Cim sensed that he had not made his desired effect on his listeners. “My father says,” he announced, suddenly, striding up and down the room in absurd and unconscious imitation of his idol—one could almost see the Prince Albert coat tails switching—“my father says that some day an Indian will be President of the United States, and then you bet you’ll all be sorry you were such dirty skunks to ’em.”
The eyes of the visiting Venables swung, as one orb, from the truculent figure of the boy to the agitated face of the mother.
“My poor child!” came from Felice Venable in accents of rage rather than pity. She was addressing Sabra.
Sabra took refuge in hauteur. “You wouldn’t understand. Our life there is so different from yours here. Yancey’s Indian editorials in the Wigwam have made a sensation. They were spoken of in the Senate at Washington.” Felice dismissed all Yancey’s written works with a wave of her hand. “In fact,” Sabra went on—she who hated Indians and all their ways—“in fact, his editorials on the subject have been so fearless and free that he has been in danger of his life from the people who have been cheating the Indians. It has been even more dangerous than when he tracked down the murderer of Pegler.”
“Pegler,” repeated the Venables, disdainfully, and without the slightest curiosity in their voices.
Sabra gave it up. “You don’t understand. The only thing you care about is whether the duck runs red or not.”
Even little Donna was not much of a success. The baby was an eerie little elf, as plain as the boy was handsome. She resembled her grandmother, Felice Venable, without a trace of that redoubtable matron’s former beauty. But she had that almost indefinable thing known as style. At the age of two she wore with undeniable chic the rather clumsy little garments that Sabra had so painstakingly made for her; and when she was dressed, for the first time, in one of the exquisitely hemstitched, tucked and embroidered white frocks that her grandmother had wrought for her, that gifted though reluctant needlewomen said, tartly, “Thank God, she’s got style, at least. She’ll have to make out with that.”
All in all, Sabra found herself joyously returning to the barren burning country to which, four years earlier, she had gone in such dread and terror. She resented her mother’s do-this, do-that. She saw Felice Venable now, no longer as a power, an authority in all matters of importance, but as a sallow old lady who tottered on heels that were too high and who, as she sat talking, pleated and unpleated with tremulous fingers the many ruffles of her white dimity wrapper. The matriarch had lost her crown. Sabra was matriarch now of her own little kingdom; and already she was planning to extend that realm beyond and beyond its present confines into who knows what vastness of demesne.
She decided that she must take the children more than ever in hand. No more of this talk of Indians, of freedom, or equality of man. She did not realize (it being long before the day of psychology as applied so glibly to the training of children) that she was, so far as Cim was concerned, years too late. At eight his character was formed. She had taught him the things that Felice Venable had taught her—stand up straight; eat your bread and butter; wash your hands; say how do you do to the lady; one and one are two; somebody has been eating my porridge, said the little wee bear. But Yancey had taught him poetry far beyond his years, and accustomed his ears to the superb cadences of the Bible; Yancey had told him, bit by bit, and all unconsciously, the saga of the settling of the great Southwest.
“Cowboys wear big sombreros to shield their faces from the rain and the sun when they’re riding the range, and the snow from dripping down their backs. He wears a handkerchief knotted at the back of the neck and hanging down in front so that he can wipe the sweat and dust from his face with it, and then there it is, open, drying in the wind; and in a dust storm he pulls it over his mouth and nose, and in a blizzard it keeps his nose and chin from freezing. He wears chaps, with the hairy side out, to keep his legs warm in winter and to protect them from being torn by chaparral and cactus thorns in summer. His boots are high heeled to keep his feet from slipping in the stirrups when he has to work standing in the saddle, and because he can sink them in the sod when he’s off his horse and roping a plunging bronc. He totes a six-shooter to keep the other fellow from shooting.”
The child’s eyes were enormous, glowing, enthralled. Yancey told him the story of the buffalo; he talked endlessly of the Indians. He even taught him some words of Comanche, which is the court language of the Indian. He put him on a horse at the age of six. A sentimentalist and a romantic, he talked to the boy of the sunset; of Spanish gold; of the wild days of the Cimarron and the empire so nearly founded there. The boy loved his mother dutifully, and as a matter of course, as a child loves the fount of food, of tender care, of shelter. But his father he worshiped, he adored.
Sabra’s leave-taking held one regret, one pain. Mother Bridget had died two weeks before Sabra arrived
