the dining room when someone shouted, “Hey, bear! Hey, bear!”
She slammed the door, her arms tight around Gwen, as a bear charged down the hall, picked up speed, and raced across the lobby to the open front door. He was a blur followed by men with brooms, who slammed the door after him and laughed nervously.
“We found him all snug in his bed for a warm winter’s nap in one of the rooms at the end of this hall,” a carpenter said and pointed when she opened the dining room door just a crack this time.
Charles Penrose came on the run. He pulled all the men off the lobby to shore up the wall where the determined bear had worried open a spot to crawl through. “Let’s go around again, men,” he said. “Let’s be certain. I’ll sleep better when every bear is denned up away from here.”
For a week Ellen opened that door cautiously, which made One-Eyed Wilson laugh at her. “It wasn’t a big bear,” he assured her.
“He looked huge,” Ellen said, with all the dignity she could muster.
Maybe the bearwasn’tso big. She took the crew’s good-natured ribbing in stride, but welcomed every degree that the thermometer dropped, driving bears away to their wintertime sleep, once they had eaten everything in sight.
“Maybe I’m a goof,” she told Gwen a week later as she bundled up the child for their walk to the log cabin where she and her father “batched it,” as Corporal Reeves said.
Charles had asked if Gwen could stay with her until seven, because he had a meeting with Mr. George Wellington Colfitt, blacksmith from Livingston, who had braved the cold and snowy roads with two iron workers to bring his own plans for a makeshift forge here.
She assured Charles she could walk Gwen to his cabin, not so many steps from the back entrance. “I’ll walk you back,” he said.
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t necessary. All he had to do was stand in the open doorway and watch until she was inside the lobby again. Still, it was a nice gesture.
She handed Gwen a packet of meat andcheese from the supper that Charles had skipped. “You know, just to tide him over until breakfast.”
By now, she knew her way in daylight or gloom, but something was off in the lobby. She stopped and sniffed, wrinkling her nose against an unfamiliar odor, wondering about that meat and cheese.
