“They don’t have big families, do they? Two or three children. You’d think savages like that—I mean—”
Yancey explained. “The Indian is a cold race—passionless, or almost. I don’t know whether it’s the food they eat—their diet—or the vigorous outdoor life they’ve lived for centuries, or whether they’re a naturally sterile race. Funny. No hair on their faces—no beards. Did you ever see an Indian festival dance?”
“Oh, no! I’ve heard they—”
“They work themselves up, you know, at those dances. Insidious music, mutilations, hysteria—all kinds of orgies to get themselves up to pitch.”
Sabra had shuddered with disgust.
This Sunday morning they flocked in by the dozens, with their sorry nags and their scabrous dogs. The men were decked in all their beads and chains with metal plaques. They camped outside the town, at the end of the street.
Sabra, seeing them, told herself sternly that she must remember to have a Christian spirit, and they were all God’s children; that these red men had been converted. She didn’t believe a word of it. “They’re just where they were before Joshua,” Mother Bridget had said.
Rangers, storekeepers, settlers. Lean squatters with their bony wives and their bare-legged, rickety children, as untamed as little wolves.
Sabra superintended the toilettes of her men folk from Yancey to Isaiah. She herself had stayed up the night before to iron his finest shirt. Isaiah had polished his boots until they glittered. Sabra sprinkled a drop of her own cherished cologne on his handkerchief. It was as though they were making ready a bridegroom.
He chided her, laughing, “My good woman, do you realize that this is no way to titivate for the work of delivering the Word of God? Sackcloth and ashes is, I believe, the prescribed costume.” He poured and drank down three fingers of whisky, the third since breakfast.
Cim cavorted excitedly in his best suit, with the bright plaid silk tie and the buttoned shoes, tasseled at the top. The boy, Sabra thought as she dressed him, grew more and more like Yancey, except that he seemed to lack his father’s driving force, his ebullience. But he was high spirited enough now, so that she had difficulty in dressing him.
“I’m going to church!” he shouted, his voice shrill. “Hi, Isaiah! Blessed be the name of the Lawd Amen hall’ujah glory be oh my fren’s come and be save hell fire and brimstone—”
“Cimarron Cravat, stop that this minute or you’ll have to stay home.” Evidently he and Isaiah, full of the Sunday meeting, had been playing church on Saturday afternoon. This was the result of their rehearsal.
Yancey’s sure dramatic instinct bade him delay until he could make an effective entrance. A dozen times Sabra called to him, as he sat in the front office busy with paper and pencil. This was, she decided, his sole preparation for the sermon he would be bound to deliver within the next hour. Later she found in the pocket of his sweeping Prince Albert the piece of paper on which he had made these notes. The paper was filled with those cabalistic whorls, crisscrosses, parallel lines and skulls with which the hand unconsciously gives relief to the troubled or restless mind. One word he had written on it, and then disguised it with meaningless marks—but not quite. Sabra, studying the paper after the events of the morning, made out the word “Yountis.”
At last he was ready. As they stepped into the road they saw that stragglers were still hurrying toward the tent. Sabra had put on, not her second-best black grosgrain, but her best, and the hat with the plumes, none of which splendor she had worn since that eventful first day. She and Yancey stepped sedately down the street, with Cim’s warm wriggling fingers in her own clasp. Sabra was a slimly elegant little figure in her modish black; Yancey, as always, a dashing one; Cim’s clothes were identical with those being worn, perhaps, by a million little boys all over the United States, now on their unwilling way to church. Isaiah, on being summoned from his little kennel in the back yard, had announced that his churchgoing toilette was not quite completed, urged them to proceed without him, and promised to catch up with them before they should have gone a hundred feet.
They went on their way. It occurred neither to Sabra nor to Yancey that there was anything bizarre or even unusual in their thus proceeding, three well-dressed and reasonably conventional figures, toward a gambling tent and saloon which, packed to suffocation with the worst and the best that a frontier town has to offer, was for one short hour to become a House of God.
“Are you nervous, Yancey dear?”
“No, sugar. Though I will say I’d fifty times rather plead with a jury of Texas Panhandle cattlemen for the life of a professional horse thief than stand up to preach before this gang of—” He broke off abruptly. “What’s everybody laughing at and pointing to?” Certainly passersby were acting strangely. Instinctively Sabra and Yancey turned to look behind them. Down the street, perhaps fifty paces behind them, came Isaiah. He was strutting in an absurd and yet unmistakably recognizable imitation of Yancey’s stride and swing. Around his waist was wound a red calico sash, and over that hung a holstered leather belt so large for his small waist that it hung to his knees and bumped against them at every step. Protruding from the holsters one saw the ugly heads of what seemed at first glance to be two six-shooters, but which turned out, on investigation by the infuriated Mrs. Cravat, to be the household monkey wrench and a bar of ink-soaked iron which went to make up one of the printing shop metal forms. On his head was a battered—an unspeakable—sombrero which he must have salvaged from the backyard debris. But this was not, after all,
