Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “But Pegler. What’s that got to do with Pegler?” She hated the name. She hated the dead man who was stalking their new life and threatening to destroy it.

  “I saw that one copy of his paper. He called it the New Day—poor devil. And in it he named names, and he outlined a policy and a belief something like—well—along the lines I’ve tried to explain to you. He accused the government of robbing the Indians. He accused the settlers of cheating them. He told just how they got their whisky, in spite of its being forbidden, and how their monthly allotment was pinched out of their foolish fingers——”

  “Oh, my heavens, Yancey! Indians! You and your miserable dirty Indians! You’re always going on about them as if they mattered! The sooner they’re all dead the better. What good are they? Filthy, thieving, lazy things. They won’t work. You’ve said so yourself. They just squat there, rotting.”

  “I’ve tried to explain to you,” Yancey began, gently. “White men can’t do those things to a helpless——”

  “And so they killed him!” Sabra cried, irrelevantly. “And they’ll kill you, too. Oh, Yancey—please—please—I don’t want to be a pioneer woman. I thought I did, but I don’t. I can’t make things different. I liked them as they were. Comfortable and safe. Let them alone. I don’t want to live in a model empire. Darling! Darling! Let’s just make it a town like Wichita … with trees … and people being sociable … not killing each other all the time … church on Sunday … a school for Cim.…”

  The face she adored was a mask. The ocean-gray eyes were slate-gray now, with the look she had seen and dreaded—cold, determined, relentless.

  “All right. Go back there. Go back to your trees and your churches and your sidewalks and your Sunday roast beef and your whole goddamned, smug, dead-alive family. But not me! Me, I’m staying here. And when I find the man who killed Pegler I’ll face him with it, and I’ll publish his name, and if he’s alive by then I’ll bring him to justice and I’ll see him strung up on a tree. If I don’t it’ll be because I’m not alive myself.”

  “Oh, God!” whimpered Sabra, and sank, a limp bundle of misery, into his arms. But those arms were, suddenly, no haven, no shelter. He put her from him, gently, but with iron firmness, and walked out of the house, through the newspaper office, down the broad and sinister red road.

  8

  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 shirt sleeves. 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 pot-bellied 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 near-by 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 climbing 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 b
ewildered 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. “Que tal?”

  “Bien. Y tu?”

  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 blood-curdling 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.