2

Coat tails swishing, eyes flashing, arms waving, voice soaring.

“Folks, there’s never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was History made in an hour—and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast commonwealth of ours” (he talked like that) “traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. ‘Lands of lost gods, and godlike men!’ They came like a procession—a crazy procession—all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand—scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. God knows why—for they all knew that once arrived there they’d have to wait like penned cattle for the firing of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the prairie. They came from Texas, and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback. In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I saw a surrey, honey colored, with a fringe around the top, and two elegant bays drawing it, still stepping high along those rutted clay roads as if out for a drive in the Presidio. There was a black boy driving it, brass buttons and all, and in the back seat was a dude in a light tan coat and a cigar in his mouth and a diamond in his shirtfront; and a woman beside him in a big hat and a pink dress laughing and urging the horses along the red dust that was halfway up to the wheel spokes and fit to choke you. They had driven like that from Denver, damned if they hadn’t. I met up with one old homesteader by the roadside—a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg—who told me he had started weeks and weeks before, and had made the long trip as best he could, on foot or by rail and boat and wagon, just as kind-hearted people along the way would pick him up. I wonder if he ever got his piece of land in that savage rush—poor old devil.”

He paused a moment, perhaps in retrospect, perhaps cunningly to whet the appetites of his listeners. He wrung a breathless, “Oh, Yancey, go on! Go on!” from Sabra.

“Well, the Border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July celebration on Judgment Day. The militia was lined up at the boundary. No one was allowed to set foot on the new land until noon next day, at the firing of the guns. Two million acres of land were to be given away for the grabbing. Noon was the time. They all knew it by heart. April twenty-second, at noon. It takes generations of people hundreds of years to settle a new land. This was going to be made livable territory over night—was made—like a miracle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves and the Fishes and the parting of the Red Sea were nothing—mere tricks.”

“Don’t be blasphemous, Yancey!” spoke up Aunt Cassandra Venable.

Cousin Dabney Venable tittered into his stock.

“A wilderness one day—except for an occasional wandering band of Indians—an empire the next. If that isn’t a modern miracle——”

“Indians, h’m?” sneered Cousin Dabney, meaningly.

“Oh, Dabney!” exclaimed Sabra, sharply. “Why do you interrupt? Why don’t you just listen!”

Yancey Cravat raised a pacifying hand, but the great buffalo head was lowered toward Cousin Dabney, as though charging. The sweetest of smiles wreathed his lips. “It’s all right, Sabra. Let Cousin Dabney speak. And why not? Un cabello haze sombra.”

Cousin Dabney’s ivory face flushed a delicate pink. “What’s that, Cravat? Cherokee talk?”

“Spanish, my lad. Spanish.”

A little moment of silent expectation. Yancey did not explain. A plump and pretty daughter-in-law (not a Venable born) put the question.

“Spanish, Cousin Yancey! I declare! Whatever in the world does it mean? Something romantic, I do hope.”

“Not exactly. A Spanish proverb. It means, literally ‘Even a hair casts a shadow.’ ”

Another second’s silence. The pretty daughter-in-law’s face became quite vacuous. “Oh. A hair—but I don’t see what that’s got to do with …”

The time had come for Felice Venable to take charge. Her drawling, querulous voice dripped its slow sweetness upon the bitter feud that lay, a poisonous pool, between the two men.

“Well, I must say I call it downright bad manners, I do indeed. Here we all are with our ears just a-flapping to hear the first sound of the militia guns at high noon on the Border, and here’s Cousin Jouett Goforth all the way up from Louisiana the first time in fifteen years, and just a-quivering with curiosity, and what do we hear but chit-chat about Spanish proverbs and shadows.” She broke off abruptly, cast a lightning glance aloft, and in a tone that would have been called a shout had it issued from the throat of any but a Venable, said, “Ah-saiah!”

The black boy’s shoo-fly, hanging limp from his inert hand, took up its frantic swishing. The air was cleared. The figures around the table relaxed. Their faces again turned toward Yancey Cravat. Yancey glanced at Sabra. Sabra’s lips puckered into a phantom kiss. They formed two words, unseen, unheard by the rest of the company. “Please, darling.”

“Cede Deo,” said Yancey, with a little bow to her. Then, with a still slighter bow, he turned to Cousin Dabney. “ ‘Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me.’ You may not recognize that either, Dabney. It’s from the Old Testament.”

Cousin Dabney Venable ran a finger along the top of his black silk stock, as though to ease his throat.

With a switch of his coat tails Yancey was off again, pausing only a moment at the sideboard to toss off three fingers of Spanish brandy, like burning liquid amber. He patted his lips with his fine linen handkerchief. “I’ve tasted nothing like that in a month, I can tell you. Raw corn whisky fit to tear your throat out. And as for the water! Red mud. There wasn’t a drink of water to be had in the town after the first twenty-four hours. There we were, thousands and thousands of us, milling around the Border like cattle, with the burning sun baking us all day, nowhere to go for shade, and the thick red dust clogging eyes and nose and mouth. No place to wash, no place to sleep, nothing to eat. Queer enough, they didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t seem to notice. They were feeding on a kind of crazy excitement, and there was a wild light in their eyes. They laughed and joked and just milled around, all day and all night and until near noon next day. If you had a bit of food you divided it with someone. I finally got a cup of water for a dollar, after standing in line for three hours, and then a woman just behind me——”

“A woman!” Cousin Arminta Greenwood (of the Georgia Greenwoods). And Sabra Cravat echoed the words in a shocked whisper.

“You wouldn’t believe, would you, that women would go it alone in a fracas like that. But they did. They were there with their husbands, some of them, but there were women who made the Run alone.”

“What kind of women?” Felice Venable’s tone was not one of inquiry but of condemnation.

“Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home. Pioneer women.”

From Aunt Cassandra Venable’s end of the table there came a word that sounded like, “Hussies!”

Yancey Cravat caught the word beneath his teeth and spat it back. “Hussies, heh! The one behind me in the line was a woman of forty—or looked it—in a calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had driven across the prairies all the way from the north of Arkansas in a springless wagon. She was like the women who crossed the continent to California in ’49. A gaunt woman, with a weather-beaten face; the terribly neglected skin”—he glanced at Sabra with her creamy coloring—“that means alkali water and sun and dust and wind. Rough hair, and unlovely hands, and boots with the mud caked on them. It’s women like her who’ve made this country what it is. You can’t read the history of the United States, my friends” (all this he later used in an Oklahoma Fourth of July speech when they tried to make him Governor) “without learning the great story of those thousands of unnamed women—women like this one I’ve described—women in mud-caked boots and calico dresses and sunbonnets, crossing the prairie and the desert and the mountains enduring hardship and privation. Good women, with a terrible and rigid goodness that comes of work and self-denial. Nothing picturesque or romantic about them, I suppose—though occasionally one of them flashes—Belle Starr the outlaw—Rose of the Cimarron—Jeannette Daisy who jumped from a moving Santa Fé train to stake her claim—but the others—no, their story’s never really been told. But it’s there, just the same. And if it’s ever told straight you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.”

“Talking nonsense,” drawled Felice Venable.

Yancey whirled on his high heels to face her, his fine eyes blazing. “You’re one of them. You came up from the South with your husband to make a new home in this Kansas——”

“I am not!” retorted Felice Venable, with enormous dignity. “And I’ll thank you not to say any such thing. Sunbonnet indeed! I’ve never worn a sunbonnet in my life. And as for my skin and hair and hands, they were the toast of the South, as I can prove by anyone here, all the way from Louisiana to Tennessee. And feet so small my slippers had to be made to order. Calico and muddy boots indeed!”

“Oh, Mamma, Yancey didn’t mean—he meant courage to leave your home in the South and come up—he wasn’t thinking of—Yancey, do get on with your story of the Run. You got a drink of water for a dollar—dear me!—and shared it with the woman in the calico and the sunbonnet …”

He looked a little sheepish. “Well, matter of fact, it turned out she didn’t have a dollar to spare, or anywhere near it, but even if she had it wouldn’t have done her any good. The fellow selling it was a rat-faced hombre with one eye and Mexican pants. The trigger finger of his right hand had been shot away in some fracas or other, so he ladled out water with that hand and toted his gun in his left. Bunged up he was, plenty. A scar on his nose, healed up, but showing the marks of where human teeth had bit him in a fight, as neat and clear as a dentist’s signboard. By the time I got to him there was one cup of water left in the bucket. He tipped it while I held the dipper, and it trickled out, just an even dipperful. The last cup of water on the Border. The crowd waiting in line behind me gave a kind of sound between a groan and a moan. The sound you hear a herd of cow animals give, out on the prairie, when their tongues are hanging out for water in the dry spell. I tipped up the dipper and had down a big mouthful—filthy tasting stuff it was, too. Gyp water. You could feel the alkali cake on your tongue. Well, my head went back as I drank, and I got one look at that woman’s face. Her eyes were on me—on my throat, where the Adam’s apple had just given that one big gulp after the first swallow. All bloodshot the whites of her eyes, and a look in them like a dying man looks at a light. Her mouth was open, and her lips were all split with the heat and the dust and the sun, and dry and flaky as ashes. And then she shut her lips a little and tried to swallow nothing, and couldn’t. There wasn’t any spit in her mouth. I couldn’t down another mouthful, parching as I was. I’d have seen her terrible face to the last day of my life. So I righted it, and held it out to her and said, ‘Here, sister, take the rest of it. I’m through.’ ”

Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little joke. “Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and weather-beaten? And that about her hair and boots and hands?”

Cravat, standing behind his wife’s chair, looked down at her; at the fine white line that marked the parting of her thick black hair. With one forefinger he touched her cheek, gently. He allowed the finger to slip down the creamy surface of her skin, from cheek bone to chin. “Dead sure, Jouett. I left out one thing, though.” Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. “Her teeth,” Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. “Broken and discolored like those of a woman of seventy. And most of them gone at the side.”

Here Yancey could not resist charging up and down, flirting his coat tails and generally ruining the fine flavor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping it) had been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild mêlée of the Run in the first place. Now he stood surveying these handsome futile faces, and a great impatience shook him, and a flame of rage shot through him, and a tongue of malice flicked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end.

“I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fé train that was standing, steam up, ready to run into the Nation. But you couldn’t get on. There wasn’t room for a flea. They were hanging on the cow-catcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn’t even do that. They went twenty miles in ninety minutes. I decided I’d use my Indian pony. I knew I’d get endurance, anyway, if not speed. And that’s what counted in the end.

“There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the Border, as near as they’d let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for miles into the Nation, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the Sooners, too, who had sneaked in and were hiding in the scrub oaks, in the draws, wherever they could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready to shoot those of us who came in, fair and square, in the Run. I knew the piece I wanted. An old freighters’ trail, out of use, but still marked with deep ruts, led almost straight to it, once you found the trail, all overgrown as it was. A little creek ran through the land, and the prairie rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around it, but on that section, because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons and cottonwoods and even a grove of pecans. I had noticed it many a time, riding the range.”

(H’m! Riding the range! All the Venables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat’s past.)

“Ten o’clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Hundreds of us had been followers of Payne and had gone as Boomers in the old Payne colonies, and had been driven out, and had come back again. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I’ve seen the same look exactly on the faces of men who were ravenous for food.

“Well, eleven o’clock, and they were crowding and cursing and fighting for places near the Line. They shouted and sang and yelled and argued, and the sound they made wasn’t human at all, but like thousands of wild animals penned up. The sun blazed down. It was cruel. The dust hung over everything in a thick cloud, blinding you and choking you. The black dust of the burned prairie was over everything. We were like a horde of fiends with our red eyes and our cracked lips and our blackened faces. Eleven-thirty. It was a picture straight out of hell. The roar grew louder. People fought for an inch of gain on the Border. Just next to me was a girl who looked about eighteen—she turned out to be twenty-five—and a beauty she was, too—on a coal-black thoroughbred.”

“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth. He was the kind of man who says, “Aha.”

“On the other side was an old fellow with a long gray beard—a plainsman, he was—a six-shooter in his belt, one wooden leg, and a flask of whisky. He took a pull out of that every minute or two. He was mounted on an Indian pony like mine. Every now and then he’d throw back his head and let out a yell that would curdle your blood, even in that chorus of fiends. As we waited we fell to talking, the three of us, though you couldn’t hear much in that uproar. The girl said she had trained her thoroughbred for the race. He was from Kentucky, and so was she. She was bound to get her husband and sixty acres, she said. She had to have it. She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask her. We were all too keyed up, anyway, to make sense. Oh, I forgot. She had on a get-up that took the attention of anyone that saw her, even in that crazy mob. The better to cut the wind, she had shortened sail and wore a short skirt, black tights, and a skullcap.”

Here there was quite a bombardment of sound as silver spoons and knives and forks were dropped from shocked and nerveless feminine Venable fingers.

“It turned out that the three of us, there in the front line, were headed down the old freighters’ trail toward the creek land. I said, ‘I’ll be the first in the Run to reach Little Bear.’ That was the name of the creek on the section. The girl pulled her cap down tight over her ears. ‘Follow me,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Then the old fellow with the wooden leg and the whiskers yelled out, ‘Whoop-ee! I’ll tell ’em along the Little Bear you’re both a-comin.’

“There we were, the girl on my left, the old plainsman on my right. Eleven forty-five. Along the Border were the soldiers, their guns in one hand, their watches in the other. Those last five minutes seemed years long; and funny, they’d quieted till there wasn’t a sound. Listening. The last minute was an eternity. Twelve o’clock. There went up a roar that drowned the crack of the soldiers’ musketry as they fired in the air as the signal of noon and the start of the Run. You could see the puffs of smoke from their guns, but you couldn’t hear a sound. The thousands surged over the Line. It was like water going over a broken dam. The rush had started, and it was devil take the hindmost. We swept across the prairie in a cloud of black and red dust that covered our faces and hands in a minute, so that we looked like black demons from hell. Off we went, down the old freight trail that was two wheel ruts, a foot wide each, worn into the prairie soil. The old man on his pony kept in one rut, the girl on her thoroughbred in the other, and I on my Whitefoot on the raised place in the middle. That first half mile was almost a neck-and-neck race. The old fellow was yelling and waving one arm and hanging on somehow. He was beating his pony with the flask on his flanks. Then he began to drop behind. Next thing I heard a terrible scream and a great shouting behind me. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. The old plainsman’s pony had stumbled and fallen. His bottle smashed into bits, his six-shooter flew in another direction, and he lay sprawling full length in the rut of the trail. The next instant he was hidden in a welter of pounding hoofs and flying dirt and cinders and wagon wheels.”

A dramatic pause. Black Isaiah was hanging from his perch like a monkey on a branch. His asparagus shoo-fly was limp. The faces around the table were balloons pulled by a single string. They swung this way and that with Yancey Cravat’s pace as he strode the room, his Prince Albert coat tails billowing. This way—the faces turned toward the sideboard. That way—they turned toward the windows. Yancey held the little moment of silence like a jewel in the circlet of faces. Sabra Cravat’s voice, high and sharp with suspense, cut the stillness.

“What happened? What happened to the old man?”

Yancey’s pliant hands flew up in a gesture of inevitability. “Oh, he was trampled to death in the mad mob that charged over him. Crazy. They couldn’t stop for a one-legged old whiskers with a quart flask.”

Out of the well-bred murmur of horror that now arose about the Venable board there emerged the voice of Felice Venable, sharp-edged with disapproval. “And the girl. The girl with the black——” Unable to say it. Southern.

“The girl and I—funny, I never did learn her name—were in the lead because we had stuck to the old trail, rutted though it was, rather than strike out across the prairie that by this time was beyond the burned area and was covered with a heavy growth of blue stem grass almost six feet high in places. A horse could only be forced through that at slow pace. That jungle of grass kept many a racer from winning his section that day.

“The girl followed close behind me. That thoroughbred she rode was built for speed, not distance. A race horse, blooded. I could hear him blowing. He was trained to short bursts. My Indian pony was just getting his second wind as her horse slackened into a trot. We had come nearly sixteen miles. I was well in the lead by that time, with the girl following. She was crouched low over his neck, like a jockey, and I could hear her talking to him, low and sweet and eager, as if he were a human being. We were far in the lead now. We had left the others behind, hundreds going this way, hundreds that, scattering for miles over the prairie. Then I saw that the prairie ahead was afire. The tall grass was blazing. Only the narrow trail down which we were galloping was open. On either side of it was a wall of flame. Some skunk of a Sooner, sneaking in ahead of the Run, had set the blaze to keep the Boomers off, saving the land for himself. The dry grass burned like oiled paper. I turned around. The girl was there, her racer stumbling, breaking and going on, his head lolling now. I saw her motion with her hand. She was coming. I whipped off my hat and clapped it over Whitefoot’s eyes, gave him the spurs, crouched down low and tight, shut my own eyes, and down the trail we went into the furnace. Hot! It was hell! The crackling and snapping on either side was like a fusillade. I could smell the singed hair on the flanks of the mustang. My own hair was singeing. I could feel the flames licking my legs and back. Another hundred yards and neither the horse nor I could have come through it. But we broke out into the open choking and blinded and half suffocated. I looked down the lane of flame. The girl hung on her horse’s neck. Her skullcap was pulled down over her eyes. She was coming through game. I knew that my land—the piece that I had come through hell for—was not more than a mile ahead. I knew that hanging around here would probably get me a shot through the head, for the Sooner that started that fire must be lurking somewhere in the high grass ready to kill anybody that tried to lay claim to his land. I began to wonder, too, if that girl wasn’t headed for the same section that I was bound for. I made up my mind that, woman or no woman, this was a race and devil take the hindmost. My poor little pony was coughing and sneezing and trembling. Her racer must have been ready to drop. I wheeled and went on. I kept thinking how, when I came to Little Bear Creek, I’d bathe my little mustang’s nose and face and his poor heaving flanks, and how I mustn’t let him drink too much, once he got his muzzle in the water.

“Just before I reached the land I was riding for I had to leave the trail and cut across the prairie. I could see a clump of elms ahead. I knew the creek was near by. But just before I got to it I came to one of those deep gullies you find in the plains country. Drought does it—a crack in the dry earth to begin with, widening with every rain until it becomes a small cañon. Almost ten feet across this one was, and deep. No way around it that I could see, and no time to look for one. I put Whitefoot to the leap and, by God, he took it, landing on the other side with hardly an inch to spare. I heard a wild scream behind me. I turned. The girl on her spent racer had tried to make the gulch. He had actually taken it—a thoroughbred and a gentleman, that animal—but he came down on his knees just on the farther edge, rolled, and slid down the gully side into the ditch. The girl had flung herself free. My claim was fifty yards away. So was the girl, with her dying horse. She lay there on the prairie. As I raced toward her—my own poor little mount was nearly gone by this time—she scrambled to her knees. I can see her face now, black with cinders and soot and dirt, her hair all over her shoulders, her cheek bleeding where she had struck a stone in her fall, her black tights torn, her little short skirt sagging. She sort of sat up and looked around her. Then she staggered to her feet before I reached her and stood there swaying, and pushing her hair out of her eyes like someone who’d been asleep. She pointed down the gully. The black of her face was streaked with tears.

“ ‘Shoot him!’ she said. ‘I can’t. His two forelegs are broken. I heard them crack. Shoot him! For God’s sake!’

“So I off my horse and down to the gully’s edge. There the animal lay, his eyes all whites, his poor legs doubled under him, his flanks black and sticky with sweat and dirt. He was done for, all right. I took out my six-shooter and aimed right between his eyes. He kicked once, sort of leaped—or tried to, and then lay still. I stood there a minute, to see if he had to have another. He was so game that, some way, I didn’t want to give him more than he needed.

“Then something made me turn around. The girl had mounted my mustang. She was off toward the creek section. Before I had moved ten paces she had reached the very piece I had marked in my mind for my own. She leaped from the horse, ripped off her skirt, tied it to her riding whip that she still held tight in her hand, dug the whip butt into the soil of the prairie—planted her flag—and the land was hers by right of claim.”

Yancey Cravat stopped talking. There was a moment of stricken silence. Sabra Cravat staring, staring at her husband with great round eyes. Lewis Venable, limp, yellow, tremulous. Felice Venable, upright and quivering. It was she who spoke first. And when she did she was every inch the thrifty descendant of French forbears; nothing of the Southern belle about her.

“Yancey Cravat, do you mean that you let her have your quarter section on the creek that you had gone to the Indian Territory for! That you had been gone a month for! That you had left your wife and child for! That——”

“Now, Mamma!” You saw that all the Venable in Sabra was summoned to keep the tears from her eyes, and that thus denied they had crowded themselves into her trembling voice. “Now, Mamma!”

“Don’t you ‘now Mamma’ me! What of the land that you were to have had! It was bad enough to think of your going to that wilderness, but to——” She paused. Her voice took on a new and more sinister note. “I don’t believe a word of it.” She whirled on Yancey, her black eyes blazing. “Why did you let that trollop in the black tights have that land?”

Yancey regarded this question with considerable judicial calm, but Felice, knowing him, might have been warned by the way his great head was lowered like that of a charging bull buffalo.

“If it had been a man I could have shot him. A good many had to, to keep the land they’d run fairly for. But you can’t shoot a woman.”

“Why not?” demanded the erstwhile Southern belle, sharply.

The Venables, as one man, gave a little jump. A nervous sound, that was half gasp and half shocked titter, went round the Venable board. A startled “Felice!” was wrung from Lewis Venable. “Why, Mamma!” said Sabra.

Yancey Cravat, enormously vital, felt rising within him the tide of irritability which this vitiated family always stirred in him. Something now about their shocked and staring faces, their lolling and graceful forms, roused in him an unreasoning rebellion. He suddenly hated them. He wanted to be free of them. He wanted to be free of them—of Wichita—of convention—of smooth custom—of—no, not of her. He now smiled his brilliant sweet smile which alone should have warned Felice Venable. But that intrepid matriarch was not one to let a tale go unpointed.

“I’m mighty pleased, for one, that it turned out as it did. Do you suppose I’d have allowed a daughter of mine—a Venable—to go traipsing down into the wilderness to live among drunken one-legged plainsmen, and toothless scrags in calico, and trollops in tights! Never! It’s over now, and a mighty good thing, too. Perhaps now, Yancey, you’ll stop this ramping up and down and be content to run that newspaper of yours and conduct your law practice—such as it is—with no more talk of this Indian Territory. A daughter of mine in boots and calico and sunbonnet, if you please, a-pioneering among savages. Reared as she was! No, indeed.”

Yancey was strangely silent. He was surveying his fine white hands critically, interestedly, as though seeing them in admiration for the first time—another sign that should have warned the brash Felice. When he spoke it was with utter gentleness.

“I’m no farmer. I’m no rancher. I didn’t want a section of farm land, anyway. The town’s where I belong, and I should have made for the town sites. There were towns of ten thousand and over sprung up in a night during the Run. Wagallala—Sperry—Wawhuska—Osage. It’s the last frontier in America, that new country. There isn’t a newspaper in one of those towns—or wasn’t, when I left. I want to go back there and help build a state out of prairie and Indians and scrub oaks and red clay. For it’ll be a state some day—mark my words.”

“That wilderness a state!” sneered Cousin Dabney Venable. “With an Osage buck or a Cherokee chief for governor, I suppose.”

“Why not? What a revenge on a government that has cheated them and driven them like cattle from place to place and broken its treaties with them and robbed them of their land. Look at Georgia! Look at Mississippi! Remember the Trail of Tears!”

“Ho hum,” yawned Cousin Jouett Goforth, and rose, fumblingly. “This has all been very interesting—odd, but interesting. But if you will excuse me now I shall have my little siesta. I am accustomed after dinner …”

Lewis Venable, so long silent, now too reached for his cane and prepared to rise. He was not quick enough. Felice Venable’s hand, thin, febrile, darted out and clutched his coat sleeve—pressed him back so that he became at once prisoner and judge in his chair at the head of the table.

“Lewis Venable, you heard him! Are you going to sit there? He says he’s going back. How about your daughter?” She turned blazing black eyes on her son-in-law. “Do you mean you’re going back to that Indian country? Do you?”

“I’ll be back there in two weeks. And remember, it’s white man’s country now.”

Sabra stood up, the boy Cim grasped about his middle in her arms, so that he began to whimper, dangling there. Her eyes were startled, enormous. “Yancey! Yancey, you’re not leaving me again!”

“Leaving you, my beauty!” He strode over to her. “Not by a long shot. This time you’re going with me.”

“And I say she’s not!” Felice Venable rapped it out. “And neither are you, my fine fellow. You were tricked out of your land by a trollop in tights, and that ends it. You’ll stay here with your wife and child.”

He shook his great head gently. His voice was dulcet.

“I’m going back to the Oklahoma country; and Sabra and Cim with me.”

Felice whirled on her husband. “Lewis! You can sit there and see your daughter dragged off to be scalped among savages!”

The sick man raised his fine white head. The faded blue eyes were turned on the girl. The child, sensing conflict, had buried his head in her shoulder. “You came with me, Felice, more than twenty years ago, and your mother thought you were going to the wilderness, too. You remember? She cried and made mourning for weeks.”

“Sabra’s different. Sabra’s different.”

The reedy voice of the sick man had the ghostly carrying quality of an echo. You heard it above the women’s shrill clamor. “No, she isn’t, Felice. She’s more like you this minute than you are yourself. She favors those pioneer women Yancey was telling about in the old days. Look at her.”

The Venable eye, from one end of the table to the other, turned like a single orb in its socket toward the young woman facing them with defiance in her bearing. Not defiance, perhaps, so much as resolve. Seeing her, head up, standing there beside her husband, one arm about the child, you saw that what her father said was indeed true. She was her mother, the Felice Venable of two decades ago; she was the woman in sunbonnet and calico to whom Yancey had given his cup of water; she was the woman jolting endless miles in covered wagons, spinning in log cabins, cooking over crude fires; she was all women who have traveled American prairie and desert and mountain and plain. Here was that inner rectitude, that chastity of lip, that clearness of eye, that refinement of feature, that absence of allure that comes with cold white fire. The pioneer type, as Yancey had said. Potentially a more formidable woman than her mother.

Seeing something of this Felice Venable said again, more loudly, as though to convince herself, “She’s not to go.”

Looking more than ever like her mother, Sabra met this stubbornly. “But I want to go, Mamma.”

“I forbid it. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I say you’ll stay here with your mother and father in decent civilization. I’ve heard enough. I hope this will serve a lesson to you, Yancey.”

“I’m going back to the Nation,” said Yancey, quite pleasantly.

Sabra stiffened. “I’m going with him.” In her new resolve she must have squeezed the hand of the child Cim, for he gave a little yelp. The combined Venables, nerves on edge, leaped in their chairs and then looked at each other with some hostility.

“And I say you’re not.”

“But I want to go.”

“You don’t.”

Perhaps Sabra had not realized until now how terribly she had counted on her husband’s return as marking the time when she would be free to leave the Venable board, to break away from the Venable clan; no more to be handled, talked over, peered at by the Venable eye—and most of all by the maternal Venable eye. Twenty-one, and the yoke of her mother’s dominance was beginning to gall her. Now, at her own inner rage and sickening disappointment, all the iron in her fused and hardened. It had gone less often to the fire than the older woman’s had. For the first time this quality in her met that of her mother, and the metal of the older woman bent.

“I will go,” said Sabra Cravat.

If anyone had been looking at Lewis Venable at that moment (which no one ever thought of doing) he could have seen a ghostly smile momentarily irradiating the transparent ivory face. But now it was Yancey Cravat who held their fascinated eye. With a cowboy yip he swung the defiant Sabra and the boy Cim high in the air in his great arms—tossed them up, so that Sabra screamed, and Cim squealed in mingled terror and delight. It was the kind of horseplay (her word) at which Felice Venable always shuddered. Altogether the three seemed suddenly an outrage in that seemly room with its mahogany and its decanters and its circle of staring highbred faces.

“Week from to-morrow,” announced Yancey, in something like a shout, so exulting it seemed. “We’ll start on a Monday, fresh and fair. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit—you’ll drive that, Sabra—and one with the household goods and bedding and camp stuff and the rest. We ought to make it in nine days.… Wichita!” His glance went round the room, and in that glance you saw not only Wichita! but Venables! “I’ve had enough of it. Sabra, my girl, we’ll leave all the goddamned middle-class respectability of Wichita, Kansas, behind us. We’re going out, by God, to a brand-new, two-fisted, rip-snorting country, full of Injuns and rattlesnakes and two-gun toters and gyp water and desper-ah-dos! Whoop-ee!”

It was too much for black Isaiah in his perilous perch high above the table. He had long ago ceased to wield his asparagus fan. He had been leaning farther and farther forward, the better to hear and see all of the scene that was spread beneath him. Now, at Yancey’s cowboy whoop, he started violently, his slight hold was loosed, and he fell like a great black grape from the vine directly into the midst of one of Felice Venable’s white and virgin frosted silver cakes.

Shouts, screams, upleapings. Isaiah plucked, white-bottomed, out of the center of the vast pastry. The sudden grayish pallor of his face matched the silver tone of his pants’ seat. Felice Venable, nerves strained to breaking, lifted her hand to cuff him smartly. But the black boy was too quick for her. With the swiftness of a wild thing he scuttled across the table to where Yancey Cravat stood with his wife and child, leaped nimbly to the floor, crept between the man’s legs like a whimpering little dog, and lay there, locked in the safety of Yancey’s great knees.