She raised herself from the object on which she had collapsed, weeping, and looked at it with brimming eyes that widened in horror as she realized that she had showered her tears on that pride of Hefner’s Furniture and Undertaking establishment, the newly arrived white velvet coffin (child’s size) intended for show window purposes alone.
VII
From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the effect that the house had been rented by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra’s. Sabra was inconsolable, but Yancey did not once reproach her for her mistake. It was characteristic of him that he was most charming and considerate in crises which might have been expected to infuriate him. “Never mind, sugar. Don’t take on like that. We’ll find a house. And, anyway, we’re here. That’s the main thing. God, when I think of those years in Wichita!”
“Why, Yancey! I thought you were happy there.”
“ ‘A prison’d soul, lapped in Elysium.’ Almost five years in one place—that’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey. Five years, back and forth like a trail horse; walking down to the Wigwam office in the morning, setting up personal and local items and writing editorials for a smug citizenry interested in nothing but the new waterworks. Walking back to dinner at noon, sitting on the veranda evenings, looking at the vegetables in the garden or the Venables in the house until I couldn’t tell vegetables from Venables and began to think, by God, that I was turning into one or the other myself.”
He groaned with relief, stretched his mighty arms, shook himself like a great shaggy lion. In all this welter of red clay and Indians and shirtsleeves and tobacco juice and drought he seemed to find a beauty and an exhilaration that eluded Sabra quite. But then Sabra, after those first two days, had ceased to search for a reason for anything. She met and accepted the most grotesque, the most fantastic happenings. When she looked back on the things she had done and the things she had said in the first few hours of her Oklahoma experience it was as though she were tolerantly regarding the naivetes of a child. Ten barrels of water a day! She knew now that water, in this burning land, was a precious thing to be measured out like wine. Life here was an anachronism, a great crude joke. It was hard to realize that while the rest of the United States, in this year of 1889, was living a conventionally civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws, millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been set back according to the frontier standards of half a century earlier. Literally she was pioneering in a wilderness surrounded but untouched by civilization.
Yancey had reverted. Always—even in his staidest Wichita incarnation—a somewhat incredibly romantic figure, he now was remarkable even in this town of fantastic humans gathered from every corner of the brilliantly picturesque Southwest. His towering form, his curling locks, his massive head, his vibrant voice, his dashing dress, his florid speech, his magnetic personality drew attention wherever he went. On the day following their arrival Yancey had taken from his trunk a pair of silver-mounted ivory-handled six-shooters and a belt and holster studded with silver. She had never before seen them. She had not known that he possessed these grim and gaudy trappings. His white sombrero he had banded with a rattlesnake skin of gold and silver, with glass eyes, a treasure also produced from the secret trunk, as well as a pair of gold-mounted spurs which further enhanced the Texas star boots. Thus bedecked for his legal and editorial pursuits he was by far the best dressed and most spectacular male in all the cycloramic Oklahoma country. He had always patronized a good tailor, and because the local talent was still so limited in this new community he later sent as far as San Antonio, Texas, when his wardrobe needed replenishing.
Sabra learned many astounding things in these first few days, and among the most terrifying were the things she learned about the husband to whom she had been happily married for more than five years. She learned, for example, that this Yancey Cravat was famed as the deadliest shot in all the deadly shooting Southwest. He had the gift of being able to point his six-shooters without sighting, as one would point with a finger. It was a direction-born gift in him and an enviable one in this community. He was one of the few who could draw and fire two six-shooters at once with equal speed and accuracy. His hands would go to his hips with a lightning gesture that yet was so smooth, so economical that the onlooker’s eye scarcely followed it. He could hit his mark as he walked, as he ran, as he rode his horse. He practised a great deal. From the back door of their cabin Sabra and Cim and rolling-eyed Isaiah used to stand watching him. He sometimes talked of wind and trajectory. You had to make allowance mathematically, he said, for this ever-blowing Oklahoma wind. Sabra was vaguely uneasy. Wichita had not been exactly effete, and Dodge City, Kansas, was notoriously a gunplay town. But here no man walked without his six-shooters strapped to his body. On the very day of her harrowing encounter with Doc Nisbett and the cowboy, Sabra, her composure regained, had gone with Yancey to see still another house owner about the possible renting of his treasure. The man was found in his crude one-room shack which he used as a combination dwelling and land office. He and Yancey seemed to know each other. Sabra was no longer astonished to find that Yancey, twenty-four hours after his arrival, appeared to be acquainted with everyone in
