By noon next day they were wondering how they had got on at all without him. He gathered wood. He started fires. He tended Cim like a nurse, played with him, sang to him, helped put him to bed, slept anywhere, like a little dog. He even helped Sabra to drive her team, change and change about, for after all there was little to it but the holding of the reins slackly in one’s fingers while the horses plodded across the prairie, mile on mile, mile on mile.
Yancey pointed out the definiteness with which the land changed when they left Kansas and came into the Oklahoma country. “Oklahoma,” he explained to Cim. “That’s Choctaw. Okla—people. Humma—red. Red People. That’s what they called it when the Indians came here to live.”
Suddenly the land, too, had become red: red clay as far as the eye could see. The rivers and little creeks were sanguine with it, and at sunset the sky seemed to reflect it, so that sometimes Sabra’s eyes burned with all this scarlet. When the trail led through a cleft in a hill the blood red of the clay on either side was like a gaping wound. Sabra shrank from it. She longed for the green of Kansas. The Oklahoma sky was not blue but steel color, and all through the day it was a brazen sheet of glittering tin over their heads. Its glare seared the eyeballs.
It was a hard trip for the child. He was by turns unruly and listless. He could not run about, except when they stopped to make camp. Sabra, curiously enough, had not the gift of amusing him as Yancey had, or even Isaiah. Isaiah told him tales that were negro folklore, handed down by word of mouth through the years. Like the songs he sang, these were primitive accounts of the sorrows and the tribulations of a wronged people and their inevitable reward in after life.
“An’ de angel say to him, he say, ‘Mose, come on up on dis’ya throne an’ eat ’case yo’ hongry, an’ drink ’case yo’ parch, and res’ yo’ weary an’ achin’ feet …’ ”
But when he rode with his father he heard thrilling tales. If it was just before his bedtime, after their early supper had been eaten, Yancey invariably began his story with the magic words, “It was on just such a night as this …”
There would follow a legend of buried treasure. Spanish conquistadores wandered weary miles over plains and prairie and desert, led, perhaps, by the false golden promises of some captured Indian eager to get back to the home of his own tribe far away. As in all newly settled countries, there were here hundreds of such tales. The sparsely settled land was full of them. The poorer the class the more glittering the treasure. These people, wresting a meager living from the barren plains, consoled themselves with tales of buried Spanish gold; of jewels. No hairy squatter or nester in his log cabin with his pony parchment-skinned wife and litter of bare-legged brats but had some tale of long-sought treasure. Cim heard dozens of these tales as they dragged their way across the red clay of Oklahoma, as they forded rivers, passed little patches of blackjack or cottonwood. He was full of them. They became as real to him as the rivers and trees themselves.
During the day Yancey told him stories of the Indians. He taught him the names of the Five Civilized Tribes, and Cim remembered the difficult Indian words and repeated them—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw. He heard the Indian story, not in terms of raids, scalpings, tomahawk, and tom-tom, but as the saga of a tricked and wronged people. Yancey Cravat needed only a listener. That that listener was four, and quite incapable of comprehending the significance of what he heard, made no difference to Cravat. He told the boy the terrific story of the Trail of Tears—of the Cherokee Nation, a simple and unnomadic people, driven from their homes in Georgia, like cattle across hundreds of miles of plain and prairie to die by the thousands before they reached the Oklahoma land that had been allotted to them, with two thousand troops under General Winfield Scott to urge on their flagging footsteps.
“Why did they make the Indians go away?”
“They wanted the land for themselves.”
“Why?”
“It had marble, and gold and silver and iron and lead, and great forests. So they took all this away from them and drove them out. They promised them things and then broke their promise.”
Sabra was horrified at Cim’s second-hand recital of this saga. He told her all about it as he later sat on the seat beside her. “Uncle Sam is a mean bad man. He took all the farms and the gold and the silver and the buff’loes away from the Indians and made them go away and they didn’t want to go and so they went and they died.”
He knew more about David Payne than about Columbus. He was more familiar with Quanah Parker, the Comanche, with Elias Boudinot and General Stand Waitie, his brother, both full-blooded Cherokees, than he was with the names of Lincoln and Washington.
Sabra, in her turn, undertook to wipe this impression from the boy’s mind. “Indians are bad people. They take little boys from their mammas and never bring them back. They burn down people’s houses, and hurt them. They’re dirty and lazy, and they steal.”
She was unprepared for the hysterical burst of protest that greeted this. The boy grew white with rage. “They’re not. You’re a liar. I hate you. I won’t ride with you.”
He actually prepared to climb down over the wagon wheel. She clutched at him with one hand, shook him smartly, cuffed him. He kicked her. She stopped the team, wound the reins, took him over her knee and spanked him soundly. He announced, through his tears, that he was going to run away and join the Indians and never come back. If she could have known that his later life was to be shaped by Yancey’s tales and this incident, certainly her protests would have been even more forceful than they were.
“Why can’t you talk to him about something besides those dirty thieving Indians? There’s enough to teach him about the history of his country, I should think. George Washington and Jefferson Davis and Captain John Smith …”
“The one who married Pocahontas, you mean?”
“I declare, Yancey, sometimes I wonder if——”
“What?”
“Oh—nothing.”
But often the days were gay enough. They fell into the routine, adjusted themselves to the discomfort. At first Sabra had been so racked with the jolting of the wagon that she was a cripple by night. Yancey taught her how to relax; not to brace herself against the wagon’s jolting but to sway easily with it. By the second day her young body had accustomed itself to the motion. She actually began to enjoy it, and at the journey’s end missed it as a traveler at sea misses the roll and dip of a ship. By this time she had the second-best gray cheviot open at the throat and her hair in a long black braid. She looked like a schoolgirl. She had got out the sunbonnet which one of the less formidable Venables had jokingly given her at parting, and this she wore to shield her eyes from the pitiless glare of sky and plain. The gray straw bonnet, with its puff of velvet and its bird, reposed in its box in the back of the wagon. The sight of her in that prairie wilderness engaged in the domestic task of beating up a bowl of biscuit dough struck no one as being incongruous. The bread supply was early exhausted. She baked in a little portable tin oven that Yancey had fitted out for her.
As for Yancey himself, Sabra had never known him so happy. He was tireless, charming, varied. She herself was fascinated by his tales of hidden mines, of Spanish doubloons, of iron chests plowed up by some gaunt homesteader’s hand plow hitched to a stumbling mule. Yancey roared snatches of cowboy songs:
When I was young I was a reckless lad,
Lots of fun with the gals I had,
I took one out each day fur a ride,
An’ I always had one by my side.
I’d hug ’em an’ kiss ’em just fur fun,
An’ I’ve proposed to more’n one,
If there’s a gal here got a kiss for me,
She’ll find me as young as I used to be.
Hi rickety whoop ti do,
How I love to sing to you.
Oh, I could sing an’ dance with glee,
If I was as young as I used to be.
Once they saw him whip a rattlesnake to death with his wagon whip. They had unhitched the horses to water them. Yancey, whip in hand, had taken them down to the muddy stream, Cim leaping and shouting at his side. His two guns, in their holsters, lay on the ground with the belt which he had just now unstrapped from about his waist. Sabra saw the thick coil, the wicked head. Perhaps she sensed it. She screamed horribly, stood transfixed. The boy’s face was a mask of fright. Yancey lashed out once with his whip, the thing struck out, he lashed again, again, again, in a kind of fury. She turned away, sickened. The whip kept up its whistle, its snap. The coiled thing lay in ribbons. Isaiah, though ashen with fright, still had to be forcibly restrained from prowling among the mass for the rattlers which, with some combination of sunset and human saliva, were supposed to be a charm against practically every misfortune known to man. Cim had nightmares, all that night and awoke screaming.
Once they saw the figure of a solitary horseman against the sunset sky. Inexplicably the figure dismounted, stood a moment, mounted swiftly, and vanished.
“What was that?”
“That was an Indian.”
“How could you tell?”
“He dismounted on the opposite side from a white man.”
That night it was Sabra who did not sleep. She held the boy tight in her arms. Every snap of a twig, every stamp of a horse’s hoof caused her to start up in terror.
Yancey tried in vain to reassure her. “Indian? What of it? Indians aren’t anything to be scared of. Not any more.”
She remembered something that Mother Bridget had said. “They’re no different. They haven’t changed since Joshua.”
“Since what?” He was very sleepy.
“Joshua.”
He could make nothing of this. He was asleep again, heavily, worn out with the day’s journey.
The wind, at certain periods of the year, blows almost without ceasing in Oklahoma. And when it rains the roads become slithering bogs of greased red dough, so that a wagon will sink and slide at the same time. They had two days of rain during which they plodded miserably, inch by inch. Cim squalled, Isaiah became just a shivering black lump of misery, and Sabra thought of her dimity-hung bed back home in Wichita; of the garden in the cool of the evening; of the family gathered in the dining room; of the pleasant food, the easy talk, the luxurious ease. “Lak yo’ breakfus’ in bed, Miss Sabra? Mizzly mo’nin’.”
At Pawnee Yancey saw fresh deer tracks. He saddled a horse and was off. They had, before this, caught bass in the streams, and Yancey had shot prairie chicken and quail, and Sabra had fried them delicately. But this was their first promise of big game. Sabra felt no fear at being left alone with the two children. It was mid-afternoon. She was happy, peaceful. There was about this existence a delightful detachment. Her prim girlhood, which, because she had continued to live in her parents’ household, had lasted into her marriage, was now behind her. Ahead of her lay all manner of unknown terrors and strangeness, but here in the wilderness she was secure. She ruled her little world. Her husband was hers, alone. Her child, too. The little black boy Isaiah was as much her slave as though the Emancipation Proclamation had never been. Here, in the wide freedom of the prairie, she was, temporarily at least, suspended out of the reach of human interference.
Now she welcomed this unexpected halt. She and Isaiah carried water from the creek and washed a few bits of clothes and hung them to dry. She bathed Cim. She heated water for herself and bathed gratefully. She set Isaiah to gathering fuel for the evening meal, while Cim played in the shade of the clump of scrub oak. She was quite serene. She listened for the sound of horse’s hoofs that would announce Yancey’s triumphant return. She could hear Cim as he played under the trees, crooning to himself some snatch of song that Yancey had taught him. Vaguely she began to wonder if Yancey should not have returned by now. She brushed her hair thoroughly, enjoying the motion, throwing it over her head and bending far forward in that contortionistic attitude required by her task. After she had braided it she decided to leave it in a long thick plait down her back. Audaciously she tied it with a bright red ribbon, smiling to think of what Yancey would say. She tidied the wagon. She was frankly worried now. Nothing could happen. Of course nothing could happen. And in another part of her mind she thought that any one of a dozen dreadful things could happen. Indians. Why not? Some wild things in the woods. Broken bones. A fall from his horse. He might lose his way. Suppose she had to spend the night alone here on the prairie with the two children. Here was the little clump of scrub oaks. The land just beyond showed a series of tiny hillocks that rolled gently away toward the horizon—rolled just enough to conceal what not of horror! A head perhaps even now peering craftily over the slope’s edge to see what it could see.
In a sudden panic she stepped out of the wagon with the feeling that she must have her own human things near her—Cim, Isaiah—to talk to. Cim was not there playing with his bits of stone and twigs. He had gone off with Isaiah to gather fuel, though she had forbidden it. Isaiah, his long arms full of dead twigs and small branches, was coming toward the wagon now. Cim was not with him.
“Where’s Cim?”
He dropped his load, looked around. “I lef’ him playin’ by hisself right hyah when Ah go fetch de wood. Ain’ he in de wagon?”
“No. No.”
“Might be he crep’ in de print wagon.”
“Wagon?” She ran to the other wagon, peered inside, called. He was not there.
Together they looked under the wagons, behind the trees. Cim! Cim! Cimarron Cravat, if you are hiding I shall punish you if you don’t come out this minute. A shrill note of terror crept into her voice. She began to run up and down, calling him. She began to scream his name, her voice cracking grotesquely. Cim! Cim! She prayed as she ran, mumblingly. O God, help me find him. O God, don’t let anything happen to him. Dear God, help me find him—Cim! Cim! Cim!
She had heard among pioneer stories that of the McAlastair wagon train crossing the continent toward California in ’49. The Benson party had got separated perhaps a half day’s journey from the front section when scouts brought news of Indians on the trail. Immediately they must break camp and hurry on to join the section ahead for mutual protection. In the midst of the bustle and confusion it was discovered that a child—a boy of three—was missing. The whole party searched at first confidently, then frenziedly, then despairingly. The parents of the missing child had three other small children and another on the way. Every second’s delay meant possible death to every other member of the party. They must push on. They appealed to the mother. “I’ll go on,” she said, and the wagon train wound its dusty way across the plains. The woman sat ashen faced, stony, her eyes fixed in a kind of perpetual horror. She never spoke of the child again.
O God! whimpered Sabra, running this way and that. O God! Oh, Cim! Cim!
She came to a little mound that dipped suddenly and unexpectedly to a draw. And there, in a hollow, she came upon him, seated before a cave in the side of the hill, the front and roof ingeniously timbered to make a log cabin. One might pass within five feet of it and never find it. Four men were seated about the doorstep outside the rude cabin. Cim was perched on the knee of one of them, who was cracking nuts for him. They were laughing and talking and munching nuts and having altogether a delightful time of it. Sabra’s knees suddenly became weak. She was trembling. She stumbled as she ran toward him. Her face worked queerly. The men sprang up, their hands at their hips.
“The man is cracking nuts for me,” remarked Cim, sociably, and not especially glad to see her.
The man on whose knee he sat was a slim young fellow with a sandy mustache and a red handkerchief knotted cowboy fashion around his throat. He put the boy down gently as Sabra came up, and rose with a kind of easy grace.
“You ran away—you—we hunted every—Cim——” she stammered, and burst into tears of mingled anger and relief.
The slim young man seemed the spokesman, though the other three were obviously older than he.
“Why, I’m real sorry you was distressed, ma’am. We was going to bring the boy back safe enough. He wandered down here lookin’ for his pa, he said.” He was standing with one hand resting lightly, tenderly, on Cim’s head, and looking down at Sabra with a smile of utter sweetness. His was the soft-spoken, almost caressing voice of the Southwestern cowman and ranger. At this Sabra’s anger, born of fright, vanished. Besides, he was so young—scarcely more than a boy.
“Well,” she explained, a little sheepishly, “I was worried.… My husband went off on the track of a deer … hours ago … he hasn’t come back … then when Cim … I came out and he was gone.… I was so—so terribly …”
She looked very wan and schoolgirlish in her prim gray dress and with her hair in a braid tied with a bright red ribbon, and her tear-stained cheeks.
One of the men who had strolled off a little way with the appearance of utmost casualness returned to the group in time to hear this. “He’ll be back any minute now,” he announced. “He didn’t get no deer.”
“But how do you know?”
The soft-spoken young man shot a malignant look at the other, the older man looked suddenly abashed. Sabra’s question went unanswered. “Won’t you sit and rest yourself, ma’am?” suggested the spokesman. The words were hospitable enough, yet there was that in the boy’s tone which conveyed to Sabra the suggestion that she and Cim had better be gone. She took Cim’s hand. Now that her fright was past she thought she must have looked very silly running down the draw with her tears and her pigtail and her screaming. She thanked them, using a little Southern charm and Southern drawl, which she often legitimately borrowed from the ancestral Venables for special occasions such as this.
“I’m ve’y grateful to you-all,” she now said. “You’ve been mighty kind. If you would just drop around to our camp I’m sure my husband would be delighted to meet you.”
The young man smiled more sweetly than ever, and the others looked at him, an inexplicable glint of humor in their weather-beaten faces.
“I sure thank you, ma’am. We’re movin’ on, my friends here and me. Pronto. Floyd, how about you getting a piece of deer meat for the lady, seeing she’s been cheated of her supper. Now, if you and the little fella don’t mind sittin’ up behind and before, why, I’ll take you back a ways. You probably run fu’ther than you expected, ma’am, scared as you was.” She had, as a matter of fact, in her terror, run almost half a mile from camp.
He mounted first. His method of accomplishing this was something of a miracle. At one moment the horse was standing ready and he was at its side. The next there was a flash, and he was on its back. It was like an optical illusion in which he seemed to have been drawn to the saddle as a needle flies to the magnet. Cim he drew up to the pommel, holding him with one hand; Sabra, perched on the horse’s rump, clung with both arms round the lad’s slim waist. Something of a horsewoman, she noticed his fine Mexican saddle, studded with silver. From the sides of the saddle hung hair-covered pockets whose bulge was the outline of a gun. A slicker such as is carried by those who ride the trails made a compact ship-shape roll behind the saddle. The horse had a velvet gait, even with this triple load. Sabra found herself wishing that this exhilarating ride might go on for miles. Suddenly she noticed that the young rider wore gloves. The sight of them made her vaguely uneasy, as though some memory had been stirred. She had never seen a plainsman wearing gloves. It was absurd, somehow.
A hundred feet or so from the camp he reined in his horse abruptly, half turned in his saddle, and with his free hand swung Sabra gently to the ground, leaning far from his saddle and keeping a firm hold on Cim and reins as he did so. He placed the child in her upraised arms, wheeled, and was gone before she could open her lips to frame a word of thanks. The piece of deer meat, neatly wrapped, lay on the ground at her feet. She stood staring after the galloping figure, dumbly. She took Cim’s hand. Together they ran toward the camp. Isaiah had a fire going, a pot of coffee bubbling. His greeting to Cim was sternly admonitory. Ten minutes later Yancey galloped in, empty handed.
“What a chase he led me! Twice I thought I had him. I’d have run him into Texas if I hadn’t thought you’d be——”
Sabra, for the first time since her marriage, felt superior to him; was impatient of his tale of prowess. She had her own story to tell, spiced with indignation. She was not interested in his mythical deer. She had an actual piece of fresh deer meat to cook for their supper.
“… and just when I was ready to die with fright, there he was, talking to those four men, and sitting on the knee of one of them as though he’d known him all his life eating nuts.… Anything might have happened to him and to me while you were off after your old deer.”
Yancey seemed less interested in the part that she and Cim had played in the adventure than in the appearance and behavior of the four men in the draw, and especially the charming young man who had so gallantly brought them back.
“Thin faced, was he? And a youngster? About nineteen or twenty? What else?”
“Oh, a low voice, and kind of sweet, as though he sang tenor. And his teeth——”
Yancey interrupted. “Long, weren’t they? The two at the side, I mean. Like a wolf’s?”
“Yes. How did you—Do you know him?”
“Sort of,” Yancey answered, thoughtfully.
Sabra was piqued. “It was lucky for us it was someone who knows you, probably. Because you don’t seem to care much about what happened to us—what might have happened.”
“You said you wanted to go a-pioneering.”
“Well?”
“This is it. Stir that fire, Isaiah. Sabra, get that deer meat a-frizzling that your friend gave you. Because we’re moving on.”
“Now? To-night? But it’s late. I thought we were camping here for the night.”
“We’ll eat and get going. Moonlight to-night. I don’t just like it here. There’s been a lot of time lost this afternoon. We’ll push on. In another day or so, with luck, we’ll be in Osage, snug and safe.”
They ate hurriedly. Yancey seemed restless, anxious to be off.
They jolted on. Cim slept, a little ball of weariness, in the back of the wagon. Isaiah drowsed beside Sabra, and she herself was half asleep, the reins slack in her hands. The scent of the sun-warmed prairie came up to her, and the pungent smell of the sagebrush. The Indians had swept over this plain in hordes; and buffalo by the millions. She wondered if the early Spaniards, in their lust for gold, had trod this ground—perhaps this very trail. Coronado, De Soto, Narvaez. She had seen pictures of them, these dark-skinned élégantes in their cumbersome trappings of leather and heavy metal, tramping the pitiless plains of this vast Southwest, searching like children for cities of gold.… The steady clop-clop of the horses’ feet, the rattle of the wagon, the squeak of the wheels, the smell of sun-baked earth …
She must have dozed off, for suddenly the sun’s rays were sharply slanted, and she shivered with the cool of the prairie night air. Voices had awakened her. Three horsemen had dashed out of a little copse and stood in the path of Yancey’s lead wagon. They were heavily armed. Their hands rested on their guns. Their faces were grim. They wore the mournful mustaches of the Western plainsman, their eyes were the eyes of men accustomed to great distances; their gaze was searing. All three wore the badge of United States marshals, but there was about them something that announced this even before the eye was caught by their badge of office. The leader addressed Yancey, his voice mild, even gentle.
“Howdy.”
“Howdy.”
“Where you bound for, pardner?”
“Osage.”
The questioner’s hand rested lightly on the butt of the six-shooter at his waist. “What might your name be?”
“Cravat—Yancey Cravat.”
The spokesman’s face lighted up with the slow, incredulous smile of a delighted child. “I’ll be doggoned!” He turned his slow grin on the man at his right, on the man at his left. “Yancey Cravat!” he said again, as though they had not heard. “I sure am pleased to make your acquaintance. Heard about you till I feel like I knew you.”
“Why, thanks,” replied Yancey, unusually modest and laconic. Sabra knew then that Yancey was playing one of his rôles. He would talk as they talked. Be one of them.
“Aimin’ to make quite a stay in Osage?”
“Aim to live there.”
“Go on! I’ve a notion to swear you in as Deputy Marshal right now, darned if I ain’t. Citizens like you is what we need, and no mistake. Lawy’in’?”
“I’m planning to take up my law practice in Osage, yes,” Yancey answered, “and start a newspaper as well.”
The three looked a little perturbed at this. They glanced at each other, then at Yancey, then away, uncomfortably. “Oh, newspaper, huh?” There was little enthusiasm in the marshal’s voice. “Well, we did have a newspaper there for a little while in Osage, ’bout a week.”
“A daily?”
“A weekly.”
There was something sinister in this. “What became of it?”
“Well, seems the editor—name of Pegler—died.”
There was a little silence. Sabra gathered up her reins and brought her team alongside Yancey’s, the better to hear. The three mustached ones acknowledged her more formal presence by briefly touching their hat brims with the forefinger of the hand that had rested on their guns.
“Who killed him?”
A little shadow of pained surprise passed over the features of the marshal. “He was just found dead one morning on the banks of the Canadian. Bullet wounds. But bullets is all pretty much alike, out here. He might ’a’ killed himself, plumb discouraged.”
The silence fell again. Yancey broke it. “The first edition of the Oklahoma Wigwam will be off the press two weeks from to-morrow.”
He gathered up the reins as though to end this chance meeting, however agreeable. “Well, gentlemen, good-evening. Glad to have met you.”
The three did not budge. “What we stopped to ask you,” said the spokesman, in his gentle drawl, “was, did you happen to glimpse four men anywhere on the road? They’re nesting somewhere in here, the Kid and his gang. Stole four horses, robbed the bank at Red Fork, shot the cashier, and lit out for the prairie. Light complected, all of ’em. The Kid is a slim young fella, light hair, red handkerchief, soft spoken, and rides with gloves on. But then you know what he’s like, Cravat, well’s I do.”
Yancey nodded in agreement. “Everybody’s heard of the Kid. No, sir, I haven’t seen him. Haven’t seen anybody the last three days but a Kaw on a pony and a bunch of dirty Cheyennes in a wagon. Funny thing, I never yet knew a bad man who wasn’t light complected—or, anyway, blue or gray eyes.”
“Oh, say, now!” protested the marshal, stroking his sandy mustache.
“Fact. You take the Kid, and the James boys, and Tom O’Phalliard, and the whole Mullins gang.”
“How about yourself? You’re pretty good with the gun, from all accounts. And black as a crow.”
Yancey lifted his great head and the heavy lids that usually drooped over the gray eyes and looked at the marshal. “That’s so,” said the other, as though in agreement at the end of an argument. “I reckon it goes fur killers and fur killers of killers.… Well, boys, we’ll be lopin’. Good luck to you.”
“Good luck to you!” responded Yancey, politely.
The three whirled their steeds spectacularly, raised their right hands in salute; the horses pivoted on their hind legs prettily; Cim crowed with delight. They were off in a cloud of red dust made redder by the last rays of the setting sun.
Yancey gathered up his reins. Sabra stared at him in bewildered indignation. “But the person who shields a criminal is just as bad as the criminal himself, isn’t he?”
Yancey looked back at her around the side of his wagon top. His smile was mischievous, sparkling, irresistible. “Don’t be righteous, Sabra. It’s middle class—and a terrible trait in a woman.”
Late next day, just before sunset, after pushing on relentlessly through the blistering sun of midday, Yancey pointed with his wagon whip to something that looked like a wallow of mud dotted with crazy shanties and tents. Theatrically he picked Cim up in his arms so that the child, too, might see. But he spoke to Sabra.
“There it is,” he said. “That’s our future home.”
Sabra looked. And her brain seemed to have no order or reason about it, for she could think only of the green nun’s veiling trimmed with ruchings of pink which lay so carefully folded, with its modish sleeves all stuffed out with soft paper, in the trunk under the canvas of the wagon.