Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  O God! whimpered Sabra, running this way and that. O God! Oh, Cim! Cim!

  She came to a little mound that dipped suddenly and unexpectedly to a draw. And there, in a hollow, she came upon him, seated before a cave in the side of the hill, the front and roof ingeniously timbered to make a log cabin. One might pass within five feet of it and never find it. Four men were seated about the doorstep outside the rude cabin. Cim was perched on the knee of one of them, who was cracking nuts for him. They were laughing and talking and munching nuts and having altogether a delightful time of it. Sabra’s knees suddenly became weak. She was trembling. She stumbled as she ran toward him. Her face worked queerly. The men sprang up, their hands at their hips.

  “The man is cracking nuts for me,” remarked Cim, sociably, and not especially glad to see her.

  The man on whose knee he sat was a slim young fellow with a sandy mustache and a red handkerchief knotted cowboy fashion around his throat. He put the boy down gently as Sabra came up, and rose with a kind of easy grace.

  “You ran away—you—we hunted every—Cim——” she stammered, and burst into tears of mingled anger and relief.

  The slim young man seemed the spokesman, though the other three were obviously older than he.

  “Why, I’m real sorry you was distressed, ma’am. We was going to bring the boy back safe enough. He wandered down here lookin’ for his pa, he said.” He was standing with one hand resting lightly, tenderly, on Cim’s head, and looking down at Sabra with a smile of utter sweetness. His was the soft-spoken, almost caressing voice of the Southwestern cowman and ranger. At this Sabra’s anger, born of fright, vanished. Besides, he was so young—scarcely more than a boy.

  “Well,” she explained, a little sheepishly, “I was worried.… My husband went off on the track of a deer … hours ago … he hasn’t come back … then when Cim … I came out and he was gone.… I was so—so terribly …”

  She looked very wan and schoolgirlish in her prim gray dress and with her hair in a braid tied with a bright red ribbon, and her tear-stained cheeks.

  One of the men who had strolled off a little way with the appearance of utmost casualness returned to the group in time to hear this. “He’ll be back any minute now,” he announced. “He didn’t get no deer.”

  “But how do you know?”

  The soft-spoken young man shot a malignant look at the other, the older man looked suddenly abashed. Sabra’s question went unanswered. “Won’t you sit and rest yourself, ma’am?” suggested the spokesman. The words were hospitable enough, yet there was that in the boy’s tone which conveyed to Sabra the suggestion that she and Cim had better be gone. She took Cim’s hand. Now that her fright was past she thought she must have looked very silly running down the draw with her tears and her pigtail and her screaming. She thanked them, using a little Southern charm and Southern drawl, which she often legitimately borrowed from the ancestral Venables for special occasions such as this.

  “I’m ve’y grateful to you-all,” she now said. “You’ve been mighty kind. If you would just drop around to our camp I’m sure my husband would be delighted to meet you.”

  The young man smiled more sweetly than ever, and the others looked at him, an inexplicable glint of humor in their weather-beaten faces.

  “I sure thank you, ma’am. We’re movin’ on, my friends here and me. Pronto. Floyd, how about you getting a piece of deer meat for the lady, seeing she’s been cheated of her supper. Now, if you and the little fella don’t mind sittin’ up behind and before, why, I’ll take you back a ways. You probably run fu’ther than you expected, ma’am, scared as you was.” She had, as a matter of fact, in her terror, run almost half a mile from camp.

  He mounted first. His method of accomplishing this was something of a miracle. At one moment the horse was standing ready and he was at its side. The next there was a flash, and he was on its back. It was like an optical illusion in which he seemed to have been drawn to the saddle as a needle flies to the magnet. Cim he drew up to the pommel, holding him with one hand; Sabra, perched on the horse’s rump, clung with both arms round the lad’s slim waist. Something of a horsewoman, she noticed his fine Mexican saddle, studded with silver. From the sides of the saddle hung hair-covered pockets whose bulge was the outline of a gun. A slicker such as is carried by those who ride the trails made a compact ship-shape roll behind the saddle. The horse had a velvet gait, even with this triple load. Sabra found herself wishing that this exhilarating ride might go on for miles. Suddenly she noticed that the young rider wore gloves. The sight of them made her vaguely uneasy, as though some memory had been stirred. She had never seen a plainsman wearing gloves. It was absurd, somehow.

  A hundred feet or so from the camp he reined in his horse abruptly, half turned in his saddle, and with his free hand swung Sabra gently to the ground, leaning far from his saddle and keeping a firm hold on Cim and reins as he did so. He placed the child in her upraised arms, wheeled, and was gone before she could open her lips to frame a word of thanks. The piece of deer meat, neatly wrapped, lay on the ground at her feet. She stood staring after the galloping figure, dumbly. She took Cim’s hand. Together they ran toward the camp. Isaiah had a fire going, a pot of coffee bubbling. His greeting to Cim was sternly admonitory. Ten minutes later Yancey galloped in, empty handed.

  “What a chase he led me! Twice I thought I had him. I’d have run him into Texas if I hadn’t thought you’d be——”

  Sabra, for the first time since her marriage, felt superior to him; was impatient of his tale of prowess. She had her own story to tell, spiced with indignation. She was not interested in his mythical deer. She had an actual piece of fresh deer meat to cook for their supper.

  “… and just when I was ready to die with fright, there he was, talking to those four men, and sitting on the knee of one of them as though he’d known him all his life eating nuts.… Anything might have happened to him and to me while you were off after your old deer.”

  Yancey seemed less interested in the part that she and Cim had played in the adventure than in the appearance and behavior of the four men in the draw, and especially the charming young man who had so gallantly brought them back.

  “Thin faced, was he? And a youngster? About nineteen or twenty? What else?”

  “Oh, a low voice, and kind of sweet, as though he sang tenor. And his teeth——”

  Yancey interrupted. “Long, weren’t they? The two at the side, I mean. Like a wolf’s?”

  “Yes. How did you—Do you know him?”

  “Sort of,” Yancey answered, thoughtfully.

  Sabra was piqued. “It was lucky for us it was someone who knows you, probably. Because you don’t seem to care much about what happened to us—what might have happened.”

  “You said you wanted to go a-pioneering.”

  “Well?”

  “This is it. Stir that fire, Isaiah. Sabra, get that deer meat a-frizzling that your friend gave you. Because we’re moving on.”

  “Now? To-night? But it’s late. I thought we were camping here for the night.”

  “We’ll eat and get going. Moonlight to-night. I don’t just like it here. There’s been a lot of time lost this afternoon. We’ll push on. In another day or so, with luck, we’ll be in Osage, snug and safe.”

  They ate hurriedly. Yancey seemed restless, anxious to be off.

  They jolted on. Cim slept, a little ball of weariness, in the back of the wagon. Isaiah drowsed beside Sabra, and she herself was half asleep, the reins slack in her hands. The scent of the sun-warmed prairie came up to her, and the pungent smell of the sagebrush. The Indians had swept over this plain in hordes; and buffalo by the millions. She wondered if the early Spaniards, in their lust for gold, had trod this ground—perhaps this very trail. Coronado, De Soto, Narvaez. She had seen pictures of them, these dark-skinned élégantes in their cumbersome trappings of leather and heavy metal, tramping the pitiless plains of this vast Southwest, searching like children for cities of gold.… The st
eady clop-clop of the horses’ feet, the rattle of the wagon, the squeak of the wheels, the smell of sun-baked earth …

  She must have dozed off, for suddenly the sun’s rays were sharply slanted, and she shivered with the cool of the prairie night air. Voices had awakened her. Three horsemen had dashed out of a little copse and stood in the path of Yancey’s lead wagon. They were heavily armed. Their hands rested on their guns. Their faces were grim. They wore the mournful mustaches of the Western plainsman, their eyes were the eyes of men accustomed to great distances; their gaze was searing. All three wore the badge of United States marshals, but there was about them something that announced this even before the eye was caught by their badge of office. The leader addressed Yancey, his voice mild, even gentle.

  “Howdy.”

  “Howdy.”

  “Where you bound for, pardner?”

  “Osage.”

  The questioner’s hand rested lightly on the butt of the six-shooter at his waist. “What might your name be?”

  “Cravat—Yancey Cravat.”

  The spokesman’s face lighted up with the slow, incredulous smile of a delighted child. “I’ll be doggoned!” He turned his slow grin on the man at his right, on the man at his left. “Yancey Cravat!” he said again, as though they had not heard. “I sure am pleased to make your acquaintance. Heard about you till I feel like I knew you.”

  “Why, thanks,” replied Yancey, unusually modest and laconic. Sabra knew then that Yancey was playing one of his rôles. He would talk as they talked. Be one of them.

  “Aimin’ to make quite a stay in Osage?”

  “Aim to live there.”

  “Go on! I’ve a notion to swear you in as Deputy Marshal right now, darned if I ain’t. Citizens like you is what we need, and no mistake. Lawy’in’?”

  “I’m planning to take up my law practice in Osage, yes,” Yancey answered, “and start a newspaper as well.”

  The three looked a little perturbed at this. They glanced at each other, then at Yancey, then away, uncomfortably. “Oh, newspaper, huh?” There was little enthusiasm in the marshal’s voice. “Well, we did have a newspaper there for a little while in Osage, ’bout a week.”

  “A daily?”

  “A weekly.”

  There was something sinister in this. “What became of it?”

  “Well, seems the editor—name of Pegler—died.”

  There was a little silence. Sabra gathered up her reins and brought her team alongside Yancey’s, the better to hear. The three mustached ones acknowledged her more formal presence by briefly touching their hat brims with the forefinger of the hand that had rested on their guns.

  “Who killed him?”

  A little shadow of pained surprise passed over the features of the marshal. “He was just found dead one morning on the banks of the Canadian. Bullet wounds. But bullets is all pretty much alike, out here. He might ’a’ killed himself, plumb discouraged.”

  The silence fell again. Yancey broke it. “The first edition of the Oklahoma Wigwam will be off the press two weeks from to-morrow.”

  He gathered up the reins as though to end this chance meeting, however agreeable. “Well, gentlemen, good-evening. Glad to have met you.”

  The three did not budge. “What we stopped to ask you,” said the spokesman, in his gentle drawl, “was, did you happen to glimpse four men anywhere on the road? They’re nesting somewhere in here, the Kid and his gang. Stole four horses, robbed the bank at Red Fork, shot the cashier, and lit out for the prairie. Light complected, all of ’em. The Kid is a slim young fella, light hair, red handkerchief, soft spoken, and rides with gloves on. But then you know what he’s like, Cravat, well’s I do.”

  Yancey nodded in agreement. “Everybody’s heard of the Kid. No, sir, I haven’t seen him. Haven’t seen anybody the last three days but a Kaw on a pony and a bunch of dirty Cheyennes in a wagon. Funny thing, I never yet knew a bad man who wasn’t light complected—or, anyway, blue or gray eyes.”

  “Oh, say, now!” protested the marshal, stroking his sandy mustache.

  “Fact. You take the Kid, and the James boys, and Tom O’Phalliard, and the whole Mullins gang.”

  “How about yourself? You’re pretty good with the gun, from all accounts. And black as a crow.”

  Yancey lifted his great head and the heavy lids that usually drooped over the gray eyes and looked at the marshal. “That’s so,” said the other, as though in agreement at the end of an argument. “I reckon it goes fur killers and fur killers of killers.… Well, boys, we’ll be lopin’. Good luck to you.”

  “Good luck to you!” responded Yancey, politely.

  The three whirled their steeds spectacularly, raised their right hands in salute; the horses pivoted on their hind legs prettily; Cim crowed with delight. They were off in a cloud of red dust made redder by the last rays of the setting sun.

  Yancey gathered up his reins. Sabra stared at him in bewildered indignation. “But the person who shields a criminal is just as bad as the criminal himself, isn’t he?”

  Yancey looked back at her around the side of his wagon top. His smile was mischievous, sparkling, irresistible. “Don’t be righteous, Sabra. It’s middle class—and a terrible trait in a woman.”

  Late next day, just before sunset, after pushing on relentlessly through the blistering sun of midday, Yancey pointed with his wagon whip to something that looked like a wallow of mud dotted with crazy shanties and tents. Theatrically he picked Cim up in his arms so that the child, too, might see. But he spoke to Sabra.

  “There it is,” he said. “That’s our future home.”

  Sabra looked. And her brain seemed to have no order or reason about it, for she could think only of the green nun’s veiling trimmed with ruchings of pink which lay so carefully folded, with its modish sleeves all stuffed out with soft paper, in the trunk under the canvas of the wagon.

  6

  Long before the end of that first nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with blazing eyes. “I won’t bring up my boy in a town like this!”

  It had been a night and a day fantastic with untoward happenings. Their wagons had rumbled wearily down the broad main street of the settlement—a raw gash in the prairie. All about, on either side, were wooden shacks, and Indians and dried mud and hitching posts and dogs and crude wagons like their own. It looked like pictures Sabra had seen of California in ’49. They had supped on ham and eggs, fried potatoes, and muddy coffee in a place labeled Ice Cream and Oyster Parlor. They spent that first night in a rooming house above one of the score of saloons that enlivened the main street—Pawhuska Avenue, it was called. It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness. The street stopped abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.

  “Pawhuska Avenue,” said a tipsy sign tacked on the front of a false-front pine shack. Yancey chose this unfortunate time to impart a little Indian lore to Cim, wide eyed on the wagon seat beside his mother.

  “That’s Osage,” he shouted to the boy. “Pawhu—that means hair. And scah, that means white. White Hair. Pawhuska—White Hair—was an old Osage Chief——”

  “Yancey Cravat!” Sabra called in a shout that almost equaled his own, and in a tone startlingly like one of Felice Venable’s best (she was, in fact, slightly hysterical, what with weariness and disappointment and fear), “Yancey Cravat, will you stop talking Indian history and find us a place to eat and sleep! Where’s your sense? Can’t you see he’s ready to drop, and so am I?”

  The greasy food set before them in the eating house sickened her. She shrank from the slatternly bold-faced girl who slammed the dishes down in front of them on the oilcloth-covered table. At this same table with them—there was only one, a long board accommodating perhaps twenty—sat red-faced men talking in great rough voices, eating with a mechanical and absent-minded thoroughness, shoveling potatoes, canned vegetables, pie into their mouths with knives. Cim wa
s terribly wide awake and noisily unruly, excited by the sounds and strangeness about him.

  “I’m an Indian!” he would yell, making a great clatter with his spoon on the table. “Ol’ White Hair! Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!” Being reprimanded, and having the spoon forcibly removed from his clutching fingers, he burst into tears and howls.

  Sabra had taken him up to the bare and clean enough little room which was to be their shelter for the night. From wide-eyed wakefulness Cim had become suddenly limp with sleep. Yancey had gone out to see to the horses, to get what information he could about renting a house, and a shack for the newspaper. A score of plans were teeming in his mind.

  “You’ll be all right,” he had said. “A good night’s sleep and everything’ll look rosy in the morning. Don’t look so down in the mouth, honey. You’re going to like it.”

  “It’s horrible! It’s—and those men! Those dreadful men.”

  “ ‘For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows than the second man in Rome.’ ” Yancey struck an attitude.

  Sabra looked at him dully. “Rome?”

  “Plutarch, my sweet.” He kissed her; was gone with a great flirt of his coat tails. She heard his light step clattering down the flimsy wooden stairs. She could distinguish his beautiful vibrant voice among the raucous speech of the other men below.

  The boy was asleep in a rude box bed drawn up beside theirs. Black Isaiah was bedded down somewhere in a little kennel outside. Sabra sank suspiciously down on the doubtful mattress. The walls of the room were wafer thin; mere pine slats with cracks between. From the street below came women’s shrill laughter, the sound of a piano hammered horribly. Horses clattered by. Voices came up in jocose greeting; there were conversations and arguments excruciatingly prolonged beneath her window.

  “I was sellin’ a thousand beef steers one time—holdin’ a herd of about three thousand—and me and my foreman, we was countin’ the cattle as they come between us. Well, the steers was wild long-legged coasters—and run! Say, they come through between us like scairt wolves, and I lost the count …”