XXII + 

But Cim did not come home on Saturday. On Saturday, at noon, when Sabra and Yancey drove from the office in their little utility car to the house on Kihekah Street for their noonday dinner they saw a great limousine drawn up at the curb. A chauffeur, vaguely familiar, lounged in front. The car was thick with the red dust of the country road. + 

A vague pang of premonition stabbed at Sabra’s vitals. She clutched Yancey’s arm. “Whose car is that?” + 

Yancey glanced at it indifferently. “Somebody drove Cim home, I suppose. Got enough dinner for company?” + 

Donna had gone to Oklahoma City to spend the weekend. It must be Cim. + 

“Cim!” Sabra called, as she entered the front door. “Cim!” But there was no answer. She went straight to the sitting room. Empty. But in the stiff little parlor, so seldom used, sat two massive, silent figures. With the Indian sense of ceremony and formality old Big Elk and his squaw had known the proper room to use for an occasion such as this. + 

“Why⁠—Big Elk!” + 

“How!” replied Big Elk, and held up his palm in the gesture of greeting. + 

“Yancey!” cried Sabra suddenly, in a terrible voice. The two pairs of black Indian eyes stared at her. Sabra saw that their dress was elaborate; the formal dress reserved for great occasions. The woman wore a dark skirt and a bright cerise satin blouse, ample and shaped like a dressing sacque. Over her shoulders was the fine bright-hued blanket. Her hair was neatly braided and wound about her hatless head. She wore no ornaments. That was the prerogative of the male. Old Big Elk was a structure of splendor. His enormous bulk filled the chair. His great knees were wide apart. His blue trousers were slashed and beaded elaborately at the sides and on his feet were moccasins heavy with intricate beadwork. His huge upper body was covered with a shirt of brilliant green brocade worn outside the trousers, and his striped blanket hung regally from his shoulders. About his neck and on his broad breast hung chains, beads, necklaces. In the bright silk neckerchief knotted about his throat you saw the silver emblem of his former glory as chief of the tribe. There were other insignia of distinction made of beaten silver⁠—the star, the crescent, the sun. On his head was a round high cap of brown beaver like a Cossack’s. Up the back of this was stuck an eagle feather. His long locks, hanging about his shoulders, straight and stiff, were dyed a brilliant orange, like an old burlesque queen’s, a startling, a fantastic background for the parchment face, lined and creased and crisscrossed with a thousand wrinkles. One hand rested on his knee. The other wielded languidly, back and forth, back and forth, an enormous semicircular fan made of eagle feathers. Side by side the two massive figures sat like things of bronze. Only their eyes moved, and that nightmarish eagle feather fan, back and forth, back and forth, regally. + 

Those dull black unsmiling eyes, that weaving fan, moved Sabra to nameless terror. “Yancey!” she cried again, through stiff lips. “Yancey!” + 

At the note of terror in her voice he was down the stairs and in the room with his quick light step. But at sight of old Big Elk and his wife his look of concern changed to one of relief. He smiled his utterly charming smile. + 

“How!” + 

“How!” croaked Big Elk. + 

Mrs. Big Elk nodded her greeting. She was a woman younger, perhaps, by thirty years than her aged husband; his third wife. She spoke English; had even attended an Indian Mission school in her girlhood. But through carelessness or indifference she used the broken, slovenly English of the unlettered Indian. + 

Now the two relapsed into impassive silence. + 

“What do they want? Ask them what they want.” + 

Yancey spoke a few words in Osage. Big Elk replied with a monosyllable. + 

“What did he say? What is it?” + 

“I asked them to eat dinner with us. He says he cannot.” + 

“I should hope not. Tell her to speak English. She speaks English.” + 

Big Elk turned his great head, slowly, as though it moved on a mechanical pivot. He stared at his fat, round-faced wife. He uttered a brief command in his own tongue. The squaw smiled a little strange, embarrassed smile, like a schoolgirl⁠—it was less a smile than a contortion of the face, so rare in her race as to be more frightening than a scowl. + 

“Big Elk and me come take you back to Wazhazhe.” + 

“What for?” cried Sabra, sharply. + 

“Four o’clock big dinner, big dance. Your son want um come tell you. Want um know he marry Ruby this morning.” + 

She was silent again, smiling her foolish fixed smile. Big Elk’s fan went back and forth, back and forth. + 

“God A’mighty!” said Yancey Cravat. He looked at Sabra, came over to her quickly, but she waved him away. + 

“Don’t. I’m not going to⁠—it’s all right.” It was as though she shrank from his touch. She stood there, staring at the two barbaric figures staring so stonily back at her with their dead black Indian eyes. It was at times like this that the Marcy in her stood her in good stead. She came of iron stock, fit to stand the fire. Only beneath her fine dark eyes you now suddenly saw a smudge of purplish brown, as though a dirty thumb had rubbed there; and a sagging of all the muscles of her face, so that she looked wattled, lined, old. + 

“Don’t look like that, honey. Come. Sit down.” + 

Again the groping wave of her hand. “I’m all right, I tell you. Come. We must go there.” + 

Yancey came forward. He shook hands formally with Big Elk, with the Indian woman. Sabra, seeing him, suddenly realized that he was not displeased. She knew that no formal politeness would have prevented him from voicing his anger if this monstrous announcement had shattered him as it had her, so that her very vitals seemed to be withering within her. + 

“Sugar, shake hands with them, won’t you?” + 

“No. No.” She wet her dry lips a little with her tongue, like one in a fever. She turned, woodenly, and walked to the door, ignoring the Indians. Across the hall, slowly, like an old woman, down the porch steps, toward the shabby little car next to the big rich one. As she went she heard Yancey’s voice (was there an exultant note in it?) at the telephone. + 

“Jesse! Take this. Get it in. Ready!⁠ ⁠… Ex-Chief Big Elk, of the Osage Nation, and Mrs. Big Elk, living at Wazhazhe, announce the marriage of their daughter Ruby Big Elk to Cimarron Cravat, son of⁠—don’t interrupt me⁠—I’m in a hurry⁠—son of Mr. and Mrs. Yancey Cravat, of this city. The wedding was solemnized at the home of the bride’s parents and was followed by an elaborate dinner made up of many Indian and American dishes, partaken of by the parents of the bride and the groom, many relatives and numerous friends of the young⁠ ⁠…” + 

Sabra climbed heavily into the car and sat staring at the broad back of the car ahead of her. Chief Big Elk and his wife came out presently, unreal, bizarre in the brilliant noonday Oklahoma sunshine, ushered by Yancey. He was being charming. They heaved their ponderous bulk into the big car. Yancey got in beside Sabra. She spoke to him once only. + 

“I think you are glad.” + 

“This is Oklahoma. In a way it’s what I wanted it to be when I came here twenty years ago. Cim’s like your father, Lewis Venable. Weak stuff, but good stock. Ruby’s pure Indian blood and a magnificent animal. It’s hard on you now, my darling. But their children and their grandchildren are going to be such stuff as Americans are made of. You’ll see.” + 

“I hope I shall die before that day.” + 

The shabby little middle-class car followed the one whirling ahead of them over the red clay Oklahoma roads. Eating the dust of the big car just ahead. + 

She went through it and stood it, miraculously, until one grotesquerie proved too much for her strained nerves and broke them. But she went into the Indian house, and saw Cim sitting beside the Indian woman, and as she looked at his beautiful weak face she thought, I wish that I had never found him that day when he was lost on the prairie long ago. He came toward her, his head lowered with that familiar look, his fine eyes hidden by the lids. + 

“Look at me!” Sabra commanded, in the voice of Felice Venable. The boy raised his eyes. She looked at him, her face stony. Ruby Big Elk came toward her with that leisurely, insolent, scuffling step. The two women gazed at each other; rather, their looks clashed, like swords held high. They did not shake hands. + 

There were races, there were prizes, there was dancing. In the old Indian days the bucks had raced on foot for a prize that was a pony tethered at a distance and won by the fleetest to reach him, mount, and ride him back to the starting point. Today the prize was a magnificent motor car that stood glittering in the open field half a mile distant. Sabra thought, I am dying, I am dying. And Donna. This squaw is her sister-in-law. Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson. + 

Ruby’s handsome head right had bought the young couple the house just across the road from Big Elk’s⁠—a one-story red brick bungalow, substantial, ugly. They showed Sabra and Yancey through it. It was furnished complete. Mongrel Spanish furniture in the living room⁠—red plush, fringe, brass nail heads as big as twenty-dollar gold pieces. An upright piano. An oak dining-room set. A fine bathroom with heavy rich bath towels neatly hung on the racks. A shining stained oak bedroom set with a rose-colored taffeta spread. Sabra felt a wave of nausea. Cim’s face was smiling, radiant. Yancey was joking and laughing with the Indians. In the kitchen sat a white girl in a gingham dress and a kitchen apron. The girl’s hair was so light a yellow as to appear almost white. Her unintelligent eyes were palest blue. Her skin was so fair as to be quite colorless. In the midst of the roomful of dark Indian faces the white face of the new Cravat hired girl seemed to swim in a hazy blob before Sabra’s eyes. But she held on. She felt Ruby’s scornful dark eyes on her. Sabra had a feeling as though she had been disemboweled and now was a hollow thing, an empty shell that moved and walked and talked. + 

Dinner. White servants and Negro servants to wait on them. A long table seating a score or more, and many such tables. Bowls and plates piled with food all down the length of it. Piles of crisp pork, roasted in the Indian fashion over hot embers sunk in a pit in the yard, and skewered with a sharp pointed stick. Bowls of dried corn. Great fat, black ripe olives. Tinned lobster. Chicken. Piles of dead ripe strawberries. Vast plateaus of angel-food cake covered with snow fields of icing. + 

Sabra went through the motions of eating. Sometimes she put a morsel into her mouth and actually swallowed it. There was a great clatter of knives and forks and dishes. Everything was eaten out of one plate. Platters and bowls were replenished. Sabra found herself seated beside Mrs. Big Elk. On her other side was Yancey. He was eating and laughing and talking. Mrs. Big Elk was being almost comically polite, solicitous. She pressed this tidbit, that dainty, on her stony guest. + 

Down the center of the table, at intervals, were huge bowls piled with a sort of pastry stuffed with forcemeat. It was like a great ravioli, and piles of it vanished beneath the onslaught of appreciative guests. + 

“For God’s sake, pretend to eat something, Sabra,” Yancey murmured, under his breath. “It’s done now. They consider it an insult. Try to eat something.” + 

She stirred the pastry and chopped meat that had been put on her plate. + 

“Good,” said Mrs. Big Elk, beside her, and pointed at the mass with one dusky maculate finger. + 

Sabra lifted her fork to her lips and swallowed a bit of it. It was delicious⁠—spicy, rich, appetizing. “Yes,” she said, and thought, I am being wonderful. This is killing me. “Yes, it is very good. This meat⁠—this stuffing⁠—is it chopped or ground through a grinder?” + 

The huge Indian woman beside her turned her expressionless gaze on Sabra. Ponderously she shook her head from side to side in negation. + 

“Naw,” she answered, politely. “Chawed.” + 

The clatter of a fork dropped to the plate, a clash among the cups and saucers. Sabra Cravat had fainted. + 