Cim was nineteen, Donna fifteen. And now Sabra lived quite alone in the new house on Kihekah Street, except for a colored woman servant sent from Kansas. She ran the paper alone, as she wished it run. She ordered the house as she wished it. She very nearly ran the town of Osage. She was a power in the Territory. And Yancey was gone, Cim was gone, Donna was gone. Sabra had refused to compromise with life, and life had take matters out of her hands.
Donna was away at an Eastern finishing school—Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson. Yancey had opposed that, of course. It had been Sabra’s idea to send Donna east to school.
“East?” Yancey had said. “Kansas City?”
“Certainly not.”
“Oh—Chicago.”
“I mean New York.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I didn’t expect you to approve. I suppose you’d like her to go to an Indian school. Donna’s an unusual girl. She’s not a beauty and never will be, but she’s brilliant, that’s what she is. Brilliant. I don’t mean intellectual. You needn’t smile. I mean that she’s got the ambition and the insight and the foresight, too, of a woman of twice her age.”
“I’m not. She’s like Mamma in many ways, only she’s got intelligence and drive. She doesn’t get along with the girls here—Maurine Turket and Gazelle Slaughter and Jewel Riggs and Czarina McKee, and those. She’s different. They go switching up and down Pawhuska Avenue. They’ll marry one of these tobacco-chewing loafers and settle down like vegetables. Well, she won’t. I’ll see to that.”
“Going to marry her off to an Eastern potentate—at fifteen?”
“You wait. You’ll see. She knows what she wants. She’ll get it, too.”
“Sure it isn’t you who know what you want her to want?”
But Sabra had sent her off to Miss Dignum’s on a diet of prunes and prisms that even her high-and-mighty old grandmother Felice Venable approved.
Cim, walking the prairies beyond Osage with that peculiar light step of his, his eyes cast down; prowling the draws and sprawling upon the clay banks of the rivers that ran so red through the Red Man’s Territory, said that he wanted to be a geologist. He spoke of the Colorado School of Mines. He worked in the Wigwam office and hated it. He could pi a case of type more quickly and completely than a drunken tramp printer. The familiar “shrdlu etaoin” was likely to appear in any column in which he had a hand. Even Jesse Rickey, his mournful mustaches more drooping than ever, protested to Yancey.
“She can’t make a newspaper man out of that kid,” he said. “Not in a million years. Newspaper men are born, not made. Cim, he just naturally hates news, let alone a newspaper office. He was born without a nose for news, like a fellow that’s born without an arm, or something. You can’t grow it if you haven’t got it.”
“I know it,” said Yancey, wearily. “He’ll find a way out.”
For the first time a rival newspaper flourished in the town of Osage. The town was scarcely large enough to support two daily papers, but Yancey’s political attitude so often was at variance with the feeling of the Territory politicians that the new daily, slipshod and dishonest though it was, and owned body and soul by Territorial interests, achieved a degree of popularity.
Sabra, unable to dictate the policy of the Wigwam with Yancey at its head, had to content herself with the management of its mechanical workings and with its increasingly important social and club columns. Osage swarmed with meetings, committees, lodges, Knights of This and Sisters of That. The Philomathean and the Twentieth Century clubs began to go in for Civic Betterment, and no Osage merchant or professional man was safe from cajoling and unattractive females in shirtwaists and skirts and eyeglasses demanding his name signed to this or that petition (with a contribution. Whatever you feel that you can give, Mr. Hefner. Of course, as a leading business man …).
They planted shrubs about the cinder-strewn environs of the Santa Fé and the Katy depots. They agitated for the immediate paving of Pawhuska Avenue (it wasn’t done). The Ladies of the Eastern Star. The Venus Lodge. Sisters of Rebekah. Daughters of the Southwest. They came into the Wigwam office with notices to be printed about lodge suppers and church sociables. Strangely enough, they were likely to stay longer and to chat more freely if Yancey and not Sabra were there to receive them. Sabra was polite but businesslike to her own sex encountered in office hours. But Yancey made himself utterly charming. He could no more help it than he could help breathing. It was almost functional with him. He made the stout, commonplace, middle-aged women feel that they were royal—and seductive. He flattered them with his fine eyes; he bowed them to the door; their eyeglasses quivered. He was likely, on their departure, to crumple their carefully worded notice and throw it on the floor. Sabra, though she made short work of the visiting Venuses and Rebekahs, ran their notice and, if necessary, carefully rewrote it.
“God A’mighty!” he would groan at noonday dinner. “The office was full of Wenuses this morning. Like a swarm of overstuffed locusts.”
Sabra was at the head of many of these Betterment movements. Also if there could be said to be anything so formal as society in Osage, Sabra Cravat was the leader of it. She was the first to electrify the ladies of the Twentieth Century Culture Club by serving them Waldorf salad—that abominable mixture of apple cubes, chopped nuts, whipped cream, and mayonnaise. The club fell upon it with little cries and murmurs. Thereafter it was served at club meetings until Osage husbands, returning home to supper after a day’s work, and being offered this salvage from the feast, would push it aside with masculine contempt for its contents and roar, “I can’t eat this stuff. Fix me some bacon and eggs.”
From this culinary and social triumph Sabra proceeded to pineapple and marshmallow salad, the recipe for which had been sent her by Donna in the East. Its indirect effects were fatal.
When it again became her turn to act as hostess to the members of the club she made her preparations for the afternoon meeting, held at the grisly hour of half-past two. Refreshments were invariably served at four. With all arrangements made, she was confronted by Ruby Big Elk with the astounding statement that this was a great Indian Festival day (September, and the corn dances were on) and that she must go to the Reservation in time for the Mescal Ceremony.
“You can’t go,” said Sabra, flatly. Midday dinner was over. Yancey had returned to the office. Cim was lounging in the hammock on the porch. For answer Ruby turned and walked with her stately, irritating step into her own room just off the kitchen and closed the door.
“Well,” shouted Sabra in the tones of Felice Venable herself, “if you do go you needn’t come back.” She marched out to the front porch, where the sight of the lounging Cim only aggravated her annoyance.
“This ends it. That girl has got to leave.”
“What girl?”
“Ruby. Twenty women this afternoon, and she says she’s going to the Reservation. They’ll be here at half-past two.” It was rather incoherent, but Cim, surprisingly enough, seemed to understand.
“But she told you a month ago.”
“Told me what? How do you know?”
“Because she told me she told you, ever so long ago.”
“Maybe she did. She never mentioned it again. I can’t be expected to remember every time the Indians have one of their powwows. I told her she couldn’t go. She’s in there getting ready. Well, this ends it. She needn’t come back.”
She flounced into the kitchen. There stood a mild-mannered young Indian girl unknown to her.
“What do you want?”
“I am here,” the girl answered, composedly, “to take Ruby Big Elk’s place this afternoon. I am Cherokee. She told me to come.” She plucked Ruby’s blue and white checked gingham apron off the hook behind the door and tied it around her waist.
“Well!” gasped Sabra, relieved, but still angry. Through the kitchen window she saw Cim hitching up the two pintos to the racy little yellow phaëton that Yancey had bought. She must run out and tell him before he left. He had seemed disturbed. She was glad he was clearing out. She liked having the men folks out of the way when afternoon company was due.
Ruby’s door opened. The girl came out. Her appearance was amazing. She wore a dress of white doeskin hanging straight from shoulders to ankles, and as soft and pliable as velvet. The hem was fringed. Front, sleeves, collar were finely beaded in an intricate pattern that was more like embroidery than beading. On her feet were moccasins in ivory white and as exquisitely beaded as the dress. It was the robe of a princess. Her dark Indian eyes were alive. Her skin seemed to glow in contrast with the garment. The girl was, for the moment, almost beautiful.
“Hello, Theresa Jump.… This is Theresa Jump. She will do my work this day. I have told her. She knows about the pineapple and marshmallow salad.” For a moment it seemed to Sabra that just the faintest shadow of amusement flitted over Ruby’s face as she said this. But then, Sabra never had pretended to understand these Indians. “I will be back to-morrow morning.”
She walked slowly out of the house by way of the kitchen door, across the yard with her slow insolent dragging step. A stab of suspicion cut Sabra. She flew to the back porch, stood there a moment. Ruby Big Elk walked slowly toward the barn. Cim drove out with the phaëton and pintos. He saw the Indian woman in her white doeskin dress. His eyes shone enormous. He lifted his head as though to breathe deeply. At that look in his face Sabra ran across the yard. One hand was at her breast, as though an Indian arrow had pierced her. Ruby had set one foot in its cream white moccasin on the buggy step. Cim held out his free hand.
Sabra reached them, panting. “Where are you going?”
“I’m driving Ruby out to the Reservation.”
“No, you’re not. No, you’re not.” She put one hand in a futile gesture on the buggy wheel, as though to stop them by main force. She knew she must not lose her dignity before this Indian woman—before her son. Yet this thing was, to her way of thinking, monstrous.
Cim gathered up the reins, his eyes on the restive ponies. “I may stay to see some of the dancing and the Mescal Ceremony. Father says it’s very interesting. Big Elk has invited me.”
“Your father knows you’re going? Like this?”
“Oh, yes.” He cast a slight, an oblique glance at her hand on the wheel. Her hand dropped heavily to her side. He spoke to the horses. They were off. Ruby Big Elk looked straight ahead. She had uttered no word. Sabra turned and walked back to the house. The hot tears blinded her. She was choking. But her pride spoke, even then. You must not go the kitchen way. That Indian girl will see you. They are all alike. You must go around by the front way. Pretend it is nothing. Oh, God, what shall I do! All those women this afternoon. Perhaps I am making a fuss over nothing. Why shouldn’t he take the Indian girl out to the Reservation and stop an hour or two to see the dances and the rites? … His face! His face when he saw her in that dress.
She bathed her eyes, powdered her nose, changed her dress, came into the kitchen, smiling. “… the pineapple cut into chunks about like this. Then you snip the marshmallow into it with the scissors. Mix whipped cream into your mayonnaise … a cherry on top … little thin sandwiches … damp napkin …” She went into the sitting doom, adjusted a shade, plumped a pillow. The door bell rang. “Howdy-do, Mrs. Nisbett.… No, you’re not. You’re just on time. It’s everybody else who’s late.” She thought, “Women are wonderful. No man could do what I am doing. Smiling and chatting when I am almost crazy.” Her fine dark eyes were luminous. Her clear ivory skin was tinged now with a spot of red on either cheek. She looked very handsome.
Theresa Jump proved clumsy and unteachable. Sabra herself mixed and served the pineapple and marshmallow salad, and though this novelty proved a great success, the triumph of serving it was spoiled for Sabra. She bundled the girl off at six, after the dishes were done. Wearily she began to set the house to rights, but Yancey came home to a confusion of chairs and squashed pillows, a mingled odor of perfumery and coffee; a litter of cake crumbs, bits of embroidery silk, and crumpled tea napkins. His huge frame moving about the cluttered sitting room made these feminine remnants seem ridiculous. The disorder of the household irked him. Worst of all, Sabra, relieved now of her guests, was free to pour out upon him all the pent-up wrath, anxiety, and shock of the past few hours. Ruby. Cim. Theresa Jump. Peyote. Osages. If his own father allows such things—what will people say—no use trying to make something of yourself.
Yancey, usually so glib with quotations from this or that sonorous passage of poetry, said little. He did not even try to cajole her into a better humor with his flattery, his charm, his tenderness. His eyes were bloodshot, his hand more unsteady than usual. He had been drinking even more than was his wont, she knew that at once. By no means drunk (she had never seen him really drunk—no one had—he was seemingly incapable of reaching a visible state of drunkenness), he was in one of his fits of moody depression. The great shoulders sagged. The splendid head lolled on his breast. He seemed sunk in gloomy thought. She felt that he hardly heard what she was saying. She herself could eat nothing. She set a place for him at the dining-room table and plumped down before him a dish of the absurd salad, a cup of coffee, some cake, a plate of the leftover sandwiches, their edges curled dismally.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Pineapple and marshmallow salad. With Ruby gone and all, I didn’t get anything for your supper—I was so upset—all those women …”
He sat looking down at the slippery mass on his plate. His great arms were spread out on the table before him. The beautiful hands were opening and closing convulsively. So a mastodon might have looked at a worm. “Pineapple and marshmallow salad,” he repeated, thoughtfully, almost wonderingly. Suddenly he threw back the magnificent head and began to laugh. Peal after peal of Herculean laughter. “Pineapple and marsh——” choking, the tears running down his cheeks. Sabra was angry, then frightened. For as suddenly as he had begun to laugh he became serious. He stood up, one hand on the table. Then he seemed to pull his whole body together like a tiger who is about to spring. He stood thus a moment, swaying a little. “ ‘Actum est de republica.’ ”
“What?” said Sabra, sharply.
“Latin, Latin, my love. Pineapple and marshmallow salad! ‘It is all over with the Republic.’ ” She shrugged her shoulders impatiently. Yancey turned, stiffly, like a soldier, walked out of the room, flicked his white sombrero off the hall rack and put it on at the usual jaunty angle, went down the porch stair with his light, graceful step, to the sidewalk and up the street, the great head lowered, the arms swinging despondently at his sides.
Sabra went on with her work of tidying up the house. Her eyes burned, her throat was constricted. Men! Men! Cim off with that squaw. Yancey angry because she had given him this very feminine dish of left-overs. What was the use of working, what was the use of pride, what was the use of ambition for your children, your home, your town if this was all it amounted to? Her work done, she allowed herself the luxury of a deliberate and cleansing storm of tears.
Eight o’clock. She heated some of the afternoon coffee and drank it sitting at the kitchen table. She went out on the front porch. Darkness had come on. A hot September evening. The crickets squeaked and ground away in the weeds. She was conscious of an aching weariness in all her body, but she could not sleep. Her eyes felt as though they were being pulled apart by invisible fingers. She put her palms over them, to shut them, to cool them. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. She undressed, unpinned the braids of her thick hair, brushed it, plaited it for the night. All the time she was listening. Listening. One.
Suddenly she began to dress again with icy fumbling fingers. She did up her hair, put on her hat and a jacket. She closed the door behind her, locked it, slipped the key into the mail box. The Wigwam office. Yancey was not there. The office was dark. She shook the door, rattled the knob, peered in, unlocked it with the key in her handbag. Her heart was pounding, but she was not afraid of the darkness. A cat’s eyes gleamed at her from the printing shop. She struck a light. No one. No one. The linotype machine grinned at her with its white teeth. Its iron arm and hand shook tauntingly at her in the wavering light. With a sudden premonition she ran to Yancey’s desk, opened the drawer in which he kept his holster and six-shooters, now that Osage had become so effete as to make them an unessential article of dress. They were not there. She knew then that Yancey had gone.
Doc Valliant. She closed and locked the door after her, stepped out into the quiet blackness of Pawhuska Avenue. Doc Valliant. He would go with her. He would drive her out there. But his office and the room at the rear, which was his dwelling, gave forth no response. Gone out somewhere—a case. Down the rickety wooden steps of the two-story brick building. She stood a moment in the street, looking this way and that. She struck her palms together in a kind of agony of futility. She would go alone if she had a horse and buggy. She could rent one at the livery stable. But what would they think—those men at the livery stable? They were the gossips of the town. It would be all over Osage, all over the county. Sabra Cravat driving out into the prairie alone in the middle of the night. Something up. Well, she couldn’t help that. She had to go. She had to get him.
Toward the livery stable, past the Bixby House. A quiet little figure rose from the blackness of the porch where all through the day the traveling men and loafers sat with their chairs tilted back against the wall. The red coal of his cigar was an eye in the darkness.
“Sabra! What is this! What are you doing running around at this hour of the night?”
Sol Levy, sitting there in the Oklahoma night, a lonely little figure, sleepless, brooding. He had never before called her Sabra.
“Sol! Sol! Cim’s out at the Reservation. Something’s happened. I know. I feel it.”
He did not scoff at this, as most men would. He seemed to understand her fear, her premonition, and to accept it with Oriental fatalism.
“What do you want to do?”
“Take me out there. Hitch up and drive me out there. Cim’s got the buggy. He went out with her.”
He did not ask where Yancey was. He asked nothing. “Go home,” he said. “Wait on your porch. I will get my rig and come for you. They shouldn’t see you. Do you want me to go home with you first?”
“No, no. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Sol Levy had two very fine horses; really good animals. They won the races regularly at the local fairs. The little light rig with its smart rubber tires whirled behind them over the red dusty Oklahoma prairie roads. His slim hands were not expert with horses. He was a nervous, jerky driver. They left the town behind them, were swallowed up by the prairie. The Reservation was a full two hours distant. Sabra took off her hat. The night air rushed against her face, cooling it. A half hour.
“Let me drive, will you, Sol?”
Without a word he entrusted the reins to her strong, accustomed hands; the hands of one who had come of generations of horse lovers. The animals sensed the change. They leaped ahead in the darkness. The light buggy rocked and bounced over the rutted roads. Sol asked her nothing. They drove in silence. Presently she began to talk, disjointedly. Yet, surprisingly enough, he seemed intuitively to understand—to fill in the gaps with his own instinct and imagination. What she said sounded absurd; he knew it for tragedy.
“… pineapple and marshmallow salad … hates that kind of thing … queer for a long time … moody … drinking … Ruby Big Elk … Cim … his face … peyote … Mescal Ceremony … Osage … white doeskin dress … Theresa Jump …”
“I see,” said Sol Levy, soothingly. “Sure. Well, sure. The boy will be all right. The boy will be all right. Well, Yancey—you know how he is—Yancey. Do you think he has gone away again? I mean—gone?”
“I don’t know.” Then, “Yes.”
Three o’clock and after. They came in sight of the Osage Reservation, a scattered settlement of sterile farms and wooden shanties sprawled on the bare unlovely prairie.
Darkness. The utter darkness that precedes the dawn. Stillness, except for the thud of their horses’ flying hoofs and the whir and bump of the buggy wheels. Then, as Sabra slowed them down, uncertainly, undecided as to what they might best do, they heard it—the weird wavering cadences of the Mescal song, the hail-like clatter of the gourd rattle shaken vigorously and monotonously; and beneath and above and around it all, reverberating, haunting, ominous, the beat of the buckskin drum. Through the still, cool night air of the prairie it came to them—to the overwrought woman, and to the little peaceful Jew. Barbaric sounds, wild, sinister. She pulled up the horses. They sat a moment, listening. Listening. The drum. The savage sound of the drum.
Fear was gnawing at her vitals, wringing her very heart with clammy fingers, yet Sabra spoke matter-of-factly, her voice holding a hard little note because she was trying to keep it from quavering.
“He’ll be in the Mescal tepee next to Big Elk’s House. They built it there when he was Chief, and they still use it regularly for the ceremony. Yancey showed it to me once, when he drove me out here.” She stopped and cleared her throat, for her voice was suddenly husky. She wondered, confusedly, if that sound was the drum or her own heart beating. She gave a little cracked laugh that bordered on hysteria. “A drum in the night. It sounds so terrible. So savage.”
Sol Levy took the reins from her shaking fingers. “Nothing to be frightened about. A lot of poor ignorant Indians trying to forget their misery. Come.” Perhaps no man ever made a more courageous gesture, for the little sensitive Jew was terribly frightened.
Uncertainly, in the blackness, they made their way toward the drum beat. Nearer and nearer, louder and louder. And yet all about, darkness, silence. Only that pulsing cry and rattle and beat pounding through the night like the tide. What if he is not there? thought Sabra.
Sol Levy pulled up in the roadway before the trampled yard that held the Mescal tepee, round, to typify the sun, built of wood, larger than any other building on the Reservation. The horses were frightened, restive. All about in the blackness you heard the stamp of other horses’ hoofs, heard them crunching the dried herbage of the autumn prairie. With difficulty he groped his way to a stump that served as hitching post, tied the horses. As he helped Sabra down her knees suddenly bent, and he caught her as she sank. “Oh! It’s all right. Stiff, I guess—from the ride.” She leaned against him a moment, then straightened determinedly. He took her arm firmly. Together they made their way toward the tent-shaped wooden tepee.
Two great, silent blanketed figures at the door through which the fitful flame of the sacred fire flared. The figures did not speak. They stood there, barring the way. The little Jew felt Sabra’s arm trembling in his hand. He peered up into the faces of the silent, immobile figures.
Suddenly, “Hello, Joe!” He turned to Sabra. “It’s Joe Yellow Eyes. He was in the store only yesterday. Say, Joe, the lady here—Mrs. Cravat—she wants her son should come out and go home.”
The blanketed figures stood silent.
Suddenly Sabra thought, “This is ridiculous.”
She loosed her arm. She took a step forward, her profile sharp and clear in the firelight. “I am the woman of Yancey Cravat, the one you call Buffalo Head. If my son is in there I want to take him home now. It is time.”
“Sure take um home,” replied the blanket that Sol had addressed as Joe Yellow Eyes. He stood aside. Blinking, stumbling a little, Sol and Sabra entered the crowded Mescal tepee.
The ceremony was almost at an end. With daybreak it would be finished. Blinded by the light, Sabra at first could discern nothing except the central fire and the figure crouched before it. Yet her eyes went this way and that, searching for him. Gradually her vision cleared. The figures within the tepee paid no attention to those two white intruders. They stood there in the doorway, bewildered, terrified; brave.
In the center a crescent of earth about six inches high curved around a fire built of sticks so arranged that as the ashes fell they formed a second crescent within the other. A man squatted, tending this fire, watchfully, absorbedly. In the center of the crescent, upon a little star of sage twigs, lay the mescal, symbol of the rite. Facing them was the Chief, old Stump Horn, in the place of honor, the emblems of office in his hands—the rattle, the wand, the fan of eagle plumes. All about the tepee crouched or lay blanketed motionless figures. Some sat with heads bowed, other gazed fixedly upon the central mescal button. All had been eating the mescal or drinking a brew in which it had steeped. Now and then a figure would slowly draw the blanket over his head and sink back to receive the vision. And the song went on, the shaking of the gourd rattle, the beat-beat of the buckskin drum. The air of the room was stifling, the room itself scrupulously clean.
At intervals around the wall, and almost level with the dirt floor, were apertures perhaps sixteen inches square. A little wooden door was shut upon most of these. Near each lay figures limper, more spent even than the other inert bodies. As Sabra and Sol stood, blinking, they learned the use of these openings. For suddenly nausea overcame one of the Indians crouched in the semicircle near the flame. The man crawled swiftly to one of the little doors, opened it, thrust head and shoulders out into the night air, relieved his body of the drug’s overdose.
Sabra only turned her eyes away, searching, searching. Then she saw where the boy lay under his gay striped blanket. His face was covered, but she knew. She knew well how the slim body curled in its blankets, how it lay at night, asleep. This was a different sleep, but she knew. They went to him, picking their way over the crouching figures with the fixed trancelike gaze; the recumbent forms that lay so still. She turned back the blanket. His face was smiling, peaceful, lovely.
She thought, “This is the way I should look at him if he were dead.” Then, “He is dead.” The boy lay breathing quietly. All about the room was an atmosphere of reverie, of swooning bliss. If the Indians looked at all at Sabra, at the Jew, at their efforts to rouse the boy, it was with the eyes of sleep-walkers. Their lips were gently smiling. Sometimes they swayed a little. The sacred fire leaped orange and scarlet and gold. Old Stump Horn wielded his eagle feather fan, back and forth, back and forth. The quavering cadences of the Mescal song rose and fell to the accompaniment of the gourd rattle and the unceasing drum. The white man and woman, frail both, tugged and strained at the inert figure of the boy.
“Oh, God!” whimpered Sabra. “He’s so heavy. What shall we do?” They bent again, tugged with all their strength, lifted but could not carry him.
“We must drag him,” Sol said, at last.
They took an arm each. So, dragging, tugging, past those rapt still forms, past those mazed smiling faces, they struggled with him to the door. The little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, on her lip. She breathed in choking gasps. Her eyes were wide and staring and dreadful in their determination. The rattle. The drum beat. The high eerie song notes, wordless.
The blackness of the outer air; past the two towering motionless blanketed figures at the door. Dragging him along the earth, through the trampled weeds.
“We can’t lift him into the buggy. We can’t——” She ran back to the two at the door. She clasped her hands before the one called Joe Yellow Eyes. She lifted her white, agonized face to him. “Help me. Help me.” She made a futile gesture of lifting.
The Indian looked at her a moment with a dead, unseeing gaze. Flecks of gold and red and yellow danced, reflected in the black pools of his eyes, and died there. Leisurely, wordless, he walked over to where the boy lay, picked him up lightly in his great arms as though he were a sack of meal, swung him into the buggy seat. He turned, then, and went back to his place at the door.
They drove back to the town of Osage. Cim’s body leaned heavily, slackly against hers; his head lay in her lap, like a little boy’s. One aching arm she held firmly about him to keep him from slipping to the floor of the buggy, so that finally it ceased to ache and became numb. The dawn came, and then the sunrise over the prairie, its red meeting the red of the Oklahoma earth, so that they drove through a fiery furnace.
She had been quiet enough until now, with a kind of stony quiet. She began to sob; a curious dry racking sound, like a hiccough.
“Now, now,” said Sol Levy, and made a little comforting noise between tongue and teeth. “So bad it isn’t. What did the boy do, he went out to see the sights on the Reservation and try what it was like to eat this dope stuff—this peyote. Say, when I was a boy I did lots worse.”
She did not seem to pay much heed to this, but it must have penetrated her numbed brain at last, for presently she stopped the painful sobbing and looked down at his lovely smiling face in her lap, the long lashes, like a girl’s, resting so fragilely on the olive cheek.
“He wanted to go. I wouldn’t let him. Is is too late, Sol?”
“Go? Go where?”
“The Colorado School of Mines. Geology.”
“Too late! That kid there! Don’t talk foolish. September. This is the time to go. It just starts. Sure he’ll go.”
They drove through the yard, over Sabra’s carefully tended grass, of which she was so proud, right to the edge of the porch steps, and so, dragging again and pulling, they got him in, undressed him; she washed his dust-smeared face.
“Well,” said Sol Levy. “I guess I go and open the store and then have a good cup of coffee.”
She put out her hand. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, sharp and tight. Her face was distorted absurdly with her effort not to cry. But when he would have patted her grimed and trembling hand with his own, in a gesture of comforting, she caught his hand to her lips and kissed it.
The sound of the horses’ hoofs died away on the still morning air. She looked down at Cim. She thought, I will take a bath, and then I will have some coffee, too. Yancey has gone again. Has left me. I know that. How do I know it? Well, nothing more can happen to me now. I have had it all, and I have borne it. Nothing more can happen to me now.