For the first time in their married life she doubted his word absolutely. He strode along toward the tent. She hurried at his side. Cim trotted to keep up with her, his hand in hers.
“What did you mean when you said there were people who would set fire to the house? I never heard of such … Did you really mean that someone … or was it an excuse to send Isaiah back because of the way he looked?”
“That was it.”
For the second time she doubted him. “I don’t believe you. There’s something going on—something you haven’t told me. Yancey, tell me.”
“I haven’t time now. Don’t be foolish. I just don’t like the complexion of—I just thought that maybe this meeting was the idea of somebody who isn’t altogether inspired by a desire for a closer communion with God. Just occurred to me. I don’t know why. Good joke on me, if it’s true.”
“I’m not going to the meeting. I’m going back to the house.” She was desperate. Her house was burning up, Isaiah was being murdered. Her linen, the silver in the DeGrasse pattern, the cake dish, the green nun’s veiling.
“You’re coming with me.” He rarely used this tone toward her.
“Yancey! Yancey, I’m afraid to have you stand up there, before all those people. I’m afraid. Let’s go back. Tell them you’re sick. Tell them I’m sick. Tell them—”
They had reached the tent. The flap was open. A roar of talk came to them from within. The entrance was packed with lean figures smoking and spitting. “Hi, Yancey! How’s the preacher? Where’s your Bible, Yancey?”
“Right here, boys.” And Yancey reached into the capacious skirt of his Prince Albert to produce in triumph the Word of God. “Come in or stay out, boys. No loafing in the doorway.” With Sabra on his arm he marched through the close-packed tent. “They’ve saved two seats for you and Cim down front—or should have. Yes, there they are.”
Sabra felt faint. She had seen the foxlike face of Lon Yountis in the doorway. “That man,” she whispered to Yancey. “He was there. He looked at you as you passed by—he looked at you so—”
“That’s fine, honey. Better than I hoped for. Nothing I like better than to have members of my flock right under my eye.”
IX
Ranged along the rear of the tent were the Indians. Osages, Poncas, Cherokees, Creeks. They had come from miles around. The Osages wore their blankets, striped orange, purple, green, scarlet, blue. The bucks wore hats—battered and dirty sombreros set high up on their heads. The thin snaky braids of their long black hair hung like wire ropes over their shoulders and down their breasts. Though they wore, for the most part, the checked gingham shirt of the white man there was always about them the gleam of metal, the flash of some brightly dyed fabric, the pattern of colored beads. The older women were shapeless bundles, with the exception of those of the Osage tribe. The Osage alone had never intermarried with the Negro. Except for intermingled white blood, the tribe was pure. The Indian children tumbled all about. The savages viewed the proceedings impassively, their faces bronze masks in which only the eyes moved. Later, on their reservations, with no white man to see and hear, they would gossip like fishwives; they would shake with laughter; they would retail this or that absurdity which, with their own eyes, they had seen the white man perform. They would slap their knees and rock with mirth.
“Great jokers, the Indians,” Yancey had once said, offhand, to Sabra. She had felt sure that he was mistaken. They were sullen, taciturn, grave. They did not speak; they grunted. They never laughed.
Holding Cim’s hand tightly in her own, Sabra, escorted by Yancey, found that two chairs had been placed for them. Other fortunate ones sat perched on the saloon bar, on the gambling tables, on the benches, on upturned barrels. The rest of the congregation stood. Sabra glanced shyly about her. Men—hundreds of men. They were strangely alike, all those faces; young-old, weather-beaten, deeply seamed, and, for the most part, beardless. The Plains had taken them early, had scorched them with her sun, parched them with her drought, buffeted them with her wind, stung them with her dust. Sabra had grown accustomed to these faces during the past two weeks. But the women—she was not prepared for the women. Calico and sunbonnets there were in plenty; but the wives of Osage’s citizenry had taken this first opportunity to show what they had in the way of finery; dresses that they had brought with them from Kansas, from Texas, from Arkansas, from Colorado, carefully laid away in layers of papers which in turn were smoothed into pasteboard boxes or into trunks. Headgear trembled with wired roses. Cheviot and lady’s-cloth and henrietta graced shoulders that had known only cotton this month past. Near her, and occupying one of the seats evidently reserved for persons of distinction, was a woman who must be, Sabra thought, about her own age; perhaps twenty or twenty-one, fair, blue eyed, almost childlike in her girlish slimness and purity of contour. She was very well dressed in a wine-color silk-warp henrietta, bustled, very tightly basqued, and elaborate with fluting on sleeves and collar. Dress and bonnet were city made and very modish. From Denver, Sabra thought, or Kansas City, or even Chicago. Sabra further decided, with feminine unreason, that her nose was the most exquisite feature of the kind she had ever seen; that her fair skin could not long endure this burning, wind-deviled climate and that the man beside her, who looked old enough to be her father, must be, after all, her husband. It was in the way he spoke to her, gazed at her, touched her. Yancey had pointed him out one day. She remembered his name because it had amused her at the time: Waltz, Evergreen Waltz. He was a notorious Southwest gambler, earned
