Someone came up the steps of the little porch and into the office. It was Mrs. Wyatt. She often brought club notices and social items to the Wigwam: rather fancied herself as a writer; a born woman’s club corresponding secretary.
“Well!” she exclaimed now, simply, but managing to put enormous bite and significance into the monosyllable. Her glance followed Sabra’s. Together the two women, tight lipped, condemnatory, watched the gay parade of Dixie Lee’s girls go by.
The flashing company disappeared. A whiff of patchouli floated back to the two women standing by the open window. Their nostrils lifted in disdain. The sound of the horses’ hoofs grew fainter.
“It’s a disgrace to the community”—Mrs. Wyatt’s voice took on its platform note—“and an insult to every wife and mother in the Territory. There ought to be a law.”
Sabra turned away from the window. Her eyes sought the orderly rows of books, bound neatly in tan and red—Yancey’s law books, so long unused now, except, perhaps, for occasional newspaper reference. Her face set itself in lines of resolve. “Perhaps there is.”
It had taken almost three of those five years to bring those lines into Sabra Cravat’s face. They were not, after all, lines. Her face was smooth, her skin still fresh in spite of dust and alkali water and sun and wind. It was, rather, that a certain hardening process had taken place—a crystallization. Yancey had told her, tenderly, that she was a charming little fool, and she had believed it—though perhaps with subconscious reservations. It was not until he left her, and the years rolled round without him, that she developed her powers. The sombrero had ridden gayly away. The head under the sunbonnet had held itself high in spite of hints, innuendoes, gossip.
A man like Yancey Cravat—spectacular, dramatic, impulsive—has a thousand critics, scores of bitter enemies. As the weeks had gone by and Yancey failed to return—had failed to write—rumor, clouded by scandal, leaped like prairie fire from house to house in Osage, from town to town in the Oklahoma Country, over the Southwest, indeed. All the old stories were revived, and their ugly red tongues licked a sordid path through the newly opened land.
They say he is living with the Cherokee squaw who is really his wife.
They say he was seen making the Run in the Kickapoo Land Opening in 1895.
They say he killed a man in the Cherokee Strip Run and was caught by a posse and hung.
They say he got a section of land, sold it at a high figure, and was seen lording it around the bar of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, in his white sombrero and his Prince Albert coat.
They say Dixie Lee is his real wife, and he left her when she was seventeen, came to Wichita, and married Sabra Venable; and he is the one who has set Dixie up in the brick house.
They say he drank five quarts of whisky one night and died and is buried in an unmarked grave in Horseshoe Ranch, where the Doolin gang held forth.
They say he is really the leader of the Doolin gang.
They say. They say. They say.
It is impossible to know how Sabra survived those first terrible weeks that lengthened into months that lengthened into years. There was in her the wiry endurance of the French Marcys; the pride of the Southern Venables. Curiously enough, in spite of all that had happened to her she still had that virginal look—that chastity of lip, that clearness of the eye, that purity of brow. Men come back to the women who look as Sabra Cravat looked, but the tempests of men’s love pass them by.
She told herself that he was dead. She told the world that he was dead. She knew, by some deep and unerring instinct, that he was alive. Donna had been so young when he left that he now was all but wiped from her memory. But Cim, strangely enough, spoke of Yancey Cravat as though he were in the next room. “My father says …” Sometimes, when Sabra saw the boy coming toward her with that familiar swinging stride, his head held down and a little thrust forward, she was wrenched by a physical pang of agony that was almost nausea.
She ran the paper competently; wrung from it a decent livelihood for herself and the two children. When it had no longer been possible to keep secret from her parents the fact of Yancey’s prolonged absence, Felice Venable had descended upon her prepared to gather to the family bosom her deserted child and to bring her, together with her offspring, back to the parental home. Lewis Venable had been too frail and ill to accompany his wife, so Felice had brought with her the more imposing among the Venables, Goforths, and Vians who chanced to be visiting the Wichita house at the time of her departure. Osage had looked upon these stately figures with much awe, but Sabra’s reception of them had been as coolly cordial as her rejection of their plans for her future was firm.
“I intend to stay right here in Osage,” she announced, quietly, but in a tone that even Felice Venable recognized as inflexible, “and run the paper, and bring
