The child Cim had got it into his head that this was to be a picnic. He had smelled pies and cakes baking; had seen hampers packed. Certainly, except for the bizarre load that both wagons contained, this might have been one of those informal excursions into a near-by wood which Cim so loved, where they lunched in the open, camped near a stream, and he was allowed to run barefoot in the shadow of his aristocratic grandmother’s cool disapproval. Felice Venable loathed all forms of bucolic diversion and could, with a glance, cause more discomfort at an al fresco luncheon than a whole battalion of red ants.
There was a lunatic week preceding their departure from Wichita. Felice fought their going to the last, and finally took to her bed with threats of impending dissolution which failed to achieve the desired effect owing to the preoccupation of the persons supposed to be stricken by her plight. From time to time, intrigued by the thumpings, scurryings, shouts, laughter, quarrels, and general upheaval attendant on the Cravats’ departure, Felice rose from her bed and trailed wanly about the house, looking, in her white dimity wrapper, like a bilious and distracted ghost. She issued orders. Take this. Don’t take that. It can’t be that you’re leaving those behind! Your own Aunt Sarah Moncrief du Tisne embroidered every inch of them with her own——
“But, Mamma, you don’t understand. Yancey says there’s very little society, and it’s all quite rough and unsettled—wild, almost.”
“That needn’t prevent you from remembering you’re a lady, I hope. Unless you are planning to be one of those hags in a sunbonnet and no teeth that Yancey seems to have taken such a fancy to.”
So Sabra Cravat took along to the frontier wilderness such oddments and elegancies as her training, lack of experience, and Southern family tradition dictated. A dozen silver knives, forks, and spoons in the DeGrasse pattern; actually, too, a dozen silver after-dinner coffee spoons; a silver cake dish, very handsome, upheld by three solid silver cupids in care-free attitudes; linen that had been spun by hand and that bore vine-wreathed monograms; many ruffled and embroidered and starched white muslin petticoats to be sullied in the red clay of the Western muck; her heavy black grosgrain silk with the three box pleats on each side, and trimmed with black passementerie; her black hat with the five black plumes; her beautiful green nun’s veiling; her tulle bonnet with the little pink flowers; forty jars of preserves; her own rocker, a lady’s chair whose seat and back were upholstered fashionably with bright colored Brussels carpeting. There were two wagons, canvas covered and lumbering. Dishes, trunks, bedding, boxes were snugly stowed away in the capacious belly of one; the printing outfit, securely roped and lashed, went in the other. This wagon held the little hand press; two six-column forms; the case rack containing the type (cardboard was tacked snugly over this to keep the type from escaping); the rollers; a stock of paper; a can of printer’s ink, tubes of job ink, a box of wooden quoins used in locking the forms.
There was, to the Wichita eye, nothing unusual in the sight of these huge covered freighters that would soon go lumbering off toward the horizon. Their like had worn many a track in the Kansas prairie. The wagon train had wound its perilous way westward since the day of the old Spanish trail, deeply rutted by the heavy wheels of Mexican carts. The very Indians who trafficked in pelts and furs and human beings had used the white man’s trails for their trading. Yet in this small expedition faring forth there was something that held the poignancy of the tragic and the ridiculous. The man, huge, bizarre, impractical; the woman, tight lipped, terribly determined, her eyes staring with the fixed, unseeing gaze of one who knows that to blink but once is to be awash with tears; the child, out of hand with excitement and impatience to be gone. From the day of Yancey’s recital of the Run, black Isaiah had begged to be taken along. Denied this, he had sulked for a week and now was nowhere to be found.
The wagons, packed, stood waiting before the Venable house. Perhaps never in the history of the settling of the West did a woman go a-pioneering in such a costume. Sabra had driven horses all her life; so now she stepped agilely from ground to hub, from hub to wheel top, perched herself on the high wagon seat and gathered up the reins with deftness and outward composure. Her eyes were enormous, her pale face paler. She wore last year’s second best gray cheviot, lined, boned, basqued, and (though plain for its day) braided all the way down the front with an elaborate pattern of curlycues. Her gray straw bonnet was trimmed only with a puff of velvet and a bird. Her feet, in high buttoned shoes, were found to touch the wagon floor with difficulty, so at the last minute a footstool was snatched from the house and placed so that she might brace herself properly during the long and racking drive. This article of furniture was no more at variance with its surroundings than the driver herself. A plump round mahogany foot rest it was, covered with a gay tapestry that had been stitched by Sabra’s grandmother on the distaff side. Its pattern of faded scarlet and yellow and blue represented what seemed to be a pair of cockatoos sparring in a rose bush. Yancey had swung Cim up to the calico-cushioned seat beside Sabra. His short legs, in their copper-toed boots, stuck straight out in front of him. His dark eyes were huge with excitement. “Why don’t we go?” he demanded, over and over, in something like a scream. He shouted to the horses as he had heard teamsters do. “Giddap in ’ere! Gee-op! G’larng!” His grandmother and grandfather, gazing up with sudden agony in their faces at sight of this little expedition actually faring forth so absurdly into the unknown, had ceased to exist for Cim. As Sabra drove one wagon and Yancey the other, the boy pivoted between them through the long drive, spending the morning in the seat beside his mother, the afternoon beside his father, with intervals of napping curled up on the bedding at the back of the wagon. All through the first day they could do nothing with him. He yelled, “Giddap! Whoa! Gee-op!” until he was hoarse, pausing only to shoot imaginary bears, panthers, wildcats, and Indians, and altogether working himself up into such a state of excitement and exhaustion that he became glittering eyed and feverish and subsequently had to be inconveniently dosed with castor oil.
Now, with a lurch and a rattle and a great clatter of hoofs the two wagons were off. Sabra had scarcely time for one final frantic look at her father and mother, at minor massed Venables, at the servants’ black faces that seemed all rolling eyeballs. She was so busy with the horses, with Cim, so filled with dizzy mixture of fright and exhilaration and a kind of terror-stricken happiness that she forgot to turn and look back, as she had meant to, like the heroine in a melodrama, at the big white house, at the hedge, at the lovely untidy garden, at the three great elms. Later she reproached herself for this. And she would say to the boy, in the bare treeless ugliness of the town that became their home, “Cim, do you remember the yellow and purple flags that used to come up first thing in the spring, in the yard?”
“What yard?”
“Granny’s yard, back home.”
“Nope.”
“Oh, Cim!”
It was as though the boy’s life had begun with this trip. The four previous years of his existence seemed to be sponged from his mind like yesterday’s exercise from a slate. Perched beside his father on the high wagon seat his thirsty little mind drank in tales that became forever part of his consciousness and influenced his whole life.
They had made an early start. By ten the boy’s eyes were heavy with sleep. He refused stubbornly to lie on the mattress inside the larger wagon; denied that he was sleepy. Sabra coaxed him to curl up on the wagon seat, his head in her lap. She held the reins in one hand; one arm was about the child. It was hot and still and drowsy. Noon came with surprising swiftness. They had brought along a precious keg of water and a food supply sufficient, they thought, to last through most of the trip—salt pork, mince and apple pies, bread, doughnuts—but their appetites were enormous. At midday they stopped and ate in the shade. Sabra prepared the meal while Yancey tended the horses. Cim, wide awake now and refreshed, ate largely with them of the fried salt pork and potatoes, the hard-boiled eggs, the mince pie. He was even given one of the precious oranges with which the journey had been provided by his grandparents. It was all very gay and comfortable and relaxed. Short as the morning had been, the afternoon stretched out, somehow, endless. Sabra began to be horribly tired, cramped. The boy whimpered. It was mid-afternoon and hot; it was late afternoon; then the brilliant Western sunset began to paint the sky. Yancey, in the wagon ahead, drew up, gazed about, got out, tied his team to one of a clump of cottonwoods.
“We’ll camp here,” he called to Sabra and come toward her wagon, prepared to lift her down, and the boy. She was stiff, utterly weary. She stared down at him, dully, then around the landscape.
“Camp?”
“Yes. For the night. Come, Cim.” He lifted the boy down with a great swoop.
“You mean for the night? Sleep here?”
He was quite matter-of-fact. “Yes. It’s a good place. Water and trees. I’ll have a fire before you can say Jack Robinson. Where’d you think you were going to sleep? Back home?”
Somehow she had not thought. She had not believed it. To sleep out of doors like this, in the open, with only a wagon top as roof! All her neat conventional life she had slept in a four-poster bed with a dotted Swiss canopy and net curtains and linen sheets that smelled sweetly of the sun and the air.
Yancey began to make camp. Already the duties of this new manner of living had become familiar. There was wood to gather, a fire to start, water to be boiled. Cim, very wide awake now, trotted after his father, after his mother. Meat began to sizzle appetizingly in the pan. The exquisite scent of coffee revived them with its promise of stimulation.
“That roll of carpet,” called Sabra, busy at the fire, to Yancey at the wagon. “Under the seat. I want Cim to sit on it … ground may be damp.…”
A sudden shout from Yancey. A squeal of terror from the bundle of carpeting in his arms—a bundle that suddenly was alive and wriggling. Yancey dropped it with an oath. The bundle lay on the ground a moment, heaving, then it began to unroll itself while the three regarded it with starting eyes. A black paw, a woolly head, a face all open mouth and whites of eyes. Black Isaiah. He had found a way to come with them to the Indian Territory.