“What?” breathed Sabra, as always enthralled by one of Yancey’s arguments, forgetting quite that she must oppose this very plea.
“They take the range away from the cattle men and cowboys—the free range that never belonged to them really, but that they had come to think of as theirs through right of use. Squatters come in, Sooners, too, and Nesters, and then the whole rush of the Opening. The range is cut up into town sites, and the town into lots, before their very eyes. Why, it must have sickened them—killed them almost—to see it.”
“But that’s progress, Yancey. The country’s got to be settled.”
“This was different. There’s never been anything like this. Settling a great section of a country always has been a matter of years—decades—centuries, even. But here they swept over it in a day. You know that as well as I do. Wilderness one day; town sites the next. And the cowboys and rangers having no more chance than chips in a flood. Can’t you see it? Shanties where the horizon used to be; grocery stores on the old buffalo trails. They went plumb locoed, I tell you. They couldn’t fight progress, but they could get revenge on the people who had taken their world away from them and cut it into little strips and dirtied it.”
“You’re taking the part of criminals, of murderers, of bad men! I’m ashamed of you! I’m afraid of you! You’re as bad as they are.”
“Now, now, Sabra. No dramatics. Leave that for me. I’m better at it. The Kid’s bad, yes. They don’t come worse than he. And they’ll get him, eventually. But he never kills unless he has to. When he robs a bank or holds up a train it’s in broad daylight, by God, with a hundred guns against him. He runs a risk. He doesn’t shoot in the dark. The other fellow always has a chance. It’s three or four, usually, against fifty. He was brought up a reckless, lawless, unschooled youngster. He’s a killer now, and he’ll die by the gun, with his boots on. But the man who fathered him needn’t be ashamed of him. There’s no yellow in the Kid.”
For one dreadful sickening second something closed with iron fingers around Sabra Cravat’s heart and squeezed it, and it ceased to beat. White faced, her dark eyes searched her husband’s face. Wichita whispers. Kansas slander. But that face was all exaltation, like the face of an evangelist, and as pure. His eyes were glowing. The iron fingers relaxed.
“But Pegler. The men who killed Pegler. Why are they so much worse—”
“Skunks. Dirty jackals hired by white-livered politicians.”
“But why? Why?”
“Because Pegler had the same idea I have—that here’s a chance to start clean, right from scratch. Live and let live. Clean politics instead of the skulduggery all around; a new way of living and of thinking, because we’ve had a chance to see how rotten and narrow and bigoted the other way has been. Here everything’s fresh. It’s all to do, and we can do it. There’s never been a chance like it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of the other pioneers to profit by. New England, and California, and the settlers of the Middle West—it got away from them, and they fell into the rut. Ugly politics, ugly towns, ugly buildings, ugly minds.” He was off again. Sabra, all impatience, stopped him.
“But Pegler. What’s that got to do with Pegler?” She hated the name. She hated the dead man who was stalking their new life and threatening to destroy it.
“I saw that one copy of his paper. He called it the New Day—poor devil. And in it he named names, and he outlined a policy and a belief something like—well—along the lines I’ve tried to explain to you. He accused the government of robbing the Indians. He accused the settlers of cheating them. He told just how they got their whisky, in spite of its being forbidden, and how their monthly allotment was pinched out of their foolish fingers—”
“Oh, my heavens, Yancey! Indians! You and your miserable dirty Indians! You’re always going on about them as if they mattered! The sooner they’re all dead the better. What good are they? Filthy, thieving, lazy things. They won’t work. You’ve said so yourself. They just squat there, rotting.”
“I’ve tried to explain to you,” Yancey began, gently. “White men can’t do those things to a helpless—”
“And so they killed him!” Sabra cried, irrelevantly. “And they’ll kill you, too. Oh, Yancey—please—please—I don’t want to be a pioneer woman. I thought I did, but I don’t. I can’t make things different. I liked them as they were. Comfortable and safe. Let them alone. I don’t want to live in a model empire. Darling! Darling! Let’s just make it a town like Wichita … with trees … and people being sociable … not killing each other all the time … church on Sunday … a school for Cim. …”
The face she adored was a mask. The ocean-gray eyes were slate-gray now, with the look she had seen and dreaded—cold, determined, relentless.
“All right. Go back there. Go back to your trees and your churches and your sidewalks and your Sunday roast beef and your whole goddamned, smug, dead-alive family. But not me! Me, I’m staying here. And when I find the man who killed Pegler I’ll face him with it, and I’ll publish his name, and if he’s alive by then I’ll bring him to justice and I’ll see him strung up on a tree. If I don’t it’ll be because I’m not alive myself.”
“Oh, God!” whimpered Sabra, and sank, a limp bundle of misery, into his arms. But those arms were, suddenly, no haven, no shelter. He put her from him, gently, but with iron
