They ate hurriedly. Yancey seemed restless, anxious to be off.
They jolted on. Cim slept, a little ball of weariness, in the back of the wagon. Isaiah drowsed beside Sabra, and she herself was half asleep, the reins slack in her hands. The scent of the sun-warmed prairie came up to her, and the pungent smell of the sagebrush. The Indians had swept over this plain in hordes; and buffalo by the millions. She wondered if the early Spaniards, in their lust for gold, had trod this ground—perhaps this very trail. Coronado, De Soto, Narvaez. She had seen pictures of them, these dark-skinned élégantes in their cumbersome trappings of leather and heavy metal, tramping the pitiless plains of this vast Southwest, searching like children for cities of gold. … The steady clop-clop of the horses’ feet, the rattle of the wagon, the squeak of the wheels, the smell of sunbaked earth …
She must have dozed off, for suddenly the sun’s rays were sharply slanted, and she shivered with the cool of the prairie night air. Voices had awakened her. Three horsemen had dashed out of a little copse and stood in the path of Yancey’s lead wagon. They were heavily armed. Their hands rested on their guns. Their faces were grim. They wore the mournful mustaches of the Western plainsman, their eyes were the eyes of men accustomed to great distances; their gaze was searing. All three wore the badge of United States marshals, but there was about them something that announced this even before the eye was caught by their badge of office. The leader addressed Yancey, his voice mild, even gentle.
“Howdy.”
“Howdy.”
“Where you bound for, pardner?”
“Osage.”
The questioner’s hand rested lightly on the butt of the six-shooter at his waist. “What might your name be?”
“Cravat—Yancey Cravat.”
The spokesman’s face lighted up with the slow, incredulous smile of a delighted child. “I’ll be doggoned!” He turned his slow grin on the man at his right, on the man at his left. “Yancey Cravat!” he said again, as though they had not heard. “I sure am pleased to make your acquaintance. Heard about you till I feel like I knew you.”
“Why, thanks,” replied Yancey, unusually modest and laconic. Sabra knew then that Yancey was playing one of his roles. He would talk as they talked. Be one of them.
“Aimin’ to make quite a stay in Osage?”
“Aim to live there.”
“Go on! I’ve a notion to swear you in as Deputy Marshal right now, darned if I ain’t. Citizens like you is what we need, and no mistake. Lawy’in’?”
“I’m planning to take up my law practice in Osage, yes,” Yancey answered, “and start a newspaper as well.”
The three looked a little perturbed at this. They glanced at each other, then at Yancey, then away, uncomfortably. “Oh, newspaper, huh?” There was little enthusiasm in the marshal’s voice. “Well, we did have a newspaper there for a little while in Osage, ’bout a week.”
“A daily?”
“A weekly.”
There was something sinister in this. “What became of it?”
“Well, seems the editor—name of Pegler—died.”
There was a little silence. Sabra gathered up her reins and brought her team alongside Yancey’s, the better to hear. The three mustached ones acknowledged her more formal presence by briefly touching their hat brims with the forefinger of the hand that had rested on their guns.
“Who killed him?”
A little shadow of pained surprise passed over the features of the marshal. “He was just found dead one morning on the banks of the Canadian. Bullet wounds. But bullets is all pretty much alike, out here. He might ’a’ killed himself, plumb discouraged.”
The silence fell again. Yancey broke it. “The first edition of the Oklahoma Wigwam will be off the press two weeks from tomorrow.”
He gathered up the reins as though to end this chance meeting, however agreeable. “Well, gentlemen, good evening. Glad to have met you.”
The three did not budge. “What we stopped to ask you,” said the spokesman, in his gentle drawl, “was, did you happen to glimpse four men anywhere on the road? They’re nesting somewhere in here, the Kid and his gang. Stole four horses, robbed the bank at Red Fork, shot the cashier, and lit out for the prairie. Light complected, all of ’em. The Kid is a slim young fella, light hair, red handkerchief, soft spoken, and rides with gloves on. But then you know what he’s like, Cravat, well’s I do.”
Yancey nodded in agreement. “Everybody’s heard of the Kid. No, sir, I haven’t seen him. Haven’t seen anybody the last three days but a Kaw on a pony and a bunch of dirty Cheyennes in a wagon. Funny thing, I never yet knew a bad man who wasn’t light complected—or, anyway, blue or gray eyes.”
“Oh, say, now!” protested the marshal, stroking his sandy mustache.
“Fact. You take the Kid, and the James boys, and Tom O’Phalliard, and the whole Mullins gang.”
“How about yourself? You’re pretty good with the gun, from all accounts. And black as a crow.”
Yancey lifted his great head and the heavy lids that usually drooped over the gray eyes and looked at the marshal. “That’s so,” said the other, as though in agreement at the end of an argument. “I reckon it goes fur killers and fur killers of killers. … Well, boys, we’ll be lopin’. Good luck to you.”
“Good luck to you!” responded Yancey, politely.
The three whirled their steeds spectacularly, raised their right hands in salute; the horses pivoted on their hind legs prettily; Cim crowed with delight. They were off in a cloud of red dust made redder by the last rays of the setting sun.
Yancey gathered up his reins. Sabra stared at him in bewildered indignation. “But the person who shields a criminal is just as bad as the criminal himself, isn’t he?”
Yancey looked back at her around the side of his wagon top. His smile was mischievous, sparkling, irresistible. “Don’t be righteous, Sabra. It’s middle class—and a terrible trait in a woman.”
Late next day, just before sunset, after pushing on relentlessly through the blistering sun
