“Well, you got to hand it to him,” the men said, gazing their fill. “He wasn’t no piker. When he held up a train or robbed a bank or shot up a posse it was always in broad daylight, by God. Middle of the day he’d come riding into town. No nitroglycerin for him, or shootin’ behind fence posts and trees in the dark. Nosiree! Out in the open, and takin’ a bigger chance than them that was robbed. Ride! Say, you couldn’t tell which was him and which was horse. They was one piece. And shoot! It wa’n’t shootin’. It was magic. They say he’s got half a million in gold cached away up in the Hills.”
For weeks, for months, the hills were honeycombed with prowlers in search for this buried treasure.
Sabra did a strange, a terrible thing. Yancey would not go near the grisly window. Sabra upheld him; denounced the gaping crowd as scavengers and ghouls. Then, suddenly, at the last minute, as the sun was setting blood red across the prairie, she walked out of the house, down the road, as if impelled, as if in a trance, like a sleep walker, and stood before Hefner’s window. The crowd made way for her respectfully. They knew her. This was the wife of Yancey Cravat, the man whose name appeared in headlines in every newspaper throughout the United States, and even beyond the ocean.
They had dressed the two bandits in new cheap black suits of store clothes, square in cut, clumsy, so that they stood woodenly away from the lean hard bodies. Clay McNulty’s face had a faintly surprised look. His long sandy mustaches drooped over a mouth singularly sweet and resigned. But the face of the boy was fixed in a smile that brought the lips in a sardonic snarl away from the wolf-like teeth. He looked older in death than he had in life, for his years had been too few for lines such as death’s fingers usually erase; and the eyes, whose lightning glance had pierced you through and through like one of the bullets from his own dreaded six-shooters, now were extinguished forever behind the waxen shades of his eyelids.
It was at the boy that Sabra looked; and having looked she turned and walked back to the house.
They gave them a decent funeral and a burial with everything in proper order, and when the minister refused to read the service over these two sinners Yancey consented to do it and did, standing there with the fresh-turned mounds of red Oklahoma clay sullying his fine high-heeled boots, and the sun blazing down upon the curling locks of his uncovered head.
“ ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. … His hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. … The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart. … Fools make mock at sin. …’ ”
They put up two rough wooden slabs, marking the graves. But souvenir hunters with little bright knives soon made short work of those. The two mounds sank lower, lower. Soon nothing marked this spot on the prairie to differentiate it from the red clay that stretched for miles all about it.
They sent to Yancey, by mail, in checks, and through solemn committees in store clothes and white collars, the substantial money rewards that, for almost five years, had been offered by the Santa Fe road, the M.K. & T., the government itself, and various banks, for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive.
Yancey refused every penny of it. The committees, the townspeople, the county, were shocked and even offended. Sabra, tight lipped, at last broke out in protest.
“We could have a decent house—a new printing press—Cim’s education—Donna—”
“I don’t take money for killing a man,” Yancey repeated, to each offer of money. The committees and the checks went back as they had come.
XIV
Sabra noticed that Yancey’s hand shook with a perceptible palsy before breakfast, and that this was more than ever noticeable as that hand approached the first drink of whisky which he always swallowed before he ate a morsel. He tossed it down as one who, seeking relief from pain, takes medicine. When he returned the glass to the table he drew a deep breath. His hand was, miraculously, quite steady.
More and more he neglected the news and business details of the Wigwam. He was restless, moody, distrait. Sabra remembered with a pang of dismay something that he had said on first coming to Osage. “God, when I think of those years in Wichita! Almost five years in one place—that’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done.”
The newspaper was prospering, for Sabra gave more and more time to it. But Yancey seemed to have lost interest, as he did in any venture once it got under way. It was now a matter of getting advertisements, taking personal and local items, recording the events in legal, real estate, commercial, and social circles. Mr. and Mrs. Abel Dagley spent Sunday in Chuckmubbee. The Rev. McAlestar Couch is riding the Doakville circuit.
Even in the courtroom or while addressing a meeting of townspeople Yancey sometimes
