Dance with the Devil

flashed by so fast that, if she looked to either side, they almost seemed like a continuous rail fence of gargantuan proportions.
        She felt gloriously free and renewed. One day on the job, and already she knew that she would be happy to be Lydia Boland's secretary and companion for the next fifty years if Lydia happened to live to be over a hundred.
        Suddenly, the trail twisted and swept directly down toward the village of Roxburgh, the slope grading into a gentle run at the bottom of which, two hundred feet away, Alex waited beside the last of the tall, gray pylons. She brought herself to a stop beside him, showering snow over his head.
        “Like it?” he asked.
        “Wonderful!”
        He drew her attention to the pylon beside them and showed her how to operate the simple controls. The cables did not carry electrical power at all, but formed a rudimentary ski-lift to the top of the mountain. One had only to grasp the lower cable, turn on the device and be dragged up the mountainside.
        “It can be hard on the arms,” Alex said. “But you can stop and rest once or twice and then grab it again. It won't shut off until you reach the top and re-set the controls up there.”
        “I was so excited about getting on skis again that I never wondered how we would get back. I guess the road isn't open yet.”
        “Not yet,” he said. “But without the wind, the drifting won't be so bad. They'll have everything cleared up by tonight.” He sat down in the snow and began to unbuckle his skis. “Come on, let's get into town for a cup of coffee at the cafe. My face is still stinging from the cold.”
        
        By the time they had walked into the square, pausing now and then while Alex commented on the town along the way, they were both slightly flushed from the exertion and no longer chilled. They decided to postpone the coffee until they had thoroughly prowled from one end of Roxburgh to the other.
        Connecting the four main streets of Roxburgh like robins running from one spoke of the wheel to the other, were narrow, twisting alleyways and dead-end avenues which gave the town a feeling of size that it did not genuinely possess. They explored these streets, stopping to look at unusual pieces of turn-of-the-century architecture: an eight-room log cabin that had recently been renovated into a magnificent home; a stone grocery store and post office combination that, with its sunken windows and recessed double-open entryway, looked more like a fort than a grocery; the Catholic Church, which was done all in unpainted natural pine with wooden pegs used for nails, composed of a thousand fascinating angles and beams and struts, a miniature cathedral large enough to seat a hundred and fifty at one time, capped with such intricate detail as handcarved pew edging and altar panels.
        As they walked, Katherine learned that the Roxburgh family had originally made their money in shipping, later in railroads and highway construction. It had been Lydia's father's conceit that the Adirondack wildernesses would swiftly open to the railroads and to the not-too-distant automobile which, he maintained, would cross these mountains on hundreds of roadways, bringing civilization into the heart of the back-lands. He had been too optimistic. Roxburgh and his land purchases around it was the only investment he had been wrong about. He had permitted his own love of the countryside to unsettle his normal business sense, had built the mansion because he wanted to make it the first cornerstone of a “showplace” town. At least, though his dreams for the land did not come to pass, he was happy here, away from the bustle of high society-a bigger fish than ever, because he was in a smaller pond.
        They were climbing a steep, icy sidewalk which, though shoveled and salted, was still treacherous in places, when Michael Harrison turned the corner immediately in front of them, seemed to slip, grasped at Alex for support and sent the other man sprawling into the snow.
        “My God, I'm sorry, Alex!” Harrison said solicitously, offering him a hand up.
        Alex ignored the hand, made it on his own. He was covered in snow and distinctly comical, though the rage on his face made it impossible for Katherine to laugh.
        “That was clever as hell,” Alex said.
        “Clever?” Mike was perplexed.
        “I suppose you'll say it was an accident?” Alex wiped the last of the