Cimarron · Chapter 6 (2/3)

It struck Sabra suddenly with a little shock of discovery that the men really were doing nothing. They lounged in doorways and against hitching posts and talked; you heard their voices in animated conversation within saloon and store and office; they cantered by gracefully, and wheeled and whirled and cantered back again. She was to learn that many of these men were not builders but scavengers. The indomitable old ’49ers were no kin of these. They were, frequently, soft, cruel, furtive, and avaricious. They had gathered here to pick up what they could and move on. Some were cowmen, full of resentment against a government that had taken the free range away from them and given it over to the homesteaders. Deprived of their only occupation, many of these became outlaws. Equipped with six-shooters, a deadly aim, and horsemanship that amounted to the miraculous, they took to the Gyp Hills, or the Osage, swooping down from their hidden haunts to terrorize a town, shoot up a bank, hold up a train, and dash out again, leaving blood behind them. They risked their lives for a few hundred dollars. Here was a vast domain without written laws, without precedent, without the customs of civilization; part of a great country, yet no part of its government. Here a horse was more valuable than a human life. A horse thief, caught, was summarily hanged to the nearest tree; the killer of a man often went free.

Down the street these two stepped in their finery, the man swaggering a little as a man should in a white sombrero and with a pretty woman on his arm; the woman looking about her interestedly, terrified at what she saw and determined not to show it. If two can be said to make a procession, then Yancey and Sabra Cravat formed quite a parade as they walked down Pawhuska Avenue in the blaze of the morning sun. Certainly they seemed to be causing a stir. Lean rangers in buckboards turned to stare. Loungers in doorways nudged each other, yawping. Cowboys clattering by whooped a greeting. It was unreal, absurd, grotesque.

“Hi, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.”

Past the Red Dog Saloon. A group in chairs tilted up against the wall or standing about in high-heeled boots and sombreros greeted Yancey now with a familiarity that astonished Sabra. “Howdy, Cim! Hello, Yancey!”

“He called you Cim!”

He ignored her surprised remark. Narrowly he was watching them as he passed. “Boys are up to something. If they try to get funny while you’re here with me⁠ ⁠…”

Sabra, glancing at the group from beneath her shielding hat brim, did see that they were behaving much like a lot of snickering schoolboys who are preparing to let fly a bombardment of snowballs. There was nudging, there was whispering, an air of secret mischief afoot.

“Why are they⁠—what do you think makes them⁠—” Sabra began, a trifle nervously.

“Oh, they’re probably fixing up a little initiation for me,” Yancey explained, his tone light but his eye wary. “Don’t get nervous. They won’t dare try any monkey-shines while you’re with me.”

“But who are they?” He evaded her question. She persisted. “Who are they?”

“I can’t say for sure. But I suspect they’re the boys that did Pegler dirt.”

“Pegler? Who is⁠—oh, isn’t that the man⁠—the editor⁠—the one who was found dead⁠—shot dead on the banks of the⁠—Yancey! Do you mean they did it!”

“I don’t say they did it⁠—exactly. They know more than is comfortable, even for these parts. I was inquiring around last night, and everybody shut up like a clam. I’m going to find out who killed Pegler and print it in the first number of the Oklahoma Wigwam.”

“Oh, Yancey! Yancey, I’m frightened!” She clung tighter to his arm. The grinning mirthless faces of the men on the saloon porch seemed to her like the fanged and snarling muzzles of wolves in a pack.

“Nothing to be frightened of, honey. They know me. I’m no Pegler they can scare. They don’t like my white hat, that’s the truth of it. Dared me last night down at the Sunny Southwest Saloon to wear it this morning. Just to try me out. They won’t have the guts to come out in the open⁠—”

The sentence never was finished. Sabra heard a curious buzzing sound past her ear. Something sang⁠—zing! Yancey’s white sombrero went spinning into the dust of the road.

Sabra’s mouth opened as though she were screaming, but the sounds she would have made emerged, feebly, as a croak.

“Stay where you are,” Yancey ordered, his voice low and even. “The dirty dogs.” She stood transfixed. She could not have run if she had wanted to. Her legs seemed suddenly no part of her⁠—remote, melting beneath her, and yet pricked with a thousand pins and needles. Yancey strolled leisurely over to where the white hat lay in the dust. He stooped carelessly, his back to the crowd on the saloon porch, picked up the hat, surveyed it, and reached toward his pocket for his handkerchief. At that movement there was a rush and a scramble on the porch. Tilted chairs leaped forward, heels clattered, a door slammed. The white-aproned proprietor who, tray in hand, had been standing idly in the doorway, vanished as though he had been blotted out by blackness. Of the group only three men remained. One of these leaned insolently against a porch post, a second stood warily behind him, and a third was edging prudently toward the closed door. There was nothing to indicate who had fired the shot that had sent Yancey’s hat spinning.

Yancey, now half turned toward them, had taken his fine white handkerchief from his pocket, had shaken out its ample folds with a gesture of elegant leisure, and, hat in hand, was flicking the dust from his headgear. This done he surveyed the hat critically, seemed to find it little the worse for its experience unless, perhaps, one excepts the two neat round holes that were drilled, back and front, through the peak of its crown. He now placed it on his head again with a gesture almost languid, tossed the fine handkerchief into the road, and with almost the same gesture, or with another so lightning quick that Sabra’s eye never followed it, his hand went to his hip. There was the crack of a shot. The man who was edging toward the door clapped his hand to his ear and brought his hand away and looked at it, and it was darkly smeared. Yancey still stood in the road, his hand at his thigh, one slim foot, in its fine high-heeled Texas star boot, advanced carelessly. His great head was lowered menacingly. His eyes, steel gray beneath the brim of the white sombrero, looked as Sabra had never before seen them look. They were terrible eyes, merciless, cold, hypnotic. She could only think of the eyes of the rattler that Yancey had whipped to death with the wagon whip on the trip across the prairie.

“A three-cornered piece, you’ll find it, Lon. The Cravat sheep brand.”

“Can’t you take a joke, Yancey?” whined one of the three, his eyes on Yancey’s gun hand.

“Joke⁠—hell!” snarled the man who had been nicked. His hand was clapped over his ear. “God help you, Cravat.”

“He always has,” replied Yancey, piously.

“If your missus wasn’t with you⁠—” began the man whom Yancey had called Lon. Perhaps the rough joke would have ended grimly enough. But here, suddenly, Sabra herself took a hand in the proceedings. Her fright had vanished. These were no longer men, evil, sinister, to be feared, but mean little boys to be put in their place. She now advanced on them in the majesty of her plumes and her silk, her fine eyes flashing, her gloved forefinger admonishing them as if they were indeed naughty children. She was every inch the descendant of the Marcys of France and the very essence of that iron woman, Felice Venable.

“Don’t you ‘missus’ me! You’re a lot of miserable, good-for-nothing loafers, that’s what you are! Shooting at people in the streets. You leave my husband alone. I declare, I’ve a notion to⁠—”

For one ridiculous dreadful moment it looked as though she meant to slap the leathery bearded cheek of the bad man known as Lon Yountis. Certainly she raised her little hand in its neat black kid. The eyes of the three were popping. Lon Yountis ducked his head exactly like an urchin who is about to be smacked by the schoolmarm. Then, with a yelp of pure terror he fled into the saloon, followed by the other two.

Sabra stood a moment. It really looked as though she might make after them. But she thought better of it and sailed down the steps in triumph to behold a crushed, a despairing Yancey.

“Oh, my God, Sabra! What have you done to me!”

“What’s the matter?”

“This time tomorrow it’ll be all over the whole Southwest, from Mexico to Arkansas, that Yancey Cravat hid behind a woman’s petticoats.”

“But you didn’t. They can’t say so. You shot him very nicely in the ear, darling.” Thus had a scant eighteen hours in the Oklahoma country twisted her normal viewpoint so askew that she did not even notice the grotesquerie of what she had just said.

“They’re telling it now, in there. My God, a woman’s got no call to interfere when men are having a little dispute.”

“Dispute! Why, Yancey Cravat! He shot your hat right off your head!”

“What of it! Little friendly shooting.”

The enormity of this example of masculine clannishness left her temporarily speechless with indignation. “Let’s be getting on,” Yancey continued, calmly. “If we’re going to look at Doc Nisbett’s house we’d better look at it. There are only two or three to be had in the whole town, and his is the pick of them. It’s central” (Central! she thought, looking about her) “and according to what he said last night there’s a room in the front big enough for getting out the paper. It’ll have to be newspaper and law office in one. Then there are four rooms in the back to live in. Plenty.”

“Oh, plenty,” echoed Sabra, thinking of the nine or ten visiting Venables always comfortably tucked away in the various high-ceilinged bedrooms in the Wichita house.

They resumed their walk. Sabra wondered if she had imagined the shooting outside the Red Dog Saloon.

Doc Nisbett (veterinarian), shirtsleeved, shrewd, with generations of New England ancestry behind him, was seated in a chair tipped up against the front of his coveted property. Nothing of the brilliant Southwest sun had mellowed the vinegar of his chemical makeup. In the rush for Territory town sites at the time of the Opening he had managed to lay his gnarled hands on five choice pieces. On these he erected dwellings, tilted his chair up against each in turn, and took his pick of latecomers frantic for some sort of shelter they could call a home. That perjury, thieving, trickery, gun play, and murder had gone into the acquiring of these⁠—as well as many other⁠—sites was not considered important or, for that matter, especially interesting.

The dwelling itself looked like one of Cim’s childish drawings of a house. The roof was an inverted V; there was a front door, a side door, and a spindling little porch. It was a box, a shelter merely, as angular and unlovely as the man who owned it. The walls were no more than partitions, the floors boards laid on dirt.

Taking her cue from Yancey⁠—“Lovely,” murmured Sabra, agonized. The mantel ornaments that had been Cousin Dabney’s wedding present! The handwoven monogrammed linen! The silver cake dish with the carefree cupids. The dozen solid silver coffee spoons! “Do very nicely. Perfectly comfortable. I see. I see. I see.”

“There you are!” They stood again on the porch, the tour completed. Yancey clapped his hands together gayly, as though by so doing he had summoned a genie who had tossed up the house before their very eyes. In the discussion of monthly rental he had been a child in the hands of this lean and grasping New Englander. “There you are! That’s all settled.” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Survey our empire, and behold our home!’ ”

“Heh, hold on a minute,” rasped Doc Nisbett. “How about water?”

“Sabra, honey, you settle these little matters between you⁠—you and the Doc⁠—will you? I’ve got to run down the street and see Jesse Rickey about putting up the press and setting up the type racks and helping me haul the form tables, and then we’ve got the furniture to buy for the house. Meet you down the street at Hefner’s Furniture Store. Ten minutes.”

He was off, with a flirt of his coat tails. She would have called, “Yancey! Don’t leave me!” but for a prideful reluctance to show fear before this dour-visaged man with the tight lips and the gimlet eyes. From the first he had seemed to regard her with disfavor. She could not imagine why. It was, of course, his Puritan New England revulsion against her plumes, her silks, her faintly Latin beauty.

“Well, now,” repeated Doc Nisbett, nasally, “about water.”

“Water?”

“How much you going to need? Renting this house depends on how much water you think you going to need. How many barrels.”

Sabra had always taken water for granted, like air and sunshine. It was one of the elements. It was simply there. But since leaving Wichita there was always talk of water. Yancey, on the prairie journey, made it the basis of their camping site.

“Oh, barrels,” she now repeated, trying to appear intensely practical. “Well, let⁠—me⁠—see. There’s cooking, of course, and all the cleaning around the house, and drinking, and bathing. I always give Cim his bath in the evening if I can. You wouldn’t believe how dirty that child gets by the end of the day. His knees⁠—oh, yes⁠—well, I should think ten barrels a day would be enough.”

“Ten barrels,” said Doc Nesbitt, in a flat voice utterly devoid of expression, “a day.”

“I should think that would be ample,” Sabra repeated, judiciously.

Doc Nisbett now regarded Sabra with a look of active dislike. Then he did a strange thing. He walked across the little porch, shut the front door, locked it, put the key in his pocket, seated himself in the chair and tilted it up against the wall at exactly the angle at which they had come upon him.

Sabra stood there. Seeing her, it would have been almost impossible to believe that anyone so bravely decked out in silk and plumes and pink roses could present a figure so bewildered, so disconsolate, so defeated. Literally, she did not know what to do. She had met and surmounted many strange experiences in these last ten days. But she had been born of generations of women to whom men had paid homage. Perhaps in all her life she had never encountered the slightest discourtesy in a man, much less this abysmal boorishness.

She looked at him, her face white, shocked. She looked up, in embarrassment, at the glaring steel sky; she looked down at the blinding red dust, she looked helplessly in the direction that Yancey had so blithely taken. She glanced again at Doc Nisbett, propped so woodenly against the wall of his hateful house. His eye was as cold, as glassy, as unseeing as the eye of a dead fish.

She should, of course, have gone straight up to him and said, “Do you mean that ten barrels are too much? I didn’t know. I am new to all this. Whatever you say.”

But she was young, and inexperienced, and full of pride, and terribly offended. So without another word she turned and marched down the dusty street. Her head in its plumed hat was high. On either cheek burned a scarlet patch. Her eyes, in her effort to keep back the hot tears, were blazing, liquid, enormous. She saw nothing. From the saloons that lined the street there came, even at this hour of the morning, yelps and the sound of music.

And then a fearful thing happened to Sabra Cravat.