Mrs. Wyatt’s house was one of the few in Osage which were used for dwelling purposes alone. No store or office occupied the front of it. Tracy Wyatt’s bus and dray line certainly could not be contained in a pine shack intended for family use. Mrs. Wyatt had five rooms. She was annoyingly proud of this, and referred to it on all possible occasions.
“The first meeting,” she said, “will be held at my house, of course. It will be so much nicer.”
She did not say nicer than what, but Sabra’s face set itself in a sort of mask of icy stubbornness. “The first meeting of the Philomathean Society will be held at the home of the Founder.” After all, Mrs. Wyatt’s house could not boast a screen door, as Sabra’s could. It was the only house in Osage that had one. Yancey had had Hefner order it from Kansas City. The wind and the flies seemed to torture Sabra. It was so unusual a luxury that frequently strangers came to the door by mistake, thinking that here was the butcher shop, which boasted the only other screen door in the town.
“I’ll serve coffee and doughnuts,” Sabra added, graciously. “And I’ll move to elect you president. I”—this not without a flick of malice—“am too busy with my household and my child and the newspaper—I often assist my husband editorially—to take up with any more work.”
The paper on Mrs. Browning’s Aurora Leigh never was written by the pretty Mrs. Evergreen Waltz. Three days later Sabra, chancing to glance out of her sitting-room window, saw the crippled and middle-aged gambler passing her house, and in spite of his infirmity he was walking with great speed—running, almost. In his hand was a piece of white paper—a letter, Sabra thought. She hoped it was not bad news. He had looked, she thought, sort of odd and wild.
Evergreen Waltz, after weeks of tireless waiting and watching, had at last intercepted a letter from his young wife’s lover. As he now came panting up the street the girl sat at the window, sewing. The single shot went just through the center of the wide white space between her great babyish blue eyes. They found her with the gold initialed thimble on her finger, and the bit of work on which she had been sewing, now brightly spotted with crimson, in her lap.
“Why didn’t you tell me that when she married him she was a girl out of a—out of a—house!” Sabra demanded, between horror and wrath.
“I thought you knew. Women are supposed to have intuition, or whatever they call it, aren’t they? All those embroidered underthings on the line in a town where water’s scarce as champagne—scarcer. And then Aurora Leigh.”
She was thoroughly enraged by now. “What, for pity’s sake, has Aurora Leigh got to do with her!”
He got down the volume. “I thought you’d been reading it yourself, perhaps.” He opened it. “ ‘Dreams of doing good for good-for-nothing people.’ ”
XI
Sabra’s second child, a girl, was born in June, a little more than a year after their coming to Osage. It was not as dreadful an ordeal there in those crude surroundings as one might have thought. She refused to send for her mother; indeed, Sabra insisted that Felice Venable be told nothing of the event until after her granddaughter had wailed her way into the Red Man’s country. Yancey had been relieved at Sabra’s decision. The thought of his luxury-loving and formidable mother-in-law with her flounced dimities and her high-heeled slippers in the midst of this Western wallow to which he had brought her daughter was a thing from which even the redoubtable Yancey shrank. Curiously enough, it was not the pain, the heat, nor the inexpert attention she received that most distressed Sabra. It was the wind. The Oklahoma wind tortured her. It rattled the doors and windows; it whirled the red dust through the house; its hot breath was on her agonized face as she lay there; if allowed its own way it leaped through the rooms, snatching the cloth off the table, the sheets off the bed, the dishes off the shelves.
“The wind!” Sabra moaned. “The wind! The wind! Make it stop.” She was a little delirious. “Yancey! With your gun. Shoot it. Seven notches. I don’t care. Only stop it.”
She was tended, during her accouchement, by the best doctor in the county and certainly the most picturesque man of medicine in the whole Southwest, Dr. Don Valliant. Like thousands of others living in this new country, his past was his own secret. He rode to his calls on horseback, in a black velveteen coat and velveteen trousers tucked into fancy leather boots. His soft black hat, rivaling Yancey’s white one, intensified the black of his eyes and hair. It was known that he often vanished for days, leaving the sick to get on as best they could. He would reappear as inexplicably as he had vanished; and it was noticed then that he was worn looking and his horse was jaded. It was no secret that he was often called to attend the bandits when one of their number, wounded in some outlaw raid, had taken to their hiding place in the Hills. He was tender and deft with Sabra, though between them he and Yancey consumed an incredible quantity of whisky during the racking hours of her confinement. At the end he held up a caterwauling morsel of flesh torn from Sabra’s flesh—a thing perfect of its kind, with an astonishing mop of black hair.
“This is a Spanish beauty you have for a daughter, Yancey. I present to you Señorita Doña Cravat.”
And Donna Cravat she remained. The town, somewhat scandalized, thought she had been named after Dr. Don himself. Besides, they did not consider Donna a name at all. The other women of the community fed their hunger for romance by endowing their girl children with such florid names as they could
