He advanced toward them, in spite of his pedestrian handicaps, with an appalling imitation of Yancey’s stride. Sabra’s face went curiously sallow, so that she was, suddenly, Felice Venable, enraged. Yancey gave a great roar of laughter, and at that Sabra’s blazing eyes turned from the ludicrous figure of the black boy to her husband. She was literally panting with fury. Her idol, her god, was being mocked.
“You—laugh! … Stop. …”
She went in a kind of swoop of rage toward the now halting figure of Isaiah. Though Cim’s hand was still tightly clutched by her own she had quite forgotten that he was there so that, as she flew toward the small mimic, Cim was yanked along as a cyclone carries small objects in its trail by the very force of its own velocity. She reached him. The black face, all eyes now (and those all whites), looked up at her, startled, terrorized. She raised her hand in its neat black kid glove to cuff him smartly. But Yancey was too quick for her. Swiftly as she had swooped upon Isaiah, Yancey’s leap had been quicker. He caught her hand halfway in its descent. His fingers closed round her wrist in an iron grip.
“Let me go!” For that instant she hated him.
“If you touch him I swear before God I’ll not set foot inside the tent. Look at him!”
The black face gazed up at him. In it was worship, utter devotion. Yancey, himself a born actor, knew that in Isaiah’s grotesque costume, in his struttings and swaggerings, there had been only that sincerest of flattery, imitation of that which was adored. The eyes were those of a dog, faithful, hurt, bewildered.
Yancey released Sabra’s wrist. He turned his brilliant winning smile on Isaiah. He put out his hand, removed the mangy sombrero from the child’s head, and let his fine white hand rest a moment on the woolly poll.
Isaiah began to blubber, his fright giving way to injury. “Ah didn’t go fo’ to fret nobody. You-all was dress up fine fo’ chu’ch meetin’ so I crave to dress myself up Sunday style—”
“That’s right, Isaiah. You look finer than any of us. Now listen to me. Do you want a real suit of Sunday clothes?”
The white teeth now vied with the rolling eyes. “Sunday suit fo’ me to wear! Fo’ true!”
“Listen close, Isaiah. I want you to do something for me. Something big. I don’t want you to go to the church meeting.” Then, as the black boy’s expressive face, all smiles the instant before, became suddenly doleful: “Isaiah, listen hard. This is something important. Everybody in town’s at the church meeting. Jesse Rickey’s drunk. The house and the newspaper office are left alone. There are people in town who’d sooner set fire to the newspaper plant and the house than see the paper come out on Thursday. I want you to go back to the house and into the kitchen, where you can see the back yard and the side entrance, too. Patrol duty, that’s what I’m putting you on.”
“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey!” agreed Isaiah. “Patrol.” His dejected frame now underwent a transformation as it stiffened to fit the new martial role.
“Now listen close. If anybody comes up to the house—they won’t come the front way, but at the back, probably, or the side—you take this—and shoot.” He took from beneath the Prince Albert a gun which, well on the left, under the coat, was not visible as were the two six-shooters that he always carried at his belt. It was a six-shooter of the kind known as the single action. The trigger was dead. It had been put out of commission. The dog—that part of the mechanism by which the hammer was held cocked and which was released at the pulling of the trigger—had been filed off. It was the deadliest of Southwestern weapons, a six-shooter whose hammer, when pulled back by the thumb, would fall again as soon as released. No need for Isaiah’s small forefinger to wrestle with the trigger.
“Oh, Yancey!” breathed Sabra, in horror. She made as though to put Cim behind her—to shield him with her best black grosgrain silk from sight of this latest horror of pioneer existence. “Yancey! He’s a child!” Now it was she who was protecting the black boy from Yancey. Yancey ignored her.
“You remember what I told you last week,” he went on, equably. “When we were shooting at the tin can on the fence post in the yard. Do it just as you did then—draw, aim, and shoot with the one motion.”
“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey! I kill ’em daid.”
“You’ll have a brand-new suit of Sunday clothes next week, remember, and boots to go with it. Now, scoot!”
Isaiah turned on the crazy high-heeled boots. “Take them off!” screamed Sabra. “You’ll kill yourself. The gun. You’ll stumble!”
But he flashed a brilliant, a glorified smile at her over his shoulder and was off, a ludicrous black Don Quixote miraculously keeping his balance; the boots slapping the deep dust of the road now this way, now that.
All Sabra’s pleasurable anticipation in the church meeting had fled. “How could you give a gun to a child like that! You’ll be giving one to Cim, here, next. Alone in the house, with a gun.”
“It isn’t loaded. Come on, honey. We’re
