In the three and a half years of her residence in Osage Sabra had yielded hardly an inch. It was amazing. It was heroic. She had set herself certain standards, and those she had maintained in spite of almost overwhelming opposition. She had been bred on tradition. If she had yielded at all it was in minor matters and because to do so was expedient. True, she could be seen of a morning on her way to the butcher’s or the grocer’s shielded from the sun by one of the gingham sunbonnets which in the beginning she had despised. Certainly one could not don a straw bonnet, velvet or flower trimmed, to dart out in a calico house dress for the purchase of a pound and a half of round steak, ten cents worth of onions, and a yeast cake.
Once only in those three years had she gone back to Wichita. At the prospect of the journey she had been in a fever of anticipation for days. She had taken with her Cim and Donna. She was so proud of them, so intent on outfitting them with a wardrobe sufficiently splendid to set off their charms, that she neglected the matter of her own costuming and found herself arriving in Wichita with a trunk containing the very clothes with which she had departed from it almost four years earlier. Prominent among these was the green nun’s veiling with the pink ruchings. She had had little enough use for it in these past years or for the wine-colored silkwarp henrietta.
“Your skin!” Felice Venable had exclaimed at sight of her daughter. “Your hands! Your hair! As dry as a bone! You look a million. What have you done to yourself?”
Sabra remembered something that Yancey once had said about Texas. Mischievously she paraphrased it in order to shock her tactless mother. “Oklahoma is fine for men and horses, but it’s hell on women and oxen.”
The visit was not a success. The very things she had expected to enjoy fell, somehow, flat. She missed the pace, the exhilarating uncertainty of the Oklahoma life. The teacup conversation of her girlhood friends seemed to lack tang and meaning. Their existence was orderly, calm, accepted. For herself and the other women of Osage there was everything still to do. There lay a city, a county, a whole vast Territory to be swept and garnished by an army of sunbonnets. Paradoxically enough, she was trying to implant in the red clay of Osage the very forms and institutions that now bored her in Wichita. Yet it was, perhaps, a very human trait. It was illustrated literally by the fact that she was, on her return, more thrilled to find that the scrawny elm, no larger than a baby’s arm, which she had planted outside the doorway in Osage, actually had found some moisture for its thirsty roots, and was now feebly vernal, than she had been at sight of the cool glossy canopy of cedar, arbor vitae, sweet locust, and crêpe myrtle that shaded the Kansas garden. She took a perverse delight in bringing the shocked look to the faces of her Wichita friends, and to all the horde of Venables and Marcys and Vians that swarmed up from the South to greet the pioneer. Curiously enough, it was not the shooting affrays and Indian yarns that ruffled them so much as her stories of the town’s social life.
“… rubber boots to parties, often, because when it rains we wade up to our ankles in mud. We carry lanterns when we go to the church sociables.… Mrs. Buckner’s sister came to visit her from St. Joseph, Missouri, and she remarked that she had noticed that the one pattern of table silver seemed to be such a favorite. She had seen it at all the little tea parties that had been given for her during her visit. Of course it was my set that had been the rounds. Everybody borrowed it. We borrow each other’s lamps, too, and china, and even linen.”
At this the Venables and Marcys and Vians and Goforths looked not only shocked but stricken. Chests of lavender-scented linen, sideboards flashing with stately silver, had always been part of the Venable and Marcy tradition.
Then the children. The visiting Venables insisted on calling Cim by his full name—Cimarron. Sabra had heard it so rarely since the day of his birth that she now realized, for the first time, how foolish she had been to yield to Yancey’s whim in the naming of the boy. Cimarron. Spanish: wild, or unruly. The boy had made such an obstreperous entrance into the world, and Yancey had shouted, in delight, “Look at him! See him kick with his feet and strike out with his fists! He’s a wild one. Heh, Cimarron! Peceno Gitano.”
Cousin Jouett Goforth or Cousin Dabney Venable said, pompously, “And now, Cimarron, my little man, tell us about the big red Indians. Did you ever fight Indians, eh, Cimarron?” The boy surveyed them from beneath his long lashes, his head lowered, looking for all the world like his father.
Cimarron was almost eight now. If it is possible for a boy of eight to be romantic in aspect, Cimarron Cravat was that. His head was not large, like Yancey’s, but long and fine, like Sabra’s—a Venable head. His eyes were Sabra’s, too, dark and large, but they had the ardent look of Yancey’s gray ones, and he had Yancey’s absurdly long and curling lashes, like a beautiful girl’s. His mannerisms—the head held down, the rare upward glance that cut you like a sword thrust when he turned it full on you—the swing of his walk, the way he gestured with his delicate hands—all these were Yancey in startling miniature.
His speech was strangely adult. This, perhaps, because of his close association with his elders in those first formative years in Osage. Yancey had delighted in talking to the boy; in taking him on rides and drives about the broad burning countryside. His skin was bronzed the color of his father’s. He looked like a little patrician Spaniard or perhaps (the Venables thought privately) part Indian. Then, too, there had been few children of his age in the town’s beginning. Sabra had been, at first, too suspicious of such as there were. He would, probably, have seemed a rather unpleasant and priggish little boy if his voice and manner had not been endowed miraculously with all the charm and magnetism that his father possessed in such disarming degree.
He now surveyed his middle-aged cousins with the concentrated and disconcerting gaze of the precocious child.
“Indians,” he answered, with great distinctness, “don’t fight white men any more. They can’t. Their—uh—spirit is broken.” Cousin Dabney Venable, who still affected black stocks (modified), now looked slightly apoplectic. “They only fought in the first place because the white men took their buff’loes away from them that they lived on and ate and traded the skins and that was all they had; and their land away from them.”
“Well,” exclaimed Cousin Jouett Goforth, of the Louisiana Goforths, “this is quite a little Redskin you have here, Cousin Sabra.”
“And,” continued Cimarron, warming to his subject, “look at the Osage Indians where my father took me to visit the reservation near where we live. The white people made them move out of Missouri to Kansas because they wanted their land, and from there to another place—I forget—and then they wanted that, too, and they said, ‘Look, you go and live in the Indian Territory where we tell you,’ and it’s all bare there, and nothing grows in that place—it’s called the Bad Lands—unless you work and slave and the Osages they were used to hunting and fishing not farming, so they are just starving to death and my father says some day they will get their revenge on the white——”
Felice Venable turned her flashing dark gaze on her daughter.
“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth.
Cousin Dabney Venable, still the disgruntled suitor, brought malicious eyes to bear on Sabra. “Well, well, Cousin Sabra! Look out that you don’t have a Pocahontas for a daughter-in-law some fine day.”
Sabra was furious, though she tried in her pride to conceal it. “Oh, Cim has just heard the talk of the men around the newspaper office—the Indian agent, Mr. Heeney, sometimes drops in on his trips to Osage—they’re talking now of having the Indian Agent’s office transferred to Osage, though Oklahoma City is fighting for it—Yancey has always been very much stirred by the wretched Indians—Cim has heard him talking.”
Cim sensed that he had not made his desired effect on his listeners. “My father says,” he announced, suddenly, striding up and down the room in absurd and unconscious imitation of his idol—one could almost see the Prince Albert coat tails switching—“my father says that some day an Indian will be President of the United States, and then you bet you’ll all be sorry you were such dirty skunks to ’em.”
The eyes of the visiting Venables swung, as one orb, from the truculent figure of the boy to the agitated face of the mother.
“My poor child!” came from Felice Venable in accents of rage rather than pity. She was addressing Sabra.
Sabra took refuge in hauteur. “You wouldn’t understand. Our life there is so different from yours here. Yancey’s Indian editorials in the Wigwam have made a sensation. They were spoken of in the Senate at Washington.” Felice dismissed all Yancey’s written works with a wave of her hand. “In fact,” Sabra went on—she who hated Indians and all their ways—“in fact, his editorials on the subject have been so fearless and free that he has been in danger of his life from the people who have been cheating the Indians. It has been even more dangerous than when he tracked down the murderer of Pegler.”
“Pegler,” repeated the Venables, disdainfully, and without the slightest curiosity in their voices.
Sabra gave it up. “You don’t understand. The only thing you care about is whether the duck runs red or not.”
Even little Donna was not much of a success. The baby was an eerie little elf, as plain as the boy was handsome. She resembled her grandmother, Felice Venable, without a trace of that redoubtable matron’s former beauty. But she had that almost indefinable thing known as style. At the age of two she wore with undeniable chic the rather clumsy little garments that Sabra had so painstakingly made for her; and when she was dressed, for the first time, in one of the exquisitely hemstitched, tucked and embroidered white frocks that her grandmother had wrought for her, that gifted though reluctant needlewomen said, tartly, “Thank God, she’s got style, at least. She’ll have to make out with that.”
All in all, Sabra found herself joyously returning to the barren burning country to which, four years earlier, she had gone in such dread and terror. She resented her mother’s do-this, do-that. She saw Felice Venable now, no longer as a power, an authority in all matters of importance, but as a sallow old lady who tottered on heels that were too high and who, as she sat talking, pleated and unpleated with tremulous fingers the many ruffles of her white dimity wrapper. The matriarch had lost her crown. Sabra was matriarch now of her own little kingdom; and already she was planning to extend that realm beyond and beyond its present confines into who knows what vastness of demesne.
She decided that she must take the children more than ever in hand. No more of this talk of Indians, of freedom, or equality of man. She did not realize (it being long before the day of psychology as applied so glibly to the training of children) that she was, so far as Cim was concerned, years too late. At eight his character was formed. She had taught him the things that Felice Venable had taught her—stand up straight; eat your bread and butter; wash your hands; say how do you do to the lady; one and one are two; somebody has been eating my porridge, said the little wee bear. But Yancey had taught him poetry far beyond his years, and accustomed his ears to the superb cadences of the Bible; Yancey had told him, bit by bit, and all unconsciously, the saga of the settling of the great Southwest.
“Cowboys wear big sombreros to shield their faces from the rain and the sun when they’re riding the range, and the snow from dripping down their backs. He wears a handkerchief knotted at the back of the neck and hanging down in front so that he can wipe the sweat and dust from his face with it, and then there it is, open, drying in the wind; and in a dust storm he pulls it over his mouth and nose, and in a blizzard it keeps his nose and chin from freezing. He wears chaps, with the hairy side out, to keep his legs warm in winter and to protect them from being torn by chaparral and cactus thorns in summer. His boots are high heeled to keep his feet from slipping in the stirrups when he has to work standing in the saddle, and because he can sink them in the sod when he’s off his horse and roping a plunging bronc. He totes a six-shooter to keep the other fellow from shooting.”
The child’s eyes were enormous, glowing, enthralled. Yancey told him the story of the buffalo; he talked endlessly of the Indians. He even taught him some words of Comanche, which is the court language of the Indian. He put him on a horse at the age of six. A sentimentalist and a romantic, he talked to the boy of the sunset; of Spanish gold; of the wild days of the Cimarron and the empire so nearly founded there. The boy loved his mother dutifully, and as a matter of course, as a child loves the fount of food, of tender care, of shelter. But his father he worshiped, he adored.
Sabra’s leave-taking held one regret, one pain. Mother Bridget had died two weeks before Sabra arrived in Wichita. It was not until she learned this sad news that Sabra realized how tremendously she had counted on telling her tale of Osage to the nun. She would have understood. She would have laughed at the story of the ten barrels of water; of the wild cowboy’s kiss in the road; she would have sympathized with Sabra’s terror during that Sunday church meeting. She had known that very life a half century ago, there in Kansas. Sabra, during her visit, did not go to the Mission School. She could not.
She had meant, at the last, to find occasion to inform her mother and the minor Venables that it was she who ironed Yancey’s fine white linen shirts. But she was not a spiteful woman. And she reflected that this might be construed as a criticism of her husband.
So, gladly, eagerly, Sabra went back to the wilds she once had despised.