Down the street these two stepped in their finery, the man swaggering a little as a man should in a white sombrero and with a pretty woman on his arm; the woman looking about her interestedly, terrified at what she saw and determined not to show it. If two can be said to make a procession, then Yancey and Sabra Cravat formed quite a parade as they walked down Pawhuska Avenue in the blaze of the morning sun. Certainly they seemed to be causing a stir. Lean rangers in buckboards turned to stare. Loungers in doorways nudged each other, yawping. Cowboys clattering by whooped a greeting. It was unreal, absurd, grotesque.
“Hi, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.”
Past the Red Dog Saloon. A group in chairs tilted up against the wall or standing about in high-heeled boots and sombreros greeted Yancey now with a familiarity that astonished Sabra. “Howdy, Cim! Hello, Yancey!”
“He called you Cim!”
He ignored her surprised remark. Narrowly he was watching them as he passed. “Boys are up to something. If they try to get funny while you’re here with me …”
Sabra, glancing at the group from beneath her shielding hat brim, did see that they were behaving much like a lot of snickering schoolboys who are preparing to let fly a bombardment of snowballs. There was nudging, there was whispering, an air of secret mischief afoot.
“Why are they—what do you think makes them—” Sabra began, a trifle nervously.
“Oh, they’re probably fixing up a little initiation for me,” Yancey explained, his tone light but his eye wary. “Don’t get nervous. They won’t dare try any monkey-shines while you’re with me.”
“But who are they?” He evaded her question. She persisted. “Who are they?”
“I can’t say for sure. But I suspect they’re the boys that did Pegler dirt.”
“Pegler? Who is—oh, isn’t that the man—the editor—the one who was found dead—shot dead on the banks of the—Yancey! Do you mean they did it!”
“I don’t say they did it—exactly. They know more than is comfortable, even for these parts. I was inquiring around last night, and everybody shut up like a clam. I’m going to find out who killed Pegler and print it in the first number of the Oklahoma Wigwam.”
“Oh, Yancey! Yancey, I’m frightened!” She clung tighter to his arm. The grinning mirthless faces of the men on the saloon porch seemed to her like the fanged and snarling muzzles of wolves in a pack.
“Nothing to be frightened of, honey. They know me. I’m no Pegler they can scare. They don’t like my white hat, that’s the truth of it. Dared me last night down at the Sunny Southwest Saloon to wear it this morning. Just to try me out. They won’t have the guts to come out in the open—”
The sentence never was finished. Sabra heard a curious buzzing sound past her ear. Something sang—zing! Yancey’s white sombrero went spinning into the dust of the road.
Sabra’s mouth opened as though she were screaming, but the sounds she would have made emerged, feebly, as a croak.
“Stay where you are,” Yancey ordered, his voice low and even. “The dirty dogs.” She stood transfixed. She could not have run if she had wanted to. Her legs seemed suddenly no part of her—remote, melting beneath her, and yet pricked with a thousand pins and needles. Yancey strolled leisurely over to where the white hat lay in the dust. He stooped carelessly, his back to the crowd on the saloon porch, picked up the hat, surveyed it, and reached toward his pocket for his handkerchief. At that movement there was a rush and a scramble on the porch. Tilted chairs leaped forward, heels clattered, a door slammed. The white-aproned proprietor who, tray in hand, had been standing idly in the doorway, vanished as though he had been blotted out by blackness. Of the group only three men remained. One of these leaned insolently against a porch post, a second stood warily behind him, and a third was edging prudently toward the closed door. There was nothing to indicate who had fired the shot that had sent Yancey’s hat spinning.
Yancey, now half turned toward them, had taken his fine white handkerchief from his pocket, had shaken out its ample folds with a gesture of elegant leisure, and, hat in hand, was flicking the dust from his headgear. This done he surveyed the hat critically, seemed to find it little the worse for its experience unless, perhaps, one excepts the two neat round holes that were drilled, back and front, through the peak of its crown. He now placed it on his head again with a gesture almost languid, tossed the fine handkerchief into the road, and with almost the same gesture, or with another so lightning quick that Sabra’s eye never followed it, his hand went to his hip. There was the crack of a shot. The man who was edging toward the door clapped his hand to his ear and brought his hand away and looked at it, and it was darkly smeared. Yancey still stood in the road, his hand at his thigh, one slim foot, in its fine high-heeled Texas star boot, advanced carelessly. His great head was lowered menacingly. His eyes, steel gray beneath the brim of the white sombrero, looked as Sabra had never before seen them look. They were terrible eyes, merciless, cold, hypnotic. She could only think of the eyes of the rattler that Yancey had whipped to death with the wagon whip on the trip across the prairie.
“A three-cornered piece, you’ll find it, Lon. The Cravat sheep brand.”
“Can’t you take a joke, Yancey?” whined one of the three, his eyes
