“The bridge is out below Gray Horse. … The Osages are having a powwow at Hominy. All night they kept me awake with their drums, those savages. … The Kid and his gang held up the Santa Fe near Wetoka and got thirty-five thousand dollars; but one of them will never hold up a train again. A shot in the head. Verdigris Bob, they call him. A name! They say the posse almost caught the Kid himself because this Verdigris Bob when he finds he is dying he begs the others to leave him and go on, but first they must stop to take his boots off. His boots he wants to have off, that murderer, to die a respectable man! The Kid stops to oblige him, and the posse in ten more minutes would have caught him, too. A feather in that sheriff’s cap, to catch the Kid! … A country! My forefathers should have lived to see me here!”
His beautiful, civilized face, mobile as an actor’s, was at once expressive of despair and bitter amusement. His long slender hands were spread in a gesture of wondering resignation.
Later he bought a horse—a quadruped possessed unbelievably of the power of locomotion—a thing rheumy-eyed, cadaverous, high rumped, like a cloth horse in a pantomime. Sol Levy was always a little afraid of it; timorous of those great square white teeth, like gravestones. He came of a race of scholars and traders. Horses had been no part of their experience. He had to nerve himself to wait on it, to give it the feed bag, an occasional apple or lump of sugar. With the horse and rickety wagon he now added kitchenware to his stock, coarse china, too; bolts of woollen cloth; and, slyly, bright colored silks and muslin flowers and ribbons. Dixie Lee and her girls fell upon these with feverish fingers and shrill cries, like children. He spread his wares for them silently. Sometimes they teased him, those pretty morons; they hung on his meager shoulders, stroked his beard. He regarded them remotely, almost sadly.
“Come on, Solly!” they said. “Why don’t you smile? Don’t you never have no fun? I bet you’re rich. Jews is all rich. Ain’t that the truth, Maude?”
His deep-sunk eyes looked at them. Shiksas. They grew uncomfortable under his gaze, then sullen, then angry. “Go on, get the hell out of here! You got your money, ain’t you? Get, sheeny!”
He sometimes talked to Dixie Lee. There existed between these two a strange relation of understanding and something resembling respect. Outcasts, both of them, he because of his race, she because of her calling. “A smart girl like you, what do you want in such a business?”
“I’ve got to live, Solly. God knows why!”
“You come from a good family. You are young yet, you are smart. There are other ways.”
“Ye‑e‑e‑s? I guess I’ll take up school teaching. Tell a lot of snotty-nosed brats that two and two make four and get handed eleven dollars at the end of the month for it. I tried a couple of things. Nix, nix!”
In a year or two he opened a little store in Osage. It was, at first, only a wooden shack containing two or three rough pine tables on which his wares were spread. He was the town Jew. He was a person apart. Sometimes the cowboys deviled him; or the saloon loungers and professional bad men. They looked upon him as fair game. He thought of them as savages. Yancey came to his rescue one day in the spectacular fashion he enjoyed. Seated at his desk in the Wigwam office Yancey heard hoots, howls, catcalls, and then the crack and rat-a-tat-tat of a fusillade. The porch of the Sunny Southwest Saloon was filled with grinning faces beneath sombreros. In the middle of the dusty road, his back against a Howe scale, stood Sol Levy. They had tried to force him to drink a great glass of whisky straight. He had struggled, coughed, sputtered; had succeeded in spitting out the burning stuff. They had got another. They were holding it up from their vantage point on the porch. Their six-shooters were in their hands. And they were shooting at him—at his feet, at his head, at his hands, expertly, devilishly, miraculously, never hitting him but always careful to come within a fraction of an inch. He had no weapon. He would not have known how to use it if he had possessed one. He was not of a race of fighters.
“Drink it!” the yells were high and less than human. “You’re a dead Jew if you don’t. Dance, gol darn you! Dance for your drink!”
The bullets spat all about him, sang past his ears, whipped up the dust about his feet. He did not run. He stood there, facing them, frozen with fear. His arms hung at his sides. His face was deathly white. They had shot off his hat. He was bareheaded. His eyes were sunken, suffering, stricken. His head lolled a little on one side. His thick black locks hung dank on his forehead. At that first instant of seeing him as he rushed out of his office, Yancey thought, subconsciously, “He looks like—like—” But the resemblance eluded him then. It was only later, after
