Before the Katy pulled in at the Osage station (the railroad actually had been extended, true to Dixie Lee’s prediction, from Wahoo to Osage and beyond) Sabra’s eyes were searching the glaring wooden platform. Len Orson, the chatty and accommodating conductor, took Donna in his arms and stood with her at the foot of the car steps. His heavy gold plated watch chain, as broad as a cable, with its concomitant Masonic charm, elk’s tooth, gold pencil, and peach pit carved in the likeness of an ape, still held Donna enthralled, though she had snatched at it whenever he passed their seat or stood to relate the gossip of the Territory to Sabra. She was hungry for news, and Len was a notorious fishwife. Now, as she stepped off the train, Sabra’s face wore that look of radiant expectancy characteristic of the returned traveler, confident of a welcome.
“Well, I guess I know somebody’ll be pretty sorry to see you,” Len said, archly. He looked about for powerful waiting arms in which to deposit Donna. The engine bell clanged, the whistle tooted. His kindly and inquisitive blue eyes swept the station platform. He plumped Donna, perforce, into Sabra’s strangely slack arms, and planted one foot, in its square-toed easy black shoe, onto the car step in the nick of time, the other leg swinging out behind him as the train moved on.
Yancey was not there. The stark red-painted wooden station sat blistering in the sun. Yancey simply was not there. Not only that, the station platform, usually graced by a score of vacuous faces and limp figures gathered to witness the exciting event of the Katy’s daily arrival and departure, was bare. Even the familiar figure of Pat Leary, the station agent, who always ran out in his shirt sleeves to wrestle such freight or express as was left on the Osage platform, could not be seen. From within the ticket office came the sound of his telegraph instrument. Its click was busy; was frantic. It chattered unceasingly in the hot afternoon stillness.
Sabra felt sick and weak. Something was wrong. She left her boxes and bags and parcels on the platform where Len Orsen had obligingly dumped them. Half an hour before their arrival in Osage she had entrusted the children to the care of a fellow passenger while she had gone to the washroom to put on one of the new dresses made in Wichita and bearing the style cachet of Kansas City: green, with cream colored ruchings at the throat and wrists, and a leghorn hat with pink roses. She had anticipated the look in Yancey’s gray eyes at sight of it. She had made the children spotless and threatened them with dire things if they sullied their splendor before their father should see them.
And now he was not there.
With Donna in her arms and Cim at her heels she hurried toward the sound of the clicking. And as she went her eyes still scanned the dusty red road that led to the station, for sight of a great figure in a white sombrero, its coat tails swooping as it came.
She peered in at the station window. Pat Leary was bent over his telegraph key. A smart tight little Irishman who had come to the Territory with the railroad section crew when the Katy was being built. Station agent now, and studying law at night.
“Mr. Leary! Mr. Leary! Have you seen Yancey?” He looked up at her absently, his hand still on the key. Click … click … clickclickclickety—clicketyclickclick.
“Wha’ say?”
“I’m Mrs. Cravat. I just got off the Katy. Where’s my husband? Where’s Yancey?”
He clicked on a moment longer; then wiped his wet forehead with his forearm protected by the black sateen sleevelet. “Ain’t you heard?”
“No,” whispered Sabra, with stiff lips that seemed no part of her. Then, in a voice rising to a scream, “No! No! No! What? Is he dead?”
The Irishman came over to her then, as she crouched at the window. “Oh, no, ma’am. Yancey’s all right. He ain’t hurt to speak of. Just a nick in the arm—and left arm at that.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Don’t take on. You goin’ to faint or——?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I been so busy.… Yancey got the Kid, you know. Killed him. The whole town’s gone crazy. Pitched battle right there on Pawhuska Avenue in front of the bank, and bodies layin’ around like a battlefield. I’m sending it out. I ain’t got much time, but I’ll give you an idea. Biggest thing that’s happened in the history of the Territory—or the whole Southwest, for that matter. Shouldn’t wonder if they’d make Yancey President. Governor, anyway. Seems Yancey was out hunting up in the Hills last Thursday——”
“Thursday! But that’s the day the paper comes out.”
“Well, the Wigwam ain’t been so regular since you been away.” She allowed that to pass without comment. “Up in the Hills he stumbles on Doc Valliant, drunk, but not so drunk he don’t recognize Yancey. Funny thing about Doc Valliant. He can be drunker’n a fool, but one part of his brain stays clear as a diamond. I seen him take a bullet out of Luke Slaughter once and sew him up when he was so drunk he didn’t know his right hand from his left, or where he was at, but he done it. What? Oh, yeh—well, he tells Yancey, drunk as he is, that he’s right in the camp where the Kid and his gang is hiding out. One of them was hurt bad in that last Santa Fé hold-up at Cimarron. Like to died, only they sent for Doc, and he came and saved him. They got close to thirty thousand that trick, and it kind of went to their head. Valliant overheard them planning to ride in here to Osage, like to-day, and hold up the Citizens’ National in broad daylight like the Kid always does. They was already started. Well, Yancey off on his horse to warn the town, and knows he’s got to detour or he’ll come on the gang and they’ll smell a rat. Well, say, he actually did meet ’em. Came on ’em, accidental. The Kid sees him and grins that wolf grin of his and sings out, ‘Yancey, you still runnin’ that paper of yourn down at Osage?’ Yancey says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, say,’ he says, ‘how much is it?’ Yancey says a dollar a year. The Kid reaches down and throws Yancey a shot sack with ten silver dollars in it. ‘Send me the paper for ten years,’ he says. ‘Where to?’ Yancey asks him. Well, say, the Kid laughs that wolf laugh of his again and he says, ‘I never thought of that. I’ll have to leave you know later.’ Well, Yancey, looking as meek and mealy-mouthed as a baby, he rides his way, he’s got a little book of poems in his hand and he’s reading as he rides, or pretending to, but first chance he sees he cuts across the Hills, puts his horse through the gullies and into the draws and across the scrub oaks like he was a circus horse or a centipede or something. He gets into Osage, dead tired and his horse in a lather, ten minutes before the Kid and his gang sweeps down Pawhuska Avenue, their six-shooters barking like a regiment was coming, and makes a rush for the bank. But the town is expecting them. Say! Blood!”
Sabra waited for no more. She turned. And as she turned she saw coming down the road in a cloud of dust a grotesque scarecrow, all shanks and teeth and rolling eyes. Black Isaiah.
“No’m, Miss Sabra, he ain’t hurt—not what yo’ rightly call hurt. No, ma’am. Jes’ a nip in de arm, and he got it slung in a black silk hank’chief and looks right sma’t handsome. They wouldn’t let him alone noways. Ev’ybody in town they shakin’ his hand caze he shoot that shot dat kill de Kid. An’ you know what he do then, Miss Sabra? He kneel down an’ he cry like a baby.… Le’ me tote dis yere valise. Ah kin tote Miss Donna, too. My, she sho’ growed!”
The newspaper office, the print shop, her parlor, her kitchen, her bedroom, were packed with men in boots, spurs, sombreros; men in overalls; with women; with children. Mrs. Wyatt was there—the Philomatheans as one woman were there; Dixie Lee actually; everyone but—sinisterly—Louie Hefner.
“Well, Mis’ Cravat, I guess you must be pretty proud of him! … This is a big day for Osage. I guess Oklahoma City knows this town’s on the map now, all right.… You missed the shootin’, Mis’ Cravat, but you’re in time to help Yancey celebrate.… Say, the Santa Fé alone offered five thousand dollars for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive. Yancey gets it, all right. And the Katy done the same. And they’s a government price on his head, and the Citizens’ National is making up a purse. You’ll be ridin’ in your own carriage, settin’ in silks, from now.”
Yancey was standing at his desk in the Wigwam office. His back was against the desk, as though he were holding this crowd at bay instead of welcoming them as congratulatory guests. His long locks hung limp on his shoulders. His face was white beneath the tan, like silver under lacquer. His great head lolled on his chest. His left arm lay in a black and scarlet silk sling made of one of his more piratical handkerchiefs.
He looked up as she came in, and at the look in his face she forgave him his neglect of her; forgave him the house full of what Felice Venable would term riffraff and worse; his faithlessness to the Wigwam. Donna, tired and frightened, had set up a wail. Cim, bewildered, had gone on a rampage. But as Yancey took a stumbling step toward her she had only one child, and that one needed her. She thrust Donna again into Isaiah’s arms; left Cim whirling among the throng; ran toward him. She was in his great arms, but it was her arms that seemed to sustain him.
“Sabra. Sugar. Send them away. I’m so tired. Oh, God, I’m so tired.”
Next day they exhibited the body of the Kid in the new plate glass show window of Hefner’s Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlors. All Osage came to view him, all the county came to view him; they rode in on trains, on horses, in wagons, in ox carts for miles and miles around. The Kid. The boy who, in his early twenties, had sent no one knew how many men to their death—whose name was the symbol for terror and daring and merciless marauding throughout the Southwest. Even in the East—in New York—the name of the Kid was known. Stories had been written about him. He was, long before his death, a mythical figure. And now he, together with Clay McNulty, his lieutenant, lay side by side, quite still, quite passive. The crowd was so dense that it threatened Louie Hefner’s window. He had to put up rope barriers to protect it and when the mob surged through these he stationed guards with six-shooters, and there was talk of calling out the militia from Fort Tipton. Sabra said it was disgusting, uncivilized. She forbade Cim to go within five hundred yards of the place—kept him, in fact, virtually a prisoner in the yard. Isaiah she could not hold. His lean black body could be seen squirming in and out of the crowds; his ebony face, its eyes popping, was always in the front row of the throng gloating before Hefner’s window. He became, in fact, a sort of guide and unofficial lecturer, holding forth upon the Kid, his life, his desperate record, the battle in which he met his death in front of the bank he had meant to despoil.
“Well, you got to hand it to him,” the men said, gazing their fill. “He wasn’t no piker. When he held up a train or robbed a bank or shot up a posse it was always in broad daylight, by God. Middle of the day he’d come riding into town. No nitro-glycerin for him, or shootin’ behind fence posts and trees in the dark. Nosiree! Out in the open, and takin’ a bigger chance than them that was robbed. Ride! Say, you couldn’t tell which was him and which was horse. They was one piece. And shoot! It wa’n’t shootin’. It was magic. They say he’s got half a million in gold cached away up in the Hills.”
For weeks, for months, the hills were honeycombed with prowlers in search for this buried treasure.
Sabra did a strange, a terrible thing. Yancey would not go near the grisly window. Sabra upheld him; denounced the gaping crowd as scavengers and ghouls. Then, suddenly, at the last minute, as the sun was setting blood red across the prairie, she walked out of the house, down the road, as if impelled, as if in a trance, like a sleep walker, and stood before Hefner’s window. The crowd made way for her respectfully. They knew her. This was the wife of Yancey Cravat, the man whose name appeared in headlines in every newspaper throughout the United States, and even beyond the ocean.
They had dressed the two bandits in new cheap black suits of store clothes, square in cut, clumsy, so that they stood woodenly away from the lean hard bodies. Clay McNulty’s face had a faintly surprised look. His long sandy mustaches drooped over a mouth singularly sweet and resigned. But the face of the boy was fixed in a smile that brought the lips in a sardonic snarl away from the wolf-like teeth. He looked older in death than he had in life, for his years had been too few for lines such as death’s fingers usually erase; and the eyes, whose lightning glance had pierced you through and through like one of the bullets from his own dreaded six-shooters, now were extinguished forever behind the waxen shades of his eyelids.
It was at the boy that Sabra looked; and having looked she turned and walked back to the house.
They gave them a decent funeral and a burial with everything in proper order, and when the minister refused to read the service over these two sinners Yancey consented to do it and did, standing there with the fresh-turned mounds of red Oklahoma clay sullying his fine high-heeled boots, and the sun blazing down upon the curling locks of his uncovered head.
“ ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.… His hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.… The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart.… Fools make mock at sin.…’ ”
They put up two rough wooden slabs, marking the graves. But souvenir hunters with little bright knives soon made short work of those. The two mounds sank lower, lower. Soon nothing marked this spot on the prairie to differentiate it from the red clay that stretched for miles all about it.
They sent to Yancey, by mail, in checks, and through solemn committees in store clothes and white collars, the substantial money rewards that, for almost five years, had been offered by the Santa Fé road, the M.K. & T., the government itself, and various banks, for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive.
Yancey refused every penny of it. The committees, the townspeople, the county, were shocked and even offended. Sabra, tight lipped, at last broke out in protest.
“We could have a decent house—a new printing press—Cim’s education—Donna——”
“I don’t take money for killing a man,” Yancey repeated, to each offer of money. The committees and the checks went back as they had come.