VIII + 

Yancey put his question wherever he came upon a little group of three or four lounging on saloon or store porch or street corner. “How did Pegler come to die?” The effect of the question always was the same. One minute they were standing sociably, gossiping, rolling cigarettes; citizenry at ease in their shirtsleeves. Yancey would stroll up with his light, graceful step, his white sombrero with the two bullet holes in its crown, his Prince Albert, his fine high-heeled boots. He would ask his question. As though by magic the group dispersed, faded, vanished. + 

He visited Coroner Hefner, of Hefner’s Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlor. That gentleman was seated, idle for the moment, in his combination office and laboratory. “Listen, Louie. How did Pegler come to die?” + 

Hefner’s sun-kissed and whisky-rouged countenance became noticeably less roseate. His pale blue pop-eyes stared at Yancey in dismay. “Are you going around town askin’ that there question, or just me?” + 

“Oh⁠—around.” + 

Hefner leaned forward. He looked about him furtively. He lowered his voice. “Yancey, you and your missus, you bought your furniture and so on here in my place, and what’s more, you paid cash for it. I want you as a customer, see, but not in the other branch of my business. Don’t go round askin’ that there question.” + 

“Think I’d better not, h’m?” + 

“I know you better not.” + 

“Why not?” + 

The versatile Hefner made a little gesture of despair, rose, vanished by way of his own back door, and did not return. + 

Yancey strolled out into the glaring sunshine of Pawhuska Avenue. Indians, Mexicans, cowboys, solid citizens lounged in whatever of shade could be found in the hot, dry, dusty street. On the corner stood Pete Pitchlyn talking to the Spaniard, Estevan Miro. They were the gossips of the town, these two. This Yancey knew. News not only of the town, but of the Territory⁠—not alone of the Territory but of the whole brilliant burning Southwest, from Texas through New Mexico into Arizona, sieved through this pair. Miro not only knew; he sold his knowledge. The Spaniard made a gay splash of color in the drab prairie street. He wore a sash of purple wound round his middle in place of a belt and his neckerchief was of scarlet. His face was tiny, like the face of a child, and pointed; his hair was thick, blue-black, and lay in definite strands, coarse and glossy, like fine wire. His two upper incisor teeth were separated by, perhaps, the width of an eighth of an inch. He was very quiet, and his movements appeared slow because of their feline grace. Eternally he rolled cigarettes in the cowboy fashion, with exquisite deftness, manipulating the tobacco and brown paper magically between the thumb and two fingers of his right hand. The smoke of these he inhaled, consuming a cigarette in three voracious pulls. The street corner on which he lounged was ringed with limp butts. + 

Pete Pitchlyn, famous Indian scout of a bygone day, has grown potbellied and flabby, now that the Indians were rotting on their reservations and there was no more work for him to do. He was a vast fellow, his height of six feet three now balanced by his bulk. His wife, a full-blood Cherokee squaw, squatted on the ground in the shade of a nearby frame shack about ten feet away, as befits a wife whose husband is conversing with another male. On the ground all around her, like a litter of puppies tumbling about a bitch, were their half-breed children. Late in his hazardous career as a scout on the plains Pitchlyn had been shot in the left heel by a poisoned Indian arrow. It was thought he would surely die. This failing, it was then thought he would lose that leg. But a combination of unlimited whisky, a constitution made up of chilled steel, and a determination that those varmints should never kill him, somehow caused him not only to live but to keep the poison-ravaged leg clinging to his carcase. Stubbornly he had refused to have it amputated, and by a miracle it had failed to send its poison through the rest of that iron frame. But the leg had withered and shrunk until now it was fully twelve inches shorter than the sound limb. He refused to use crutches or the clumsy mechanical devices of the day, and got about with astonishing speed and agility. When he stood on the sound leg he was, with his magnificent breadth of shoulders, a giant of six feet three. But occasionally the sound leg tired, and he would rest it by slumping for a moment on the other. He then became a runt five feet high. + 

The story was told of him that when he first came to Osage in the rush of the Run he, with hundreds of others, sought the refreshment of the Montezuma Saloon, which hospice⁠—a mere tent⁠—had opened its bar and stood ready for business as the earliest homesteader drew his red-eyed sweating horse up before the first town site to which claim was laid in the settlement of Osage (at that time⁠—fully a month before⁠—a piece of prairie as bare and flat as the palm of your hand). The crowd around the rough pine slab of the hastily improvised bar was parched, wild eyed, clamorous. The bartenders, hardened importations though they were, were soon ready to drop with fatigue. Even in this milling mob the towering figure of Pete Pitchlyn was one to command attention. Above the clamor he ordered his drink⁠—three fingers of whisky. It was a long time coming. He had had a hard day. He leaned one elbow on the bar, while shouts emerged as croaks from parched throats, and glasses and bottles whirled all about him. Dead tired, he shifted his weight from the sound right leg to the withered left, and conversed halfheartedly with the thirsty ones on this side and that. The harried bartender poured Pitchlyn’s whisky, shoved it toward him, saw in his place only a wearily pensive little man whose head barely showed above the bar, and, outraged, his patience tried beyond endurance, yelled: + 

“Hey, you runt! Get out of there! Where’s the son of a bitch who ordered this whisky?” + 

Like a python Pete Pitchlyn uncoiled to his full height and glared down on the bewildered bartender. + 

Crowded though it was, the drinks were on the house. + 

These two specimens of the Southwest it was that Yancey now approached, his step a saunter, his manner carefree, even bland. Almost imperceptibly the two seemed to stiffen, as though bracing themselves for action. In the old scout it evidenced itself in his sudden emergence from lounging cripple to statuesque giant. In the Spaniard you sensed, rather than saw, only a curiously rippling motion of the muscles beneath the smooth tawny skin, like a snake that glides before it really moves to go. + 

“Howdy, Pete!” + 

“Howdy, Yancey!” + 

He looked at the Spaniard. Miro eyed him innocently. “Qué tal?” + 

“Bien. Y tú?” + 

They stood, the three, wary, silent. Yancey balanced gayly from shining boot toe to high heel and back again. The Cherokee woman kept her sloe eyes on her man, as though, having received one signal, she were holding herself in readiness for another. + 

Yancey put the eternal question of the inquiring reporter. “Well, boys, what do you know?” + 

The two were braced for a query less airy. Their faces relaxed in an expression resembling disappointment. It was as when gunfire fails to explode. The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders, a protean gesture intended on this occasion to convey to the utter innocence and uneventfulness of the daily existence led by Estevan Miro. Pete Pitchlyn’s eyes, in that ravaged face, were coals in an ash heap. It was not for him to be seen talking on the street corner with the man who was asking a fatal question⁠—fatal not only to the asker but to the one who should be foolhardy enough to answer it. He knew Yancey, admired him, wished him well. Yet there was little he dared say now before the reptilian Miro. Yancey continued, conversationally: + 

“I understand there’s an element rarin’ around town bragging that they’re going to make Osage the terror of the Southwest, like Abilene and Dodge City in the old days; and the Cimarron.” The jaws of Pete Pitchlyn worked rhythmically on the form of nicotine to which he was addicted. Estevan Miro inhaled a deep draught of his brand of poison and sent forth its wraith, a pale gray jet, through his nostrils. Thus each maintained an air of nonchalance to hide his nervousness. “I’m interviewing citizens of note,” continued Yancey, blandly, “on whether they think this town ought to be run on that principle or on a Socratic one that the more modern element has in mind.” He lifted his great head and turned his rare gaze full on the little Spaniard. His gray eyes, quizzical, mocking, met the black eyes, and the darker ones shifted. “Are you at all familiar with the works of Socrates⁠—‘Socrates⁠ ⁠… whom well inspir’d the oracle pronounced wisest of men’?” + 

Again Estevan Miro shrugged. This time the gesture was exquisitely complicated in its meaning, even for a low-class Spaniard. Slight embarrassment was in it, some bewilderment, and a grain⁠—the merest fleck⁠—of something as nearly approaching contempt as was possible in him for a man whom he feared. + 

“Yancey,” said Pete Pitchlyn, deliberately, “stick to your lawy’in’.” + 

“Why?” + 

“Anybody’s got the gift of gab like you have is wastin’ their time doin’ anything else.” + 

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Yancey replied, all modesty. “Running a newspaper keeps me in touch with folks. I like it. Besides, the law isn’t very remunerative in these parts. Running a newspaper’s my way of earning a living. Of course,” he continued brightly, as an afterthought, “there have been times when running a newspaper has saved the editor the trouble of ever again having to earn a living.” The faces of the two were blank as a sponged slate. Suddenly⁠—“Come on, boys. Who killed Pegler?” + 

Pete Pitchlyn, his Cherokee squaw, and the litter of babies dispersed. It was magic. They faded, vanished. It was as though the woman had tossed her young into a pouch, like a kangaroo. As for the cripple, he might have been a centipede. Yancey and the Spaniard were left alone on the sunny street corner. The face of Miro now became strangely pinched. The eyes were inky slits. He was summoning all his little bravado, pulling it out of his inmost depths. + 

“I know something. I have that to tell you,” he said in Spanish, his lips barely moving. + 

Yancey replied in the same tongue, “Out with it.” + 

The Spaniard did not speak. The slits looked at Yancey. Yancey knew that already he must have been well paid by someone to show such temerity when his very vitals were gripped with fear. “You know something, h’m? Well, Miro, mas vale saber que haber.” With which bit of philosophy he showed Miro what a Westerner can do in the way of a shrug; and sauntered off. + 

Miro leaped after him in one noiseless bound, like a cat. He seemed now to be more afraid of not revealing that which he had been paid to say than of saying it. He spoke rapidly, in Spanish. His hard r sounds drummed like hail on a tin roof. “I say only that which was told to me. The words are not mine. They say, ‘Are you a friend of Yancey Cravat?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ They say then, ‘Tell your friend Yancey Cravat that wisdom is better than wealth. If he does not keep his damn mouth shut he will die.’ The words are not mine.” + 

“Thanks,” replied Yancey, thoughtfully, speaking in English now. Then with one fine white hand he reached out swiftly and gave Miro’s scarlet neckerchief a quick strong jerk and twist. The gesture was at once an insult and a threat. “Tell them⁠—” Suddenly Yancey stopped. He opened his mouth, and there issued from it a sound so dreadful, so unearthly as to freeze the blood of any within hearing. It was a sound between the gobble of an angry turkey cock and the howl of a coyote. Throughout the Southwest it was known that this terrible sound, famed as the gobble, was Cherokee in origin and a death cry among the Territory Indians. It was known, too, that when an Indian gobbled it meant sudden destruction to any or all in his path. + 

The Spaniard’s face went a curious dough gray. With a whimper he ran, a streak of purple and scarlet and brown, round the corner of the nearest shack, and vanished. + 

Unfortunately, Yancey could not resist the temptation of dilating to Sabra on this dramatic triumph. The story was, furthermore, told in the presence of Cim and Isaiah, and illustrated⁠—before Sabra could prevent it⁠—with a magnificent rendering the bloodcurdling gobble. They were seated at noonday dinner, with Isaiah slapping briskly back and forth between stove and table. Sabra’s fork, halfway to her mouth, fell clattering on her plate. Her face blanched. Her appetite was gone. Cim, tutored by that natural Thespian and mimic, black Isaiah, spent the afternoon attempting faithfully to reproduce the hideous sound, to the disastrous end that Sabra, nerves torn to shreds, spanked him soundly and administered a smart cuff to Isaiah for good measure. Luckily, the full import of the sinister Indian gobble was lost on her, else she might have taken even stronger measures. + 

It was all like a nightmarish game, she thought. The shooting, the carousing, the brawls and high altercations; the sounds of laughter and ribaldry and drinking and song that issued from the flimsy cardboard false-front shacks that lined the preposterous street. Steadfastly she refused to believe that this was to be the accepted order of their existence. Yancey was always talking of a new code, a new day; live and let live. He was full of wisdom culled from the Old Testament, with which he pointed his remarks. “ ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ ” when Sabra reminded him of this or that pleasant Wichita custom. But Sabra prepared herself with a retort, and was able, after some quiet research, to refute this with: + 

“ ‘Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.’ There! Now perhaps you’ll stop quoting the Bible at me every time you want an excuse for something you do.” + 

“The devil,” retorted Yancey, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” But later she wondered whether by this he had intended a rather ungallant fling at her own quotation or a sheepish excuse for his own. + 

She refused to believe, too, that this business of the Pegler shooting was as serious as Yancey made it out to be. It was just one of his whims. He would, she told herself, publish something or other about it in the first edition of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Yancey stoutly maintained it was due off the press on Thursday. Privately, Sabra thought that this would have to be accomplished by a miracle. This was Friday. A fortnight had gone by. Nothing had been done. Perhaps he was exaggerating the danger as well as the importance of all this Pegler business. Something else would come up to attract his interest, arouse his indignation, or outrage his sense of justice. + 

She was overjoyed when, that same day, a solemn deputation of citizens, three in number, de rigueur in sombreros and six-shooters, called on Yancey in his office (where, by some chance, he happened momentarily to be) with the amazing request that he conduct divine service the following Sunday morning. Osage was over a month old. The women folks, they said, in effect, thought it high time that some contact be established between the little town sprawled on the prairie and the Power supposedly gazing down upon it from beyond the brilliant steel-blue dome suspended over it. Beneath the calico and sunbonnets despised of Sabra on that first day of her coming to Osage there apparently glowed the same urge for convention, discipline, and the old order that so fired her to revolt. She warmed toward them. She made up her mind that, once the paper had gone to press, she would don the black silk and the hat with the plumes and go calling on such of the wooden shacks as she knew had fostered this meeting. Then she recollected her mother’s training and the stern commands of fashion. The sunbonnets had been residents of Osage before she had arrived. They would have to call first. She pictured, mentally, a group of Mother Hubbards balanced stylishly on the edge of her parlor chairs, making small talk in this welter of Southwestern barbarism. + 

She got out a plaid silk tie for Cim. “Church meeting!” she exclaimed, joyously. Here, at last, was something familiar; something on which she could get a firm foothold in this quagmire. Yancey temporarily abandoned his journalistic mission in order to make proper arrangements for Sunday’s meeting. There was, certainly, no building large enough to hold the thousands who, surprisingly enough, made up this settlement spawned overnight on the prairie. Yancey, born entrepreneur, took hold with the enthusiasm that he always displayed in the first spurt of a new enterprise. Already news of the prospective meeting had spread by the mysterious means common to isolated settlements. Nesters, homesteaders, rangers, cowboys for miles around somehow got wind of it. Saddles were polished, harnesses shined, calicoes washed and ironed, faces scrubbed. Church meeting. + 

Yancey turned quite naturally to the one shelter in the town adequate to the size of the crowd expected. It was the gambling tent that stood at the far north end of Pawhuska Avenue, flags waving gayly from its top in the brisk Oklahoma wind. For the men it was the social center of Osage. Faro, stud poker, chuckaluck diverted their minds from the stern business of citizenship and saved them the trouble of counting their ready cash on Saturday night. Sunday was, of course, the great day in the gambling tent. Rangers, cowboys, a generous sprinkling of professional bad men from the nearby hills and plains, and all the town women who were not respectable flocked to the tent on Sunday for recreation, society, and excitement. Shouts, the tinkle of glass, the sound of a tubercular piano playing Champagne Charley assailed the ears of the passersby. The great canvas dome, measuring ninety by one hundred and fifty feet, was decorated with flags and bunting; cheerful, bright, gay. + 

It was a question whether the owner and dealer would be willing to sacrifice any portion of Sunday’s brisk trade for the furtherance of the Lord’s business, even though the goodwill of the townspeople were to be gained thereby. After all, he might argue, it was not this element that kept a faro game going. + 

Yancey, because of his professional position and his well-known power to charm, was delegated to confer with that citizen du monde, Mr. Grat Gotch, better known as Arkansas Grat, proprietor and dealer of the gambling tent. Mr. Gotch was in. Not only that, it being midafternoon and a slack hour for business, he was superintending the placing of a work of art recently purchased by him and just arrived via the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, familiarly known throughout the Territory, by a natural process of elision, as the Katy. The newly acquired treasure was a picture, done in oils, of a robust and very pink lady of full habit who, apparently having expended all her energy upon the arrangement of her elaborate and highly modern coiffure, was temporarily unable to proceed further with her toilette until fortified by refreshment and repose. To this end she had flung herself in a complete state of nature (barring the hairpins) down on a convenient couch where she lolled at ease, her lips parted to receive a pair of ripe red cherries which she held dangling between thumb and forefinger of a hand whose little finger was elegantly crooked. Her eyes were not on the cherries but on the beholder, of whom she was, plainly, all unaware. + 

As a tent naturally boasts no walls, it was impossible properly to hang this objet d’art, and it was being suspended by guy ropes from the tent top so that it dangled just in front of the bar, as it properly should, flanked by mirrors. Arkansas Grat had pursued his profession in the bonanza days of Denver, San Francisco, White Oaks, and Dodge City. In these precocious cities his artistic tastes had been developed. He knew that the eye, as well as the gullet, must have refreshment in hours of ease. A little plump man, Grat, with a round and smiling countenance, strangely unlined. He looked like an old baby. + 

He now, at Yancey’s entrance, called his attention to the newly acquired treasure, expressing at the same time his admiration for it. + 

“Ain’t she,” he demanded, “a lalapaloosa!” + 

Yancey surveyed the bright pink lady. He had come to ask a favor of Grat, but he would not sell his artistic soul for this mess of pottage. + 

“It’s a calumny,” he announced, with some vehemence, “on nature’s fairest achievement.” + 

The word was not contained in Mr. Gotch’s vocabulary. He mistook Yancey’s warmth of tone for enthusiasm. “That’s right,” he agreed, in triumphant satisfaction. “I was sayin’ to the boys only this morning when she come.” + 

Yancey ordered his drink and invited Gotch to have one with him. Arkansas Grat was not one of those abstemious characters frequently found in fiction who, being dispensers of alcoholic refreshment, never sample their own wares. Over the whisky Yancey put his case. + 

“Listen, Grat. The women folks have got it into their heads that there ought to be a church service Sunday, now that Osage is over a month old, with ten thousand inhabitants, and probably the metropolis of the great Southwest in another ten years. They want the thing done right. I’m chosen to conduct the meeting. There’s no building in town big enough to hold the crowd. What I want to know is, can we have the loan of your tent here for about an hour Sunday morning for the purpose of divine worship?” + 

Arkansas Grat set down his glass, made a sweeping gesture with his right hand that included faro tables, lolling cherry eater, bar, piano, and all else that the tent contained. + 

“Divine worship! Why, hell, yes, Yancey,” he replied, graciously. + 

They went to work early Sunday. So as not to mar the numbers they covered the faro and roulette tables with twenty-two-foot boards. Such of the prospective congregation as came early would use these for seats. There were, too, a few rude benches on which the players usually sat. The remainder must stand. The meeting was to be from eleven to twelve. As early as nine o’clock they began to arrive. They seemed to spring out of the earth. The horizon spewed up little hurrying figures, black against the brilliant Oklahoma sky. They came from lonely cabins, dugouts, tents. Ox carts, wagons, buggies, horsemen, mule teams. They were starving for company. It wasn’t religion they sought; it was the stimulation that comes of meeting their kind in the mass. They brought picnic baskets and boxes prepared for a holiday. The cowboys were gorgeous. They wore their pink and purple shirts, their five-gallon hats, their gayest neckerchiefs, their most ornate high-heeled boots. They rode up and down before the big tent, their horses curveting and stepping high. “Whoa there! Don’t crowd the cattle!⁠ ⁠… You figgerin’ on gettin’ saved, Quince?⁠ ⁠… Yessir, I’m here for the circus and I’m stayin’ for the concert and grand olio besides.⁠ ⁠… Say, you’re too late, son. Good whisky and bad women has ruined you.” + 

The town seemed alive with blanketed Indians. + 

They squatted in the shade of the wooden shacks. They walked in from their nearby reservations, or rode their mangy horses, or brought in their entire families⁠—squaw, papoose, two or three children of assorted sizes, dogs. The family rarely was a large one. Sabra had once remarked this. + 

“They don’t have big families, do they? Two or three children. You’d think savages like that⁠—I mean⁠—” + 

Yancey explained. “The Indian is a cold race⁠—passionless, or almost. I don’t know whether it’s the food they eat⁠—their diet⁠—or the vigorous outdoor life they’ve lived for centuries, or whether they’re a naturally sterile race. Funny. No hair on their faces⁠—no beards. Did you ever see an Indian festival dance?” + 

“Oh, no! I’ve heard they⁠—” + 

“They work themselves up, you know, at those dances. Insidious music, mutilations, hysteria⁠—all kinds of orgies to get themselves up to pitch.” + 

Sabra had shuddered with disgust. + 

This Sunday morning they flocked in by the dozens, with their sorry nags and their scabrous dogs. The men were decked in all their beads and chains with metal plaques. They camped outside the town, at the end of the street. + 

Sabra, seeing them, told herself sternly that she must remember to have a Christian spirit, and they were all God’s children; that these red men had been converted. She didn’t believe a word of it. “They’re just where they were before Joshua,” Mother Bridget had said. + 

Rangers, storekeepers, settlers. Lean squatters with their bony wives and their bare-legged, rickety children, as untamed as little wolves. + 

Sabra superintended the toilettes of her men folk from Yancey to Isaiah. She herself had stayed up the night before to iron his finest shirt. Isaiah had polished his boots until they glittered. Sabra sprinkled a drop of her own cherished cologne on his handkerchief. It was as though they were making ready a bridegroom. + 

He chided her, laughing, “My good woman, do you realize that this is no way to titivate for the work of delivering the Word of God? Sackcloth and ashes is, I believe, the prescribed costume.” He poured and drank down three fingers of whisky, the third since breakfast. + 

Cim cavorted excitedly in his best suit, with the bright plaid silk tie and the buttoned shoes, tasseled at the top. The boy, Sabra thought as she dressed him, grew more and more like Yancey, except that he seemed to lack his father’s driving force, his ebullience. But he was high spirited enough now, so that she had difficulty in dressing him. + 

“I’m going to church!” he shouted, his voice shrill. “Hi, Isaiah! Blessed be the name of the Lawd Amen hall’ujah glory be oh my fren’s come and be save hell fire and brimstone⁠—” + 

“Cimarron Cravat, stop that this minute or you’ll have to stay home.” Evidently he and Isaiah, full of the Sunday meeting, had been playing church on Saturday afternoon. This was the result of their rehearsal. + 

Yancey’s sure dramatic instinct bade him delay until he could make an effective entrance. A dozen times Sabra called to him, as he sat in the front office busy with paper and pencil. This was, she decided, his sole preparation for the sermon he would be bound to deliver within the next hour. Later she found in the pocket of his sweeping Prince Albert the piece of paper on which he had made these notes. The paper was filled with those cabalistic whorls, crisscrosses, parallel lines and skulls with which the hand unconsciously gives relief to the troubled or restless mind. One word he had written on it, and then disguised it with meaningless marks⁠—but not quite. Sabra, studying the paper after the events of the morning, made out the word “Yountis.” + 

At last he was ready. As they stepped into the road they saw that stragglers were still hurrying toward the tent. Sabra had put on, not her second-best black grosgrain, but her best, and the hat with the plumes, none of which splendor she had worn since that eventful first day. She and Yancey stepped sedately down the street, with Cim’s warm wriggling fingers in her own clasp. Sabra was a slimly elegant little figure in her modish black; Yancey, as always, a dashing one; Cim’s clothes were identical with those being worn, perhaps, by a million little boys all over the United States, now on their unwilling way to church. Isaiah, on being summoned from his little kennel in the back yard, had announced that his churchgoing toilette was not quite completed, urged them to proceed without him, and promised to catch up with them before they should have gone a hundred feet. + 

They went on their way. It occurred neither to Sabra nor to Yancey that there was anything bizarre or even unusual in their thus proceeding, three well-dressed and reasonably conventional figures, toward a gambling tent and saloon which, packed to suffocation with the worst and the best that a frontier town has to offer, was for one short hour to become a House of God. + 

“Are you nervous, Yancey dear?” + 

“No, sugar. Though I will say I’d fifty times rather plead with a jury of Texas Panhandle cattlemen for the life of a professional horse thief than stand up to preach before this gang of⁠—” He broke off abruptly. “What’s everybody laughing at and pointing to?” Certainly passersby were acting strangely. Instinctively Sabra and Yancey turned to look behind them. Down the street, perhaps fifty paces behind them, came Isaiah. He was strutting in an absurd and yet unmistakably recognizable imitation of Yancey’s stride and swing. Around his waist was wound a red calico sash, and over that hung a holstered leather belt so large for his small waist that it hung to his knees and bumped against them at every step. Protruding from the holsters one saw the ugly heads of what seemed at first glance to be two six-shooters, but which turned out, on investigation by the infuriated Mrs. Cravat, to be the household monkey wrench and a bar of ink-soaked iron which went to make up one of the printing shop metal forms. On his head was a battered⁠—an unspeakable⁠—sombrero which he must have salvaged from the backyard debris. But this was not, after all, the high point of his sartorial triumph. He had found somewhere a pair of Yancey’s discarded boots. They were high heeled, slim, star trimmed. Even in their final degradation they still had something of the elegance of cut and material that Yancey’s footgear always bore. Into these wrecks of splendor Isaiah had thrust, as far as possible, his own great bare splay feet. The high heels toppled. The arched insteps split under the pressure. Isaiah teetered, wobbled, walked now on his ankles as the treacherous heel betrayed him; now on his toes. Yet he managed, by the very power of his dramatic gift, to give to the appreciative onlooker a complete picture of Yancey Cravat in ludicrous⁠—in grotesque miniature. + 

He advanced toward them, in spite of his pedestrian handicaps, with an appalling imitation of Yancey’s stride. Sabra’s face went curiously sallow, so that she was, suddenly, Felice Venable, enraged. Yancey gave a great roar of laughter, and at that Sabra’s blazing eyes turned from the ludicrous figure of the black boy to her husband. She was literally panting with fury. Her idol, her god, was being mocked. + 

“You⁠—laugh!⁠ ⁠… Stop.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She went in a kind of swoop of rage toward the now halting figure of Isaiah. Though Cim’s hand was still tightly clutched by her own she had quite forgotten that he was there so that, as she flew toward the small mimic, Cim was yanked along as a cyclone carries small objects in its trail by the very force of its own velocity. She reached him. The black face, all eyes now (and those all whites), looked up at her, startled, terrorized. She raised her hand in its neat black kid glove to cuff him smartly. But Yancey was too quick for her. Swiftly as she had swooped upon Isaiah, Yancey’s leap had been quicker. He caught her hand halfway in its descent. His fingers closed round her wrist in an iron grip. + 

“Let me go!” For that instant she hated him. + 

“If you touch him I swear before God I’ll not set foot inside the tent. Look at him!” + 

The black face gazed up at him. In it was worship, utter devotion. Yancey, himself a born actor, knew that in Isaiah’s grotesque costume, in his struttings and swaggerings, there had been only that sincerest of flattery, imitation of that which was adored. The eyes were those of a dog, faithful, hurt, bewildered. + 

Yancey released Sabra’s wrist. He turned his brilliant winning smile on Isaiah. He put out his hand, removed the mangy sombrero from the child’s head, and let his fine white hand rest a moment on the woolly poll. + 

Isaiah began to blubber, his fright giving way to injury. “Ah didn’t go fo’ to fret nobody. You-all was dress up fine fo’ chu’ch meetin’ so I crave to dress myself up Sunday style⁠—” + 

“That’s right, Isaiah. You look finer than any of us. Now listen to me. Do you want a real suit of Sunday clothes?” + 

The white teeth now vied with the rolling eyes. “Sunday suit fo’ me to wear! Fo’ true!” + 

“Listen close, Isaiah. I want you to do something for me. Something big. I don’t want you to go to the church meeting.” Then, as the black boy’s expressive face, all smiles the instant before, became suddenly doleful: “Isaiah, listen hard. This is something important. Everybody in town’s at the church meeting. Jesse Rickey’s drunk. The house and the newspaper office are left alone. There are people in town who’d sooner set fire to the newspaper plant and the house than see the paper come out on Thursday. I want you to go back to the house and into the kitchen, where you can see the back yard and the side entrance, too. Patrol duty, that’s what I’m putting you on.” + 

“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey!” agreed Isaiah. “Patrol.” His dejected frame now underwent a transformation as it stiffened to fit the new martial role. + 

“Now listen close. If anybody comes up to the house⁠—they won’t come the front way, but at the back, probably, or the side⁠—you take this⁠—and shoot.” He took from beneath the Prince Albert a gun which, well on the left, under the coat, was not visible as were the two six-shooters that he always carried at his belt. It was a six-shooter of the kind known as the single action. The trigger was dead. It had been put out of commission. The dog⁠—that part of the mechanism by which the hammer was held cocked and which was released at the pulling of the trigger⁠—had been filed off. It was the deadliest of Southwestern weapons, a six-shooter whose hammer, when pulled back by the thumb, would fall again as soon as released. No need for Isaiah’s small forefinger to wrestle with the trigger. + 

“Oh, Yancey!” breathed Sabra, in horror. She made as though to put Cim behind her⁠—to shield him with her best black grosgrain silk from sight of this latest horror of pioneer existence. “Yancey! He’s a child!” Now it was she who was protecting the black boy from Yancey. Yancey ignored her. + 

“You remember what I told you last week,” he went on, equably. “When we were shooting at the tin can on the fence post in the yard. Do it just as you did then⁠—draw, aim, and shoot with the one motion.” + 

“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey! I kill ’em daid.” + 

“You’ll have a brand-new suit of Sunday clothes next week, remember, and boots to go with it. Now, scoot!” + 

Isaiah turned on the crazy high-heeled boots. “Take them off!” screamed Sabra. “You’ll kill yourself. The gun. You’ll stumble!” + 

But he flashed a brilliant, a glorified smile at her over his shoulder and was off, a ludicrous black Don Quixote miraculously keeping his balance; the boots slapping the deep dust of the road now this way, now that. + 

All Sabra’s pleasurable anticipation in the church meeting had fled. “How could you give a gun to a child like that! You’ll be giving one to Cim, here, next. Alone in the house, with a gun.” + 

“It isn’t loaded. Come on, honey. We’re late.” + 

For the first time in their married life she doubted his word absolutely. He strode along toward the tent. She hurried at his side. Cim trotted to keep up with her, his hand in hers. + 

“What did you mean when you said there were people who would set fire to the house? I never heard of such⁠ ⁠… Did you really mean that someone⁠ ⁠… or was it an excuse to send Isaiah back because of the way he looked?” + 

“That was it.” + 

For the second time she doubted him. “I don’t believe you. There’s something going on⁠—something you haven’t told me. Yancey, tell me.” + 

“I haven’t time now. Don’t be foolish. I just don’t like the complexion of⁠—I just thought that maybe this meeting was the idea of somebody who isn’t altogether inspired by a desire for a closer communion with God. Just occurred to me. I don’t know why. Good joke on me, if it’s true.” + 

“I’m not going to the meeting. I’m going back to the house.” She was desperate. Her house was burning up, Isaiah was being murdered. Her linen, the silver in the DeGrasse pattern, the cake dish, the green nun’s veiling. + 

“You’re coming with me.” He rarely used this tone toward her. + 

“Yancey! Yancey, I’m afraid to have you stand up there, before all those people. I’m afraid. Let’s go back. Tell them you’re sick. Tell them I’m sick. Tell them⁠—” + 

They had reached the tent. The flap was open. A roar of talk came to them from within. The entrance was packed with lean figures smoking and spitting. “Hi, Yancey! How’s the preacher? Where’s your Bible, Yancey?” + 

“Right here, boys.” And Yancey reached into the capacious skirt of his Prince Albert to produce in triumph the Word of God. “Come in or stay out, boys. No loafing in the doorway.” With Sabra on his arm he marched through the close-packed tent. “They’ve saved two seats for you and Cim down front⁠—or should have. Yes, there they are.” + 

Sabra felt faint. She had seen the foxlike face of Lon Yountis in the doorway. “That man,” she whispered to Yancey. “He was there. He looked at you as you passed by⁠—he looked at you so⁠—” + 

“That’s fine, honey. Better than I hoped for. Nothing I like better than to have members of my flock right under my eye.” + 