“Joke—hell!” snarled the man who had been nicked. His hand was clapped over his ear. “God help you, Cravat.”
“He always has,” replied Yancey, piously.
“If your missus wasn’t with you—” began the man whom Yancey had called Lon. Perhaps the rough joke would have ended grimly enough. But here, suddenly, Sabra herself took a hand in the proceedings. Her fright had vanished. These were no longer men, evil, sinister, to be feared, but mean little boys to be put in their place. She now advanced on them in the majesty of her plumes and her silk, her fine eyes flashing, her gloved forefinger admonishing them as if they were indeed naughty children. She was every inch the descendant of the Marcys of France and the very essence of that iron woman, Felice Venable.
“Don’t you ‘missus’ me! You’re a lot of miserable, good-for-nothing loafers, that’s what you are! Shooting at people in the streets. You leave my husband alone. I declare, I’ve a notion to—”
For one ridiculous dreadful moment it looked as though she meant to slap the leathery bearded cheek of the bad man known as Lon Yountis. Certainly she raised her little hand in its neat black kid. The eyes of the three were popping. Lon Yountis ducked his head exactly like an urchin who is about to be smacked by the schoolmarm. Then, with a yelp of pure terror he fled into the saloon, followed by the other two.
Sabra stood a moment. It really looked as though she might make after them. But she thought better of it and sailed down the steps in triumph to behold a crushed, a despairing Yancey.
“Oh, my God, Sabra! What have you done to me!”
“What’s the matter?”
“This time tomorrow it’ll be all over the whole Southwest, from Mexico to Arkansas, that Yancey Cravat hid behind a woman’s petticoats.”
“But you didn’t. They can’t say so. You shot him very nicely in the ear, darling.” Thus had a scant eighteen hours in the Oklahoma country twisted her normal viewpoint so askew that she did not even notice the grotesquerie of what she had just said.
“They’re telling it now, in there. My God, a woman’s got no call to interfere when men are having a little dispute.”
“Dispute! Why, Yancey Cravat! He shot your hat right off your head!”
“What of it! Little friendly shooting.”
The enormity of this example of masculine clannishness left her temporarily speechless with indignation. “Let’s be getting on,” Yancey continued, calmly. “If we’re going to look at Doc Nisbett’s house we’d better look at it. There are only two or three to be had in the whole town, and his is the pick of them. It’s central” (Central! she thought, looking about her) “and according to what he said last night there’s a room in the front big enough for getting out the paper. It’ll have to be newspaper and law office in one. Then there are four rooms in the back to live in. Plenty.”
“Oh, plenty,” echoed Sabra, thinking of the nine or ten visiting Venables always comfortably tucked away in the various high-ceilinged bedrooms in the Wichita house.
They resumed their walk. Sabra wondered if she had imagined the shooting outside the Red Dog Saloon.
Doc Nisbett (veterinarian), shirtsleeved, shrewd, with generations of New England ancestry behind him, was seated in a chair tipped up against the front of his coveted property. Nothing of the brilliant Southwest sun had mellowed the vinegar of his chemical makeup. In the rush for Territory town sites at the time of the Opening he had managed to lay his gnarled hands on five choice pieces. On these he erected dwellings, tilted his chair up against each in turn, and took his pick of latecomers frantic for some sort of shelter they could call a home. That perjury, thieving, trickery, gun play, and murder had gone into the acquiring of these—as well as many other—sites was not considered important or, for that matter, especially interesting.
The dwelling itself looked like one of Cim’s childish drawings of a house. The roof was an inverted V; there was a front door, a side door, and a spindling little porch. It was a box, a shelter merely, as angular and unlovely as the man who owned it. The walls were no more than partitions, the floors boards laid on dirt.
Taking her cue from Yancey—“Lovely,” murmured Sabra, agonized. The mantel ornaments that had been Cousin Dabney’s wedding present! The handwoven monogrammed linen! The silver cake dish with the carefree cupids. The dozen solid silver coffee spoons! “Do very nicely. Perfectly comfortable. I see. I see. I see.”
“There you are!” They stood again on the porch, the tour completed. Yancey clapped his hands together gayly, as though by so doing he had summoned a genie who had tossed up the house before their very eyes. In the discussion of monthly rental he had been a child in the hands of this lean and grasping New Englander. “There you are! That’s all settled.” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Survey our empire, and behold our home!’ ”
“Heh, hold on a minute,” rasped Doc Nisbett. “How about water?”
“Sabra, honey, you settle these little matters between you—you and the Doc—will you? I’ve got to run down the street and see Jesse Rickey about putting up the press and setting up the type racks and helping me haul the form tables, and then we’ve got the furniture to buy for the house. Meet you down the street at Hefner’s Furniture Store. Ten minutes.”
He was off, with a flirt of his coat tails. She would have called, “Yancey! Don’t leave me!” but for a prideful reluctance to show fear before this dour-visaged man with the tight lips and the gimlet eyes. From the first he had seemed to regard her with disfavor. She could not imagine why. It was, of course, his Puritan New England revulsion against her plumes, her silks, her faintly Latin beauty.
“Well, now,” repeated Doc Nisbett, nasally, “about water.”
“Water?”
“How much you going to need? Renting this house
