It was as though Osage and the whole Oklahoma country now stopped and took a deep breath. Well it might. Just ahead of it, all unknown, waited years of such clangor and strife as would make the past years seem uneventful in comparison. Ever since the day of the Run, more than fifteen years ago, it had been racing helter-skelter, devil take the hindmost; shooting into the air, prancing and yelping out of sheer vitality and cussedness. A rough roof over its head; coarse food on its table; a horse to ride; a burning drink to toss down its throat; border justice; gyp water; a girl to hug; mud roads to the edge of the sun-baked prairie, and thereafter no road; grab what you need; fight for what you want—the men who had come to the wilderness of the Oklahoma country had expected no more than this; and this they had got. A man’s country it seemed to be, ruled by men for men. The women allowed them to think so. The word feminism was unknown to the Sabra Cravats, the Mrs. Wyatts, the Mrs. Hefners, the Mesdames Turket and Folsom and Sipes. Prim, good women and courageous, banded together by their goodness and by their common resolve to tame the wilderness. Their power was the more tremendous because they did not know they had it. They never once said, during those fifteen years, “We women will do this. We women will change that.” Quietly, indomitably, relentlessly, without even a furtive glance of understanding exchanged between them, but secure in their common knowledge of the sentimental American male, they went ahead with their plans.
The Philomathean Club. The Twentieth Century Culture Club. The Eastern Star. The Daughters of Rebekah. The Venus Lodge.
“Ha-ha!” and “Ho-ho!” roared their menfolk. “What do you girls do at these meetings of yours? Swap cooking receipts and dress patterns?”
“Oh, yes. And we talk.”
“I bet you do. Say, you don’t have to tell any man that. Talk! Time about ten of you women folks start gabblin’ together I bet you get the whole Territory settled—politics, Injuns, land fights, and all.”
“Just about.”
Yancey had come home from the Spanish-American War a hero. Other men from Osage had been in the Philippines. One had even died there (dysentery and ptomaine from bad tinned beef). But Yancey was the town’s Rough Rider. He had charged up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt. Osage, knowing Yancey and never having seen Roosevelt, assumed that Yancey Cravat—the Southwest Cimarron—had led the way, an ivory- and silver-mounted six-shooter in either hand, the great buffalo head lowered with such menace that the little brown men had fled to their jungles in terror.
His return had been the occasion for such a celebration as the town had never known and never would know again, they assured each other, between drinks, until the day when statehood should come to the Territory. He returned a captain, unwounded, but thin and yellow, with the livery look that confirmed the stories one had heard of putrid food, typhoid, dysentery, and mosquitoes more deadly, in this semitropical country, than bullets or cannon.
Poisoned and enfeebled though he was, his return seemed to energize the crude little town. Wherever he might be he lived in a swirl of events that drew into its eddy all that came within its radius. Hi, Yancey! Hi, Clint! He shed the khaki and the cocked hat and actually appeared again in the familiar white sombrero, Prince Albert, and high-heeled boots. Osage breathed a sigh of satisfaction. His dereliction was forgiven, the rumors about him forgotten—or allowed to subside, at least. Again the editorial columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam blazed with hyperbole.
It was hard for Sabra to take second place (or to appear to take second place) in the office of the Wigwam. She had so long ruled there alone. Her word had been law to the wavering Jesse Rickey and to the worshiping Cliff Means. And now to say, “You’d better ask Mr. Cravat.”
“He says leave it to you. He’s went out.”
Yancey did a good deal of going out. Sabra, after all, still did most of the work of the paper without having the satisfaction of dictating its policy. A linotype machine, that talented iron monster, now chattered and chittered and clanked in the composing room of the Wigwam. It was the first of its kind in the Oklahoma country. Very costly and uncannily human, Sabra never quite got over her fear of it. The long arm reached down with such leisurely assurance, snatched its handful of metal, carried it over, descended, dropped it. It opened its capacious maw to be fed bars of silvery lead which it spat forth again in the shape of neat cakes of type. Its keys were like grinning teeth. It grunted, shivered, clumped, spoke—or nearly.
“I never come near it,” Sabra once admitted, “that I don’t expect the thing to reach down with its iron arm and clap me on the shoulder and clatter, ‘Hello, Sabra!’ ”
She was proud of the linotype machine, for it had been her five years at the head of the Wigwam that had made it possible. It was she who had gone out after job printing contracts; who had educated the local merchants to the value of advertising. Certainly Yancey, prancing and prating, had never given a thought to these substantial foundations on which the entire business success of the paper rested. They now got out with ease the daily Wigwam for the Osage townspeople and the weekly for county subscribers. Passing the windows of the Wigwam office on Pawhuska Avenue you could hear the thump and rattle of the iron monster. Between them Jesse Rickey and Cliff Means ran the linotype. Often they labored far into the night on job work, and the late passer-by would see the little light burning in the printing shop and hear the rattle and thump of the machine. In a pinch Sabra herself could run it. Yancey never went near it, and, strangely enough, young Cim had a horror of it, as he had of most things mechanical. After one attempt at the keyboard, during which he had hopelessly jammed the machine’s delicate insides, he was forbidden ever to go near it again. For that matter, Cim had little enough taste for the newspaper business. He pied type at the case rack. He had no news sense. He had neither his father’s gift for mingling with people and winning their confidence nor his mother’s more orderly materialistic mind. He had much of Yancey Cravat’s charm, and something of the vagueness of his grandfather, old Lewis Venable (dead these two years), but combining the worst features of both.
“Stop dreaming!” Sabra said to him, often and often. “What are you dreaming about?”
She had grown to love the atmosphere of the newspaper office and resented the boy’s indifference to it. She loved the very smell of it—the mixed odor of hot metal, printer’s ink, dust, white paper, acid, corncob pipe, and cats.
“Stop dreaming!” Yancey hearing her thus admonishing Cim, whirled on her in one of his rare moments of utter rage. “God a’mighty, Sabra! That’s what Ann Hathaway said to Shakespeare. Don’t you women know that ‘Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming’? Leave the boy alone! Let him dream! Let him dream!”
“One starry dreamer in a family is enough,” Sabra retorted, tartly.
Five years had gone by—six years since Yancey’s return. Yet, strangely enough, Sabra never had a feeling of security. She never forgot what he had said about Wichita. “Almost five years in one place. That’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey.” Five years. And this was well into the sixth. He had plunged head first into the statehood fight, into the Indian Territory situation. The anti-Indian faction was bitterly opposed to the plan for combining the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory under the single state of Oklahoma. Their slogan was The White Man’s State for the White Man.
“Who brought the Indian here to the Oklahoma country in the first place?” shouted Yancey in the editorial columns of the Wigwam. “White men. They hounded them from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which they now live in squalor and misery. It isn’t fit for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now. Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the country that has taken their country away from them. Give them at least the right to become citizens of the state of Oklahoma.”
He was obsessed by it. He traveled to Washington in the hope of lobbying for it, and made quite a stir in that formal capital with his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his Texas star boots, his great buffalo head, his charm, his grace, his manner. Roosevelt was characteristically cordial to his old campaign comrade. Washington ladies were captivated by the flowery speeches of this romantic this story-book swaggerer out of the Southwest.
It was rumored on good authority that he was to be appointed the next Governor of the Oklahoma Territory.
“Oh, Yancey,” Sabra said, “do be careful. Governor of the Territory! It would mean so much. It would help Cim in the future. Donna, too. Their father a governor.” She thought, “Perhaps everything will be all right now. Perhaps all that I’ve gone through in the last ten years will be worth it, now. Perhaps it was for this. He’ll settle down.… Mamma can’t say now … and all the Venables and the Vians and the Goforths and the Greenwoods.…” She had had to endure their pity, even from a distance, all these years.
The rumor took on substance. My husband, Yancey Cravat, Governor of the Territory of Oklahoma. And then, when statehood came, as it must in the next few years, perhaps Governor of the state of Oklahoma. Why not!
At which point Yancey blasted any possibility of his appointment to the governorship by hurling a red-hot editorial into the columns of the Wigwam. The gist of it was that the hundreds of thousands of Indians now living on reservations throughout the United States should be allowed to live where they pleased, at liberty. The whites of the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory, with an Indian population of about one hundred and twenty thousand of various tribes—Poncas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Osages, Kiowas, Comanches, Kaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and a score of others—read, emitted a roar of rage, and brandishing the paper ran screaming into the streets, cursing the name of Yancey Cravat.
Sabra had caught the editorial in the wet proof sheet. Her eye leaped down its lines.
Herded like sheep in a corral—no, like wild animals in a cage—they are left to rot on their reservations by a government that has taken first their land, then their self-respect, then their liberty from them. The land of the free! When the very people who first dwelt on it are prisoners! Slaves, but slaves deprived of the solace of work. What hope have they, what ambition, what object in living! Their spirit is broken. Their pride is gone. Slothful, yes. Why not? Each month he receives his dole, his pittance. Look at the Osage Nation, now dwindled to a wretched two thousand souls. The men are still handsome, strong, vital; the women beautiful, dignified, often intelligent. Yet there they huddle in their miserable shanties like beaten animals eating the food that is thrown them by a great—a munificent—government. The government of these United States! Let them be free. Let the Red Man live a free man as the White Man lives.…
Much that he wrote was true, perhaps. Yet the plight of the Indian was not as pitiable as Yancey painted it. He cast over them the glamour of his own romantic nature. The truth was that they themselves cared little—except a few of their tribal leaders, more intelligent than the rest. They hunted a little, fished, slept, visited from tribe to tribe, the Poncas visiting the Osages, the Osages the Poncas, gossiping, eating, holding powwows. The men were great poker players, having learned the game from the white man, and spent hours at it.
They passed through the town of Osage in their brilliant striped blankets, sometimes walking, sometimes on sorry nags, sometimes in rickety wagons laden with pots, poles, rags, papooses, hounds. The townspeople hastily removed such articles as might please the pilfering fancy.
Sabra picked up the proof sheet, still damp from the press, and walked into Yancey’s office. Her face was white, set.
“You’re going to run this, Yancey?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll never be Governor of the Territory.”
“Never.”
She stood a moment, her face working. She crushed the galley proof in her hand so that her knuckles stood out, white.
“I’ve forgiven you many, many things, God knows, in the last ten years. I’ll never forgive you for this. Never.”
“Yes, you will, honey. Never is a long time. Not while I’m alive, maybe. But some day, a long time from now—though not so very long, maybe—you’ll be able to turn back to the old files of the Oklahoma Wigwam and lift this editorial of mine right out of it, word for word, and run it as your own.”
“Never.… Donna … Cim …”
“I can’t live my children’s lives for them, Sabra, honey. They’ve got to live their own. I believe what I believe. This town is rotten—the Territory—the whole country. Rotten.”
“You’re a fine one to say what is or isn’t rotten. You with your whisky and your Indians and your women. I despise you. So does everyone in the town—in the Territory.”
“ ‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own home.’ ” A trifle sonorously.
She never really knew whether he had done this thing with the very purpose of making his governorship impossible. It was like him.
Curiously enough, the editorial, while it maddened the white population of the Territory, gained the paper many readers. The Wigwam prospered. Osage blossomed. The town was still rough, crude, wide open, even dangerous. But it began to take on an aspect of permanence. It was no longer a camp; it was a town. It began to build schools, churches, halls. Arkansas Grat’s gambling tent had long ago been replaced by a solid wooden structure, just as gambling terms of the West and the Southwest had slowly been incorporated into the language of daily use. I’m keeping cases on him … standing pat … bluffing … bucking the tiger. Terms filched from the gaming table; poker and faro and keno.
Sol Levy’s store—the Levy Mercantile Company—had two waxen ladies in the window, their features only slightly affected by the burning Southwest sun. Yancey boomed Sol Levy for mayor of Osage, but he never had a chance. It was remarkable how the Oklahoma Wigwam persisted, though its position in most public questions was violently unpopular. Perhaps it, like Yancey, had a vitality and a charm that no one could withstand.
Although Sol Levy was still the town Jew, respected, prosperous, the town had never quite absorbed this Oriental. A citizen of years’ standing, he still was a stranger. He mingled little with his fellow townsmen outside business hours. He lived lonesomely at the Bixby House and ate the notoriously bad meals served by Mrs. Bixby. He was shy of the town women though the Women of the Town found him kindly, passionate, and generous. The business men liked him. They put him on committees. Occasionally Sabra or some other woman who knew him well enough would say, half playfully, half seriously, “Why don’t you get married, Sol? A nice fellow like you. You’d make some girl happy.”
Sometimes he thought vaguely of going to Wichita or Kansas City or even Chicago to meet some nice Jewish girl there, but he never did. It never entered his head to marry a Gentile. The social life of the town was almost unknown to him. Sometimes if a big local organization—the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Sons of the Southwest—gave a benefit dance, you would glimpse him briefly, in the early part of the evening, standing shyly against the wall or leaning half hidden in the doorway, a darkling, remote, curiously Oriental figure in the midst of these robust red-faced plainsmen and ex-cowmen.
“Come on, Sol, mix in! Grab off one of the girls and get to dancin’, why don’t you? What you scairt of?” But Sol remained aloof. He regarded the hot, sweaty, shouting dancers with a kind of interested bewilderment and wonder, much as the dancers themselves sometimes watched the Indians during one of the Festival Dances on the outlying reservations. On occasion he made himself politely agreeable to a stout matron well past middle age. They looked up at his tragic dark eyes; they noticed his slim ivory hand as it passed them a plate of cake or a cup of coffee. “He’s real nice when you get to know him,” they said. “For a Jew, that is.”
Between him and Yancey there existed a deep sympathy and understanding. Yancey campaigned for Sol Levy in the mayoralty race—if a thing so one-sided could be called a race. The Wigwam extolled him.
Sol Levy, the genial proprietor of the Levy Mercantile Company, is the Wigwam’s candidate for mayor. It behooves the people of Osage to do honor to one of its pioneer citizens whose career, since its early days, has been marked by industry, prosperity, generosity. He comes of a race of dreamers and doers.…
“Why, the very idea!” snorted the redoubtable virago, Mrs. Tracy Wyatt, whose husband was the opposing candidate. “A Jew for mayor of Osage! They’ll be having an Indian mayor next. Mr. Wyatt’s folks are real Americans. They helped settle Arkansas. And as for me, why, I can trace my ancestry right back to William Whipple, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”
Sol Levy never had a chance for public honor. He, in fact, did practically nothing to further his own possible election. He seemed to regard the whole matter with a remoteness slightly tinged with ironic humor. Yancey dropped into Sol’s store to bring him this latest pronouncement of the bristling Mrs. Wyatt. Sol was busy in the back of the store, where he was helping the boy unpack a new invoice of china and lamps just received, for the Levy Mercantile Company had blossomed into a general store of parts. His head was in a barrel, and when he straightened and looked up at the towering Yancey there were bits of straw and excelsior clinging to his shirt sleeves and necktie and his black hair.
“Declaration of Independence!” he exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Tell her one of my ancestors wrote the Ten Commandments. Fella name of Moses.”
Yancey, roaring with laughter, used this in the Wigwam, and it naturally helped as much as anything to defeat the already defeated candidate.
Sometimes the slim, white-faced proprietor, with his friend Yancey Cravat, stood in the doorway of the store, watching the town go by. They said little. It was as though they were outsiders, looking on at a strange pageant.
“What the hell are you doing here in this town, anyway, Sol?” Yancey would say, as though musing aloud.
“And you?” Sol would retort. “A civilized barbarian.”
The town went by—Indians, cowboys up from Texas, plainsmen, ranchers. They still squatted at the curb, as in the early days. They chewed tobacco and spat. The big sombrero persisted, and even the boots and spurs.
“Howdy, Yancey! Howdy, Sol! H’are you, Cim!”
There was talk of paving Pawhuska Avenue, but this did not come for years. The town actually boasted a waterworks. The Wigwam office still stood on Pawhuska, but it now occupied the entire house. Two years after Yancey’s return they had decided to build a home on Kihekah Street, where there actually were trees now almost ten years old.
Sabra had built the house as she wanted it, though at first there had been a spirited argument about this. Yancey’s idea had been, of course, ridiculous, fantastic. He said he wanted the house built in native style.
“Native! What in the world! A wickiup?”
“Well, a house in the old Southwest Indian style—almost pueblo, I mean. Or Spanish, sort of, made of Oklahoma red clay—plaster, maybe. Not brick. And low, with a patio where you can be out of doors and yet away from the sun. And where you can have privacy.”
Sabra made short work of that idea. Or perhaps Yancey did not persist. He withdrew his plan as suddenly as he had presented it; shrugged his great shoulders as though the house no longer interested him.
Osage built its new houses with an attached front porch gaping socially out into the street. It sat on the front porch in its shirt sleeves and kitchen apron. It called from porch to porch, “How’s your tomato plants doing? I see the Packses got out-of-town company visiting.” It didn’t in the least want privacy.
Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas, and scroll work. There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with bubonic plague. There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms on the second floor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace. In the parlor were brown brocade-and-velvet settee and stuffed chairs. In the sitting room was a lamp with a leaded glass shade in the shape of a strange and bloated flower—a Burbankian monstrosity, half water lily, half petunia.
“As long as we’re building and furnishing,” Sabra said, “it might as well be the best.” She had gone about planning the house, and furnishing it, with her customary energy and capability. With it all she found time to do her work on the Wigwam—for without her the paper would have been run to the ground in six months. Osage had long since ceased to consider it queer that she, a woman, and the wife of one of its most prominent citizens, should go to work every morning like a man.
By ten every morning she had attended to her household, seen it started for the day, had planned the meals, ordered them on her way downtown, and was at her desk in the Wigwam office, sorting mail, reading exchanges, taking ads, covering news, writing heads, pasting up. Yancey’s contributions were brilliant but spasmodic. The necessary departmental items—real estate transfers, routine court news, out-of-town district and county gleanings—bored him, though he knew well that they were necessary to the success of the paper. He left these to Sabra, among many other things.
Sabra, in common with the other well-to-do housewives of the community, employed an Indian girl as a house servant. There was no other kind of help available. After her hideous experience with Arita Red Feather she had been careful to get Indian girls older, more settled, though this was difficult. She preferred Osage girls. These married young, often before they had finished their studies at the Indian school.
Ruby Big Elk had been with Sabra now for three years. A curious, big, silent girl of about twenty-two—almost handsome—one of six children—a large family for an Osage. Sabra was somewhat taken aback, after the girl had been with her for some months, to learn that she already had been twice married.
“What became of your husbands, Ruby?”
“Died.”
She had a manner that bordered on the insolent. Sabra put it down to Indian dignity. When she walked she scuffed her feet ever so little, and this, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to add insolence to her bearing. “Oh, do lift your feet, Ruby! Don’t scuffle when you walk.” The girl made no reply. Went on scuffling. Sabra discovered that she was lame; the left leg was slightly shorter than the right. She did not limp—or, rather, hid the tendency to limp by the irritating sliding sound. Her walk was straight, leisurely, measured. Sabra was terribly embarrassed; apologized to the Indian girl. The girl only looked at her and said nothing. Sabra repressed a little shiver. She had never got accustomed to the Indians.
Sabra was a bustler and a driver. As she went about the house in the morning, performing a dozen household duties before leaving for the Wigwam office, her quick tapping step drummed like hail on a tin roof. It annoyed her intensely, always, to see Ruby Big Elk making up the beds with that regal manner, or moving about the kitchen with the pace and air of a Lady Macbeth. The girl’s broad, immobile face, her unspeaking eyes, her secret manner all worked a slow constant poison in Sabra. She spoke seldom; never smiled. When Sabra spoke to her about some household task she would regard her mistress with an unblinking gaze that was highly disconcerting.
“Did you understand about the grape jell, Ruby? To let it get thoroughly cool before you pour on the wax?”
Ruby would majestically incline her fine head, large, like a man’s head. The word sinister came into Sabra’s mind. Still, Sabra argued, she was good to the children, fed them well, never complained about the work. Sometimes—on rare occasions—she would dig a little pit in the back yard and build a slow hot smothered fire by some secret Indian process, and there, to the intense delight of young Cim, she would roast meats deliciously in the Indian fashion, crisp and sweet, skewered with little shafts of wood that she herself whittled down. Donna refused to touch the meat, as did Sabra. Donna shared her mother’s dislike of the Indians—or perhaps she had early been impressed with her mother’s feeling about them. Sometimes Donna, the spoiled, the pampered, the imperious (every inch her grandmother Felice Venable), would feel Ruby Big Elk’s eye on her—that expressionless, dead black Indian eye. Yet back of its deadness, its utter lack of expression, there still seemed to lurk a cold contempt.
“What are you staring at, Ruby?” Donna would cry, pettishly. Ruby would walk out of the room with her slow scuffling step, her body erect, her head regal, her eyes looking straight ahead. She said nothing. “Miserable squaw!” Donna would hiss under her breath. “Gives herself the airs of a princess because her greasy old father runs the tribe or something.”
Ruby’s father, Big Elk, had in fact been Chief of the Osage tribe by election for ten years, and though he no longer held this highest office, was a man much looked up to in the Osage Nation. He had sent his six children and actually his fat wife to the Indian school, but he himself steadfastly refused to speak a word of English, though he knew enough of the language. He conversed in Osage, and when necessary used an interpreter. It was a kind of stubborn Indian pride in him. It was his enduring challenge to the white man. “You have not defeated me.”
His pride did not, however, extend to more material things, and Sabra was frequently annoyed by the sight of the entire Big Elk family, the old ex-Chief, his squaw, and the five brothers and sisters, squatting in her kitchen doorway enjoying such juicy bits as Ruby saw fit to bestow upon them from the Cravat larder. When Sabra would have put a stop to this, Yancey intervened.
“He’s a wise old man. If he had a little white blood in him he’d be as great as Quanah Parker was, or Sequoyah. Everything he says is wisdom. I like to talk with him. Leave him alone.”
This did not serve to lessen Sabra’s irritation. Often she returned home to find Yancey squatting on the ground with old Big Elk, smoking and conversing in a mixture of Osage and English, for Big Elk did not refuse to understand the English language, even though he would not speak it. Yancey had some knowledge of Osage. Sabra, coming upon the two grunting and muttering and smoking and staring ahead into nothingness or (worse still) cracking some Indian joke and shaking with silent laughter, Indian fashion, was filled with fury. Nothing so maddened her.
It slowly dawned on Sabra that young Cim was always to be found lolling in the kitchen, talking to Ruby. Ruby, she discovered to her horror, was teaching Cim to speak Osage. A difficult language to the white, he seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She came upon them, their heads close together over the kitchen table, laughing and talking and singing. Rather, Ruby Big Elk was singing a song with a curious rhythm, and (to Sabra’s ear, at least) no melody. There was a pulsation of the girl’s voice on sustained notes such as is sometimes produced on a violin when the same note is sounded several times during a single bow stroke. Cim was trying to follow the strange gutturals, slurs, and accents, his eyes fixed on Ruby’s face, his own expression utterly absorbed, rapt.
“What are you doing? What is this?”
The Indian girl’s face took on its customary expression of proud disdain. She rose. “Teach um song,” she said; which was queer, for she spoke English perfectly.
“Well, I must say, Cimarron Cravat! When you know your father is expecting you down at the office——” She stopped. Her quick eye had leaped to the table where lay the little round peyote disk or mescal button which is the hashish of the Indian.
She had heard about it; knew how prevalent among the Indian tribes from Nebraska down to Mexico had become the habit of eating this little buttonlike top of a Mexican cactus plant. In shape a disk about an inch and a half in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick, the mescal or peyote gave the eater a strange feeling of lightness, dispelled pain and fatigue, caused visions of marvelous beauty and grandeur. The use of it had become an Indian religious rite.
Like a fury Sabra advanced to the table, snatched up the little round button of soft green.
“Peyote!” She whirled on Cim. “What are you doing with this thing?”
Cim’s eyes were cast down sullenly. His hands in his pockets, he leaned against the wall, very limp, very bored, very infuriating and insolent.
“Ruby was just teaching me one of the Mescal Ceremony songs. Darned interesting. It’s the last song. They sing it at sunrise when they’re just about all in. Goes like this.”
To Sabra’s horror he began an eerie song as he stood there leaning against the kitchen wall, his eyes half closed.
“Stop it!” screamed Sabra. With the gesture of a tragedy queen she motioned him out of the kitchen. He obeyed with very bad grace, his going more annoying, in its manner, than his staying. Sabra followed him, silently. Suddenly she realized she hated his walk, and knew why. He walked with a queer little springing gait, on the very soles of his feet. It came over her that it always had annoyed her. She remembered that someone had laughingly told her what Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian scout, lounging on his street corner, had said about young Cim:
“Every time I see that young Cimarron Cravat a-comin’ down the street I expect to hear a twig snap. Walks like a story-book Injun.”
In the privacy of the sitting room Sabra confronted her son, the bit of peyote still crushed in her hand.
“So you’ve come to this! I’m ashamed of you!”
“Come to what?”
She opened her hand to show the button of pulpy green crushed in her palm. “Peyote. A son of mine. I’d rather see you dead——”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom, don’t get Biblical, like Dad. To hear you a person would think you’d found me drugged in a Chinese opium den.”
“I think I’d almost rather.”
“It’s nothing but a miserable little piece of cactus. And what was I doing but sitting in the kitchen listening to Ruby tell how her father——”
“I should think a man of almost eighteen could find something better to do than sit in a kitchen in the middle of the day talking to an Indian hired girl. Where’s your pride!”
Cim’s eyes were still cast down. He still lounged insolently, his hands in his pockets. “How about these stories you’ve told me all your life about the love you Southerners had for your servants and how old Angie was like a second mother to you?”
“Niggers are different. They know their place.”
He raised the heavy eyelids then and lifted his fine head with the menacing look that she knew so well in his father. “You’re right. They are different. In the first place, Ruby isn’t an Indian hired girl. She is the daughter of an Osage chief.”
“Osage fiddlesticks! What of it!”
“Ruby Big Elk is just as important a person in the Osage Nation as Alice Roosevelt is in Washington.”
“Now, listen here, Cimarron Cravat! I’ve heard about enough. A lot of dirty Indians! Just you march yourself down to the Wigwam office, young man, and don’t you ever again let me catch you talking in that disrespectful manner about the daughter of the President of the United States. And if I ever hear that you’ve eaten a bite of this miserable stuff”—she held out her hand, shaking a little, the mescal button crushed in her palm—“I’ll have your father thrash you within an inch of your life, big as you are. As it is, he shall hear of this.”
But Yancey, on being told, only looked thoughtful and a little sad. “It’s your own fault, Sabra. You’re bound that the boy shall live the life you’ve planned for him instead of the one he wants. So he’s trying to escape into a dream life. Like the Indians. It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you know, either.”
“The Indians started to eat peyote after the whites had taken their religious and spiritual and decent physical life away from them. They had owned the plains and the prairies for centuries. The whites took those. The whites killed off the buffalo, whose flesh had been the Indians’ food, and whose skins had been their shelter, and gave them bacon and tumbledown wooden houses in their place. The whites told them that the gods they had worshiped were commonplace things. The Sun was a dying planet—the Stars lumps of hot metal—the Rain a thing that could be regulated by tree planting—the Wind just a current of air that a man in Washington knew all about and whose travels he could prophesy by looking at a piece of machinery.”
“And they ought to be grateful for it. The government’s given them food and clothes and homes and land. They’re a shiftless good-for-nothing lot and won’t work. They won’t plant crops.”
“ ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ He has got to have dreams, or life is unendurable. So the Indian turned to the peyote. He finds peace and comfort and beauty in his dreams.”
A horrible suspicion darted through Sabra. “Yancey Cravat, have you ever——”
He nodded his magnificent head slowly, sadly. “Many times. Many times.”