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Show THE STORY Yancrey Cravat, JuBt returned from the newly opened Indian territory, relate,, his experiences to a larQ gathering of the Variable Vari-able family, Vancuy Is married to Ha bra Vennbl, In a criminal lawyer and editor of the Wic hita Wlffwam, When the Run started, Yancey had raced bin pony awainiit the thoroughbred mount of a Klrl. The Kirlb horne was Injured and when Yancey toppd to shoot It she grubbed his pony and got the land Yancey wanted. Yancey announces he la go inff hack to the (Oklahoma country with Babra and their four-year-old son, Cimarron. CHAPTER I Continued 3 Tlif; reedy voice of the sick ruiui hail tlio ghostly carrying quality of an echo. You hoard It nlinve the woman's shrill clamor. "No, she Isn't, Felice. Klio's more like you this minute than you aro yourself. She favors those pioneer women Yancey was tolling ahout In the old days. Look nt her." The Venable eye, from one end of the tahle to the other, turned like a Bliiffle orb In Its socket toward the youiiK woman facing them with dcll-ntico dcll-ntico In her hearing. Not defiance, perhaps, ro much as resolve, feeing lier, head up, standing there beside her husband, one arm about the child, you saw that what her father said was Indeed true. She was her mother, the Felice Venahlo of two decades ago; she was the woman In sunhonnet and calico to whom Yancey had Riven his cup of water; she was the woman Jolting endless miles In covered wagons, spinning In log cabins, cooking cook-ing over crude fires; she was all women wom-en who have traveled American prairie and desert nnd mountain and plain. The pioneer type, as Yancey had said. Potentially a more formidable woman than her mother. Seeing something of this, Felice Venable Ven-able said again, more loudly, as though to convince herself, "She's not to go." T.ooklng more than ever like her mother, Sabra met this stubbornly. "Kiit I want to go, mamma." "I forbid It. You don't know what you want. You don't know what you're talking about. I say you'll stay here with your mother and father In decent civilization. I've heard enough. I hope this will serve a lesson to you, Yancey." "I'm going back to the Nation," snld Yancey, quite pleasantly. Sabra stiffened. "I'm going with lilm." The combined Venables, nerves on edge, leaped In their chairs and then looked at each other with some hostility. "And I say you're not." "But I want to go." "You don't." Terhaps Sabra had not realized until now how terribly she had counted on lier husband's return as marking the time when she would be free to leave the Venable board, to break away from the Venable clun; no more to be handled, han-dled, talked over, peered at by the Venable eye and most of all by the maternal Venable eye. Twenty-one, and the yoke of her mother's dominance dom-inance was beginning to gall her. Now, at her own Inner rage and sickening disappointment, all the Iron In her fused and hardened. It had gone less often to the fire than the older woman's wom-an's had. For the first time this quality qual-ity In her met that of her mother, and the metal of the older woman bent. "I will go," said Sabra Cravat. If anyone had been looking at Lewis Venable at that moment (which no one ver thought of doing)) he could have Been a ghostly smile momentarily irradiating ir-radiating the transparent Ivory face. But now It was Yancey Cravat who held their fascinated eye. With a cowboy yip he swung the defiant Sabra and the boy CIm high in the air In bis great arms tossed them up, so that Sabra screamed, and Clm squealed in mingled terror and delight. "Week from tomorrow," announced Yancey, In something like a shout, so exulting It seemed. "We'll start on a Monday, fresh and fair. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit you'll drive that, Sabra and one with the household goods and bedding and camp stuff and the rest. We ought to make It In nine days. . . . Wichita !" Ills glance went round the room, and lu that glance you saw not only Wichita! but Venables! "I've had enough of it, Sabra, my girl, we'll leave all the middle-class respectability respectabil-ity of Wichita, Kan., behind us. We're going out, by G 1, to a brand new, two-fisted, rip-snorting country, full of Injuns and rattlesnakes and two-gun toters and gyp water and desper-ah-os! Whoop-ee!" CHAPTER II Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Twice a year, chaperoned by old Gen. "Bull" I'luin-mer, I'luin-mer, the Indians swept through the streets In their visiting regalia feathers, feath-ers, beads, blankets, chains a brilliant bril-liant sight. Ahead of them nnd behind be-hind them was the reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Itlley. All Wichita, accustomed to them though It was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways nnd otlices and kitchens. Bucks, bfs, chiefs, squaws, papooses; tepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the cavalcade caval-cade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the mid-western town, a vivid frieze of color against the drab moiiotntvy of the prairie By EDNA FERBER Copyright by Edna Ferber. WNU Service, , A cowed enough people they seemed by now; dirty, degraded. Since the Cusler massacre of '70 they had been pretty thoroughly beaten Into submission. sub-mission. Sabra, If she considered them at all, thought of thern as dirty and useless two-footed animals. The once-wild once-wild things seemed tame enough now, herded together on their reservations, spirit broken, pride destroyed. The child Clm had got It Into his head that this was to be a picnic. lie had smelled pies and cakes baking; had seen hampers packed. Certainly, except for the bizarre load that both wagons contained, this might have been one of those Informal excursions Into a nearby wood which Clm so loved, where they lunched In the open, camped near a stream,' and he was allowed to run barefoot In the shadow of his aristocratic grandmother's cool disapproval. There was a lunatic week preceding their departure from Wichita. Felice fought their going to the last, and finally took to her bed with threats of Impending dissolution which failed to achieve the desired effect owing to the preoccupation of the persons supposed to be stricken by her plight. From time to time, intrigued by the thurup-Ings, thurup-Ings, scurrylngs, shouts, laughter, quarrels, quar-rels, and general upheaval attendant on the Cravats' departure, Felice rose from her bed and trailed wanly about the house, looking, in her white dimity wrapper, like a bilious and distracted ghost. She Issued orders. "Take this. Don't take that. It cau't be that you're leaving those behind! Your own Aunt Sarah Moncrief du Tisne embroidered every inch of them with her own " "But, mamma, you don't understand. Yancey says there's very little society, and It's nil quite rough and unsettled wild, almost." "That needn't prevent you from remembering re-membering you're a lady, I hope. Unless Un-less you are planning to be one of those hags In a sunbonnet and no teeth that Yancey seems to have taken such a fancy to." So Sabra Cravat took along to the frontier wilderness such oddments and elegancies as her training, lack of experience, ex-perience, and southern family tradition tradi-tion dictated. There were two wagons, canvas covered and lumbering. Dishes, trunks, bedding, boxes were snugly stowed away In the capacious belly of one; the printing outfit, securely roped and lashed, went In the other. There was, to the Wichita eye, nothing noth-ing unusual In the sight of these huge covered freighters that would soon go lumbering off toward the horizon. Their like had worn many a track In the Kansas prairie. Yet In this small expedition faring forth there was something that held the poignancy of the tragic and the ridiculous. The man, huge, bizarre, Impractical ; the woman, tight lipped, terribly determined, deter-mined, her eyes staring with the fixed, unseeing gaze of one who knows that to blink but once Is to be awash with tears; the child, out of hand with excitement ex-citement and Impatience to be gone. From the day of Yancey's recital of the Run, black Isaiah, small descendant descend-ant of the Venables' black servants, had begged to be taken along. Denied De-nied this, he had sulked for a week and now was nowhere to be found. The wagons, packed, stood waiting before the Venable house. Perhaps never In the history of the settling of the West did a woman go a-ploneering In such a costume. Sabra had driven horses all her life ; so now she stepped agilely from ground to hub, from hub to wheel top, perched herself on the high wagon seat and gathered up the reins with deftness and outward composure. com-posure. Her eyes ware enormous, her pale face paler. Yancey had swung Clm up to the calico-cushioned seat beside Sabra. His short legs, in their copper-toed boots, stuck straight out In front of him. His dark eyes were huge with excitement. "Why don't we go?" he demanded, over and over, In something like a scream. He shouted to the horses as he had heard teamsters team-sters do. "Giddap In 'ere; Gee-op! G'larng!" His grandmother and grandfather, grand-father, gazing up with sudden agony in their faces at sight of this little expedition actually faring forth so absurdly ab-surdly Into the unknown, had ceased to exist for Clm. As Sabra drove one wagon and Yancey the other, the boy pivoted between them through the long drive, spending the morning in the seat beside his mother, the afternoon beside his father, with Intervals of napping curled up on the bedding at the back of the wagon. Now, with a lurch and a rattle and a great clatter of hoofs the two wagons were off. They had made an early start By ten the boy's eyes were heavy with sleep. Sabra coaxed him to curl up on the wagon seat, his head in her lap. She held the reins In one hand; one arm was about the child. It was hot and still and drowsy. Noon came with surprising swiftness. They had brought along a precious keg of water and a food supply sufficient, they thought, to last through most of the trip salt pork, mince and apple pies, bread, doughnuts dough-nuts but their appetites were enormous. enor-mous. At midday they stopped and ate in the shade. Sabra prepared the meal while Yancey tended the horses. Clm, wide awake now and refreshed, ate largely with them of the fried" salt pork and potatoes, the hard-boiled eggs, the mince pie. It was all very gay and comfortable and relaxed. Short as the morning had been, the afternoon stretched out, somehow, endless. end-less. Sabra began to be horribly tired, cramped. The boy whimpered. It was mid-afternoon and hot ; It was late afternoon ; tiien the brilliant western sunset began to paint the sky. Yancey, Yan-cey, In the wagon ahead, drew up, gazed about, got out, tied his team to one of a clump of cottonwoods. "We'll camp here," he called to Sabra and came toward tier wagon, . prepared to lift her down, and the boy. She was stiff, utterly weary. She stared down at him, dully, then around the landscape. "Camp?" "Y'es. For the night. Come, Cim." He lifted the boy down with a great swoop. "You mean for the night? Sleep here?" He was quite matter-of-fact. "Yes. It's a good place. Water and trees. r (ft - It Wa a Hard Trip for the Child. I'll have a fire before you can say Jack Robinson. Where'd you think you were going to sleep? Back home?" Somehow she had not thought. She had not believed It. To sleep out of doors like this, In the open, with only a wagon top as roof! All her neat conventional life she had slept In a four-poster bed with a dotted Swiss canopy and net curtains and linen sheets that smelled sweetly of the sun and the air. . Yancey began to make camp. Already Al-ready the duties of this new manner of living had become familiar. There was wood to gather, a fire to start, water to be boiled. Cim, very wide awake now, trotted after his father, after his mother. Meat began to sizzle appetizingly In the pan. The exquisite scent of coffee revived them with its promise of stimulation. "That roll of carpet," called Sabra, busy at the fire, to Yancey at the wagon. "Under the seat. I want Clm to sit on It . . . ground may be damp. . . ." A sudden shout from Yancey. A squeal of terror from the bundle of carpeting In his arms a bundle that suddenly was alive and wriggling. Yancey dropped It with an oath. The bundle lay on the ground a moment, heaving, then It began to unroll itself while the three regarded It with starting eyes. A black paw, a woolly head, a fac all open mouth and whites of eyes. Black Isaiah. He had found a way to come with them to the Indian territory. By noon next day they were wondering won-dering how they had got on at all without him. He gathered wood. He started fires. He tended Clm like a nurse, played with him, gang to him, helped put him to bed, slept anywhere, like a little dog. Yancey pointed out the definiteness with which the land changed when they left Kansas and came Into the Oklahoma country. "Okla-homa," he explained to Clm. "That's Choctaw. Okla people. Liu nun a red. Red people. That's what they called It when the Indians came here to live." Suddenly the land, too, had become red: red clay as far as the eye could see. When the trail led through a cleft in a hill the blood red of the clay on either side was like a gaping wound. Sabra shrank from it. Its. glare seared the eyeballs. It was a hard trip for the child. He was by turns unruly and listless. He could not run ahout, except when they stopped to make camp. Sabra, curiously curi-ously enough, had not the gift of amusing him as Yancey had, or even Isaiah. Isaiah told him tales that were negro folklore, handed down by word of mouth through the years. Often the days were gay enough. They fell into the routine, adjusted themselves to the discomfort. Sabra got out the sunbonnet wliich one of the less formidable Venables had Jokingly Jok-ingly given her at parting, and tills she wore to shield her eyes from the pitiless glare of sky and plain. The sight of her in that prairie wilderness engaged In the domestic task of beating beat-ing up a bowl of biscuit dough struck no one as being incongruous. The bread supply was early exhausted. She baked In a little portable tin oven that Yancey had fitted out for her. As for Yancey himself, Sabra had never known him so happy. He was tireless, charming, varied. She herself was fascinated by his tales of hidden mines, of Spanish doubloons, of Iron chests plowed up by some gaunt homesteader's home-steader's hand plow hitched to a stumbling mule. The wind, at certain periods of the year, blows almost without ceasing In Oklahoma. And when it rains the roads become slithering bogs of greased red dough, so that a wagon will sink and slide at the same time. They had two days of rain during which they plodded miserably, inch by inch. Cim squalled, Isaiah became Just a shivering black lump of misery, and Sabra thought of her dimity-hung bed back home In Wichita ; of the garden in the cool of the evening; of the family gathered in the " dining room ; of the pleasant food, the easy talk, the luxurious ease. At Pawnee Yancey saw fresh deer tracks. He saddled a horse and was off. They had, before this, caught bass In thj streams, and Yancey had shot prairie chicken and quail, and Sabra had fried them delicately. But this was their first promise of big game. Sabra welcomed this unexpected unex-pected halt. She and Isaiah carried water from the creek and washed a few bits of clothes and hung them to dry. She bathed Cim. She heated water for herself and bathed gratefully. grate-fully. She set Isaiah to gathering fuel for the evening meal, while Clm played In the shade of the clump of scrub oak. She was quite serene. She listened lis-tened for the sound of horse's hoofs that would announce Yancey's triumphant trium-phant return. Vaguely she began to wonder if Yancey should not have returned re-turned by now. She brushed her hair thoroughly, enjoying " the motion, throwing It over her head and bending far forward in that contortlonistlc attitude at-titude required by her task. After she had braided it she decided to leave It In a long thick plait down her back. Audaciously she tied It with a bright red ribbon, smiling to think of what Yancey would say. She tidied the wagon. She was frankly worried now. Nothing could happen. Of course nothing could happen. And In another part of her mind she thought that any -one of a dozen dreadful things could happen. Indians. Why not? Some wild thing In the woods. Broken bones. A fall from his horse. He might lose his way. Suppose she had to spend the night alone here on the prairie with the two children. In a sudden panic she stepped out of the wagon with the feeling that sha must have her own human things near her Cim, Isaiah to talk to. Cim was not there playing with his bits of stone and twigs. He had gone off with Isaiah to gather fuel, though she had forbidden it. Isaiah, his long arms full of dead twigs and small brandies, was coming toward the wagon now. Cim was not with him. "Where's Cim?" He dropped his load, looked around. "I lef him playln' by hisseif right hyah when Ah go fetch de wood. Aln' he In de wagon?" "No. No." "Might be he crep' In de print wagon." "Wgon?" She ran to the other wagon, peered inside, called. He was not there. Together they looked under the wagons, behind the trees. "Cim! Cim! Cimarron Cravat, if you are hiding I shall punish you if you don't come out this minute." A shrill note of terror crept Into her voice. She began to scream his name, her voice cracking grotesquely. "Cim! Cim!" She prayed as she ran, mumblingly. "O God, help me find him. O God, don't let anything happen to him. Dear God, hdp me find him Clm! Cim! Cim!" Sri ame to a little mound that dipped suddenly and unexpectedly to a draw. And there, In a hollow, she came upou him, seated before a cave in the side of the hill, the front and roof Ingeniously timbered to make a log cabin. One might pass wlthirt Ave feet of It and never find it. Four men were seated about the doorstep outs!d9 the rude cabin. Cim was perched on the knee of one of them, who was cracking nuts for him. They were laughing and talking and munching nuts and having altogether a delightful delight-ful time of it. Sabra's knees su&tenly became weak. She was trembling. She stumbled as she ran 'toward him. Her face "worked queerly. The men sprang up, their hands at their hips. "The man Is cracking nuts for me," remarked Clm, sociably, and not especially es-pecially glad to see her. The man on whose knee he sat was a slim young fellow with a sandy mustache mus-tache and a red handkerchief knotted cowboy fashion around his throat. He put the boy down gently as Sabra came up, and rose with a kind of easy grace. "You ran away you we hunted every Cim " she stammered, and burst into tears of mingled anger and relief. The slim young man seemed the spokesman, though the other three were obviously older than he. "Why, I'm real sorry you was distressed, dis-tressed, ma'am. We was going to bring the boy back safe enough. He wandered down here lookin' for his pa, he said." He was standing with one hand resting lightly, tenderly, on Clm's head, and looking down at Sabra with a smile of utter sweetness. His was the soft-spoken, almost caressing voice of the southwestern cowman and ranger. At this Sabra's anger, born of fright, varnished. Besides, he was so young scarcely more than a boy. "Well," she explained, a little sheepishly, sheep-ishly, "I was worried. . . . My husband hus-band went off on the track of a deer . . . hours ago ... he hasn't come back . ... then when Cim ... I came out and he was gone. ... I was so so terribly ter-ribly . . ." "Won't you sit and rest yourself, ma'am?" suggested the spokesman. The words were hospitable enough, yet there was that in the boy's tone which conveyed to Sabra the suggestion that she and Clm had better be gone. She took Cim's hand. Now that her fright was past she thought she must have looked very silly running down the draw with her tears and her pigtail and her screaming. She thanked them, using a little southern charm and southern drawl, which she often legitimately borrowed from the ancestral an-cestral Venables for special occasions such as this. "I'm ve'y grateful to you-all," she now said. "You've been mighty kind. If you would Just drop around to our camp I'm sure my husband would be delighted to meet you." The young man smiled more sweetly than ever, and the others looked at him, an Inexplicable glint of humor In their weather-beaten faces. "I sure thank you, ma'am. We're movln' on, my friends here and me. Pronto. Floyd, how about you getting a piece of deer meat for the lady, seeing see-ing she's been cheated of her supper. Now, if you and the little fella don't mind sittin" up behind and before, why, I'll take you back a ways. You probably run fu'ther than you expected, ex-pected, ma'am, scared as you was." She had, as a matter of fact, In her terror, run almost half a mile from camp. He mounted first. His method of accomplishing this was something of a miracle. At one moment the horse was standing ready and he was at Its side. The next there was a flash, and he was on Its back. It was like an optical illusion In which he seemed to have been drawn to the saddle as a needle flies to the magnet. Clm he drew up to the pommel, holding him with one hand; Sabra, perched on the clung with both arms round the lad's slim waist. Something of a horsewoman, she noticed his fine Mexican saddle, studded with silver. From the sides of the saddle hung hair-covered pockets whose bulge was the outline of a gun. A slicker such as Is carried by those who ride the trails made a compact ship-shape roll behind the saddle. Suddenly she noticed no-ticed that the young rider wore gloves. The sight of them made her vaguely uneasy, as though some memory had been stirred. She had never seen a plainsman wearing gloves. It was absurd, ab-surd, somehow. TO BE CONTINTJEttJ |