by Edna Ferber
“Alaska!” she could only repeat, feebly. So that was it.
“I’m famished. What’s this? Bacon and eggs?” He reached for a slice of bread from the plate on the table, buttered it lavishly, clapped a strip of coldish bacon on top of that, and devoured it in eager bites. Sabra saw then, for the first time, that he was thinner; there were hollow shadows in the pock-marked cheeks; there was a scarcely perceptible sag to the massive shoulders. There was something about his hand. The forefinger of the right hand was gone. She felt suddenly faint, ill. She reeled a little and stumbled. As always, he sprang toward her. His lips were against her hair.
“Oh, God! How I’ve missed you, Sabra, sugar!”
“Yancey! The children!” It was the prim exclamation of a woman who had forgotten the pleasant ways of dalliance. Those five years had served to accentuate her spinsterish qualities; had made her more and more powerful; less human; had slowed the machinery of her emotional equipment. A man in the house. A possessive male, enfolding her in his arms; touching her hair, her throat with urgent fingers. She was embarrassed almost. Besides, this man had neglected her, deserted her, had left his children to get on as best they could. She shrugged herself free. Anger leaped within her. He was a stranger.
“Don’t touch me. You can’t come home like this—after years—after years——”
“Ah, Penelope!”
She stared. “Who?”
“ ‘Strange lady, surely to thee above all woman kind the Olympians have given a heart that cannot be softened. No other woman in the world would harden her heart to stand thus aloof from her husband, who after travail and sore had come to her … to his own country.’ ”
“You and your miserable Milton!”
He looked only slightly surprised and did not correct her.
One by one, and then in groups and then in crowds, the neighbors and townspeople began to come in—the Wyatts, Louis Hefner, Cass Peery, Mott Bixler, Ike Hawes, Grat Gotch, Doc Nisbett—the local politicians, the storekeepers, their wives. They came out of curiosity, though they felt proper resentment toward this strange—this baffling creature who had ridden carelessly away, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves, and now had ridden as casually back again. They would have stayed away if they could, but his enchantment was too strong. Perhaps he represented, for them, the thing they fain would be or have. When Yancey, flouting responsibility and convention, rode away to be gone for mysterious years, a hundred men, bound by ties of work and wife and child, escaped in spirit with him; a hundred women, faithful wives and dutiful mothers, thought of Yancey as the elusive, the romantic, the desirable male.
Well, they would see how she had met it, and take their cue from her. A smart woman, Sabra Cravat. Throw him out, likely as not, and serve him right. But at sight of Yancey Cravat in his Rough Rider uniform of khaki, U.S.V. on the collar, the hat brim dashingly caught up on the left side with the insignia of crossed sabers, they were snared again in the mesh of his enchantment. The Rough Riders. Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night. He became a figure symbolic of the war, of the Oklahoma country, of the Territory, of the Southwest—impetuous, romantic, adventuring.
“Hi, Yancey! Well, say, where you been, you old son of a stampedin’ steer!”
“Howdy, Cimarron! Where at’s your white hat?”
“You and this Roosevelt get goin’ in this war, I guess the Spaniards’ll wish Columbus never been born.”
And Yancey, in return, “Hello, Clint! Howdy, Sam! Well, damn’ if it isn’t you, Grat! H’are you, Ike, you old hoss thief!”
The great figure towered even above these tall plainsmen; the fine eyes glowed; the mellifluous voice worked its magic. The renegade was a hero; the outcast had returned a conquerer.
Alaska. Oklahoma had not been so busy with its own growing pains that it had failed to hear of Alaska and the Gold Rush. “Alaska! Go on, you wasn’t never in Alaska! Heard you’d turned Injun. Heard you was buried up in Boot Hill along of the Doolins.”
He got out the little leather sack. While they gathered round him he poured out before their glistening eyes the shining yellow heap of that treasure with which the whole history of the Southwest was intertwined. Gold. The hills and the plains had been honeycombed for it; men had hungered and fought and parched for it; had died for it; had been killed for it; had sacrificed honor, home, happiness in the hope of finding it. And here was the precious yellow stuff from far-off Alaska trickling through Yancey Cravat’s slim white fingers.
“Damn it all, Yancey, some folks has all the luck.”
And so he stood, this Odysseus, and wove for them this new chapter in his saga. And they listened, and wondered, and believed and were stirred with envy and admiration and the longing for like adventure. He talked, he laughed, he gesticulated, he strode up and down, and they never missed the flirt of the Prince Albert coat tails, for there were brass buttons and patch pockets and gold embroidery and the glitter of crossed sabers to take their place.
“Luck! Call it luck, do you, Mott, to be frozen, starved, lost, snow-blinded! One whole winter shut up alone in a one-room cabin with the snow piled to the roof-top and no living soul to talk to for months. Luck to have your pardner that you trusted cheat you out of your claim and rob you of your gold in the bargain! All but this handful. I was going to see Sabra covered in gold like an Aztec princess.”
The eyes of listening Osage swung to the prim blue serge figure of the cheated Aztec princess, encountered the level gaze, the unsmiling lips; swung back again hastily to the dashing, the martial figure of the lately despised wanderer.
A tale of another world; a story of a land so remote from the brilliant scarlet and orange of the burning Southwest country that the very sound of the words he used in describing it fell with a strange cadence on the ears of the eager listeners. And as always when Yancey was telling the tale, he filled his hearers with a longing for the place he described; a longing that was like a nostalgia for something they had never known. Well, folks, winters at fifty below zero. Two hours of bitter winter sunshine, and then blackness. Long splendid summer days in May and June, with twenty hours of sunshine and four hours of twilight. Sabra, listening with the others, found this new vocabulary as strange, as terrifying, as the jargon of the Oklahoma country had been to her when first she had encountered it years ago.
Yukon. Chilkoot Pass. Skagway. Kuskokwim. Klondike. Moose. Caribou. Huskies. Sledges. Nome. Sitka. Blizzards. Snow blindness. Frozen fingers. Pemmican. Cold. Cold. Cold. Gold. Gold. Gold. To the fascinated figures crowded into the stuffy rooms of this little frame house squatting on the sun-baked Oklahoma prairie he brought, by the magic of his voice and his eloquence, the relentless movement of the glaciers, the black menace of icy rivers, the waste plains of blinding, treacherous snow. Two years of this, he said; and looked ruefully down at the stump that had been his famous trigger finger.
They, too, looked. Two years. Two years, and he had been gone five. That left three unaccounted for, right enough. The old stories seeped up in their minds. Their eyes, grown accustomed to the uniform, were less dazzled now. They saw the indefinable break that had come to the magnificent figure—not a break, really, but a loosening, a lowering of the resistance such as comes to steel that has been too often in the flaming furnace. You looked at the massive shoulders—they did not droop. The rare glance still pierced you like a sword thrust. The buffalo head, lowered, menaced you; lifted, thrilled you. Yet something had vanished.
“Where’d you join up, Yancey?”
“San Antonio. Leonard Wood’s down there—Colonel Wood now—and young Roosevelt, Lieutenant Colonel. He’s been drilling the boys. Most of them born on a horse and weaned on a Winchester. We’re better equipped than the regulars that have been at it for years. Young Roosevelt’s to thank for that. They were all for issuing us winter clothing, by God, to wear through a summer campaign in the tropics—those nincompoops in Washington—and they’d have done it
if it hadn’t been for him.”
Southwest Davis spoke up from the crowd. “That case, you’ll be leaving right soon, won’t you? Week or so.”
“Week!” echoed Yancey, and looked at Sabra. “I go back to San Antonio to-morrow. The regiment leaves for Tampa next day.”
He had not told her before. Yet she said nothing, gave no sign. She had outfaced them with her pride and her spirit for five years; she would give them no satisfaction now. Five years. One day. San Antonio—Tampa—Cuba—the Philippines—War. She gave no sign. Curiously, the picture that was passing in her mind was this: she saw herself, as though it were someone she had known in the dim, far past, standing in the cool, shady corridor of the Mission School in Wichita. She saw, through the open door, the oblong of Kansas sunshine and sky and garden; there swept over her again that wave of nostalgia she had felt for the scene she was leaving; she was shaken by terror of this strange Indian country to which she was going with her husband.
“… but here in this land, Sabra, my girl, the women, they’ve been the real hewers of wood and drawers of water. You’ll want to remember that.”
Sabra remembered it now, well enough.
Slowly the crowd began to disperse. The men had their business; the women their housework. Wives linked their arms through those of husbands, and the gesture was one of perhaps not entirely unconscious cruelty, accompanied as it was by a darting glance at Sabra.
“Rough Rider uniform, sack of gold, golden voice, and melting eye,” that glance seemed to say. “You’re welcome to all the happiness you can get from those. Security, permanence, home, husband—I wouldn’t change places with you.”
“Come on, Yancey!” shouted Strap Buckner. “Over to the Sunny Southwest and have a drink. We got a terrible lot of drinking to do, ain’t we, boys? Come on, you old longhorn. We got to drink to you because you’re back and because you’re going away.”
“And to the war!” yelled Bixler.
“And the Rough Riders!”
“And Alaska!”
Their boots clattered across the board floor of the newspaper office. They swept the towering figure in its khaki uniform with them. He turned, waved his hat at her. “Back in a minute, honey.” They were gone.
Sabra turned to the children, Cim and Donna, flushed, both, with the unwonted excitement; out of hand. Her face set itself with that look of quiet resolve. “Half the morning’s gone. But I want you to go along to school, anyway. Now, none of that! It’s no use your staying around here. The paper must be got out. Jesse’ll be no good to me the rest of the day. It’s easy to see that. I’ll write a note to your teachers.… Run along now. I must go to court.”
She actually had made up her mind that she would see the day through as she had started it. The Dixie Lee case, seething for weeks, was coming to a crisis this morning—this very minute. She would be late if she did not hasten. She would not let the work of months go for nothing because this man—this stranger had seen fit to stride into her life for a day.
She pinned on her hat, saw that her handbag contained pencil and paper, hurried into the back room that was printing shop, composing room, press room combined, she had been right about Jesse Rickey. That consistently irresponsible one was even now leaning a familiar elbow on the polished surface of the Sunny Southwest bar as he helped toast the returned wanderer or the departing hero or the war in the semi-tropics, or the snows of Alaska “—or God knows what!” concluded Sabra, in her mind.
Cliff Means, the ink-smeared printer’s devil who, at fifteen, served as Jesse Rickey’s sole assistant in the mechanical end of the Wigwam office, looked up from his case rack as Sabra entered.
“It’s all right, Mis’ Cravat. I got the head all set up like you said. ‘Vice Gets Death Blow. Reign of Scarlet Woman Ends. Judge Issues Ban.’ Even if Jesse don’t—even if he ain’t—why, you and me can set up the story this afternoon so we can start the press goin’ for Thursday. We ain’t been late with the paper yet, have we?”
“Out on time every Thursday for five years,” Sabra said, almost defiantly.
Suddenly, sharp and clear, Yancey’s voice calling her from the office porch, from the front office, from the print-shop doorway; urgent, perturbed. “Sabra! Sabra! Sabra!”
He strode into the back shop. She faced him. Instinctively she knew. “What’s this about Dixie Lee?” His news-trained eye leaped to the form. He read the setup head, upside down, expertly. “When’s this case come up?”
“Now.”
“Who’s defending her?”
“Nobody in town would touch the case. They say she got a lawyer from Denver. He didn’t show up. He knew better than to take her money.”
“Prosecuting?”
“Pat Leary.”
Without a word he turned. She caught him at the door, gripped his arm. “Where are you going?”
“Court.”
“What for? What for?” But she knew. She actually interposed her body between him and the street door then, as though physically to prevent him from going. Her face was white. Her eyes stared enormous.
“You can’t take the case of that woman.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t. Because I’ve been fighting her. Because the Wigwam has come out against all that she stands for.”
“Why, Sabra, honey, where are you thinking of sending her?”
“Away. Away from Osage.”
“But where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Things have changed since you went away. Went away and left me.”
“Nothing’s changed. It’s all the same. Dixie’s been stoned in the market place for two thousand years and more. Driving her out is not going to do it. You’ve got to drive the devil out of——”
“Yancey Cravat, are you preaching to me? You who left your wife and children to starve, for all you cared! And now you come back and you take this creature’s part against every respectable woman in Osage—against me!”
“I know it. I can’t help it, Sabra.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” cried Sabra—the Sabra Cravat who had been evolved in the past five years. “I think you’re crazy! They’ve all said so. And now I know they are right.”
“Maybe so.”
“If you dare to think of disgracing me by defending her. And your children. I’ve fought her for months in the paper. A miserable creature like that! Your own wife—a laughing stock—for a—a——”
“The Territory’s rotten. But, by God, every citizen’s still got the legal right to fight for existence!” He put her gently aside.
She went mad. She became a wildcat. She tried to hold him. She beat herself against him. It was like an infuriated sparrow hurling itself upon a mastodon. “If you dare! Why did you come back? I hate you. What’s she to you? I say you won’t. I’d rather see you dead. I’d kill you first. That scum! That filth! That harlot!”
Her dignity was gone. He lifted her, scratching, kicking, clawing, set her gently down in the chair in front of her desk. The screen slammed. His quick, light step across the porch, down the stair. Crumpled, tearstained, wild as she was, and with her hat on one side she reached automatically for her pencil, a pad of copy paper, and wrote a new head. Vice Again Triumphs Over Justice. Then, with what composure she could summon, she sped down the dusty road to where the combination jail and courthouse—a crude wooden building—sat broiling in the sun.
Because of the notoriety of the defendant the inadequate little courtroom would have been crowded enough in any case. But the news of Yancey’s abrupt departure from the Sunny Southwest Saloon—and the reason for it—had spread from house to house through the little town with the rapidity of a forest fire leaping from tree to tree. Mad Yancey Cravat’s latest freak. Men left their offices, their stores; women their cooking, their cleaning. The courtroom, stifling, fly infested, baked by the morning sun, was packed beyond endurance. The crowd perched on the window sills, stood on boxes outside the windows, suffocated in the doorway,
squatted on the floor. The jury so hastily assembled, Pat Leary in a solemn suit of black, Dixie Lee with her girls, even Judge Sipes himself seemed in momentary danger of being trampled by the milling mob. It was a travesty of a courtroom. The Judge nervously champing his cud of tobacco, the corners of his mouth stained brown; Pat Leary neat, tight, representing law and order in his glittering celluloid collar; Dixie Lee, with a sense of the dramatic, all in black, her white cheeks unrouged, her dark abundant hair in neat smooth bands under the prim brim of her toque. But her girls were in full panoply of plumes. It was rather exhilarating to see them in that assemblage of drab respectability.
The jury was a hard-faced lot for the most part. Plucked from the plains or the hills; halting of speech, slow of mind, quick on the trigger. Two or three in overalls; one or two in the unaccustomed discomfort of store clothes. The rest in the conventional boots, corduroys or jeans, and rough shirt. A slow, rhythmic motion of the jaw was evidence that a generous preliminary bite of plug served as a precaution to soothe the nerves and steady the judgment.
This legal farce had already begun before Yancey made his spectacular entrance.
17
“Case of the Territory of Oklahoma versus Dixie Lee!” (So they had made it a Territorial case.…) “Counsel for the Territory of Oklahoma!” Pat Leary stood up. “… for the defense.” No one. The close-packed courtroom was a nightmare of staring eyes and fish-like mouths greedily devouring Dixie Lee’s white, ravaged face. Oddly enough, compared to these, she seemed pure, aloof, exquisite. “The defendant having failed to provide herself with counsel, it is my duty, according to the laws of the gover’ment of the United States and the Territory of Oklahoma to appoint counsel for the defendant.” He shifted his quid, the while his cunning, red-rimmed eyes roved solemnly through the crowd seeking the shyster, Gwin Larkin. A stir in the close-packed crowd; a murmur. “I hereby appoint——” The murmur swelled. “Order in the court!”
