“I’m taking along my china dishes,” breathed Sabra through her tears, “and my lovely linen and the mantel set that Cousin Dabney gave me for a wedding present, and my own rocker to sit in, and my wine-color silk-warp henrietta, and some slips from the garden, because Yancey says there isn’t much growing.”
Behind her spectacles the eyes of the wise old nun were soft with pity. “That’ll be lovely.” She watched the calico pony and the phaeton drive off up the dusty Kansas road. She turned toward the Mission house. The beads clicked. Hail, Mary, full of grace …
IV
The child Cim had got it into his head that this was to be a picnic. He had smelled pies and cakes baking; had seen hampers packed. Certainly, except for the bizarre load that both wagons contained, this might have been one of those informal excursions into a nearby wood which Cim so loved, where they lunched in the open, camped near a stream, and he was allowed to run barefoot in the shadow of his aristocratic grandmother’s cool disapproval. Felice Venable loathed all forms of bucolic diversion and could, with a glance, cause more discomfort at an al fresco luncheon than a whole battalion of red ants.
There was a lunatic week preceding their departure from Wichita. Felice fought their going to the last, and finally took to her bed with threats of impending dissolution which failed to achieve the desired effect owing to the preoccupation of the persons supposed to be stricken by her plight. From time to time, intrigued by the thumpings, scurryings, shouts, laughter, quarrels, and general upheaval attendant on the Cravats’ departure, Felice rose from her bed and trailed wanly about the house, looking, in her white dimity wrapper, like a bilious and distracted ghost. She issued orders. Take this. Don’t take that. It can’t be that you’re leaving those behind! Your own Aunt Sarah Moncrief du Tisne embroidered every inch of them with her own—
“But, Mamma, you don’t understand. Yancey says there’s very little society, and it’s all quite rough and unsettled—wild, almost.”
“That needn’t prevent you from remembering you’re a lady, I hope. Unless you are planning to be one of those hags in a sunbonnet and no teeth that Yancey seems to have taken such a fancy to.”
So Sabra Cravat took along to the frontier wilderness such oddments and elegancies as her training, lack of experience, and Southern family tradition dictated. A dozen silver knives, forks, and spoons in the DeGrasse pattern; actually, too, a dozen silver after-dinner coffee spoons; a silver cake dish, very handsome, upheld by three solid silver cupids in carefree attitudes; linen that had been spun by hand and that bore vine-wreathed monograms; many ruffled and embroidered and starched white muslin petticoats to be sullied in the red clay of the Western muck; her heavy black grosgrain silk with the three box pleats on each side, and trimmed with black passementerie; her black hat with the five black plumes; her beautiful green nun’s veiling; her tulle bonnet with the little pink flowers; forty jars of preserves; her own rocker, a lady’s chair whose seat and back were upholstered fashionably with bright colored Brussels carpeting. There were two wagons, canvas covered and lumbering. Dishes, trunks, bedding, boxes were snugly stowed away in the capacious belly of one; the printing outfit, securely roped and lashed, went in the other. This wagon held the little hand press; two six-column forms; the case rack containing the type (cardboard was tacked snugly over this to keep the type from escaping); the rollers; a stock of paper; a can of printer’s ink, tubes of job ink, a box of wooden quoins used in locking the forms.
There was, to the Wichita eye, nothing unusual in the sight of these huge covered freighters that would soon go lumbering off toward the horizon. Their like had worn many a track in the Kansas prairie. The wagon train had wound its perilous way westward since the day of the old Spanish trail, deeply rutted by the heavy wheels of Mexican carts. The very Indians who trafficked in pelts and furs and human beings had used the white man’s trails for their trading. Yet in this small expedition faring forth there was something that held the poignancy of the tragic and the ridiculous. The man, huge, bizarre, impractical; the woman, tight lipped, terribly determined, her eyes staring with the fixed, unseeing gaze of one who knows that to blink but once is to be awash with tears; the child, out of hand with excitement and impatience to be gone. From the day of Yancey’s recital of the Run, black Isaiah had begged to be taken along. Denied this, he had sulked for a week and now was nowhere to be found.
The wagons, packed, stood waiting before the Venable house. Perhaps never in the history of the settling of the West did a woman go a-pioneering in such a costume. Sabra had driven horses all her life; so now she stepped agilely from ground to hub, from hub to wheel top, perched herself on the high wagon seat and gathered up the reins with deftness and outward composure. Her eyes were enormous, her pale face paler. She wore last year’s second best gray cheviot, lined, boned, basqued, and (though plain for its day) braided all the way down the front with an elaborate pattern of curlicues. Her gray straw bonnet was trimmed only with a puff of velvet and a bird. Her feet, in high buttoned shoes, were found to touch the wagon floor with difficulty, so at the last minute a footstool was snatched from the house and placed so that she might brace herself properly during the long and racking drive. This article of furniture was no more at variance with its surroundings than the driver herself. A plump round mahogany foot rest it was, covered with a gay tapestry that
