“Sabra’s different. Sabra’s different.”
The reedy voice of the sick man had the ghostly carrying quality of an echo. You heard it above the women’s shrill clamor. “No, she isn’t, Felice. She’s more like you this minute than you are yourself. She favors those pioneer women Yancey was telling about in the old days. Look at her.”
The Venable eye, from one end of the table to the other, turned like a single orb in its socket toward the young woman facing them with defiance in her bearing. Not defiance, perhaps, so much as resolve. Seeing her, head up, standing there beside her husband, one arm about the child, you saw that what her father said was indeed true. She was her mother, the Felice Venable of two decades ago; she was the woman in sunbonnet and calico to whom Yancey had given his cup of water; she was the woman jolting endless miles in covered wagons, spinning in log cabins, cooking over crude fires; she was all women who have traveled American prairie and desert and mountain and plain. Here was that inner rectitude, that chastity of lip, that clearness of eye, that refinement of feature, that absence of allure that comes with cold white fire. The pioneer type, as Yancey had said. Potentially a more formidable woman than her mother.
Seeing something of this Felice Venable said again, more loudly, as though to convince herself, “She’s not to go.”
Looking more than ever like her mother, Sabra met this stubbornly. “But I want to go, Mamma.”
“I forbid it. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I say you’ll stay here with your mother and father in decent civilization. I’ve heard enough. I hope this will serve a lesson to you, Yancey.”
“I’m going back to the Nation,” said Yancey, quite pleasantly.
Sabra stiffened. “I’m going with him.” In her new resolve she must have squeezed the hand of the child Cim, for he gave a little yelp. The combined Venables, nerves on edge, leaped in their chairs and then looked at each other with some hostility.
“And I say you’re not.”
“But I want to go.”
“You don’t.”
Perhaps Sabra had not realized until now how terribly she had counted on her husband’s return as marking the time when she would be free to leave the Venable board, to break away from the Venable clan; no more to be handled, talked over, peered at by the Venable eye—and most of all by the maternal Venable eye. Twenty-one, and the yoke of her mother’s dominance was beginning to gall her. Now, at her own inner rage and sickening disappointment, all the iron in her fused and hardened. It had gone less often to the fire than the older woman’s had. For the first time this quality in her met that of her mother, and the metal of the older woman bent.
“I will go,” said Sabra Cravat.
If anyone had been looking at Lewis Venable at that moment (which no one ever thought of doing) he could have seen a ghostly smile momentarily irradiating the transparent ivory face. But now it was Yancey Cravat who held their fascinated eye. With a cowboy yip he swung the defiant Sabra and the boy Cim high in the air in his great arms—tossed them up, so that Sabra screamed, and Cim squealed in mingled terror and delight. It was the kind of horseplay (her word) at which Felice Venable always shuddered. Altogether the three seemed suddenly an outrage in that seemly room with its mahogany and its decanters and its circle of staring high-bred faces.
“Week from tomorrow,” announced Yancey, in something like a shout, so exulting it seemed. “We’ll start on a Monday, fresh and fair. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit—you’ll drive that, Sabra—and one with the household goods and bedding and camp stuff and the rest. We ought to make it in nine days. … Wichita!” His glance went round the room, and in that glance you saw not only Wichita! but Venables! “I’ve had enough of it. Sabra, my girl, we’ll leave all the goddamned middle-class respectability of Wichita, Kansas, behind us. We’re going out, by God, to a brand-new, two-fisted, rip-snorting country, full of Injuns and rattlesnakes and two-gun toters and gyp water and desper‑ah‑dos! Whoopee!”
It was too much for black Isaiah in his perilous perch high above the table. He had long ago ceased to wield his asparagus fan. He had been leaning farther and farther forward, the better to hear and see all of the scene that was spread beneath him. Now, at Yancey’s cowboy whoop, he started violently, his slight hold was loosed, and he fell like a great black grape from the vine directly into the midst of one of Felice Venable’s white and virgin frosted silver cakes.
Shouts, screams, upleapings. Isaiah plucked, white-bottomed, out of the center of the vast pastry. The sudden grayish pallor of his face matched the silver tone of his pants’ seat. Felice Venable, nerves strained to breaking, lifted her hand to cuff him smartly. But the black boy was too quick for her. With the swiftness of a wild thing he scuttled across the table to where Yancey Cravat stood with his wife and child, leaped nimbly to the floor, crept between the man’s legs like a whimpering little dog, and lay there, locked in the safety of Yancey’s great knees.
III
Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Sabra had seen them all her life. At the age of three Cim was held up in his father’s arms to watch a great band of them go by on one of their annual pilgrimages. He played Indian, of course, patting his lips to simulate the Indian yodeling yell. He had a war bonnet made of chicken feathers sewed to the
