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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Torby Glibstone’s Enterprise
Tom Sheehan
Torbert “Torby” Glibstone was about the smartest young man ever to come west in a wagon, helping his grandparents to move to a piece of land they had inherited from their son when he was killed in a gunfight in Dawson, Wyoming. Torby was 15 at the time the wagon set off from Independence, Missouri, part of a large wagon train. His grandparents were both just turned 61, on the same day, which got them married in the first place like a celebration was in order, and they were game for the move west. Torby had lived with them for seven years and they made sure some of Torby’s reading books were in the wagon, “But not all of them, son, ‘cause we couldn’t carry half of them in one wagon,” Toby’s grandfather said, knowing his grandson was an avaricious reader at all hours of day and night.
Almost a year later, after leaving Independence, they were settled on the small ranch a few miles up-river from Dawson, Wyoming, comfortable in their new holdings, some left-over cattle remaining from a broken herd, and some good elements left in the property. The mild preservation of the property was due to two individuals in Dawson, the sheriff and the banker, who made sure the land, in essence, was kept intact, though some thefts from or damage to the property had occurred. It was not far from Good Grace’s Pond that was fed by a spring from a mountain fall that didn’t stop until winter froze it up tight, as well as Good Grace’s Pond, some nights that winter looking like a mirror in the moonlight.
Both men, Ben Silverwood the banker and Jess Sturgiss the sheriff, were taken with young Torby who they found willing, determined, loyal to a fault to his grandparents, and the most imaginative and lively talker they had met in a long while. There were no other young men like him in all of Dawson or nearby ranches that reached all the way up the river to the mountains sitting like sentinels of the territory, huge, rugged guardians who stood silent until thunder came over their tops swift as rockets, or falling stars, heading east or west in the night, ran across the sky like runaways. For hours on his arrival, when his day’s work was done and enough light still shone on the rugged peaks, he went back into his reading and found old mountains in a new place; craggy tors from Scotland, Bavarian mountains lyrically found in an old German translation, pieces of the Pyrenees and Alps and the Andes brought to him by thin paper in leather bound books he’d treasure every day of his life.
Wyoming gave him his own ranges to discover. Around him he knew The Teton and Rocky Mountain and Gros Ventre Ranges. His interests were well known in a short time.
“He’s as bright as a new spoon,” the banker once said to the sheriff, “and he’s the breeziest and quickest and most entertaining talker we’ve had around here since a mare gave birth to a dogie. One day I’ll bet he’s the mayor of the town or the head of the council.”
“And maybe the bank president,” the sheriff offered in his pitch at humor. They both laughed.
But for all the talking he did, Torby Glibstone did a lot of watching and listening, and one thing came ringing true to him once he had his first beer at the Four Horse Saloon in the heart of Dawson. It was the day he finished a trail drive for a neighbor who needed help and offered him a beer as part token of thanks at the finish of the drive.
The neighbor was Cal Thumblick, an old timer in the region who had lost his only son in a landslide.
Thumblick said, “I’m damned sorry your first beer is so warm, Torby. I don’t much like it so warm, but warm beer is better than no beer from where I stand.” He tapped his mug on Torby’s mug and added, “Here’s to better days and better beer.”
Torby Glibstone, that very moment, was off and running with an idea that he had not given birth to, but which had come out of his reading a letter from one old friend of his father’s to another friend. It mentioned a cave where ice had been stored from winter months until late in the summer of the year.
He found the letter to be revelatory.
Dawson was built against a solid foothill of the mountain, with the river only a few hundred yards from the center of town, and little was known about the buzzing that went on in Torby’s mind about the condition of his first beer, which he liked but knew it would be better if it was cooler … especially on a hot day or the end of an arduous task, like a month-long trail drive … or longer. “Cowpokes,” he thought, “might taste that cool beer for the duration of a drive.”
He asked the banker about a small piece of property that was pretty close to a large rock wall at the north edge of town. “Mr. Silverwood,” he said one day as they sat in front of the bank on a bench, “that little piece of land over by the cliff at the edge of town has sparked a fair amount of interest in me. I posed a few questions to some local folks and they say it’s the property of the bank. Is there any chance that I can gain possession of the site to step off in my business career without having to produce much of a down payment on the site? If I find a business opportunity to set off there, might such a down payment on purchase of the property come from business profits, thereby not requiring me to make any cash deposit on it from this end?”
“Son,” Silverwood said, not knowing what the lad had in mind but sure he’d make a go of any venture, “You come down to the office in the morning and I’ll have proper papers drawn up with a minimum down payment on your part. I can’t let it wander off without something, that’s the banker’s way, but it won’t be a whole lot and you can even work it off in a week or so if need be.”
He slapped Torby on the back and said, “Good talking to you, Son. See you in the morning.” He could not wait to share the news with the sheriff.
After the papers were signed, Torby, a land owner by agreement, went to work every time he was free from ranch duties, and he’d work dawn to dark on every Sunday digging a huge hole in the ground. It took him months of labor, in which he managed to put a little money onto his mortgage, all which was deemed appropriate by Silverwood. The banker was eager to learn what Torby was working on but never asked him, thinking all the time it was the foundation of a building he had brought out of his reading, a special place of some sort or other, but beyond his guessing.
The hole eventually was about 19 feet deep and 5 feet on each of its 4 sides. Onlookers were amazed to see, when he was finished, tossing some of the rocks he had uncovered into the base of the hole, lining them up like a square floor; bigger rocks were packed with smaller rocks, the whole bottom of the hole eventually covered with stones and rocks. On this foundation he erected a wooden platform made of squared logs or cut beams set apart from each other by a few inches.
Folks stood wondering at the site, asking questions and opinions of each other.
After that effort, Torby started building 4 walls, each one of loose but wedged stones so that they fit tightly together. In another few months the walls were complete, and the last few feet of the rock walls were set with a kind of mixture to hold the stones fast in place.
To everybody’s surprise, including the banker and the sheriff who visited the site each day, Torby started to dig a trench around the walled hole, out about 3 feet. He built a new foundation in that trench, on which he built a platform and started to build new walls on the new foundation.
Silverwood said to the sheriff one day as they were enjoying a few drinks at the saloon, “I think winter is about to catch up to Torby and his project. He won’t be able to work much in the cold weather. Well, it’s a great start on something, we can agree to that. Boy works like a dog working an old bone right down to dinner.”
But Torby kept at it, building double-sided walls about 8 feet high on the exterior foundation, then put a roof over the top and filled the in-between section of all each wall with sawdust and hay mix, including the separated partitions of a double roof.
Sheriff Sturgiss said to his banker pal on another night in the saloon, “I think I have an idea of what Torby’s up to.”
“Oh, c’mon, Jess, law’s your business, not buildings and property. That’s my business. What the devil can you make of this, on the chase most days after someone escapes your jail or tries to rob my place or the store, or the damned livery for that matter. I’ll leave the law to you and you let me keep my mind on that Torby. Makes me shivery, he works so hard.”
Well, the winter came down hard, pounding at local folks, and shutting ranches into long days trying to keep cattle fed, and just getting by as they looked forward to spring when the harsh grip on Earth would be loosened and slip away toward summer.
But one day, winter well onto its coldest spell, Torby Glibstone started the second leg of his business: cutting ice from Good Grace’s Pond in big chunks that he levered onto wagons some days and onto a large sled other days, and hauled it to his new enterprise, dropping the ice into the hole through a trap door no one had seen him cut, crushing it down into his own icehouse in Dawson, the first of its kind in Wyoming.
Word ran around the territory as fast as a rabbit on the move.
“Well,” the sheriff said to Silverwood, “it’s like I figured that time you didn’t want to hear from me.” He had the needle in place, poking with it.
“Ah, Jess,” Silverwood replied, “I’m sorry about that. What do you think he’s up to now?”
“If you’re asking me polite like, Ben, I’ll make a wager that the next thing that boy does is build the second saloon in Dawson, and it’s going to be right next to his own icehouse, practically on the spot, and he’ll have his loan paid off quicker’n you can smell rabbit stew out on the grass. Boy’s got the handle on business and nobody knows how far he can go with it. He might even own the bank someday.”
The needle was home as Silverwood shivered. It was the second time Torby Glibstone had set it off.
That winter the icehouse was crushed full of ice from Good Grace’s Pond, and Torby started work on his own saloon, where he was sure to enjoy a cool beer on a hot summer day, all because he had read a letter in a book about an earlier icehouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The saloon, Bookman’s Cool Paradise, was built and in place by the following April and cool beer was the main attraction, Torby’s grandfather the bartender and his grandmother making and selling the most delicious sandwiches this side of either Chicago or San Francisco, according to all reports. The Cowpoke’s Special, a thick sandwich with ham and several cheeses the main ingredients, was the big seller, most cowpokes tired of trail beef and beans and loving the change.
The avaricious reader had made his start in a unique way and folks all over wondered what he’d do next. It was a steady point of discussion, and all guesses were mostly treated with a sense of possibility.
It was Sheriff Jess Sturgiss who said to his banker pal one day, “If I was you, Ben, I’d try to find out what book that boy’s been reading lately.”
Silverwood hadn’t thought of that at all, but the more he did think about it, he figured he’d better get as smart as Torby Glibstone, and in a hurry.
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