He swallowed his second drink. His face seemed less drawn, his hand steadier, his whole bearing more alert. “Now listen, Sabra. You don’t understand. You don’t understand the Osages. This is serious.”
Sabra interrupted quickly. “Don’t think I’m hard. I’m not condemning her altogether, or Isaiah, either. I’m partly to blame. I should have seen. But I am so busy. Anyway, I can’t have her here now, can I? With Isaiah. Even you …”
He filled his glass. She wished he would stop drinking; go home. She would sit up the night with the Indian girl. And in the morning—well, she must get someone in to help. They would know, sooner or later.
He was repeating rather listlessly what he had said. “The Osages have kept the tribe absolutely free of Negro blood. This is a bad business.”
Her patience was at an end. “What of it? And how do you know? How do you know?”
“Because they remove any member of the tribe that has had to do with a Negro.”
“Remove!”
“Kill. By torture.”
She stared at him. He was drunk, of course. “You’re talking nonsense,” she said crisply. She was very angry.
“Don’t let this get around. They might blame you. The Osages. They might—I’ll just go and take another look at her.”
The girl was sleeping. Sabra felt a pang of pity as she gazed down at her. “Go to bed—off with you,” said Doc Valliant to Isaiah. The boy’s face was wet, pulpy with tears and sweat and fright. He walked slackly, as though exhausted.
“Wait.” Sabra cut him some bread from the loaf, sliced a piece of meat left from supper. “Here. Eat this. Everything will be all right in the morning.”
The news got round. Perhaps Doc Valliant talked in drink. Doubtless the girl who came in to help her. Perhaps Isaiah, who after a night’s exhausted sleep had suddenly become proudly paternal and boasted loudly about the house (and no doubt out of it) of the size, beauty, and intelligence of the little lump of dusky flesh that lay beside Arita Red Feather’s bed in the very cradle that had held Donna when an infant. Arita Red Feather was frantic to get up. They had to keep her in bed by main force. She had not spoken a dozen words since the birth of the child.
On the fourth day following the child’s birth Sabra came into Arita Red Feather’s room early in the morning and she was not there. The infant was not there. Their beds had been slept in and now were empty. She ran straight into the yard where Isaiah’s little hut stood. He was not there. She questioned the girl who now helped with the housework and who slept on a couch in the dining room. She had heard nothing, seen nothing. The three had vanished in the night.
Well, Sabra thought, philosophically, they have gone off. Isaiah can make out, somehow. Perhaps he can even get a job as a printer somewhere. He was handy, quick, bright. He had some money, for she had given him, in these later years, a little weekly wage, and he had earned a quarter here, a half dollar there. Enough, perhaps, to take them by train back to Kansas. Certainly they had not gone to Arita’s people, for Big Knee, questioned, denied all knowledge of his daughter, of her child, of the black boy. He behaved like an Indian in a Cooper novel. He grunted, looked blank, folded his arms, stared with dead black, expressionless eyes. They could make nothing of him. His squaw, stout, silent, only shook her head; pretended that she neither spoke nor understood English.
Then the rumor rose, spread, received credence. It was started by Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian guide and plainsman who sometimes lived with the Indians for months at a time on their reservations, who went with them on their visiting jaunts, hunted, fished, ate with them, who was married to a Cherokee, and who had even been adopted into the Cherokee tribe. He had got the story from a Cherokee who in turn had had it from an Osage. The Osage, having managed to lay hands on some whisky, and becoming very drunk, now told the grisly tale for the first time.
There had been an Osage meeting of the Principal Chief, old Howling Wolf; the Assistant Chief; the eight members of the Council, which included Big Knee, Arita’s father. There the news of the girl’s dereliction had been discussed, her punishment gravely decided upon, and that of Isaiah.
They had come in the night and got them—the black boy, the Indian girl, the infant—by what means no one knew. Arita Red Feather and her child had been bound together, placed in an untanned and uncured steer hide, the hide was securely fastened, they were carried then to the open, sunbaked, and deserted prairie and left there, with a guard. The hide shrank and shrank and shrank in the burning sun, closer and closer, day by day, until soon there was no movement within it.
Isaiah, already half dead with fright, was at noonday securely bound and fastened to a stake. Near by, but not near enough quite to touch him, was a rattlesnake so caught by a leather thong that, strike and coil and strike as it might, it could not quite reach, with its venomous head, the writhing, gibbering thing that lay staring with eyes that protruded out of all semblance to human features. But as dusk came on the dew fell, and the leather thong stretched a little with the wet. And as twilight deepened and the dew grew heavier the leather thong holding the horrible reptile stretched more and more. Presently it was long enough.
