It is no use saying to a man who has been gone for five years, “Where have you been?” Besides, there was not time. Next morning he was on his way to the Philippines. It was not until he had gone that she realized her failure actually to put this question that had been haunting her for half a decade.
Cim and Donna took him for granted, as children do. So did Jesse Rickey, with his mind of a child. For that matter, Yancey took his own return for granted. His manner was nonchalant, his spirits high, his exuberance infectious. He set the pitch. There was about him nothing of the delinquent husband.
He now strode magnificently into the room where the children were at breakfast, snatched them up, kissed them. You would have thought he had been gone a week.
Donna was shy of him. “Your daughter’s a Venable, Mrs. Cravat,” he said, and turned to the boy. Cim, slender, graceful, taller than he seemed because of that trick of lowering his fine head and gazing at you from beneath his too-long lashes, reached almost to Yancey’s broad shoulders. But he had not Yancey’s heroic bulk, his vitality. The Cravat skull structure was contradicted by the narrow Venable face. The mouth was oversensitive, the hands and feet too exquisite, the smile almost girlish in its wistful sweetness. “ ‘Gods! How the son degenerates from the sire!’ ”
“Yancey!” cried Sabra in shocked protest. It was as though the five years had never been.
“Do you want to see my dog?” Cim asked.
“Have you got a pony?”
“Oh, no.”
“I’ll buy you one this afternoon. A pinto. Here. Look.”
He took from his pocket a little soft leathern pouch soiled and worn from much handling. It was laced through at the top with a bit of stout string. He loosed this, poured the bag’s contents onto the breakfast table; a little heap of shining yellow. The three stood looking at it. Cim touched it with one finger.
“What is it?”
Yancey scooped up a handful of it and let it trickle through his fingers. “That’s gold.” He turned to Sabra. “It’s all I’ve got to show, honey, for two years and more in Alaska.”
“Alaska!” she could only repeat, feebly. So that was it.
“I’m famished. What’s this? Bacon and eggs?” He reached for a slice of bread from the plate on the table, buttered it lavishly, clapped a strip of coldish bacon on top of that, and devoured it in eager bites. Sabra saw then, for the first time, that he was thinner; there were hollow shadows in the pockmarked cheeks; there was a scarcely perceptible sag to the massive shoulders. There was something about his hand. The forefinger of the right hand was gone. She felt suddenly faint, ill. She reeled a little and stumbled. As always, he sprang toward her. His lips were against her hair.
“Oh, God! How I’ve missed you, Sabra, sugar!”
“Yancey! The children!” It was the prim exclamation of a woman who had forgotten the pleasant ways of dalliance. Those five years had served to accentuate her spinsterish qualities; had made her more and more powerful; less human; had slowed the machinery of her emotional equipment. A man in the house. A possessive male, enfolding her in his arms; touching her hair, her throat with urgent fingers. She was embarrassed almost. Besides, this man had neglected her, deserted her, had left his children to get on as best they could. She shrugged herself free. Anger leaped within her. He was a stranger.
“Don’t touch me. You can’t come home like this—after years—after years—”
“Ah, Penelope!”
She stared. “Who?”
“ ‘Strange lady, surely to thee above all woman kind the Olympians have given a heart that cannot be softened. No other woman in the world would harden her heart to stand thus aloof from her husband, who after travail and sore had come to her … to his own country.’ ”
“You and your miserable Milton!”
He looked only slightly surprised and did not correct her.
One by one, and then in groups and then in crowds, the neighbors and townspeople began to come in—the Wyatts, Louis Hefner, Cass Peery, Mott Bixler, Ike Hawes, Grat Gotch, Doc Nisbett—the local politicians, the storekeepers, their wives. They came out of curiosity, though they felt proper resentment toward this strange—this baffling creature who had ridden carelessly away, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves, and now had ridden as casually back again. They would have stayed away if they could, but his enchantment was too strong. Perhaps he represented, for them, the thing they fain would be or have. When Yancey, flouting responsibility and convention, rode away to be gone for mysterious years, a hundred men, bound by ties of work and wife and child, escaped in spirit with him; a hundred women, faithful wives and dutiful mothers, thought of Yancey as the elusive, the romantic, the desirable male.
Well, they would see how she had met it, and take their cue from her. A smart woman, Sabra Cravat. Throw him out, likely as not, and serve him right. But at sight of Yancey Cravat in his Rough Rider uniform of khaki, U.S.V. on the collar, the hat brim dashingly caught up on the left side with the insignia of crossed sabers, they were snared again in the mesh of his enchantment. The Rough Riders. Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! There’ll Be a Hot Time in the
