Dixie Lee’s girls were riding by on their daily afternoon parade. Sabra recognized their laughter and the easy measured clatter of their horses’ hoofs before they came into view. She knew it was Dixie Lee’s girls. Somehow, the virtuous women of Osage did not laugh much, though Sabra did not put this thought into words, ever in her mind. She glanced up now as they drove by. She was seated at her desk by the window in the front office of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Their plumes, their parasols, their brilliant-hued dresses made a gay garden of color in the monotony of Pawhuska Avenue. They rode in open phaëtons, but without the usual top, so that they had only their parasols to shade their brightly painted faces from the ardent Southwest sun. The color of the parasols and plumes and dresses was changed from day to day, but they always were done in ensemble effect. One day the eyes of Osage’s male population were dazzled (and its female population’s eyes affronted) by a burst of rosy splendor shading from pale pink to scarlet. The next day they would shade from palest lavender to deepest purple. The next, from delicate lemon to orange; the day following they ran the gamut of green. They came four by four, and usually one in each carriage handled the reins, though occasionally a Negro driver occupied the front seat alone. They were not boisterous. Indeed, they conducted themselves in seemly enough fashion except perhaps for the little bursts of laughter and for the fact that they were generous with the ankles beneath the ruffled skirts. Often they carried dolls in their arms. Sometimes—rarely—they called to each other. Their voices were high and curiously unformed, like the voices of little children, and yet with a metallic note in them.
“Madge, looka! When we get to the end of Pawhuska we’ll race you to Coley’s Gulch and back.” These afternoon races became almost daily sporting events, and the young bloods of Osage got into the habit of stationing themselves along the road to bet on the pale pink plumes or the deep rose plumes.
“Heh, go it, Clemmie! Whip him up, Carmen. Give him the whip! Come on! Whoop-ee! Yi!” Plumes whirling, parasols bobbing, skirts flying, shrill shouts and screams of laughter from the edge of town. But on the return drive their behavior was again seemly enough, their cheeks flushed with a natural color beneath the obvious red.
Sabra’s face darkened now as she saw them driving slowly by. Dixie Lee never drove with them. Sabra knew where she was this afternoon. She was down in the back room of the Osage First National Bank talking business to the President, Murch Rankin. The business men of the town were negotiating for the bringing of the packing house and a plough works and a watch factory to Osage. Any one of these industries required a substantial bonus. The spirit of the day was the boom spirit. Boom the town of Osage. Dixie Lee was essentially a commercial woman—shrewd, clear headed. She had made a great success of her business. It was one of the crude town’s industries, and now she, as well as the banker, the hardware man, the proprietor of the furniture store, the meat market, the clothing store, contributed her share toward coaxing new industries to favor Osage. That way lay prosperity.
Dixie Lee was a personage in the town. Visitors came to her house now from the cities and counties round about. She had built for herself and her thriving business the first brick structure in the wooden town; a square, solid, and imposing two-story house, its bricks formed from the native Oklahoma red clay. Cal Bixby had followed close on it with the Bixby Block on Pawhuska Avenue, but Dixie Lee had led the way. She had commissioned Louie Hefner to buy her red velvet and gold furniture and her long gilt-framed mirrors, her scarlet deep-pile carpet—that famous velvet-pile carpet in which Shanghai Wiley, that bearded, cultured, and magnetic barbarian, said he sank so deep that for a terrified moment he fell into a panic, being unable to tell which was red carpet and which his own flowing red beard. Dixie herself had gone East for her statues and pictures. The new house had been opened with a celebration the like of which had never been seen in the Southwest. Sabra Cravat, mentioning no names, had had an editorial about it in which the phrases “insult to the fair womanhood of America” and “orgy rivaling the Bacchanalian revels of history” (Yancey’s library stood her in good stead these days) figured prominently. Both the Philomathean Society and the Twentieth Century Culture Club had, for the duration of one meeting at least, deserted literature and culture for the discussion of the more vital topic of Dixie Lee’s new mansion.
It was—this red brick brothel—less sinister than these good and innocent women suspected. Dixie Lee, now a woman of thirty or more, ruled it with an iron hand. Within it obtained certain laws and rules of conduct so rigid as to be almost prim. In a crude, wild, and nearly lawless country the brick mansion occupied a strange place, filled a want foreign to its original purpose. It was, in a way, a club, a rendezvous, a salon. For hundreds of men who came there it was all they had ever known of richness, of color, of luxury. The red and gold, the plush and silk, the perfume, the draperies, the white arms, the gleaming shoulders sank deep into their hard-bitten senses, long starved from years on wind-swept ranches, plains dust bedeviled, prairies baked barren by the fierce Southwest sun. Here they lolled, sunk deep in rosy comfort, while they talked Territory politics, swapped yarns of the old cattle days, played cards, drank wines which tasted like sweet prickling water to their whisky-scarred palates. They kissed these women, embraced them fiercely, thought tenderly of many of them, and frequently married them; and these women, once married, settled down contentedly to an almost slavish domesticity.
A hard woman, Dixie Lee; a bad woman. Sabra was morally right in her attitude toward her. Yet this woman, as well as Sabra, filled her place in the early life of the Territory.
Now, as the laughter sounded nearer and the equipages came within her view, Sabra, seated at her desk in the newspaper office, put down the soft pencil with which she had been filling sheet after sheet of copy paper. She wrote easily now, with no pretense to style, but concisely and with an excellent sense of news values. The Oklahoma Wigwam had flourished in these last five years of her proprietorship. She was thinking seriously of making it a daily instead of a weekly; of using the entire building on Pawhuska Avenue for the newspaper plant and building a proper house for herself and the two children on one of the residence streets newly sprung up—streets that boasted neatly painted houses and elm and cottonwood trees in the front yards.
Someone came up the steps of the little porch and into the office. It was Mrs. Wyatt. She often brought club notices and social items to the Wigwam: rather fancied herself as a writer; a born woman’s club corresponding secretary.
“Well!” she exclaimed now, simply, but managing to put enormous bite and significance into the monosyllable. Her glance followed Sabra’s. Together the two women, tight lipped, condemnatory, watched the gay parade of Dixie Lee’s girls go by.
The flashing company disappeared. A whiff of patchouli floated back to the two women standing by the open window. Their nostrils lifted in disdain. The sound of the horses’ hoofs grew fainter.
“It’s a disgrace to the community”—Mrs. Wyatt’s voice took on its platform note—“and an insult to every wife and mother in the Territory. There ought to be a law.”
Sabra turned away from the window. Her eyes sought the orderly rows of books, bound neatly in tan and red—Yancey’s law books, so long unused now, except, perhaps, for occasional newspaper reference. Her face set itself in lines of resolve. “Perhaps there is.”
It had taken almost three of those five years to bring those lines into Sabra Cravat’s face. They were not, after all, lines. Her face was smooth, her skin still fresh in spite of dust and alkali water and sun and wind. It was, rather, that a certain hardening process had taken place—a crystallization. Yancey had told her, tenderly, that she was a charming little fool, and she had believed it—though perhaps with subconscious reservations. It was not until he left her, and the years rolled round without him, that she developed her powers. The sombrero had ridden gayly away. The head under the sunbonnet had held itself high in spite of hints, innuendoes, gossip.
A man like Yancey Cravat—spectacular, dramatic, impulsive—has a thousand critics, scores of bitter enemies. As the weeks had gone by and Yancey failed to return—had failed to write—rumor, clouded by scandal, leaped like prairie fire from house to house in Osage, from town to town in the Oklahoma Country, over the Southwest, indeed. All the old stories were revived, and their ugly red tongues licked a sordid path through the newly opened land.
They say he is living with the Cherokee squaw who is really his wife.
They say he was seen making the Run in the Kickapoo Land Opening in 1895.
They say he killed a man in the Cherokee Strip Run and was caught by a posse and hung.
They say he got a section of land, sold it at a high figure, and was seen lording it around the bar of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, in his white sombrero and his Prince Albert coat.
They say Dixie Lee is his real wife, and he left her when she was seventeen, came to Wichita, and married Sabra Venable; and he is the one who has set Dixie up in the brick house.
They say he drank five quarts of whisky one night and died and is buried in an unmarked grave in Horseshoe Ranch, where the Doolin gang held forth.
They say he is really the leader of the Doolin gang.
They say. They say. They say.
It is impossible to know how Sabra survived those first terrible weeks that lengthened into months that lengthened into years. There was in her the wiry endurance of the French Marcys; the pride of the Southern Venables. Curiously enough, in spite of all that had happened to her she still had that virginal look—that chastity of lip, that clearness of the eye, that purity of brow. Men come back to the women who look as Sabra Cravat looked, but the tempests of men’s love pass them by.
She told herself that he was dead. She told the world that he was dead. She knew, by some deep and unerring instinct, that he was alive. Donna had been so young when he left that he now was all but wiped from her memory. But Cim, strangely enough, spoke of Yancey Cravat as though he were in the next room. “My father says …” Sometimes, when Sabra saw the boy coming toward her with that familiar swinging stride, his head held down and a little thrust forward, she was wrenched by a physical pang of agony that was almost nausea.
She ran the paper competently; wrung from it a decent livelihood for herself and the two children. When it had no longer been possible to keep secret from her parents the fact of Yancey’s prolonged absence, Felice Venable had descended upon her prepared to gather to the family bosom her deserted child and to bring her, together with her offspring, back to the parental home. Lewis Venable had been too frail and ill to accompany his wife, so Felice had brought with her the more imposing among the Venables, Goforths, and Vians who chanced to be visiting the Wichita house at the time of her departure. Osage had looked upon these stately figures with much awe, but Sabra’s reception of them had been as coolly cordial as her rejection of their plans for her future was firm.
“I intend to stay right here in Osage,” she announced, quietly, but in a tone that even Felice Venable recognized as inflexible, “and run the paper, and bring up my children as their father would have expected them to be brought up.”
“Their father!” Felice Venable repeated, in withering accents.
The boy Cimarron, curiously sensitive to sounds and moods, stood before his grandmother, his head thrust forward, his handsome eyes glowing. “My father is the most famous man in Oklahoma. The Indians call him Buffalo Head.”
Felice Venable pounced on this. “If that’s what you mean by bringing them up as their father …”
The meeting degenerated into one of those family bickerings. “I do wish, Mamma, that you wouldn’t repeat everything I say and twist it by your tone into something poisonous.”
“I say! I can’t help it if the things you say sound ridiculous when they are repeated. I simply mean——”
“I don’t care what you mean. I mean to stay here in Osage until Yancey—until——” She never finished that sentence.
The Osage society notes became less simple. From bare accounts of quiltings, sewing bees, and church sociables they blossomed into flowery imitations of the metropolitan dailies’ descriptions of social events. Refreshments were termed elegant. Osage matrons turned from the sturdy baked beans, cole slaw, and veal loaf of an earlier day to express themselves in food terms culled from the pictures in the household magazines. They heard about fruit salads. They built angel-food cakes whose basis was the whites of thirteen eggs, and their husbands, at breakfast, said, “What makes these scrambled eggs so yellow?” Countrified costumes were described in terms of fashion. The wilted prairie flowers that graced weddings and parties were transformed into rare hothouse blooms by the magic touch of the Oklahoma Wigwam hand press. Sabra cannily published all the brilliant social news items that somewhat belatedly came her way via the ready-print and the paper’s scant outside news service.
Newport. Oct. 4—One of the most brilliant weddings which Newport has seen for many years was solemnized in old Trinity Church today. The principals were Miss Georgina Harwood and Mr. Harold Blake, both members of families within the charmed circle of the 400. The bride wore a gown of ivory satin with draperies and rufflings of rarest point lace, the lace veil being caught with a tiara of pearls and diamonds. After the ceremony a magnificent collation …
The feminine population of Osage—of the county—felt that it had seen the ivory satin, the point lace, the tiara of pearls and diamonds, as these splendors moved down the aisle of old Trinity on the person of Miss Georgina Harwood of Newport. They derived from it the vicarious satisfaction that a dieting dyspeptic gets from reading the cook book.
Sabra was, without being fully aware of it, a power that shaped the social aspect of this crude Southwestern town. The Ladies of the new Happy Hour Club, on her declining to become a member, pleading lack of time and press of work (as well she might), made her an honorary member, resolved to have her influential name on their club roster, somehow. They were paying unconscious tribute to Oklahoma’s first feminist. She still ran the paper single handed, with the aid of Jesse Rickey, the most expert printer in the Southwest (when sober), and as good as the average when drunk.
Sabra, serene in the knowledge that the attacked could do little to wreak vengeance on a woman, printed stories and statements which for boldness and downright effrontery would have earned a male editor a horsewhipping. She publicly scolded the street loafers who, in useless sombreros and six-shooters and boots and spurs, relics of a bygone day, lolled limply on Pawhuska Avenue corners, spitting tobacco juice into the gutter. Sometimes she borrowed Yancey’s vigorous and picturesque phraseology. She denounced a local politician as being too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse, and the phrase stuck, and in the end defeated him. Law, order, the sanctity of the home, prunes, prisms. Though the Gyp Hills and the Osage Hills still were as venomous with outlaws as the Plains were with rattlesnakes; though the six-shooter still was as ordinary a part of the Oklahoma male costume as boots or trousers; though outlawry still meant stealing a horse rather than killing a man; though the Territory itself had been settled and peopled, in thousands of cases, by men who had come to it, not in a spirit of adventure, but from cowardice, rapacity, or worse, Sabra Cravat and the other basically conventional women of the community were working unconsciously, yet with a quiet ferocity, toward that day when one of them would be able to say, standing in a doorway with a stiff little smile:
“Awfully nice of you to come.”
“Awfully nice of you to ask me,” the other would reply.
When that day came, Osage would no longer need to feel itself looked down upon by Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
Slowly, slowly, certain figures began to take on the proportions of personalities. No one had arisen in the Territory to fill Yancey Cravat’s romantic boots. Pat Leary was coming on as a Territory lawyer, with an office in the Bixby Block and the railroads on which he had worked as section hand now consulting him on points of Territorial law. In his early railroad days he had married an Osage girl named Crook Nose. People shook their heads over this and said that he regretted it now, and that a lawyer could never hope to get on with this marital millstone round his neck.
There still was very little actual money in the Territory. People traded this for that. Sabra often translated subscriptions to the Oklahoma Wigwam—and even advertising space—into terms of fresh vegetables, berries, wild turkey, quail, prairie chickens, dress lengths, and shoes and stockings for the children.
Sol Levy’s store, grown to respectable proportions now, provided Sabra with countless necessities in return for the advertisement which, sent through the country via the Oklahoma Wigwam, urged its readers to Trade at Sol Levy’s. Visit the Only Zoo in the Territory. This invitation, a trifle bewildering to the uninitiated, was meant to be taken literally. In the back of his store Sol Levy kept a sizable menagerie. It had started through one of those chance encounters. A gaunt and bearded plainsman had come into the store one day with the suggestion that the proprietor trade a pair of pants for a bear cub. The idea had amused Sol Levy; then he had glanced out into the glare of Pawhuska Avenue and had seen the man’s ocherous wife, his litter of spindling children, huddled together in a crazy wagon attached by what appeared to be ropes, strings, and bits of nail and wire, to horses so cadaverous that his amusement was changed to pity. He gave the man the pants, stockings for the children, and—the sentimentalist in him—a piece of bright-colored cotton stuff for the woman.
The bear cub, little larger than a puppy, had been led gingerly into the welter of packing cases, straw, excelsior, and broken china which was the Levy Mercantile Company’s back yard, and there tied with a piece of rope which he immediately bit in two. Five minutes later a local housewife, deep in the purchase of a dress length of gingham, and feeling something rubbing against her stout calves, looked down to see the bear cub sociably gnawing his way through her basket of provisions, carelessly placed on the floor by her side.
One week later the grateful ranger brought in a pair of catamounts. A crude wire cage was built. There were added coyotes, prairie dogs, an eagle. The zoo became famous, and all the town came to see it. It brought trade to the Mercantile Company, and free advertising. It was the nucleus for the zoo which, fifteen years later, Sol Levy shyly presented to the Osage City Park, and which contained every wild thing that the Southwest had known, from the buffalo to the rattlesnake.
In a quiet, dreamy way Sol Levy had managed to buy a surprising amount of Osage real estate by now. He owned the lot on which his store stood, the one just south of it, and, among other pieces, the building and lot which comprised the site of the Wigwam and the Cravat house. In the year following Yancey’s departure Sabra’s economic survival was made possible only through the almost shame-faced generosity of this quiet, sad-eyed man.
“I’ve got it all down in my books,” Sabra would say, proudly. “You know that it will all be paid back some day.”
He began in the Oklahoma Wigwam a campaign of advertising out of all proportions to his needs, and Sabra’s debt to him began to shrink to the vanishing point. She got into the habit of talking to him about her business problems, and he advised her shrewdly. When she was utterly discouraged, he would say, not triumphantly, but as one who states an irrefutable and not particularly happy fact:
“Some day, Mrs. Cravat, you and I will look back on this and we will laugh—but not very loud.”
“How do you mean—laugh?”
The little curious cast came into his eyes. “Oh—I will be very rich, and you will be very famous. And Yancey——”
“Yancey!” The word was wrenched from her like a cry.
“They will tell stories about Yancey until he will grow into a legend. He will be part of the history of the Southwest. They will remember him and write about him when all these mealy-faced governors are dead and gone and forgotten. They will tell the little children about him, and they will dispute about him—he did this, he did that; he was like this, he was like that. You will see.”
Sabra thought of her own children, who knew so little of their father. Donna, a thin secretive child of almost seven now, with dark, straight black hair and a sallow skin like Yancey’s; Cim, almost thirteen, moody, charming, imaginative. Donna was more like her grandmother Felice Venable than her own mother; Cim resembled Yancey so strongly in mood, manner, and emotions as to have almost no trace of Sabra. She wondered, with a pang, if she had failed to impress herself on them because of her absorption in the town, in the newspaper, in the resolve to succeed. She got out a photograph of Yancey that she had hidden away because to see it was to feel a stab of pain, and had it framed, and hung it on the wall where the children could see it daily. He was shown in the familiar costume—the Prince Albert, the white sombrero, the six-shooters, the boots, the spurs, the long black locks curling beneath the hat brim, the hypnotic eyes startling you with their arresting gaze, so that it was as if he were examining you rather than that you were seeing his likeness in a photograph. One slim foot, in its high-heeled boot, was slightly advanced, the coat tails flared, the whole picture was somehow endowed with a sense of life and motion.
“Your father——” Sabra would begin, courageously, resolved to make him live again in the minds of the children. Donna was not especially interested. Cim said, “I know it,” and capped her story with a tale of his own in which Yancey’s feat of derring-do outrivaled any swashbuckling escapade of D’Artagnan.
“Oh, but Cim, that’s not true! You mustn’t believe stories like that about your father.”
“It is true. Isaiah told me. I guess he ought to know.” And then the question she dreaded. “When are Isaiah and Father coming back?”
She could answer, somehow, evasively, about Yancey, for her instinct concerning him was sure and strong. But at the fate that had overtaken the Negro boy she cowered, afraid even to face the thought of it. For the thing that had happened to the black boy was so dreadful, so remorseless that when the truth of it came to Sabra she felt all this little world of propriety, of middle-class Middle West convention that she had built up about her turning to ashes under the sudden flaring fire of hidden savagery. She tried never to think of it, but sometimes, at night, the hideous thing took possession of her, and she was swept by such horror that she crouched there under the bedclothes, clammy and shivering with the sweat of utter fear. Her hatred of the Indians now amounted to an obsession.
It was in the fourth year of Yancey’s absence that, coming suddenly and silently into the kitchen from the newspaper office, where she had been busy as usual, she saw Arita Red Feather twisted in a contortion in front of the table where she had been at work. Her face was grotesque, was wet, with agony. It was the agony which only one kind of pain can bring to a woman’s face. The Indian girl was in the pangs of childbirth. Even as she saw her Sabra realized that something about her had vaguely disturbed her in the past few weeks. Yet she had not known, had not dreamed of this. The loose garment which the girl always wore—her strong natural slenderness—the erect dignity of her Indian carriage—the stoicism of her race—had served to keep secret her condition. She had had, too, Sabra now realized in a flash, a way of being out of the room when her mistress was in it; busy in the pantry when Sabra was in the kitchen; busy in the kitchen when Sabra was in the dining room; in and out like a dark, swift shadow.
“Arita! Here. Come. Lie down. I’ll send for your father—your mother.” Her father was Big Knee, well known and something of a power in the Osage tribe. Of the tribal officers he was one of the eight members of the Council and as such was part of the tribe’s governing body.
Dreadful as the look on Arita Red Feather’s face had been, it was now contorted almost beyond recognition. “No! No!” She broke into a storm of pleading in her own tongue. Her eyes were black pools of agony. Sabra had never thought that one of pure Indian blood would thus give way to any emotion before a white person.
She put the girl to bed. She sent Isaiah for Dr. Valliant, who luckily was in town and sober. He went to work quietly, efficiently, aided by Sabra, making the best of such crude and hasty necessities as came to hand. The girl made no outcry. Her eyes were a dull, dead black; her face was rigid. Sabra, passing from the kitchen to the girl’s bedroom with hot water, cloths, blankets, saw Isaiah crouched in a corner by the wood box. He looked up at her mutely. His face was a curious ash gray. As Sabra looked at him she knew.
The child was a boy. His hair was coarse and kinky. His nose was wide. His lips were thick. He was a Negro child. Doc Valliant looked at him as Sabra held the writhing red-purple bundle in her arms.
“This is a bad business.”
“I’ll send for her parents. I’ll speak to Isaiah. They can marry.”
“Marry! Don’t you know?”
Something in his voice startled her. “What?”
“The Osages don’t marry Negroes. It’s forbidden.”
“Why, lots of them have. You see Negroes who are Indians every day. On the street.”
“Not Osages. Seminoles, yes. And Creeks, and Choctaws, and even Chickasaws. But the Osages, except for intermarriage with whites, have kept the tribe pure.”
This information seemed to Sabra to be unimportant and slightly silly. Purity of the tribe, indeed! Osages! She resolved to be matter of fact and sensible now that the shocking event was at hand, waiting to be dealt with. She herself felt guilty, for this thing had happened in her own house. She should have foreseen danger and avoided it. Isaiah had been a faithful black child in her mind, whereas he was, in reality, a man grown.
Dr. Valliant had finished his work. The girl lay on the bed, her dull black eyes fixed on them; silent, watchful, hopeless. Isaiah crouched in the kitchen. The child lay now in Sabra’s arms. Donna and Cim were, fortunately, asleep, for it was now long past midnight. The tense excitement past, the whole affair seemed to Sabra sordid, dreadful. What would the town say? What would the members of the Philomathean Club and the Twentieth Century Culture Club think?
Doc Valliant came over to her and looked down at the queer shriveled morsel in her arms. “We must let his father see him.”
Sabra shrank. “Oh, no!”
He took the baby from her and turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll do it. Let me have a drink of whisky, will you, Sabra? I’m dead tired.”
She went past him into the dining room, without a glance at the Negro boy cowering in the kitchen. Doc Valliant followed her. As she poured a drink of Yancey’s store of whisky, almost untouched since he had left, she heard Valliant’s voice, very gentle, and then the sound of Isaiah’s blubbering. All the primness in her was outraged. Her firm mouth took on a still straighter line. Valliant took the child back to the Indian girl’s bed and placed it by her side. He stumbled with weariness as he entered the dining room where Sabra stood at the table. As he reached for the drink Sabra saw that his hand shook a little as Yancey’s used to do in that same gesture. She must not think of that. She must not think of that.
“There’s no use talking now, Doctor, about what the Osages do or don’t do that you say is so pure. The baby’s born. I shall send for the old man—what’s his name?—Big Knee. As soon as Arita can be moved he must take her home. As for Isaiah, I’ve a notion to send him back to Kansas, as I wanted to do years ago, only he begged so to stay, and Yancey let him. And now this.”
Doc Valliant had swallowed the whisky at a gulp—had thrown it down his throat as one takes medicine to relieve pain. He poured another glass. His face was tired and drawn. It was late. His nerves were not what they had been, what with drink, overwork, and countless nights without sleep as he rode the country on his black horse, his handsome figure grown a little soft and sagging now. But he still was a dashing sight when he sat the saddle in his black corduroys and his soft-brimmed black hat.
He swallowed his second drink. His face seemed less drawn, his hand steadier, his whole bearing more alert. “Now listen, Sabra. You don’t understand. You don’t understand the Osages. This is serious.”
Sabra interrupted quickly. “Don’t think I’m hard. I’m not condemning her altogether, or Isaiah, either. I’m partly to blame. I should have seen. But I am so busy. Anyway, I can’t have her here now, can I? With Isaiah. Even you …”
He filled his glass. She wished he would stop drinking; go home. She would sit up the night with the Indian girl. And in the morning—well, she must get someone in to help. They would know, sooner or later.
He was repeating rather listlessly what he had said. “The Osages have kept the tribe absolutely free of Negro blood. This is a bad business.”
Her patience was at an end. “What of it? And how do you know? How do you know?”
“Because they remove any member of the tribe that has had to do with a Negro.”
“Remove!”
“Kill. By torture.”
She stared at him. He was drunk, of course. “You’re talking nonsense,” she said crisply. She was very angry.
“Don’t let this get around. They might blame you. The Osages. They might——I’ll just go and take another look at her.”
The girl was sleeping. Sabra felt a pang of pity as she gazed down at her. “Go to bed—off with you,” said Doc Valliant to Isaiah. The boy’s face was wet, pulpy with tears and sweat and fright. He walked slackly, as though exhausted.
“Wait.” Sabra cut him some bread from the loaf, sliced a piece of meat left from supper. “Here. Eat this. Everything will be all right in the morning.”
The news got round. Perhaps Doc Valliant talked in drink. Doubtless the girl who came in to help her. Perhaps Isaiah, who after a night’s exhausted sleep had suddenly become proudly paternal and boasted loudly about the house (and no doubt out of it) of the size, beauty, and intelligence of the little lump of dusky flesh that lay beside Arita Red Feather’s bed in the very cradle that had held Donna when an infant. Arita Red Feather was frantic to get up. They had to keep her in bed by main force. She had not spoken a dozen words since the birth of the child.
On the fourth day following the child’s birth Sabra came into Arita Red Feather’s room early in the morning and she was not there. The infant was not there. Their beds had been slept in and now were empty. She ran straight into the yard where Isaiah’s little hut stood. He was not there. She questioned the girl who now helped with the housework and who slept on a couch in the dining room. She had heard nothing, seen nothing. The three had vanished in the night.
Well, Sabra thought, philosophically, they have gone off. Isaiah can make out, somehow. Perhaps he can even get a job as a printer somewhere. He was handy, quick, bright. He had some money, for she had given him, in these later years, a little weekly wage, and he had earned a quarter here, a half dollar there. Enough, perhaps, to take them by train back to Kansas. Certainly they had not gone to Arita’s people, for Big Knee, questioned, denied all knowledge of his daughter, of her child, of the black boy. He behaved like an Indian in a Cooper novel. He grunted, looked blank, folded his arms, stared with dead black, expressionless eyes. They could make nothing of him. His squaw, stout, silent, only shook her head; pretended that she neither spoke nor understood English.
Then the rumor rose, spread, received credence. It was started by Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian guide and plainsman who sometimes lived with the Indians for months at a time on their reservations, who went with them on their visiting jaunts, hunted, fished, ate with them, who was married to a Cherokee, and who had even been adopted into the Cherokee tribe. He had got the story from a Cherokee who in turn had had it from an Osage. The Osage, having managed to lay hands on some whisky, and becoming very drunk, now told the grisly tale for the first time.
There had been an Osage meeting of the Principal Chief, old Howling Wolf; the Assistant Chief; the eight members of the Council, which included Big Knee, Arita’s father. There the news of the girl’s dereliction had been discussed, her punishment gravely decided upon, and that of Isaiah.
They had come in the night and got them—the black boy, the Indian girl, the infant—by what means no one knew. Arita Red Feather and her child had been bound together, placed in an untanned and uncured steer hide, the hide was securely fastened, they were carried then to the open, sun-baked, and deserted prairie and left there, with a guard. The hide shrank and shrank and shrank in the burning sun, closer and closer, day by day, until soon there was no movement within it.
Isaiah, already half dead with fright, was at noonday securely bound and fastened to a stake. Near by, but not near enough quite to touch him, was a rattlesnake so caught by a leather thong that, strike and coil and strike as it might, it could not quite reach, with its venomous head, the writhing, gibbering thing that lay staring with eyes that protruded out of all semblance to human features. But as dusk came on the dew fell, and the leather thong stretched a little with the wet. And as twilight deepened and the dew grew heavier the leather thong holding the horrible reptile stretched more and more. Presently it was long enough.