“There it is,” he said. “That’s our future home.”
Sabra looked. And her brain seemed to have no order or reason about it, for she could think only of the green nun’s veiling trimmed with ruchings of pink which lay so carefully folded, with its modish sleeves all stuffed out with soft paper, in the trunk under the canvas of the wagon.
VI
Long before the end of that first nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with blazing eyes. “I won’t bring up my boy in a town like this!”
It had been a night and a day fantastic with untoward happenings. Their wagons had rumbled wearily down the broad main street of the settlement—a raw gash in the prairie. All about, on either side, were wooden shacks, and Indians and dried mud and hitching posts and dogs and crude wagons like their own. It looked like pictures Sabra had seen of California in ’49. They had supped on ham and eggs, fried potatoes, and muddy coffee in a place labeled Ice Cream and Oyster Parlor. They spent that first night in a rooming house above one of the score of saloons that enlivened the main street—Pawhuska Avenue, it was called. It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness. The street stopped abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.
“Pawhuska Avenue,” said a tipsy sign tacked on the front of a false-front pine shack. Yancey chose this unfortunate time to impart a little Indian lore to Cim, wide eyed on the wagon seat beside his mother.
“That’s Osage,” he shouted to the boy. “Pawhu—that means hair. And scah, that means white. White Hair. Pawhuska—White Hair—was an old Osage Chief—”
“Yancey Cravat!” Sabra called in a shout that almost equaled his own, and in a tone startlingly like one of Felice Venable’s best (she was, in fact, slightly hysterical, what with weariness and disappointment and fear), “Yancey Cravat, will you stop talking Indian history and find us a place to eat and sleep! Where’s your sense? Can’t you see he’s ready to drop, and so am I?”
The greasy food set before them in the eating house sickened her. She shrank from the slatternly boldfaced girl who slammed the dishes down in front of them on the oilcloth-covered table. At this same table with them—there was only one, a long board accommodating perhaps twenty—sat red-faced men talking in great rough voices, eating with a mechanical and absentminded thoroughness, shoveling potatoes, canned vegetables, pie into their mouths with knives. Cim was terribly wide awake and noisily unruly, excited by the sounds and strangeness about him.
“I’m an Indian!” he would yell, making a great clatter with his spoon on the table. “Ol’ White Hair! Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!” Being reprimanded, and having the spoon forcibly removed from his clutching fingers, he burst into tears and howls.
Sabra had taken him up to the bare and clean enough little room which was to be their shelter for the night. From wide-eyed wakefulness Cim had become suddenly limp with sleep. Yancey had gone out to see to the horses, to get what information he could about renting a house, and a shack for the newspaper. A score of plans were teeming in his mind.
“You’ll be all right,” he had said. “A good night’s sleep and everything’ll look rosy in the morning. Don’t look so down in the mouth, honey. You’re going to like it.”
“It’s horrible! It’s—and those men! Those dreadful men.”
“ ‘For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows than the second man in Rome.’ ” Yancey struck an attitude.
Sabra looked at him dully. “Rome?”
“Plutarch, my sweet.” He kissed her; was gone with a great flirt of his coat tails. She heard his light step clattering down the flimsy wooden stairs. She could distinguish his beautiful vibrant voice among the raucous speech of the other men below.
The boy was asleep in a rude box bed drawn up beside theirs. Black Isaiah was bedded down somewhere in a little kennel outside. Sabra sank suspiciously down on the doubtful mattress. The walls of the room were wafer thin; mere pine slats with cracks between. From the street below came women’s shrill laughter, the sound of a piano hammered horribly. Horses clattered by. Voices came up in jocose greeting; there were conversations and arguments excruciatingly prolonged beneath her window.
“I was sellin’ a thousand beef steers one time—holdin’ a herd of about three thousand—and me and my foreman, we was countin’ the cattle as they come between us. Well, the steers was wild long-legged coasters—and run! Say, they come through between us like scairt wolves, and I lost the count …”
“Heard where the Mullins gang rode in there this morning and cleaned up the town—both banks—eleven thousand in one and nineteen thousand in the other, and when they come out it looked like the whole county’d rallied against ’em. …”
“Say, he’s a bad hombre, that fella. Got a poisoned tongue, like a rattlesnake. … Spades trump?”
“No, hearts. Say, I would of known how to handle him. One time we was campin’ on Amarillo Creek …”
A loud knock at the door opposite Sabra’s room. The knock repeated. Then a woman’s voice, metallic, high. “Quien es? Quien es?” The impatient rattle of a door knob, and a man’s gruff voice.
A long-drawn wail in the street below, “Oh, Joe! He‑e‑e‑ere’s your mule!” followed by a burst of laughter.
Yet somehow she had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion, only to be awakened by pistol shots, a series of bloodcurdling yells, the crash and tinkle of broken glass. Then came screams of women, the sound of horses galloping. She lay there, cowering. Cim stirred
