by Edna Ferber
“If your missus wasn’t with you——” began the man whom Yancey had called Lon. Perhaps the rough joke would have ended grimly enough. But here, suddenly, Sabra herself took a hand in the proceedings. Her fright had vanished. These were no longer men, evil, sinister, to be feared, but mean little boys to be put in their place. She now advanced on them in the majesty of her plumes and her silk, her fine eyes flashing, her gloved forefinger admonishing them as if they were indeed naughty children. She was every inch the descendant of the Marcys of France and the very essence of that iron woman, Felice Venable.
“Don’t you ‘missus’ me! You’re a lot of miserable, good-for-nothing loafers, that’s what you are! Shooting at people in the streets. You leave my husband alone. I declare, I’ve a notion to——”
For one ridiculous dreadful moment it looked as though she meant to slap the leathery bearded cheek of the bad man known as Lon Yountis. Certainly she raised her little hand in its neat black kid. The eyes of the three were popping. Lon Yountis ducked his head exactly like an urchin who is about to be smacked by the schoolmarm. Then, with a yelp of pure terror he fled into the saloon, followed by the other two.
Sabra stood a moment. It really looked as though she might make after them. But she thought better of it and sailed down the steps in triumph to behold a crushed, a despairing Yancey.
“Oh, my God, Sabra! What have you done to me!”
“What’s the matter?”
“This time to-morrow it’ll be all over the whole Southwest, from Mexico to Arkansas, that Yancey Cravat hid behind a woman’s petticoats.”
“But you didn’t. They can’t say so. You shot him very nicely in the ear, darling.” Thus had a scant eighteen hours in the Oklahoma country twisted her normal viewpoint so askew that she did not even notice the grotesquerie of what she had just said.
“They’re telling it now, in there. My God, a woman’s got no call to interfere when men are having a little dispute.”
“Dispute! Why, Yancey Cravat! He shot your hat right off your head!”
“What of it! Little friendly shooting.”
The enormity of this example of masculine clannishness left her temporarily speechless with indignation. “Let’s be getting on,” Yancey continued, calmly. “If we’re going to look at Doc Nisbett’s house we’d better look at it. There are only two or three to be had in the whole town, and his is the pick of them. It’s central” (Central! she thought, looking about her) “and according to what he said last night there’s a room in the front big enough for getting out the paper. It’ll have to be newspaper and law office in one. Then there are four rooms in the back to live in. Plenty.”
“Oh, plenty,” echoed Sabra, thinking of the nine or ten visiting Venables always comfortably tucked away in the various high-ceilinged bedrooms in the Wichita house.
They resumed their walk. Sabra wondered if she had imagined the shooting outside the Red Dog Saloon.
Doc Nisbett (veterinarian), shirt sleeved, shrewd, with generations of New England ancestry behind him, was seated in a chair tipped up against the front of his coveted property. Nothing of the brilliant Southwest sun had mellowed the vinegar of his chemical make-up. In the rush for Territory town sites at the time of the Opening he had managed to lay his gnarled hands on five choice pieces. On these he erected dwellings, tilted his chair up against each in turn, and took his pick of late-comers frantic for some sort of shelter they could call a home. That perjury, thieving, trickery, gun play, and murder had gone into the acquiring of these—as well as many other—sites was not considered important or, for that matter, especially interesting.
The dwelling itself looked like one of Cim’s childish drawings of a house. The roof was an inverted V; there was a front door, a side door, and a spindling little porch. It was a box, a shelter merely, as angular and unlovely as the man who owned it. The walls were no more than partitions, the floors boards laid on dirt.
Taking her cue from Yancey—“Lovely,” murmured Sabra, agonized. The mantel ornaments that had been Cousin Dabney’s wedding present! The hand-woven monogrammed linen! The silver cake dish with the carefree cupids. The dozen solid silver coffee spoons! “Do very nicely. Perfectly comfortable. I see. I see. I see.”
“There you are!” They stood again on the porch, the tour completed. Yancey clapped his hands together gayly, as though by so doing he had summoned a genie who had tossed up the house before their very eyes. In the discussion of monthly rental he had been a child in the hands of this lean and grasping New Englander. “There you are! That’s all settled.” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Survey our empire, and behold our home!’ ”
“Heh, hold on a minute,” rasped Doc Nisbett. “How about water?”
“Sabra, honey, you settle these little matters between you—you and the Doc—will you? I’ve got to run down the street and see Jesse Rickey about putting up the press and setting up the type racks and helping me haul the form tables, and then we’ve got the furniture to buy for the house. Meet you down the street at Hefner’s Furniture Store. Ten minutes.”
He was off, with a flirt of his coat tails. She would have called, “Yancey! Don’t leave me!” but for a prideful reluctance to show fear before this dour-visaged man with the tight lips and the gimlet eyes. From the first he had seemed to regard her with disfavor. She could not imagine why. It was, of course, his Puritan New England revulsion against her plumes, her silks, her faintly Latin beauty.
“Well, now,” repeated Doc Nisbett, nasally, “about water.”
“Water?”
“How much you going to need? Renting this house depends on how much water you think you going to need. How many barrels.”
Sabra had always taken water for granted, like air and sunshine. It was one of the elements. It was simply there. But since leaving Wichita there was always talk of water. Yancey, on the prairie journey, made it the basis of their camping site.
“Oh, barrels,” she now repeated, trying to appear intensely practical. “Well, let—me—see. There’s cooking, of course, and all the cleaning around the house, and drinking, and bathing. I always give Cim his bath in the evening if I can. You wouldn’t believe how dirty that child gets by the end of the day. His knees—oh, yes—well, I should think ten barrels a day would be enough.”
“Ten barrels,” said Doc Nesbitt, in a flat voice utterly devoid of expression, “a day.”
“I should think that would be ample,” Sabra repeated, judiciously.
Doc Nisbett now regarded Sabra with a look of active dislike. Then he did a strange thing. He walked across the little porch, shut the front door, locked it, put the key in his pocket, seated himself in the chair and tilted it up against the wall at exactly the angle at which they had come upon him.
Sabra stood there. Seeing her, it would have been almost impossible to believe that anyone so bravely decked out in silk and plumes and pink roses could present a figure so bewildered, so disconsolate, so defeated. Literally, she did not know what to do. She had met and surmounted many strange experiences in these last ten days. But she had been born of generations of women to whom men had paid homage. Perhaps in all her life she had never encountered the slightest discourtesy in a man, much less this abysmal boorishness.
She looked at him, her face white, shocked. She looked up, in embarrassment, at the glaring steel sky; she looked down at the blinding red dust, she looked helplessly in the direction that Yancey had so blithely taken. She glanced again at Doc Nisbett, propped so woodenly against the wall of his hateful house. His eye was as cold, as glassy, as unseeing as the eye of a dead fish.
She should, of course, have gone straight up to him and said, “Do you mean that ten barrels are too much? I didn’t know. I am new to all this. Whatever you say.”
But she was young, and inexperienced, and full of pride, and terribly offended. So without another word she turned and marched down the dusty street. Her head in its plumed hat was high. On either cheek burned a scarlet patch. Her eyes, in
her effort to keep back the hot tears, were blazing, liquid, enormous. She saw nothing. From the saloons that lined the street there came, even at this hour of the morning, yelps and the sound of music.
And then a fearful thing happened to Sabra Cravat.
Down the street toward her came a galloping cowboy in sombrero and chaps and six-shooters. Sabra was used to such as he. Full of her troubles, she was scarcely aware that she had glanced at him. How could she know that he was just up from the plains of Texas, that this raw town represented for him the height of effete civilization, that he was, in celebration of his arrival, already howling drunk as befits a cowboy just off the range, and that never before in his life (he was barely twenty-three) had he seen a creature so gorgeous as this which now came toward him, all silk, plumes, roses, jet, scarlet cheeks, and great liquid eyes. Up he galloped; stared, wheeled, flung himself off his horse, ran toward her in his high-heeled cowboy boots (strangely enough all that Sabra could recall about him afterward were those boots as he came toward her. The gay tops were of shiny leather, and alternating around them was the figure of a dancing girl with flaring skirts, and a poker hand of cards which later she learned was a royal flush, all handsomely embossed on the patent leather cuffs of the boots). She realized, in a flash of pure terror, that he was making straight for her. She stood, petrified. He came nearer, he stood before her, he threw his arms like steel bands about her, he kissed her full on the lips, released her, leaped on his horse, and was off with a blood-curdling yelp and a clatter and a whirl of dust.
She thought that she was going to be sick, there, in the road. Then she began to run, fleetly but awkwardly, in her flounced and bustled silken skirts. Hefner’s Furniture Store. Hefner’s Furniture Store. Hefner’s Furniture Store. She saw it at last. Hefner’s Furniture and Undertaking Parlors. A crude wooden shack, like the rest. She ran in. Yancey. Yancey! Everything looked dim to her bewildered and sun-blinded eyes. Someone came toward her. A large moist man, in shirt sleeves. Hefner, probably. My husband. My husband, Yancey Cravat. No. Sorry, ma’am. Ain’t been in, I know of. Anything I can do for you, ma’am?
She blurted it, hysterically. “A man—a cowboy—I was walking along—he jumped off his horse—he—I never saw him b——he kissed me—there on the street in broad daylight—a cowboy—he kissed——”
“Why, ma’am, don’t take on so. Young fella off the range, prob’ly. Up from Texas, more’n likely, and never did see a gorgeous critter like yourself, if you’ll pardon my mentioning it.”
Her voice rose in her hysteria. “You don’t understand! He kissed me. He k-k-k-k——” racking sobs.
“Now, now, lady. He was drunk, and you kind of went to his head. He’ll ride back to Texas, and you’ll be none the worse for it.”
At this calloused viewpoint of a tragedy she broke down completely and buried her head on her folded arms atop the object nearest at hand. Her slim body shook with her sobs. Her tears flowed. She cried aloud like a child.
But at that a plaintive but firm note of protest entered Mr. Hefner’s voice.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but that’s velvet you’re crying on, and water spots velvet something terrible. If you’d just lean on something else …”
She raised herself from the object on which she had collapsed, weeping, and looked at it with brimming eyes that widened in horror as she realized that she had showered her tears on that pride of Hefner’s Furniture and Undertaking establishment, the newly arrived white velvet coffin (child’s size) intended for show window purposes alone.
7
From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the effect that the house had been rented by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra’s. Sabra was inconsolable, but Yancey did not once reproach her for her mistake. It was characteristic of him that he was most charming and considerate in crises which might have been expected to infuriate him. “Never mind, sugar. Don’t take on like that. We’ll find a house. And, anyway, we’re here. That’s the main thing. God, when I think of those years in Wichita!”
“Why, Yancey! I thought you were happy there.”
“ ‘A prison’d soul, lapped in Elysium.’ Almost five years in one place—that’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey. Five years, back and forth like a trail horse; walking down to the Wigwam office in the morning, setting up personal and local items and writing editorials for a smug citizenry interested in nothing but the new waterworks. Walking back to dinner at noon, sitting on the veranda evenings, looking at the vegetables in the garden or the Venables in the house until I couldn’t tell vegetables from Venables and began to think, by God, that I was turning into one or the other myself.”
He groaned with relief, stretched his mighty arms, shook himself like a great shaggy lion. In all this welter of red clay and Indians and shirt sleeves and tobacco juice and drought he seemed to find a beauty and an exhilaration that eluded Sabra quite. But then Sabra, after those first two days, had ceased to search for a reason for anything. She met and accepted the most grotesque, the most fantastic happenings. When she looked back on the things she had done and the things she had said in the first few hours of her Oklahoma experience it was as though she were tolerantly regarding the naïvetés of a child. Ten barrels of water a day! She knew now that water, in this burning land, was a precious thing to be measured out like wine. Life here was an anachronism, a great crude joke. It was hard to realize that while the rest of the United States, in this year of 1889, was living a conventionally civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws, millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been set back according to the frontier standards of half a century earlier. Literally she was pioneering in a wilderness surrounded but untouched by civilization.
Yancey had reverted. Always—even in his staidest Wichita incarnation—a somewhat incredibly romantic figure, he now was remarkable even in this town of fantastic humans gathered from every corner of the brilliantly picturesque Southwest. His towering form, his curling locks, his massive head, his vibrant voice, his dashing dress, his florid speech, his magnetic personality drew attention wherever he went. On the day following their arrival Yancey had taken from his trunk a pair of silver-mounted ivory-handled six-shooters and a belt and holster studded with silver. She had never before seen them. She had not known that he possessed these grim and gaudy trappings. His white sombrero he had banded with a rattlesnake skin of gold and silver, with glass eyes, a treasure also produced from the secret trunk, as well as a pair of gold-mounted spurs which further enhanced the Texas star boots. Thus bedecked for his legal and editorial pursuits he was by far the best dressed and most spectacular male in all the cycloramic Oklahoma country. He had always patronized a good tailor, and because the local talent was still so limited in this new community he later sent as far as San Antonio, Texas, when his wardrobe needed replenishing.
Sabra learned many astounding things in these first few days, and among the most terrifying were the things she learned about the husband to whom she had been happily married for more than five years. She learned, for example, that this Yancey Cravat was famed as the deadliest shot in all the deadly shooting Southwest. He had the gift of being able to point his six-shooters without sighting, as one would point with a finger. It was a direction-born gift in him and an enviable one in this community. He was one of the few who could draw and fire two six-shooters at once with equal speed and accuracy. His hands would go to his hips with a lightning gesture that yet was so smooth, so economical that the onlooker’s eye scarcely followed it. He could hit his mark as he walked, as he ran, as he rode his horse. He practised a great deal. From the back door of their cabin Sabra and Cim and rolling-eyed Isaiah used to stand watching him. He sometimes talked of wind and trajectory. You had to make allowance mathematically, he said, for this ever-blowing Oklahoma wind. Sabra was vaguely uneasy. Wichita had not been exactly effete, and Dodge City,
Kansas, was notoriously a gun-play town. But here no man walked without his six-shooters strapped to his body. On the very day of her harrowing encounter with Doc Nisbett and the cowboy, Sabra, her composure regained, had gone with Yancey to see still another house owner about the possible renting of his treasure. The man was found in his crude one-room shack which he used as a combination dwelling and land office. He and Yancey seemed to know each other. Sabra was no longer astonished to find that Yancey, twenty-four hours after his arrival, appeared to be acquainted with everyone in the town. The man glanced up at them from the rough pine table at which he was writing.
“Howdy, Yancey!”
“Howdy, Cass!”
Yancey, all grace, performed an introduction. The lean, leather-skinned house owner wiped his palm on his pants’ seat in courtly fashion and, thus purified, extended a hospitable hand to Sabra. Yancey revealed to him their plight.
“Well, now, say, that’s plumb terr’ble, that is. Might be I can help you out—you and your good lady here. But say, Yancey, just let me step out, will you, to the corner, and mail this here letter. The bag’s goin’ any minute now.”
He licked and stamped the envelope, rose, and took from the table beside him his broad leather belt with its pair of holstered six-shooters, evidently temporarily laid aside for comfort while writing. This he now strapped quickly about his waist with the same unconcern that another man would use in slipping into his coat. He merely was donning conventional street attire for the well-dressed man of the locality. He picked up his sheaf of envelopes and stepped out. In three minutes he was back, and affably ready to talk terms with them.
It was, perhaps, this simple and sinister act, more than anything she had hitherto witnessed, that impressed Sabra with the utter lawlessness of this new land to which her husband had brought her.
This house, so dearly held by the man called Cass, turned out to be a four-room dwelling inadequate to their needs, and they were in despair at the thought of being obliged to wait until a house could be built. Then Yancey had a brilliant idea. He found a two-room cabin made of rough boards. This was hauled to the site of the main house, plastered, and—added to it—provided them with a six-room combination dwelling, newspaper plant, and law office. There was all the splendor of sitting room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen to live in. One room of the small attached cabin was a combination law and newspaper office. The other served as composing room and print shop. The Hefner Furniture and Undertaking Parlors provided them with furniture—a large wooden bedstead to fit Sabra’s mattress and spring; a small bed for Cim; tables, chairs—the plainest of everything. The few bits of furnishing and ornament that Sabra had brought with her from Wichita were fortunately—or unfortunately—possessed of the enduring beauty of objects which have been carefully made by hands exquisitely aware of line, texture, color, and further enhanced by the rich mellow patina that comes with the years. Her pieces of silver, of china, of fine linen were as out of place in this roughly furnished cabin of unpainted lumber as a court lady in a peasant’s hovel. In two days Sabra was a housewife established in her routine as though she had been at it for years. A pan of biscuits in the oven of the wood-burning kitchen stove; a dress pattern of calico, cut out and ready for basting, on the table in the sitting room.