The bear cub, little larger than a puppy, had been led gingerly into the welter of packing cases, straw, excelsior, and broken china which was the Levy Mercantile Company’s back yard, and there tied with a piece of rope which he immediately bit in two. Five minutes later a local housewife, deep in the purchase of a dress length of gingham, and feeling something rubbing against her stout calves, looked down to see the bear cub sociably gnawing his way through her basket of provisions, carelessly placed on the floor by her side.
One week later the grateful ranger brought in a pair of catamounts. A crude wire cage was built. There were added coyotes, prairie dogs, an eagle. The zoo became famous, and all the town came to see it. It brought trade to the Mercantile Company, and free advertising. It was the nucleus for the zoo which, fifteen years later, Sol Levy shyly presented to the Osage City Park, and which contained every wild thing that the Southwest had known, from the buffalo to the rattlesnake.
In a quiet, dreamy way Sol Levy had managed to buy a surprising amount of Osage real estate by now. He owned the lot on which his store stood, the one just south of it, and, among other pieces, the building and lot which comprised the site of the Wigwam and the Cravat house. In the year following Yancey’s departure Sabra’s economic survival was made possible only through the almost shamefaced generosity of this quiet, sad-eyed man.
“I’ve got it all down in my books,” Sabra would say, proudly. “You know that it will all be paid back some day.”
He began in the Oklahoma Wigwam a campaign of advertising out of all proportions to his needs, and Sabra’s debt to him began to shrink to the vanishing point. She got into the habit of talking to him about her business problems, and he advised her shrewdly. When she was utterly discouraged, he would say, not triumphantly, but as one who states an irrefutable and not particularly happy fact:
“Some day, Mrs. Cravat, you and I will look back on this and we will laugh—but not very loud.”
“How do you mean—laugh?”
The little curious cast came into his eyes. “Oh—I will be very rich, and you will be very famous. And Yancey—”
“Yancey!” The word was wrenched from her like a cry.
“They will tell stories about Yancey until he will grow into a legend. He will be part of the history of the Southwest. They will remember him and write about him when all these mealy-faced governors are dead and gone and forgotten. They will tell the little children about him, and they will dispute about him—he did this, he did that; he was like this, he was like that. You will see.”
Sabra thought of her own children, who knew so little of their father. Donna, a thin secretive child of almost seven now, with dark, straight black hair and a sallow skin like Yancey’s; Cim, almost thirteen, moody, charming, imaginative. Donna was more like her grandmother Felice Venable than her own mother; Cim resembled Yancey so strongly in mood, manner, and emotions as to have almost no trace of Sabra. She wondered, with a pang, if she had failed to impress herself on them because of her absorption in the town, in the newspaper, in the resolve to succeed. She got out a photograph of Yancey that she had hidden away because to see it was to feel a stab of pain, and had it framed, and hung it on the wall where the children could see it daily. He was shown in the familiar costume—the Prince Albert, the white sombrero, the six-shooters, the boots, the spurs, the long black locks curling beneath the hat brim, the hypnotic eyes startling you with their arresting gaze, so that it was as if he were examining you rather than that you were seeing his likeness in a photograph. One slim foot, in its high-heeled boot, was slightly advanced, the coat tails flared, the whole picture was somehow endowed with a sense of life and motion.
“Your father—” Sabra would begin, courageously, resolved to make him live again in the minds of the children. Donna was not especially interested. Cim said, “I know it,” and capped her story with a tale of his own in which Yancey’s feat of derring-do outrivaled any swashbuckling escapade of D’Artagnan.
“Oh, but Cim, that’s not true! You mustn’t believe stories like that about your father.”
“It is true. Isaiah told me. I guess he ought to know.” And then the question she dreaded. “When are Isaiah and Father coming back?”
She could answer, somehow, evasively, about Yancey, for her instinct concerning him was sure and strong. But at the fate that had overtaken the Negro boy she cowered, afraid even to face the thought of it. For the thing that had happened to the black boy was so dreadful, so remorseless that when the truth of it came to Sabra she felt all this little world of propriety, of middle-class Middle West convention that she had built up about her turning to ashes under the sudden flaring fire of hidden savagery. She tried never to think of it, but sometimes,
