“Why can’t you talk to him about something besides those dirty thieving Indians? There’s enough to teach him about the history of his country, I should think. George Washington and Jefferson Davis and Captain John Smith …”
“The one who married Pocahontas, you mean?”
“I declare, Yancey, sometimes I wonder if—”
“What?”
“Oh—nothing.”
But often the days were gay enough. They fell into the routine, adjusted themselves to the discomfort. At first Sabra had been so racked with the jolting of the wagon that she was a cripple by night. Yancey taught her how to relax; not to brace herself against the wagon’s jolting but to sway easily with it. By the second day her young body had accustomed itself to the motion. She actually began to enjoy it, and at the journey’s end missed it as a traveler at sea misses the roll and dip of a ship. By this time she had the second-best gray cheviot open at the throat and her hair in a long black braid. She looked like a schoolgirl. She had got out the sunbonnet which one of the less formidable Venables had jokingly given her at parting, and this she wore to shield her eyes from the pitiless glare of sky and plain. The gray straw bonnet, with its puff of velvet and its bird, reposed in its box in the back of the wagon. The sight of her in that prairie wilderness engaged in the domestic task of beating up a bowl of biscuit dough struck no one as being incongruous. The bread supply was early exhausted. She baked in a little portable tin oven that Yancey had fitted out for her.
As for Yancey himself, Sabra had never known him so happy. He was tireless, charming, varied. She herself was fascinated by his tales of hidden mines, of Spanish doubloons, of iron chests plowed up by some gaunt homesteader’s hand plow hitched to a stumbling mule. Yancey roared snatches of cowboy songs:
“When I was young I was a reckless lad,
Lots of fun with the gals I had,
I took one out each day fur a ride,
An’ I always had one by my side.
I’d hug ’em an’ kiss ’em just fur fun,
An’ I’ve proposed to more’n one,
If there’s a gal here got a kiss for me,
She’ll find me as young as I used to be.Hi rickety whoop ti do,
How I love to sing to you.
Oh, I could sing an’ dance with glee,
If I was as young as I used to be.”
Once they saw him whip a rattlesnake to death with his wagon whip. They had unhitched the horses to water them. Yancey, whip in hand, had taken them down to the muddy stream, Cim leaping and shouting at his side. His two guns, in their holsters, lay on the ground with the belt which he had just now unstrapped from about his waist. Sabra saw the thick coil, the wicked head. Perhaps she sensed it. She screamed horribly, stood transfixed. The boy’s face was a mask of fright. Yancey lashed out once with his whip, the thing struck out, he lashed again, again, again, in a kind of fury. She turned away, sickened. The whip kept up its whistle, its snap. The coiled thing lay in ribbons. Isaiah, though ashen with fright, still had to be forcibly restrained from prowling among the mass for the rattlers which, with some combination of sunset and human saliva, were supposed to be a charm against practically every misfortune known to man. Cim had nightmares all that night and awoke screaming.
Once they saw the figure of a solitary horseman against the sunset sky. Inexplicably the figure dismounted, stood a moment, mounted swiftly, and vanished.
“What was that?”
“That was an Indian.”
“How could you tell?”
“He dismounted on the opposite side from a white man.”
That night it was Sabra who did not sleep. She held the boy tight in her arms. Every snap of a twig, every stamp of a horse’s hoof caused her to start up in terror.
Yancey tried in vain to reassure her. “Indian? What of it? Indians aren’t anything to be scared of. Not any more.”
She remembered something that Mother Bridget had said. “They’re no different. They haven’t changed since Joshua.”
“Since what?” He was very sleepy.
“Joshua.”
He could make nothing of this. He was asleep again, heavily, worn out with the day’s journey.
The wind, at certain periods of the year, blows almost without ceasing in Oklahoma. And when it rains the roads become slithering bogs of greased red dough, so that a wagon will sink and slide at the same time. They had two days of rain during which they plodded miserably, inch by inch. Cim squalled, Isaiah became just a shivering black lump of misery, and Sabra thought of her dimity-hung bed back home in Wichita; of the garden in the cool of the evening; of the family gathered in the dining room; of the pleasant food, the easy talk, the luxurious ease. “Lak yo’ breakfus’ in bed, Miss Sabra? Mizzly mo’nin’.”
At Pawnee Yancey saw fresh deer tracks. He saddled a horse and was off. They had, before this, caught bass in the streams, and Yancey had shot prairie chicken and quail, and Sabra had fried them delicately. But this was their first promise of big game. Sabra felt no fear at being left alone with the two children. It was midafternoon. She was happy, peaceful. There was about this existence a delightful detachment. Her prim girlhood, which, because she had continued to live in her parents’ household, had lasted into her marriage, was now behind her. Ahead of her lay all manner of unknown terrors and strangeness, but here in the wilderness she was secure. She ruled her little world. Her husband was hers, alone. Her child, too. The little black boy Isaiah was as much her
