Bloomingdale’s The iconic American chain, known for its curated selection, designer collaborations, and a certain “je ne sais quoi,” is thriving, even as rivals like Macy’s and Nordstrom face significant headwinds.

In a retail landscape dotted with defunct department stores and echoing food courts, one name seems to be bucking the trend:

So, what is it about Bloomingdale’s that has kept the store so relevant, so… resilient? Is it the famous little brown bags, or something more substantial? Let’s explore.

The Art of Curation

Bloomingdale’s has always been about the mix. They don’t just sell clothes; they present a point of view. A stroll through their stores isn’t a simple shopping trip; it’s an exploration of current trends, classic style, and unexpected finds.

Unlike other department stores that can feel overwhelmed with inventory, Bloomingdale’s feels edited. Their buyers seem to possess an unerring knack for spotting what’s next and bringing it to their customers first. This creates an unparalleled level of trust and loyalty.

Designer Collaborations That Matter

Long before every brand had a collaboration, Bloomingdale’s was pioneering this approach. Their partnerships with designers, both established and emerging, are legendary. These collections offer customers a chance to own pieces from coveted labels at a more accessible price point.

These collaborations don’t just drive traffic; they build excitement and a sense of exclusivity. You feel like you’re part of something, a member of the “in-the-know” crowd. This is a crucial element of Bloomingdale’s’ brand identity.

A Focus on Experience

In an age of online shopping, Bloomingdale’s understands that they need to offer something that Amazon can’t. That “something” is experience. They invest heavily in creating vibrant and inviting store environments.

From in-store events and trunk shows to the signature cafes and bars, Bloomingdale’s is designed to be a destination. They’re creating a community, a place where people can gather, socialize, and connect with other fashion enthusiasts.

The Power of Omni-Channel

While Bloomingdale’s physical stores are a cornerstone of their success, they haven’t ignored the digital landscape. Their online presence is strong, integrated with their physical footprint. They offer services like buy online, pick up in-store, and free shipping.

This seamless omni-channel approach allows customers to shop in a way that suits their needs. They’re not forced to choose between online and in-store; they can have both.

The Ultimate Question

So, is Bloomingdale’s truly defying the demise of department stores? The answer is a bit of a yes and no.

Yes, Bloomingdale’s is doing well. They’re making a profit, they’re growing, and they have a strong brand identity. But they’re also operating in a market that is increasingly volatile. Consumer habits are changing rapidly, and the retail landscape is unpredictable.

Bloomingdale’s has built a strong foundation, but they can’t afford to rest on their laurels. They need to continue to innovate, to evolve, and to meet the changing needs of their customers.

Perhaps the real question is not whether Bloomingdale’s is defying the demise, but whether they are adapting to the new retail reality. And on that score, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.

A Brighter Future for Department Stores?

The success of Bloomingdale’s offers a glimmer of hope for the future of department stores. It demonstrates that with the right strategy, a commitment to quality and curation, and a focus on experience, it’s possible not just to survive but to thrive.

But it’s important to remember that not all department stores are created equal. Bloomingdale’s success is a testament to its unique brand identity, its loyal customer base, and its forward-thinking management team. It’s not a formula that can easily be replicated.

Ultimately, the demise of department stores is not inevitable. It’s about a failure to adapt. Bloomingdale’s is proof that with a little creativity and a lot of hard work, department stores can continue to be a vibrant part of the retail landscape for years to come.

Contact Factoring Specialist, Chris Lehnes

When Trump declared April 2, 2025, as “Liberation Day,” it was supposed to mark the beginning of a manufacturing renaissance. The promise was simple: by slapping aggressive tariffs on foreign goods, the administration would force production back to American soil, revitalize the Rust Belt, and end the “obliteration” of industrial towns.

However, as we move through early 2026, the data tells a different story. Far from a “roaring” comeback, the sector is in a documented retreat. While a recent January uptick in the ISM Manufacturing PMI https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/business-confidence(52.6) offers a flicker of hope, the broader picture since the 2025 tariff rollout has been one of contraction and “stagflation-lite.”

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1. The Numbers Don’t Lie: A Sector in Contraction

Despite the rhetoric, the U.S. manufacturing sector has struggled to keep its head above water over the last year.

• Job Losses: Since the tariffs were announced, the sector has shed roughly 72,000 jobs. ADP data from January 2026 shows a further loss of 8,000 manufacturing positions, marking a persistent downward trend.
• The PMI Slump: Before the unexpected January bounce, the sector experienced ten consecutive months of contraction. A reading below 50 indicates the industry is shrinking, and for most of 2025, it stayed firmly in the red.
• Small Business Strain: For firms with 20 to 49 employees, employment levels have plummeted to their lowest point since 2022. These smaller shops often lack the capital to absorb tariff costs that larger corporations can sometimes weather.

2. The “Tax on Production” Problem

The fundamental issue with broad-based tariffs is that they don’t just tax finished goods; they tax the inputs that American factories need to build things.

“U.S. manufacturing is deeply integrated into global supply chains. When you tax steel, aluminum, and intermediate components, you aren’t just protecting a few domestic mills—you’re raising the cost of every car, appliance, and machine built in America.”

For example, Ford reported incurring nearly $2 billion in annual tariff costs in 2025. When domestic manufacturers face higher costs for their raw materials than their overseas competitors, they become less competitive on the global stage. Instead of hiring, they are forced to raise prices or implement hiring freezes to protect their margins.

3. Uncertainty is the Real Killer

Beyond the direct costs, the volatility of trade policy has created a “permanent risk mode” for supply chains.

• Constant Shifts: In just the last few weeks, the administration increased tariffs on South Korea to 25% and threatened a 100% tariff on Canada.
• Investment Freeze: Businesses hate uncertainty. Many firms have shifted their budgets away from efficiency-improving capital investments (like new machinery) toward “tariff mitigation” strategies.
• The Supreme Court Factor: Markets are currently holding their breath for a SCOTUS ruling on the legality of using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to bypass Congress for these trade penalties.

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The Bottom Line

The “manufacturing boom” is currently going in reverse. While the administration points to isolated gains in domestic metal production, the downstream effects—higher prices for consumers and job losses in tech-heavy and automotive sectors—are outweighing the benefits.

American factories are resilient, but they are currently caught between the hammer of high interest rates and the anvil of rising input costs. Until trade policy finds a steady, predictable rhythm, the “Golden Age” remains more of a slogan than a reality.

Contact Factoring Specialist, Chris Lehnes

$3 Million Non-Recourse Factoring Facility to Digital Marketing Firm

Company has very large companies as clients which pay their invoices slowly. Our factoring facility will advance cash when invoices are issued allowing company to cover overhead .

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Unlock Your Agency’s Growth: The Power of Accounts Receivable Factoring for Digital Marketing Firms

In the world of digital marketing, agility and access to capital are paramount. You land a big client, launch a successful campaign, and the invoices stack up. The problem? Those invoices might not get paid for 30, 60, or even 90 days. This lag, known as the “cash flow gap,” can stifle your growth, prevent you from taking on new projects, and even impact your ability to pay your team.

This is where Accounts Receivable (AR) Factoring comes in—a powerful financial tool that many digital marketing agencies are overlooking.

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What is Accounts Receivable Factoring?

Simply put, AR factoring allows your agency to sell its outstanding invoices to a third-party financial company (the “factor”) at a slight discount. In return, you receive an immediate cash advance, typically 70-90% of the invoice value. The factor then collects the full payment from your client when it’s due, and you receive the remaining balance (minus the factoring fee) once the invoice is paid.

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How AR Factoring Benefits Digital Marketing Agencies

Here’s why factoring can be a game-changer for your digital marketing business:

1. Immediate Cash Flow Injection

The Problem: You’ve delivered fantastic results, but your client’s payment terms are extended. You need cash now to cover payroll, invest in new software, or launch another campaign.

The Solution: Factoring turns those 30- or 60-day invoices into same-day cash. This immediate liquidity allows you to:

• Pay employees and contractors on time.
• Invest in new talent or technology.
• Cover operational expenses without stress.
• Take on larger projects without financial strain.

2. Fueling Growth and Expansion

The Problem: A potential big client comes along, but their project requires a significant upfront investment in ad spend, software licenses, or specialized talent that you don’t currently have liquid cash for.

The Solution: Factoring provides the working capital to pursue ambitious growth opportunities. You can:

• Bid on bigger contracts with confidence.
• Scale your ad campaigns rapidly.
• Expand your service offerings.
• Invest in business development to acquire new clients.

3. Reduced Financial Risk and Stress

The Problem: Chasing late payments is time-consuming, awkward, and can strain client relationships. Plus, the risk of non-payment always looms.

The Solution: With factoring, the responsibility of collections often shifts to the factor (depending on the agreement). This means:

• Your team can focus on marketing, not collections.
• Reduced administrative burden and operational costs.
• Mitigated risk of bad debt (especially with “non-recourse factoring”).
• Predictable cash flow eliminates financial anxiety.

4. Access to Capital Without Debt

The Problem: Traditional bank loans can be hard to secure for young or rapidly growing agencies, often requiring extensive collateral or a lengthy application process.

The Solution: Factoring is not a loan. You’re selling an asset (your invoice), not taking on debt. This makes it an attractive option because:

• It doesn’t appear as debt on your balance sheet.
• Approval is often based on your clients’ creditworthiness, not just yours.
• It’s typically easier and faster to qualify for compared to traditional loans.
• It preserves your existing credit lines for other needs.

5. Capitalizing on Seasonal Peaks and Valleys

The Problem: Digital marketing often has seasonal fluctuations. You might have huge projects during peak seasons, followed by leaner periods.

The Solution: Factoring offers flexible funding that scales with your business. You can factor invoices only when you need to, providing an agile solution to manage inconsistent cash flow throughout the year.

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Is Factoring Right for Your Agency?

If your digital marketing agency deals with:

• Slow-paying clients (even if they’re reliable payers).
• Rapid growth that outpaces your cash reserves.
• The need for immediate working capital without taking on debt.
• A desire to streamline your collections process and reduce administrative overhead.

Then accounts receivable factoring deserves a serious look. It’s a strategic financial tool that can provide the stability and liquidity your agency needs to not just survive, but to truly thrive in the competitive digital landscape.

Contact Factoring Specialist, Chris Lehnes

Podcast – Small Businesses face numerous challenges, among them is the ability to have access to sufficient working capital to meet the ongoing cash obligations of the business.

While this need can be met by a traditional line of credit for businesses which meet all traditional bank lending criteria, many businesses do not meet those standards and require an alternative.

One such option is accounts receivable factoring. With factoring, a B2B or B2G business can quickly convert their accounts receivable into cash.

Many factoring companies focus exclusively on the credit quality of the customer base and ignore the financial condition of the business and the personal financial condition of the owners.

This works well for businesses with traits such as:

Losses

Rapidly Growing

Highly Leveraged

Customer Concentrations

Out-of-favor Industries

Weak Personal Credit

Character Issues

Listen to this podcast to gain a greater understanding of the types of businesses which can benefit from this form of financing.

To learn if you are a fit contact me today

The Fed’s Delicate Balance

Few voices carry as much weight as Jamie Dimon’s. So, when the JPMorgan Chase CEO uses words regarding Fed independence like “absolutely critical” and warns of “adverse consequences,” the markets—and the public—should probably lean in.

His recent comments regarding political interference with the Federal Reserve aren’t just about high-level banking theory; they are a direct warning about the stability of the American economy and the cost of living for every citizen.

The “Referee” of the Economy

To understand Dimon’s concern, you have to look at the Federal Reserve’s role. Think of the Fed as the “referee” of the economy. Their job is to manage inflation and employment by adjusting interest rates. For this to work, they have to be able to make tough, often unpopular decisions—like raising rates to cool down inflation—without worrying about whether those moves will cost a politician an election.

As Dimon pointed out during a recent earnings call, “The independence of the Fed is absolutely critical.” Why? Because the moment the public or investors believe the Fed is taking orders from the White House, trust in the U.S. dollar and the stability of our markets begins to crumble.

The Irony of Political Pressure

The current tension stems from persistent political pressure on Fed Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates. The logic from the political side is simple: lower rates usually mean more borrowing, more spending, and a short-term boost to the economy.

However, Dimon warns that this pressure can backfire spectacularly. He noted that “playing around with the Fed could have adverse consequences, the absolute opposite of what you might be hoping for.”

Here is the paradox: If the Fed lowers rates because a politician told them to, rather than because the data supports it, investors will fear that inflation is going to spiral out of control. To protect themselves, those same investors will demand higher returns on government bonds. This drives “long-term” interest rates up—the very rates that determine what you pay for a mortgage, a car loan, or a credit card balance.

By trying to force rates down for a political win, leaders could inadvertently push rates higher for the average consumer.

Why This Matters Now

Dimon’s warning comes at a delicate time. Between the potential for new tariffs (which can drive up prices) and a growing federal deficit, the U.S. economy is walking a tightrope.

If the Fed loses its autonomy, the “soft landing” we’ve all been hoping for—where inflation cools without a major recession—becomes much harder to achieve. As Dimon noted, asset prices are currently priced for perfection, and the margin for error is slim.

The Bottom Line

Jamie Dimon isn’t just defending a colleague in Jerome Powell; he is defending the institutional credibility that keeps the global financial system running.

In a world of hyper-partisan politics, some things need to remain “above the fray.” The Federal Reserve is one of them. If the independence of the central bank is compromised, we won’t just see it in the headlines—we’ll feel it in our monthly bills.

*** What do you think? Is political oversight of the Fed necessary for accountability, or is Jamie Dimon right that independence is the only way to keep the economy stable? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Contact Factoring Specialist, Chris Lehnes

Download Cimarron by Edna Ferber

Cimarron is a novel by Edna Ferber, published in April 1930 and based on development in Oklahoma after the Land Rush. The book was adapted into a critically acclaimed film of the same name, released in 1931 through RKO Pictures. The story was again adapted for the screen by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was released in 1960, to meager success.

Background

The Land Rush

Main article: Oklahoma Land Race

The Oklahoma Land Rush (also called the Oklahoma Land Race and Cherokee Strip Land Run) plays a pivotal role in both the novel and film adaptations. “Manifest destiny” and the desperation of the settlers involved in the rush provides the opening drama and sets the stage for the twists and turns in the book. Every settler is desperate to stake his claim on the best piece of land (near water).

Cimarron involves two land runs. The first, for the Unassigned Lands, occurred on April 22, 1889. The second, for the Cherokee Outlet (commonly called the Cherokee Strip) occurred in 1893. The piece of land in question had been allotted to the Cherokee Nation as part of the 1828 Treaty of New Echota, while the rest of the Oklahoma Territory had been opened to settlers. As commerce grew across the area of Kansas and Oklahoma, cattlemen became increasingly annoyed by the presence of the Cherokee on prime land that they wanted to use to drive cattle from northern ranches to Texas. Some of this annoyance with the Native people can be attributed to the decision made by the Cherokees to side with the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. In the 1880s, the government attempted to lease the land for cattle ranching, but the Native Americans refused. Eventually, the Cherokee people did sell the land to the government.

Throughout the remaining years of the 1880s various cattle associations and ranches fought over the land. Disputes even turned deadly, as large cattle companies and small ranchers both claimed the land as their own. This eventually led to a ban on cattle ranching in the area, and in 1893 the land, 58 miles (93 km) wide by 225 miles (362 km) long, was opened to homesteaders. The land was divided into 42,000 claims, and each homesteader had to literally stake (put a stake with a white flag attached) their claim, and pick up a certificate back at the starting place. Nearly 100,000 people arrived for the rush, and over half of them would be sent back home after the day was through.

Novel

Cimarron derives its name from the Cimarron Territory. The Cimarron Territory was an unrecognized name for the No Man’s Land, an unsettled area of the West and Midwest, especially lands once inhabited by Native American tribes such as the Cherokee and Sioux. In 1886 the government declared such lands open to settlement. At the time of the novel’s opening, Oklahoma is one such “Cimarron Territory,” though in actuality the historical setting of the novel is somewhere in the Cherokee Outlet, also known as the Cherokee Strip, and probably the city of Guthrie, Oklahoma.

The novel is set in the Oklahoma of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It follows the lives of Yancey and Sabra Cravat, beginning with Yancey’s tale of his participation in the 1893 land rush. They emigrate from Wichita, Kansas, to the fictional town of Osage, Oklahoma with their son Cim and—unknowingly—a black boy named Isaiah. In Osage, the Cravats print their newspaper, the Oklahoma Wigwam, and build their fortune amongst Indian disputes, outlaws, and the discovery of oil in Oklahoma.

Upon its publication, Cimarron was a sensation in America and came to epitomize an era in American history. It was the best selling novel of 1930,^[1] as it provided readers an outlet to escape their present suffering in the Great Depression. This novel became Ferber’s third successful novel and paved the way for many more Ferber-penned historical epics, and it was published as an Armed Services Edition during WWII.

While it became seen as a triumphant feminist story detailing Sabra Cravat’s growth from a traditional American housewife into a successful leader and politician, Ferber stated in her autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, that the novel was originally intended as a satirical criticism of American womanhood and American sentimentality.^[2][3] Throughout the novel, Sabra’s practice of imperial domesticity can be seen in her attempts to “civilize” Native Americans by forcing them to adopt white values, and her fixation on expanding her own sphere of influence, which as a woman, was traditionally her home.^[4]

The character of Yancey Cravat is based on Temple Lea Houston, last child of Texas icon Sam Houston. Temple Houston was a brilliant trial lawyer known for his flamboyant courtroom theatrics. He was also a competent gunfighter who killed at least one man in a stand-up shootout.

Full Text of Cimarron

VINTAGE MOVIE CLASSICS

Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic lms that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered
through the publication of the novels on which they were based.
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FIRST VINTAGE MOVIE CLASSICS EDITION, MARCH 2014

Copyright © 1930 by Edna Ferber, renewed 1957 by Edna Ferber Foreword copyright © 2014 by Julie
Gilbert
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House
LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House
companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of
Random House LLC, New York, in 1930.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Movie Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random
House LLC.
This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of
the author’s imagination or are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on le at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-345-80575-1 eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-80576-8
Cover design: Evan Ga ney Design
Cover photograph by Jochem Wijnands © akg / Horizons www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1

PREFACE

Only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book are true. There is no attempt
to set down a literal history of Oklahoma. All the characters, the towns, and many of the
happenings contained herein are imaginary. But through reading the scant available records,
documents, and histories (including the Oklahoma State Historical Library collection) and through
many talks with men and women who have lived in Oklahoma since the day of the Opening, something of
the spirit, the color, the movement, the life of that incredible commonwealth has, I hope, been
caught. Certainly the Run, the Sunday service in the gambling tent, the death of Isaiah and of
Arita Red Feather, the catching of the can of nitroglycerin, many of the shooting a rays, most
descriptive passages, all of the oil phase, and the Osage Indian material complete—these are based
on actual happenings. In many cases material entirely true was discarded as un t for use because it
was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of
ction.
There is no city of Osage, Oklahoma. It is a composite of, perhaps,
ve existent Oklahoma cities. The Kid is not meant to be the notorious Billy the Kid of an earlier
day. There was no Yancey Cravat—he is a blending of a number of dashing Oklahoma gures of a past
and present day. There is no Sabra Cravat, but she exists in a score of bright-eyed, white-haired,
intensely interesting women of sixty- ve or thereabouts who told me many strange things as we
talked and rocked on an Oklahoma front porch (tree-shaded now).
Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

EDNA FERBER

1

All the Venables sat at Sunday dinner. All those handsome inbred Venable faces were turned,
enthralled, toward Yancey Cravat, who was talking. The combined e ect was almost blinding, as of
incandescence; but Yancey Cravat was not bedazzled. A sun surrounded by lesser planets, he gave out
a radiance so powerful as to dim the luminous circle about him.
Yancey had a disconcerting habit of abruptly concluding a meal— for himself, at least—by throwing
down his napkin at the side of his plate, rising, and striding about the room, or even leaving it.
It was not deliberate rudeness. He ate little. His appetite satis ed, he instinctively ceased to
eat; ceased to wish to contemplate food. But the Venables sat hours at table, leisurely shelling
almonds, sipping sherry; Cousin Dabney Venable peeling an orange for Cousin Bella French Vian with
the absorbed concentration of a sculptor molding his clay.
The Venables, dining, strangely resembled one of those fertile and dramatic family groups portrayed
lolling unconventionally at meat in the less spiritual of those Biblical canvases that glow richly
down at one from the great gallery walls of Europe. Though their garb was sober enough, being
characteristic of the time—1889—and the place
—Kansas—it yet conveyed an impression as of purple and scarlet robes enveloping these gracile
shoulders. You would not have been surprised to see, moving silently about this board, Nubian
blacks in loincloths, bearing aloft golden vessels piled with exotic fruits or steaming with
strange pasties in which nightingales’ tongues gured

prominently. Blacks, as a matter of fact, did move about the Venable table, but these, too, wore
the conventional garb of the servitor.
This branch of the Venable family tree had been transplanted from Mississippi to Kansas more than
two decades before, but the mid-west had failed to set her bourgeois stamp upon them. Straitened
though it was, there still obtained in that household, by some genealogical miracle, many of those
charming ways, remotely Oriental, that were of the South whence they had sprung. The midday meal
was, more often than not, a sort of tribal feast at which sprawled hosts of impecunious kin,
mysteriously sprung up at the sound of the dinner bell and the scent of baking meats. Unwilling
émigrés, war ruined, Lewis Venable and his wife Felice had brought their dear customs with them
into exile, as well as the superb mahogany oval at which they now sat, and the war-salvaged silver
which gave elegance to the Wichita, Kansas, board. Certainly the mahogany had su ered in transit;
and many of their Southern ways, transplanted to Kansas, seemed slightly silly—or would have, had
they not been tinged with pathos. The hot breads of the South, heaped high at every meal, still
wrought alimentary havoc. The frying pan and the deep-fat kettle (both, perhaps, as much as
anything responsible for the tragedy of ’64) still spattered their deadly fusillade in this
household. Indeed, the creamy pallor of the Venable women, so like that of a magnolia petal in
their girlhood, and tending so surely toward the ocherous in middle age, was less a matter of
pigment than of liver. Impecunious though the family now was, three or four negro servants went
about the house, soft-footed, slack, charming. “Rest yo’ wrap?” they suggested, velvet voiced and
hospitable, as you entered the wide hallway that was at once so bare and so cluttered. And, “Beat
biscuit, Miss Adeline?” as they pro ered a fragrant plate.
Even that Kansas garden was of another latitude. Lean hounds drowsed in the sun-drenched untidiness
of the doorway, and that untidiness was hidden and transformed by a miracle of color and scent and
bloom. Here were passion ower and wistaria and even Bougainvillea in season. Honeysuckle gave out
its swooning sweetness. In the early spring lilies of the valley thrust the phantom

green of their spears up through the dead brown banking the lilac bushes. That coarse vulgarian,
the Kansas sun ower, was a thing despised of the Venables. If one so much as showed its broad face
among the scented élégantes of that garden it su ered instant decapitation. On one occasion Felice
Venable had been known to ruin a pair of very ne-tempered embroidery scissors while impetuously
acting as headsman. She had even been heard to bewail the absence of Spanish moss in this northerly
climate. A neighboring midwest matron, mi ed, resented this.
“But that’s a parasite! And real creepy, almost. I was in South Carolina and saw it. Kind of
oating, like ghosts. And no earthly good.”
“Do even the owers have to be useful in Kansas?” drawled Felice Venable. She was not very popular
with the bustling wives of Wichita. They resented her ru ed and trailing white wrappers of
cross-barred dimity; her pointed slippers, her arched instep, her indi erence to all that went on
outside the hedge that surrounded the Venable yard; they resented the hedge itself, symbol of
exclusiveness in that open-faced Kansas town. Sheathed in the velvet of Felice Venable’s languor
was a sharp-edged poniard of wit inherited from her French forbears, the old Marcys of St. Louis;
Missouri fur traders of almost a century earlier. You saw the Marcy mark in the black of her still
bountiful hair, in the curve of the brows above the dark eyes—in the dark eyes themselves, so alive
in the otherwise immobile face.
As the family now sat at its noonday meal it was plain that while two decades of living in the
Middle West had done little to quicken the speech or hasten the movements of Lewis Venable and his
wife Felice (they still “you-alled”; they declared to goodness; the eighteenth letter of the
alphabet would forever be ah to them) it had made a noticeable di erence in the younger generation.
Up and down the long table they ranged, sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law;
grandchildren; remoter kin such as visiting nieces and nephews and cousins, o shoots of this far-
ung family. As the more northern-bred members of the company exclaimed at the tale they now were
hearing you noted that their vowels were

shorter, their diction more clipped, the turn of the head, the lift of the hand less leisurely. In
all those faces there was a resemblance, one to the other. Perhaps the listening look which all of
them now wore served to accentuate this.
It was late May, and unseasonably hot for the altitude. Then, too, there had been an early pest of
moths and June ies this spring. High above the table, and directly over it, on a narrow board
suspended by rods from the lofty ceiling sat perched Isaiah, the little black boy. With one hand he
clung to the side rods of his precarious roost; with the other he wielded a shoo y of feathery
asparagus ferns cut from the early garden. Its soft susurrus as he swished it back and forth was an
obbligato to the music of Yancey Cravat’s golden voice. Clinging thus aloft the black boy looked a
simian version of one of Raphael’s ceilinged angels. His round head, fuzzed with little tight
tufts, as of woolly astrakhan through which the black of his poll gleamed richly, was cocked at an
impish angle the better to catch the words that owed from the lips of the speaker. His eyes,
popping with excitement, were xed in an entrancement on the great lounging gure of Yancey Cravat.
So bewitched was the boy that frequently his hand fell limp and he forgot altogether his task of
bestirring with his verdant fan the hot moist air above the food-laden table. An impatient upward
glance from Felice Venable’s darting black eyes, together with a sharply admonitory “Ah-saiah!”
would set him to swishing vigorously until the enchantment again stayed his arm.
The Venables saw nothing untoward in this remnant of Mississippi feudalism. Dozens of Isaiah’s
forbears had sat perched thus, bestirring the air so that generations of Mississippi Venables might
the more agreeably sup and eat and talk. Wichita had rst beheld this phenomenon aghast; and even
now, after twenty years, it was a subject for local tongue waggings.
Yancey Cravat was talking. He had been talking for the better part of an hour. This very morning he
had returned from the Oklahoma country—the newly opened Indian Territory where he had made the Run
that marked the settling of this vast tract of virgin land known colloquially as the Nation. Now,
as he talked, the faces of the others

had the rapt look of those who listen to a saga. It was the look that Jason’s listeners must have
had, and Ulysses’; and the eager crowd that gathered about Francisco Vasquez de Coronado before
they learned that his search for the Seven Cities of Cibolo had been in vain.
The men at table leaned forward, their hands clasped rather loosely between their knees or on the
cloth before them, their plates pushed away, their chairs shoved back. Now and then the sudden
white ridge of a hardset muscle showed along the line of a masculine jaw. Their eyes were those of
men who follow a game in which they would fain take part. The women listened, a little frightened,
their lips parted. They shushed their children when they moved or whimpered, or, that failing, sent
them, with a half-tender, half-admonitory slap behind, to play in the sunny dooryard. Sometimes a
woman’s hand reached out possessively, remindingly, and was laid on the arm or the hand of the man
seated beside her. “I am here,” the hand’s pressure said. “Your place is with me. Don’t listen to
him like that. Don’t believe him. I am your wife. I am safety. I am security. I am comfort. I am
habit. I am convention. Don’t listen like that. Don’t look like that.”
But the man would shake o the hand, not roughly, but with absent-minded resentment.
Of all that circlet of faces, linked by the enchantment of the tale now being unfolded before them,
there stood out lambent as a ame the face of Sabra Cravat as she sat there at table, her child Cim
in her lap. Though she, like her mother Felice Venable, was de nitely of the olive-skinned type,
her face seemed luminously white as she listened to the amazing, incredible, and slightly
ridiculous story now being unfolded by her husband. It was plain, too, that in her, as in her
mother, the strain of the pioneering French Marcys was strong. Her abundant hair was as black, and
her eyes; and the strong brows arched with a swooping curve like the twin scimitars that hung above
the replace in the company room. Sabra was secretly ashamed of her heavy brows and given to
surveying them disapprovingly in her mirror while running a fore nger (slightly moistened by her
tongue) along their sable curves. For the rest,

there was something more New England than Southern in the directness of her glance, the quick turn
of her head, the briskness of her speech and manner. Twenty-one now, married at sixteen, mother of
a four-year-old boy, and still in love with her picturesque giant of a husband, there was about
Sabra Cravat a bloom, a glow, sometimes seen at their exquisite and transitory time in a woman’s
life when her chemical, emotional, and physical make-up attains its highest point and fuses.
It was easy to trace the resemblance, both in face and spirit, between this glowing girl and the
sallow woman at the foot of the table. But to turn from her to old Lewis Venable was to nd one’s
self ba ed by the mysteries of paternity. Old Lewis Venable was not old, but aged; a futile,
fumbling, gentle man, somewhat hag-ridden and rendered the more unvital by malaria. Face and hands
had a yellow ivory quality born of generations subjected to hot breads, lowlands, bad liver, port
wine. To say nothing of a resident unexplored bullet somewhere between the third and fth ribs, got
at Murfreesboro as a member of Stanford’s Battery, Heavy Artillery, long long before Roentgen had
conceived an eye like God’s.
Lewis Venable, in his armchair at the head of the table, was as spellbound as black Isaiah in his
high perch above it. Curiously enough, even the boy Cim had listened, or seemed to listen, as he
sat in his mother’s lap. Sabra had eaten her dinner over the child’s head in absent-minded bites,
her eyes always on her husband’s face. She rarely had had to say, “Hush, Cim, hush!” or to wrest a
knife or fork or forbidden tidbit from his clutching ngers. Perhaps it was the curiously musical
quality of the story-teller’s voice that lulled him. Sabra Venable’s disgruntled suitors had said
when she married Yancey Cravat, a stranger, mysterious, out of Texas and the Cimarron, that it was
his voice that had bewitched her. They were in a measure right, for though Yancey Cravat was
verbose, frequently even windy, and though much that he said was dry enough in actual content, he
had those priceless gifts of the born orator, a vibrant and exible voice, great sweetness and
charm of manner, an hypnotic eye, and the power of making each listener feel

that what was being said was intended for his ear alone. Something of the charlatan was in him,
much of the actor, a dash of the fanatic.
Any tale told by Yancey Cravat was likely to contain enchantment, incredibility (though this last
was not present while he was telling it), and a tinge of the absurd. Yancey himself, even at this
early time, was a bizarre, glamorous, and slightly mythical
gure. No room seemed big enough for his gigantic frame; no chair but dwindled beneath the breadth
of his shoulders. He seemed actually to loom more than his six feet two. His black locks he wore
overlong, so that they curled a little about his neck in the manner of Booth. His cheeks and
forehead were, in places, deeply pitted, as with the pox. Women, perversely enough, found this
attractive.
But rst of all you noted his head, his huge head, like a bu alo’s, so heavy that it seemed to loll
of its own weight. It was with a shock of astonishment that you remarked about him certain things
totally at variance with his bulk, his virility, his appearance of enormous power. His mouth, full
and sensual, had still an expression of great sweetness. His eyelashes were long and curling, like
a beautiful girl’s, and when he raised his heavy head to look at you, beneath the long black locks
and the dark lashes you saw with something of bewilderment that his eyes were a deep and
unfathomable ocean gray.
Now, in the course of his story, and under the excitement of it, he left the table and sprang to
his feet, striding about and talking as he strode. His step was amazingly light and graceful for a
man of his powerful frame. Fascinated, you saw that his feet were small and arched like a woman’s,
and he wore, even in this year of 1889, Texas star boots of ne soft exible calf, very high
heeled, thin soled, and ornamented with cunningly wrought gold stars around the tops. His hands,
too, were disproportionate to a man of his stature; slim, pliant, white. He used them as he talked,
and the eye followed their movements bewitched. For the rest, his costume was a Prince Albert of ne
black broadcloth whose skirts swooped and spread with the vigor of his movements; a pleated white
shirt, soft and exquisite material; a black string tie; trousers tucked into the gay boot-tops;
and, always, a white felt hat, broad-brimmed and

rolling. On occasion he simply blubbered Shakespeare, the Old Testament, the Odyssey, the Iliad.
His speech was spattered with bits of Latin, and with occasional Spanish phrases, relic of his
Texas days. He attered you with his ne eyes; he bewitched you with his voice; he mesmerized you
with his hands. He drank a quart of whisky a day; was almost never drunk, but on rare occasions
when the liquor fumes bested him he would invariably select a hapless victim and, whipping out the
pair of mother-o’-pearl-handled six- shooters he always wore at his belt, would force him to dance
by shooting at his feet—a pleasing fancy brought with him from Texas and the Cimarron. Afterward,
sobered, he was always lled with shame. Wine, he quoted sadly, is a mocker, strong drink is raging.
Yancey Cravat could have been (in fact was, though most of America never knew it) the greatest
criminal lawyer of his day. It was said that he hypnotized a jury with his eyes and his hands and
his voice. His law practice yielded him nothing, or less than that, for being sentimental and
melodramatic he usually found himself out of pocket following his brilliant and successful defense
of some Dodge City dance-hall girl or roistering cowboy whose six-shooter had been pointed the
wrong way.
His past, before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this;
slander whispered that. Rumor, romantic, unsavory, fantastic, shifting and changing like clouds on
a mountain peak, oated about the head of Yancey Cravat. They say he has Indian blood in him. They
say he has an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known
as “Cimarron” Cravat, hence his son’s name, corrupted to Cim. They say his real name is Cimarron
Seven, of the Choctaw Indian family of Sevens; he was raised in a tepee; a wickiup had been his
bedroom, a blanket his robe. It was known he had been one of the early Boomers who followed the
banner of the picturesque and splendidly mad David Payne in the rst wild dash of that adventurer
into Indian Territory. He had dwelt, others whispered, in that sinister strip, thirty-four miles
wide and almost two hundred miles long, called No-Man’s-Land as early as 1854, and, later, known as
the Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning wild or unruly.

Here, in this strange unowned empire without laws and without a government, a paradise for horse
thieves, murderers, desperadoes it was rumored he had spent at least a year (and for good reason).
They said the evidences of his Indian blood were plain; look at his skin, his hair, his manner of
walking. And why did he protest in his newspaper against the government’s treatment of those dirty,
thieving, lazy, good-for-nothing wards of a bene cent country! As for his newspaper—its very name
was a scandal: The Wichita Wigwam. And just below this: All the news. Any Scandal Not Libelous.
Published Once a Week if Convenient. For that matter, who ever heard of a practising lawyer who ran
a newspaper at the same time? Its columns were echoes of his own thundering oratory in the
courtroom or on the platform. He had started his paper in opposition to the old established Wichita
Eagle. Wichita, roaring, said he should have called his sheet the Rooster. The combination law and
newspaper o ce itself was a jumble and welter of pied type, unopened exchanges, boiler plate, legal
volumes, paste pots, loose tobacco, old coats, and racing posters. Wichita, professing scorn of the
Wigwam, read it. Wichita perused his maiden editorial entitled Shall the Blue Blood of the Decayed
South Poison the Red Blood of the Great Middle West? and saw him, two months later, carry o in
triumph as his bride Sabra Venable, daughter of that same Decay; Sabra Venable, whose cerulean
stream might have mingled with the more vulgarly sanguine life uid of any youth in Wichita. In
spite of the garden hedge, the parental pride, the arched insteps, the colored servants, and the
general air of what-would-you- varlet that pervaded the Venable household at the entrance of a
local male a-wooing, Sabra Venable, at sixteen, might have had her pick of the red-blooded lads of
Kansas, all the way from Salina to Win eld. Not to mention more legitimate suitors of blue-blooded
stock up from the South, such as Dabney Venable himself, Sabra’s cousin, who resembled at once
Lafayette and old Lewis, even to the premature silver of his hair, the length of the ne,
dolichocephalic, slightly decadent head, and the black stock at sight of which Wichita gasped.
When, from among all these eligibles, Sabra had chosen the romantic but mysterious Cravat, Wichita
mothers of

marriageable daughters felt themselves revenged of the Venable airs. Strangely enough, the
marriageable daughters seemed more resentful than ever, and there was a noticeable falling o in
the number of young ladies who had been wont to drop around at the Wigwam o ce with notices of this
or that meeting or social event to be inserted in the columns of the paper.
During the course of the bountiful meal with which the Venable table was spread Yancey Cravat had
eaten almost nothing. Here was an audience to his liking. Here was a tale to his taste. His story,
wild, unbelievable, yet true, was of the opening of the Oklahoma country; of a wilderness made
populous in an hour; of cities numbering thousands literally sprung up overnight, where the day
before had been only prairie, coyotes, rattlesnakes, red clay, scrub oak, and an occasional nester
hidden in the security of a weedy draw.
He had been a month absent. Like thousands of others he had gone in search of free land and a
fortune. Here was an empire to be had for the taking. He talked, as always, in the highfalutin
terms of the speaker who is ever conscious of his audience. Yet, fantastic as it was, all that he
said was woven of the warp and woof of truth. Whole scenes, as he talked, seemed to be happening
before his listeners’ eyes.

2

Coat tails swishing, eyes ashing, arms waving, voice soaring.
“Folks, there’s never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days.
This was done in one. It was History made in an hour—and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands
of people from all over this vast commonwealth of ours” (he talked like that) “traveled hundreds of
miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had
roamed it. ‘Lands of lost gods, and godlike men!’ They came like a procession—a crazy
procession—all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at
hand— scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there
rst. God knows why—for they all knew that once arrived there they’d have to wait like penned cattle
for the
ring of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants
swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the
prairie. They came from Texas, and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God,
all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback.
In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I saw a surrey, honey colored, with a fringe
around the top, and two elegant bays drawing it, still stepping high along those rutted clay roads
as if out for a drive in the Presidio. There was a black boy driving it, brass buttons and all, and
in the back seat was a dude in a light tan coat and a cigar in his mouth and a diamond in his
shirtfront; and a woman beside him in a big hat and a pink dress laughing and urging

the horses along the red dust that was halfway up to the wheel spokes and t to choke you. They had
driven like that from Denver, damned if they hadn’t. I met up with one old homesteader by the
roadside—a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg—who told me he had started weeks and weeks before,
and had made the long trip as best he could, on foot or by rail and boat and wagon, just as kind-
hearted people along the way would pick him up. I wonder if he ever got his piece of land in that
savage rush—poor old devil.”
He paused a moment, perhaps in retrospect, perhaps cunningly to whet the appetites of his
listeners. He wrung a breathless, “Oh, Yancey, go on! Go on!” from Sabra.
“Well, the Border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July celebration on Judgment Day. The
militia was lined up at the boundary. No one was allowed to set foot on the new land until noon
next day, at the ring of the guns. Two million acres of land were to be given away for the
grabbing. Noon was the time. They all knew it by heart. April twenty-second, at noon. It takes
generations of people hundreds of years to settle a new land. This was going to be made livable
territory over night—was made—like a miracle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves
and the Fishes and the parting of the Red Sea were nothing—mere tricks.”
“Don’t be blasphemous, Yancey!” spoke up Aunt Cassandra Venable.
Cousin Dabney Venable tittered into his stock.
“A wilderness one day—except for an occasional wandering band of Indians—an empire the next. If
that isn’t a modern miracle——”
“Indians, h’m?” sneered Cousin Dabney, meaningly.
“Oh, Dabney!” exclaimed Sabra, sharply. “Why do you interrupt?
Why don’t you just listen!”
Yancey Cravat raised a pacifying hand, but the great bu alo head was lowered toward Cousin Dabney,
as though charging. The sweetest of smiles wreathed his lips. “It’s all right, Sabra. Let Cousin
Dabney speak. And why not? Un cabello haze sombra.”
Cousin Dabney’s ivory face ushed a delicate pink. “What’s that, Cravat? Cherokee talk?”

“Spanish, my lad. Spanish.”
A little moment of silent expectation. Yancey did not explain. A plump and pretty daughter-in-law
(not a Venable born) put the question.
“Spanish, Cousin Yancey! I declare! Whatever in the world does it mean? Something romantic, I do
hope.”
“Not exactly. A Spanish proverb. It means, literally ‘Even a hair casts a shadow.’ ”
Another second’s silence. The pretty daughter-in-law’s face became quite vacuous. “Oh. A hair—but I
don’t see what that’s got to do with …”
The time had come for Felice Venable to take charge. Her drawling, querulous voice dripped its slow
sweetness upon the bitter feud that lay, a poisonous pool, between the two men.
“Well, I must say I call it downright bad manners, I do indeed. Here we all are with our ears just
a- apping to hear the rst sound of the militia guns at high noon on the Border, and here’s Cousin
Jouett Goforth all the way up from Louisiana the rst time in fteen years, and just a-quivering with
curiosity, and what do we hear but chit-chat about Spanish proverbs and shadows.” She broke o
abruptly, cast a lightning glance aloft, and in a tone that would have been called a shout had it
issued from the throat of any but a Venable, said, “Ah-saiah!”
The black boy’s shoo- y, hanging limp from his inert hand, took up its frantic swishing. The air
was cleared. The gures around the table relaxed. Their faces again turned toward Yancey Cravat.
Yancey glanced at Sabra. Sabra’s lips puckered into a phantom kiss. They formed two words, unseen,
unheard by the rest of the company. “Please, darling.”
“Cede Deo,” said Yancey, with a little bow to her. Then, with a still slighter bow, he turned to
Cousin Dabney. “ ‘Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me.’ You may not recognize
that either, Dabney. It’s from the Old Testament.”
Cousin Dabney Venable ran a nger along the top of his black silk stock, as though to ease his
throat.

With a switch of his coat tails Yancey was o again, pausing only a moment at the sideboard to toss
o three ngers of Spanish brandy, like burning liquid amber. He patted his lips with his ne linen
handkerchief. “I’ve tasted nothing like that in a month, I can tell you. Raw corn whisky t to tear
your throat out. And as for the water! Red mud. There wasn’t a drink of water to be had in the town
after the rst twenty-four hours. There we were, thousands and thousands of us, milling around the
Border like cattle, with the burning sun baking us all day, nowhere to go for shade, and the thick
red dust clogging eyes and nose and mouth. No place to wash, no place to sleep, nothing to eat.
Queer enough, they didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t seem to notice. They were feeding on a kind of crazy
excitement, and there was a wild light in their eyes. They laughed and joked and just milled
around, all day and all night and until near noon next day. If you had a bit of food you divided it
with someone. I nally got a cup of water for a dollar, after standing in line for three hours, and
then a woman just behind me——”
“A woman!” Cousin Arminta Greenwood (of the Georgia Greenwoods). And Sabra Cravat echoed the words
in a shocked whisper.
“You wouldn’t believe, would you, that women would go it alone in a fracas like that. But they did.
They were there with their husbands, some of them, but there were women who made the Run alone.”
“What kind of women?” Felice Venable’s tone was not one of inquiry but of condemnation.
“Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home.
Pioneer women.”
From Aunt Cassandra Venable’s end of the table there came a word that sounded like, “Hussies!”
Yancey Cravat caught the word beneath his teeth and spat it back. “Hussies, heh! The one behind me
in the line was a woman of forty
—or looked it—in a calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had driven across the prairies all the way
from the north of Arkansas in a springless wagon. She was like the women who crossed the continent
to California in ’49. A gaunt woman, with a weather-

beaten face; the terribly neglected skin”—he glanced at Sabra with her creamy coloring—“that means
alkali water and sun and dust and wind. Rough hair, and unlovely hands, and boots with the mud
caked on them. It’s women like her who’ve made this country what it is. You can’t read the history
of the United States, my friends” (all this he later used in an Oklahoma Fourth of July speech when
they tried to make him Governor) “without learning the great story of those thousands of unnamed
women—women like this one I’ve described—women in mud-caked boots and calico dresses and
sunbonnets, crossing the prairie and the desert and the mountains enduring hardship and privation.
Good women, with a terrible and rigid goodness that comes of work and self-denial. Nothing
picturesque or romantic about them, I suppose—though occasionally one of them ashes—Belle Starr the
outlaw—Rose of the Cimarron
—Jeannette Daisy who jumped from a moving Santa Fé train to stake her claim—but the others—no,
their story’s never really been told. But it’s there, just the same. And if it’s ever told straight
you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.”
“Talking nonsense,” drawled Felice Venable.
Yancey whirled on his high heels to face her, his ne eyes blazing. “You’re one of them. You came up
from the South with your husband to make a new home in this Kansas——”
“I am not!” retorted Felice Venable, with enormous dignity. “And I’ll thank you not to say any such
thing. Sunbonnet indeed! I’ve never worn a sunbonnet in my life. And as for my skin and hair and
hands, they were the toast of the South, as I can prove by anyone here, all the way from Louisiana
to Tennessee. And feet so small my slippers had to be made to order. Calico and muddy boots
indeed!”
“Oh, Mamma, Yancey didn’t mean—he meant courage to leave your home in the South and come up—he
wasn’t thinking of— Yancey, do get on with your story of the Run. You got a drink of water for a
dollar—dear me!—and shared it with the woman in the calico and the sunbonnet …”
He looked a little sheepish. “Well, matter of fact, it turned out she didn’t have a dollar to
spare, or anywhere near it, but even if she

had it wouldn’t have done her any good. The fellow selling it was a rat-faced hombre with one eye
and Mexican pants. The trigger
nger of his right hand had been shot away in some fracas or other, so he ladled out water with
that hand and toted his gun in his left. Bunged up he was, plenty. A scar on his nose, healed up,
but showing the marks of where human teeth had bit him in a ght, as neat and clear as a dentist’s
signboard. By the time I got to him there was one cup of water left in the bucket. He tipped it
while I held the dipper, and it trickled out, just an even dipperful. The last cup of water on the
Border. The crowd waiting in line behind me gave a kind of sound between a groan and a moan. The
sound you hear a herd of cow animals give, out on the prairie, when their tongues are hanging out
for water in the dry spell. I tipped up the dipper and had down a big mouthful— lthy tasting stu it
was, too. Gyp water. You could feel the alkali cake on your tongue. Well, my head went back as I
drank, and I got one look at that woman’s face. Her eyes were on me—on my throat, where the Adam’s
apple had just given that one big gulp after the rst swallow. All bloodshot the whites of her eyes,
and a look in them like a dying man looks at a light. Her mouth was open, and her lips were all
split with the heat and the dust and the sun, and dry and aky as ashes. And then she shut her lips
a little and tried to swallow nothing, and couldn’t. There wasn’t any spit in her mouth. I couldn’t
down another mouthful, parching as I was. I’d have seen her terrible face to the last day of my
life. So I righted it, and held it out to her and said, ‘Here, sister, take the rest of it. I’m
through.’ ”
Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little joke. “Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and
weather-beaten? And that about her hair and boots and hands?”
Cravat, standing behind his wife’s chair, looked down at her; at the ne white line that marked the
parting of her thick black hair. With one fore nger he touched her cheek, gently. He allowed the
nger to slip down the creamy surface of her skin, from cheek bone to chin. “Dead sure, Jouett. I
left out one thing, though.” Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. “Her teeth,”

Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. “Broken and discolored like those of a woman of seventy. And
most of them gone at the side.”
Here Yancey could not resist charging up and down, irting his coat tails and generally ruining the
ne avor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping it) had
been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild mêlée of the Run in the rst place. Now he stood
surveying these handsome futile faces, and a great impatience shook him, and a ame of rage shot
through him, and a tongue of malice icked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he
had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end.
“I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fé train that was standing, steam up, ready to
run into the Nation. But you couldn’t get on. There wasn’t room for a ea. They were hanging on the
cow-catcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to
make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn’t even do that. They went twenty miles in
ninety minutes. I decided I’d use my Indian pony. I knew I’d get endurance, anyway, if not speed.
And that’s what counted in the end.
“There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the Border, as
near as they’d let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for
miles into the Nation, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the
Sooners, too, who had sneaked in and were hiding in the scrub oaks, in the draws, wherever they
could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready
to shoot those of us who came in, fair and square, in the Run. I knew the piece I wanted. An old
freighters’ trail, out of use, but still marked with deep ruts, led almost straight to it, once you
found the trail, all overgrown as it was. A little creek ran through the land, and the prairie
rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around it, but on that section,
because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons and cottonwoods and even a grove of
pecans. I had noticed it many a time, riding the range.”

(H’m! Riding the range! All the Venables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray
bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat’s past.)
“Ten o’clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Hundreds of us had been followers of Payne
and had gone as Boomers in the old Payne colonies, and had been driven out, and had come back
again. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the
land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I’ve seen the same look exactly on the
faces of men who were ravenous for food.
“Well, eleven o’clock, and they were crowding and cursing and
ghting for places near the Line. They shouted and sang and yelled and argued, and the sound they
made wasn’t human at all, but like thousands of wild animals penned up. The sun blazed down. It was
cruel. The dust hung over everything in a thick cloud, blinding you and choking you. The black dust
of the burned prairie was over everything. We were like a horde of ends with our red eyes and our
cracked lips and our blackened faces. Eleven-thirty. It was a picture straight out of hell. The
roar grew louder. People fought for an inch of gain on the Border. Just next to me was a girl who
looked about eighteen—she turned out to be twenty- ve—and a beauty she was, too—on a coal-black
thoroughbred.”
“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth. He was the kind of man who says, “Aha.”
“On the other side was an old fellow with a long gray beard—a plainsman, he was—a six-shooter in
his belt, one wooden leg, and a
ask of whisky. He took a pull out of that every minute or two. He was mounted on an Indian pony
like mine. Every now and then he’d throw back his head and let out a yell that would curdle your
blood, even in that chorus of ends. As we waited we fell to talking, the three of us, though you
couldn’t hear much in that uproar. The girl said she had trained her thoroughbred for the race. He
was from Kentucky, and so was she. She was bound to get her husband and sixty acres, she said. She
had to have it. She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask her. We were all too keyed up, anyway, to make
sense. Oh, I forgot. She had on a get-up that took the attention of anyone

that saw her, even in that crazy mob. The better to cut the wind, she had shortened sail and wore a
short skirt, black tights, and a skullcap.”
Here there was quite a bombardment of sound as silver spoons and knives and forks were dropped from
shocked and nerveless feminine Venable ngers.
“It turned out that the three of us, there in the front line, were headed down the old freighters’
trail toward the creek land. I said, ‘I’ll be the rst in the Run to reach Little Bear.’ That was
the name of the creek on the section. The girl pulled her cap down tight over her ears. ‘Follow
me,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Then the old fellow with the wooden leg and the whiskers
yelled out, ‘Whoop-ee! I’ll tell ’em along the Little Bear you’re both a-comin.’
“There we were, the girl on my left, the old plainsman on my right. Eleven forty- ve. Along the
Border were the soldiers, their guns in one hand, their watches in the other. Those last ve minutes
seemed years long; and funny, they’d quieted till there wasn’t a sound. Listening. The last minute
was an eternity. Twelve o’clock. There went up a roar that drowned the crack of the soldiers’
musketry as they red in the air as the signal of noon and the start of the Run. You could see the
pu s of smoke from their guns, but you couldn’t hear a sound. The thousands surged over the Line.
It was like water going over a broken dam. The rush had started, and it was devil take the
hindmost. We swept across the prairie in a cloud of black and red dust that covered our faces and
hands in a minute, so that we looked like black demons from hell. O we went, down the old freight
trail that was two wheel ruts, a foot wide each, worn into the prairie soil. The old man on his
pony kept in one rut, the girl on her thoroughbred in the other, and I on my Whitefoot on the
raised place in the middle. That rst half mile was almost a neck-and-neck race. The old fellow was
yelling and waving one arm and hanging on somehow. He was beating his pony with the ask on his
anks. Then he began to drop behind. Next thing I heard a terrible scream and a great shouting
behind me. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. The old plainsman’s pony had stumbled and
fallen. His bottle smashed into bits, his six-shooter ew in

another direction, and he lay sprawling full length in the rut of the trail. The next instant he
was hidden in a welter of pounding hoofs and ying dirt and cinders and wagon wheels.”
A dramatic pause. Black Isaiah was hanging from his perch like a monkey on a branch. His asparagus
shoo- y was limp. The faces around the table were balloons pulled by a single string. They swung
this way and that with Yancey Cravat’s pace as he strode the room, his Prince Albert coat tails
billowing. This way—the faces turned toward the sideboard. That way—they turned toward the windows.
Yancey held the little moment of silence like a jewel in the circlet of faces. Sabra Cravat’s
voice, high and sharp with suspense, cut the stillness.
“What happened? What happened to the old man?”
Yancey’s pliant hands ew up in a gesture of inevitability. “Oh, he was trampled to death in the mad
mob that charged over him. Crazy. They couldn’t stop for a one-legged old whiskers with a quart
ask.”
Out of the well-bred murmur of horror that now arose about the Venable board there emerged the
voice of Felice Venable, sharp- edged with disapproval. “And the girl. The girl with the black——”
Unable to say it. Southern.
“The girl and I—funny, I never did learn her name—were in the lead because we had stuck to the old
trail, rutted though it was, rather than strike out across the prairie that by this time was beyond
the burned area and was covered with a heavy growth of blue stem grass almost six feet high in
places. A horse could only be forced through that at slow pace. That jungle of grass kept many a
racer from winning his section that day.
“The girl followed close behind me. That thoroughbred she rode was built for speed, not distance. A
race horse, blooded. I could hear him blowing. He was trained to short bursts. My Indian pony was
just getting his second wind as her horse slackened into a trot. We had come nearly sixteen miles.
I was well in the lead by that time, with the girl following. She was crouched low over his neck,
like a jockey, and I could hear her talking to him, low and sweet and eager, as if he were a human
being. We were far in the lead now.

We had left the others behind, hundreds going this way, hundreds that, scattering for miles over
the prairie. Then I saw that the prairie ahead was a re. The tall grass was blazing. Only the
narrow trail down which we were galloping was open. On either side of it was a wall of ame. Some
skunk of a Sooner, sneaking in ahead of the Run, had set the blaze to keep the Boomers o , saving
the land for himself. The dry grass burned like oiled paper. I turned around. The girl was there,
her racer stumbling, breaking and going on, his head lolling now. I saw her motion with her hand.
She was coming. I whipped o my hat and clapped it over Whitefoot’s eyes, gave him the spurs,
crouched down low and tight, shut my own eyes, and down the trail we went into the furnace. Hot! It
was hell! The crackling and snapping on either side was like a fusillade. I could smell the singed
hair on the anks of the mustang. My own hair was singeing. I could feel the ames licking my legs
and back. Another hundred yards and neither the horse nor I could have come through it. But we
broke out into the open choking and blinded and half su ocated. I looked down the lane of ame. The
girl hung on her horse’s neck. Her skullcap was pulled down over her eyes. She was coming through
game. I knew that my land—the piece that I had come through hell for—was not more than a mile
ahead. I knew that hanging around here would probably get me a shot through the head, for the
Sooner that started that re must be lurking somewhere in the high grass ready to kill anybody that
tried to lay claim to his land. I began to wonder, too, if that girl wasn’t headed for the same
section that I was bound for. I made up my mind that, woman or no woman, this was a race and devil
take the hindmost. My poor little pony was coughing and sneezing and trembling. Her racer must have
been ready to drop. I wheeled and went on. I kept thinking how, when I came to Little Bear Creek,
I’d bathe my little mustang’s nose and face and his poor heaving anks, and how I mustn’t let him
drink too much, once he got his muzzle in the water. “Just before I reached the land I was riding
for I had to leave the trail and cut across the prairie. I could see a clump of elms ahead. I knew
the creek was near by. But just before I got to it I came to one of those deep gullies you nd in
the plains country. Drought does it

—a crack in the dry earth to begin with, widening with every rain until it becomes a small cañon.
Almost ten feet across this one was, and deep. No way around it that I could see, and no time to
look for one. I put Whitefoot to the leap and, by God, he took it, landing on the other side with
hardly an inch to spare. I heard a wild scream behind me. I turned. The girl on her spent racer had
tried to make the gulch. He had actually taken it—a thoroughbred and a gentleman, that animal—but
he came down on his knees just on the farther edge, rolled, and slid down the gully side into the
ditch. The girl had ung herself free. My claim was fty yards away. So was the girl, with her dying
horse. She lay there on the prairie. As I raced toward her—my own poor little mount was nearly gone
by this time—she scrambled to her knees. I can see her face now, black with cinders and soot and
dirt, her hair all over her shoulders, her cheek bleeding where she had struck a stone in her fall,
her black tights torn, her little short skirt sagging. She sort of sat up and looked around her.
Then she staggered to her feet before I reached her and stood there swaying, and pushing her hair
out of her eyes like someone who’d been asleep. She pointed down the gully. The black of her face
was streaked with tears.
“ ‘Shoot him!’ she said. ‘I can’t. His two forelegs are broken. I heard them crack. Shoot him! For
God’s sake!’
“So I o my horse and down to the gully’s edge. There the animal lay, his eyes all whites, his poor
legs doubled under him, his anks black and sticky with sweat and dirt. He was done for, all right.
I took out my six-shooter and aimed right between his eyes. He kicked once, sort of leaped—or tried
to, and then lay still. I stood there a minute, to see if he had to have another. He was so game
that, some way, I didn’t want to give him more than he needed.
“Then something made me turn around. The girl had mounted my mustang. She was o toward the creek
section. Before I had moved ten paces she had reached the very piece I had marked in my mind for my
own. She leaped from the horse, ripped o her skirt, tied it to her riding whip that she still held
tight in her hand, dug the whip butt into the soil of the prairie—planted her ag—and the land was
hers by right of claim.”

Yancey Cravat stopped talking. There was a moment of stricken silence. Sabra Cravat staring,
staring at her husband with great round eyes. Lewis Venable, limp, yellow, tremulous. Felice
Venable, upright and quivering. It was she who spoke rst. And when she did she was every inch the
thrifty descendant of French forbears; nothing of the Southern belle about her.
“Yancey Cravat, do you mean that you let her have your quarter section on the creek that you had
gone to the Indian Territory for! That you had been gone a month for! That you had left your wife
and child for! That——”
“Now, Mamma!” You saw that all the Venable in Sabra was summoned to keep the tears from her eyes,
and that thus denied they had crowded themselves into her trembling voice. “Now, Mamma!”
“Don’t you ‘now Mamma’ me! What of the land that you were to have had! It was bad enough to think
of your going to that wilderness, but to——” She paused. Her voice took on a new and more sinister
note. “I don’t believe a word of it.” She whirled on Yancey, her black eyes blazing. “Why did you
let that trollop in the black tights have that land?”
Yancey regarded this question with considerable judicial calm, but Felice, knowing him, might have
been warned by the way his great head was lowered like that of a charging bull bu alo.
“If it had been a man I could have shot him. A good many had to, to keep the land they’d run fairly
for. But you can’t shoot a woman.”
“Why not?” demanded the erstwhile Southern belle, sharply.
The Venables, as one man, gave a little jump. A nervous sound, that was half gasp and half shocked
titter, went round the Venable board. A startled “Felice!” was wrung from Lewis Venable. “Why,
Mamma!” said Sabra.
Yancey Cravat, enormously vital, felt rising within him the tide of irritability which this
vitiated family always stirred in him. Something now about their shocked and staring faces, their
lolling and graceful forms, roused in him an unreasoning rebellion. He suddenly hated them. He
wanted to be free of them. He wanted to be free of them—of Wichita—of convention—of smooth
custom—of

—no, not of her. He now smiled his brilliant sweet smile which alone should have warned Felice
Venable. But that intrepid matriarch was not one to let a tale go unpointed.
“I’m mighty pleased, for one, that it turned out as it did. Do you suppose I’d have allowed a
daughter of mine—a Venable—to go traipsing down into the wilderness to live among drunken one-
legged plainsmen, and toothless scrags in calico, and trollops in tights! Never! It’s over now, and
a mighty good thing, too. Perhaps now, Yancey, you’ll stop this ramping up and down and be content
to run that newspaper of yours and conduct your law practice—such as it is—with no more talk of
this Indian Territory. A daughter of mine in boots and calico and sunbonnet, if you please,
a-pioneering among savages. Reared as she was! No, indeed.”
Yancey was strangely silent. He was surveying his ne white hands critically, interestedly, as
though seeing them in admiration for the rst time—another sign that should have warned the brash
Felice. When he spoke it was with utter gentleness.
“I’m no farmer. I’m no rancher. I didn’t want a section of farm land, anyway. The town’s where I
belong, and I should have made for the town sites. There were towns of ten thousand and over sprung
up in a night during the Run. Wagallala—Sperry— Wawhuska—Osage. It’s the last frontier in America,
that new country. There isn’t a newspaper in one of those towns—or wasn’t, when I left. I want to
go back there and help build a state out of prairie and Indians and scrub oaks and red clay. For
it’ll be a state some day—mark my words.”
“That wilderness a state!” sneered Cousin Dabney Venable. “With an Osage buck or a Cherokee chief
for governor, I suppose.”
“Why not? What a revenge on a government that has cheated them and driven them like cattle from
place to place and broken its treaties with them and robbed them of their land. Look at Georgia!
Look at Mississippi! Remember the Trail of Tears!”
“Ho hum,” yawned Cousin Jouett Goforth, and rose, fumblingly. “This has all been very
interesting—odd, but interesting. But if you will excuse me now I shall have my little siesta. I am
accustomed after dinner …”

Lewis Venable, so long silent, now too reached for his cane and prepared to rise. He was not quick
enough. Felice Venable’s hand, thin, febrile, darted out and clutched his coat sleeve—pressed him
back so that he became at once prisoner and judge in his chair at the head of the table.
“Lewis Venable, you heard him! Are you going to sit there? He says he’s going back. How about your
daughter?” She turned blazing black eyes on her son-in-law. “Do you mean you’re going back to that
Indian country? Do you?”
“I’ll be back there in two weeks. And remember, it’s white man’s country now.”
Sabra stood up, the boy Cim grasped about his middle in her arms, so that he began to whimper,
dangling there. Her eyes were startled, enormous. “Yancey! Yancey, you’re not leaving me again!”
“Leaving you, my beauty!” He strode over to her. “Not by a long shot. This time you’re going with
me.”
“And I say she’s not!” Felice Venable rapped it out. “And neither are you, my ne fellow. You were
tricked out of your land by a trollop in tights, and that ends it. You’ll stay here with your wife
and child.”
He shook his great head gently. His voice was dulcet.
“I’m going back to the Oklahoma country; and Sabra and Cim with me.”
Felice whirled on her husband. “Lewis! You can sit there and see your daughter dragged o to be
scalped among savages!”
The sick man raised his ne white head. The faded blue eyes were turned on the girl. The child,
sensing con ict, had buried his head in her shoulder. “You came with me, Felice, more than twenty
years ago, and your mother thought you were going to the wilderness, too. You remember? She cried
and made mourning for weeks.”
“Sabra’s di erent. Sabra’s di erent.”
The reedy voice of the sick man had the ghostly carrying quality of an echo. You heard it above the
women’s shrill clamor. “No, she isn’t, Felice. She’s more like you this minute than you are
yourself. She favors those pioneer women Yancey was telling about in the old days. Look at her.”

The Venable eye, from one end of the table to the other, turned like a single orb in its socket
toward the young woman facing them with de ance in her bearing. Not de ance, perhaps, so much as
resolve. Seeing her, 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 Venable of two decades
ago; she was the woman in sunbonnet and calico to whom Yancey had given his cup of water; she was
the woman jolting endless miles in covered wagons, spinning in log cabins, cooking over crude res;
she was all women who have traveled American prairie and desert and mountain and plain. Here was
that inner rectitude, that chastity of lip, that clearness of eye, that re nement of feature, that
absence of allure that comes with cold white re. The pioneer type, as Yancey had said. Potentially
a more formidable woman than her mother.
Seeing something of this Felice Venable said again, more loudly, as though to convince herself,
“She’s not to go.”
Looking more than ever like her mother, Sabra met this stubbornly. “But 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,” said Yancey, quite pleasantly.
Sabra sti ened. “I’m going with him.” In her new resolve she must have squeezed the hand of the
child Cim, for he gave a little yelp. 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.”
Perhaps Sabra had not realized until now how terribly she had counted on her husband’s return as
marking the time when she would be free to leave the Venable board, to break away from the Venable
clan; no more to be handled, 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 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
re than the older woman’s had. For the rst time this quality 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 ever thought of doing) he
could have seen a ghostly smile momentarily irradiating the transparent ivory face. But now it was
Yancey Cravat who held their fascinated eye. With a cowboy yip he swung the de ant Sabra and the
boy Cim high in the air in his great arms—tossed them up, so that Sabra screamed, and Cim squealed
in mingled terror and delight. It was the kind of horseplay (her word) at which Felice Venable
always shuddered. Altogether the three seemed suddenly an outrage in that seemly room with its
mahogany and its decanters and its circle of staring highbred faces.
“Week from to-morrow,” 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 out t—you’ll drive that,
Sabra—and one with the household goods and bedding and camp stu and the rest. We ought to make it
in nine days.… Wichita!” His glance went round the room, and in that glance you saw not only
Wichita! but Venables! “I’ve had enough of it. Sabra, my girl, we’ll leave all the goddamned
middle-class respectability of Wichita, Kansas, behind us. We’re going out, by God, to a brand-new,
two-
sted, rip-snorting country, full of Injuns and rattlesnakes and two- gun toters and gyp water and
desper-ah-dos! Whoop-ee!”
It was too much for black Isaiah in his perilous perch high above the table. He had long ago ceased
to wield his asparagus fan. He had been leaning farther and farther forward, the better to hear and
see all of the scene that was spread beneath him. Now, at Yancey’s cowboy whoop, he started
violently, his slight hold was loosed, and he fell like a great black grape from the vine directly
into the midst of one of Felice Venable’s white and virgin frosted silver cakes.
Shouts, screams, upleapings. Isaiah plucked, white-bottomed, out of the center of the vast pastry.
The sudden grayish pallor of his face

matched the silver tone of his pants’ seat. Felice Venable, nerves strained to breaking, lifted her
hand to cu him smartly. But the black boy was too quick for her. With the swiftness of a wild
thing he scuttled across the table to where Yancey Cravat stood with his wife and child, leaped
nimbly to the oor, crept between the man’s legs like a whimpering little dog, and lay there, locked
in the safety of Yancey’s great knees.

3

Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Sabra had seen them all her life. At the age
of three Cim was held up in his father’s arms to watch a great band of them go by on one of their
annual pilgrimages. He played Indian, of course, patting his lips to simulate the Indian yodeling
yell. He had a war bonnet made of chicken feathers sewed to the edge of a long strip of red calico.
Twice a year, chaperoned by old General “Bull” Plummer, the Indians swept through the streets of
Wichita in their visiting regalia
—feathers, beads, blankets, chains—a brilliant sight. Ahead of them and behind them was the
reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Riley. All
Wichita, accustomed to them though it was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways and o ces
and kitchens. Bucks, braves, chiefs, squaws, papooses; tepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the
cavalcade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the mid-western town, a vivid frieze of color
against the drab monotony of the prairies.
In late spring it was likely to be the Cheyennes going north from their reservation in the Indian
Territory to visit their cousins the Sioux in Dakota. In the late autumn it was the Sioux riding
south to return the visit of the Cheyennes. Both of these were horse Indians, and of the Plains
tribes, great visitors among themselves, and as gossipy and highly gregarious as old women on a
hotel veranda. Usually they called a halt in their journey to make camp for the night outside the
town. Though watched over by martial eye, they usually managed to pilfer, in a friendly sort of
way, anything they

could lay hands on—chickens, wash unwisely left on the line, the very clothes o the scarecrows in
the eld.
Throughout the year there were always little groups of Indians to be seen on the streets of the
town—Kaws, Osages, and Poncas. They came on ponies or in wagons from their reservations; bought
bacon, calico, whisky if they could get it. You saw them squatting on their haunches in the dust of
the sunny street, silent, sloe eyed, aloof. They seemed to be studying the townspeople passing to
and fro. Only their eyes moved. Their dress was a mixture of savagery and civilization. The Osages,
especially, clung to the blanket. Trousers, coat, and even hat might be in the conventional pattern
of the whites. But over this the Osage wore his striped blanket of vivid orange and purple and red.
It was as though he de ed the whites to take from him that last insignia of race.
A cowed enough people they seemed by now; dirty, degraded. Since the Custer Massacre of ’76 they
had been pretty thoroughly beaten into submission. Only occasionally there seemed to emanate from a
band of them a sullen, enduring hate. It had no de nite expression. It was not in their bearing; it
could not be said to look out from the dead black Indian eye, nor was it anywhere about the
immobile parchment face. Yet somewhere black implacable resentment smoldered in the heart of this
dying race.
In one way or another, at school, in books and newspapers of the time, in her father’s talk with
the men and women of his own generation, Sabra had picked up odds and ends of information about
these silent, slothful, yet sinister gures. She had been surprised— even incredulous—at her
husband’s partisanship of the redskins. It was one of his absurdities. He seemed actually to
consider them as human beings.
Tears came to his own eyes when he spoke of that blot on southern civilization, the Trail of Tears,
in which the Cherokees, a peaceful and home-loving Indian tribe, were torn from the land which a
government had given them by sworn treaty, to be sent far away on a march which, from cold, hunger,
exposure, and heartbreak, was marked by bleaching bones from Georgia to Oklahoma. Yancey and old
Lewis Venable had a long-standing feud

on the subject of Mississippi’s treatment of the Choctaws and Georgia’s cruelty to the Cherokees.
“Oh, treaties!” sneered Yancey’s father-in-law, outraged at some blistering editorial with which
Yancey had enlivened the pages of the Wichita Wigwam. “One doesn’t make treaties with savages—and
expect to keep them.”
“You call the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees and the Seminoles savages! They
are the Five Civilized Tribes! They had their laws, they had their religion, they cultivated the
land, they were peaceful, home-loving, wise. Would you call Chief Apushmataha a savage?”
“Certainly, sir! Most assuredly.”
“How about Sequoyah? John Ross? Stand Waitie? Quanah Parker?
They were wise men. Great men.”
“Savages, with enough white blood in them to make them leaders of their dull-witted, full-blood
brothers. The Creeks, sir” (he pronounced it “suh”), “intermarried with niggers. And so did the
Choctaws; and the Seminoles down in Florida.”
Yancey smiled his winning smile. “I understand that while you Southerners didn’t exactly marry——”
“Marriage, sir, is one thing. Nature, sir, is another. Far from signing treaties with these
creatures and giving them valuable American land to call their own——”
“Which was their own before we took it away from them.”
“—I would be in favor of extermination by some humane but e ective process. They are a sore on the
benign bosom of an otherwise healthy government.”
“It is now being done as e ectively as even you could wish, though perhaps lacking a little
something on the humane side.”
From her father and mother, too, Sabra had heard much of this sort of talk before Yancey had come
into her life. She had heard of them at school, as well. Their savagery and trickiness had been
emphasized; their tragedy had been glossed over or scarcely touched upon. Sabra, if she considered
them at all, thought of them as dirty and useless two-footed animals. In her girlhood she had gone
to a school conducted by the Sisters of Loretto, under the jurisdiction of

the Jesuit Fathers. Early in the history of Kansas, long before Sabra’s day, it had started as a
Mission school, and the indefatigable Jesuit priests had traveled the country on horseback, riding
the weary and dangerous miles over the prairies to convert the Indians. Mother Bridget, a powerful,
heavy woman of past sixty now, shrewd, dominating, yet strangely childlike, had come to the Mission
when a girl just past her novitiate, in the wild and woolly days of Kansas. She had seen the oxen
haul the native yellow limestone of which the building was made; she had known the fear of the
scalping knife; with her own big, capable, curiously masculine hands she had planted the rst young
fruit trees, the vegetable and ower garden that now ourished in the encircling osage hedge; she
had superintended the building of the great hedge itself, made of the tough yet supple wood that
the exploring pioneer French had called bois d’arc, because in the early days the Indians had
fashioned their bows of it. Then Kansans had corrupted the word until now the wood was known as
“bodark.” The Mission had been an Indian school then, with a constantly uctuating attendance. One
day there would be forty pairs of curiously dead black Indian eyes intent on a primer of reading,
writing, or arithmetic; the next there would none. The tribe had gone on a visit to a neighboring
friendly tribe. Bucks and squaws, ponies and dogs and children, they were o on society bent, the
Osages visiting the Kaws, or the Kaws the Quapaws. At other times their absence might mean
something more sinister—an uprising in the brewing, or an attack on an enemy tribe. Mother Bridget
had terrible tales to tell. She could even make grim jokes about those early days. “Hair-raising
times they were,” she would tell you (it was her pet pun), “in more ways than one, as many a poor
white settler could prove to you who’d had the scalp lifted o him by the knife.” She had taught the
Indian girls to sew, to exchange wigwams for cabins, and to wear sunbonnets and to speak about
their souls and their earthly troubles as well to a Great Father named God who was much more
powerful than the Sun and the Rain and the Wind to whom they attributed such potency. These things
they did with gratifying docility for weeks at a time, or even months, after which it was
discovered that they buried their dead

under the cabins, removing enough of the puncheon oor to enable them to dig a grave, laying the
timbers back neatly, and then deserting the cabins to live outdoors again, going back to the
blanket at the same time and holding elaborate placating ceremonies to various gods of the
elements. Mother Bridget (Sister Bridget then, red cheeked in her wimple, her beads clicking a
stubborn race against the treachery of the savages) and the other Sisters of Loretto had it all to
do over again from the start.
All this was past now. The Indians were herded on reservations in the Indian Territory. Mother
Bridget and her helpers taught embroidery and music and kindred ladylike accomplishments to the
bonneted and gloved young ladies of Wichita’s gentry. The osage hedge now shielded prim and docile
misses where once it had tried to con ne the wild things of the prairie. The wild things seemed
tame enough now, herded together on their reservations, spirit broken, pride destroyed.
Sabra had her calico pony hitched to the phaëton (a matron now, it was no longer seemly to ride him
as she used to, up and down the rutted prairie roads, her black hair in a long thick braid
switching to the speed of the hard-bitten hoofs). Mother Bridget was in the Mission vegetable
garden, superintending the cutting of great rosy stalks of late pie plant. The skirt of her habit
was hitched up informally above her list shoes, muddied by the soft loam of the garden.
“Indian Territory! What does your ma say?” “She’s wild.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” Then added hastily: “Of course, I hate to leave Mamma and Papa. But the Bible says,
‘Whither thou——’ ”
“I know what the Bible says,” interrupted the old nun shrewdly. “Why does he want to go—Cravat?”
Sabra glowed with pride. “Yancey says it’s a chance to build an empire out of the last frontier in
America. He says its lawmakers can pro t by the mistakes of the other states, so that when the
Indian Territory becomes a state some day it will know wherein the other states have failed, and
knowing—us—avoid the pitfalls——”

“Stu !” interrupted Mother Bridget. “He’s going for the adventure of it. They always have, no
matter what excuse they’ve given, from the Holy Grail to the California gold elds. The di erence
in America is that the women have always gone along. When you read the history of France you’re
peeking through a bedroom keyhole. The history of England is a joust. The women-folks were always
Elaineish and anemic, seems. When Ladye Guinevere had pinned a bow of ribbon to her knight’s
sleeve, why, her job was done for the day. He could ride o to be killed while she stayed home and
stitched at a tapestry. 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.”
“But that’s what Yancey said. Exactly.”
“Did he now!” She stood up and released the full folds of her skirt from the waist cord that had
served to loop it away from the moist earth. She lifted her voice in an order to the gure that
stooped over the pie-plant bed. “Enough, Sister Norah, enough. Tell Sister Agnes plenty of sugar
and not like the last pie, t to pucker your mouth.” She turned back to Sabra. “When do you start?
How do you go?”
“Next Monday. Two wagons. One with the printing out t, the other with the household goods and
bedding. Yancey will have it that we’ve got to take along bed-springs for me, right out of our bed
here and laid at in the wagon.”
Mother Bridget seemed not to hear. She looked out across the garden to where prairie met sky. Her
eyes, behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, saw a pageant that Sabra had never known. “So. It’s come
to that. They’ve opened it to the whites after all—the land that was to belong to the Indians
forever. ‘As long as grass grows and the rivers ow.’ That’s what the treaty said. H’m. Well, what
next!”
“Oh, Indians …” said Sabra. Her tone was that of one who speaks of prairie dogs, seven-year
locusts, or any like Western nuisance.
“I know,” said Mother Bridget. “You can’t change them. Nobody knows better than I. I’ve had Indian
girls here in the school for two years at a stretch. We’d teach them to wash themselves every day;
they’d learn to sew, and embroider, and cook and read and write.

They were taught worsted and coral work and drawing and even painting and vocal music. They learned
the Gospel of the Son of God. They’d leave here as neat and pretty and well behaved as any girl
you’d care to see. In two weeks I’d hear they’d gone back to the blanket. Say what you like, the
full-blood Indian to-day is just about where he was before Joshua. Well——”
Sabra was a little bored by all this. She had not come out to the old Mission to hear about
Indians. She had come to say farewell to Mother Bridget, and have a fuss made over her, and to be
exclaimed over. Wasn’t she going to be a pioneer woman such as you read about in the books?
“I must be going, dear Mother Bridget. I just came out—there’s so much to do.” She was vaguely
disappointed in the dramatics of this visit.
“I’ve something for you. Come along.” She led the way through the garden, across the sandstone
agging of the porch, into the dim cool mustiness of the Mission hall. She left Sabra there and went
swiftly down the corridor. Sabra waited, grateful for this shady haven after the heat of the Kansas
sun. She had known this hall, and the bare bright rooms that opened o it, all through her
girlhood. The fragrance of pie crust, baking crisply, came to her nostrils: the shell, of course,
that was to hold the succulent rhubarb. There was the sound of a heavy door opening, shutting,
click, thud, somewhere down a turn in the corridor. She had never seen Mother Bridget’s room. No
one had. Sabra wondered about it. The Sisters of Loretto owned nothing. It was a rule of the Order.
The possessive pronoun,
rst person, was never used by them. Sabra recalled how Sister Innocenta had come running in one
morning in great distress. “Our rosary!” she had cried. “I have lost our rosary!” The string of
devotional beads she always wore at her waist had somehow slipped or broken and was missing. They
kept nothing for themselves. Strange and sometimes beautiful things came into their hands and were
immediately disposed of. Sabra had seen Mother Bridget part with queer objects. Once it had been a
scalping knife with brown stains on it that looked like rust and were not; another time an Osage
papoose board with its gay and intricately beaded pocket in

which some Indian woman had carried her babies strapped to her tireless back. There had been a
crewelwork motto done in bright- colored wool threads by the ngers of some hopeful New England
émigrée of years ago. Its curlycue letters announced: Music Hath Charms to Soothe the Savage
Breast. It had been found hanging on the wall just above the prim little parlor organ in the cabin
of a settler whose young wife and children had been killed during a sudden uprising of Indians in
his absence.
Suddenly, as she waited there in the peace of the old building, there swept over Sabra a great wave
of nostalgia for the very scenes she was leaving. It was as though she already had put behind her
these familiar things of her girlhood: the calico pony and the little yellow phaëton; the oblong of
Kansas sunshine and sky and garden seen through the Mission doorway; the scents and sounds and
security of the solid stone building itself. She was shaken by terror. Indian Territory!
Indian—why, she couldn’t go there to live. To live forever, the rest of her life. Yancey Cravat,
her husband, became suddenly remote, a stranger, terrible. She was Sabra Venable, Sabra Venable,
here, safe from harm, in the Mission school. She wouldn’t go. Her mother was right.
A door at the end of the corridor opened. The huge gure of Mother Bridget appeared, lling the
oblong, blotting out the sunlight. In her arms was a thick roll of cloth. “Here,” she said, and
turned to let the light fall on it. It was a blanket or coverlet woven in a block pattern of white
and a deep, brilliant blue. “It’s to keep you and little Cim warm, in the wagon, on the way to the
Indian Territory. I wove it myself, on a hand loom. There’s no wear-out to it. The blue is Indian
dye, and nothing can fade it. It’s a wild country you’ll be going to. But there’s something in the
blue of this makes any room t to live in, no matter how bare and ugly. If they ask you out there
what it is, tell ’em a Kansas tapestry.”
She walked with Sabra to the phaëton and produced from a capacious pocket hidden in the folds of
her habit a little scarlet June apple for the pony. Sabra kissed her on both plump cheeks quickly
and stepped into the buggy, placing the blue and white blanket on the seat beside her. Her face was
screwed up comically—the face of

a little girl who is pretending not to be crying. “Good-bye,” she said, and was surprised to nd
that her voice was no more than a whisper. And at that, feeling very sorry for herself, she began
to cry, openly, even as she matter-of-factly gathered up the reins in her strong young ngers.
Mother Bridget stepped close to the wheel. “It’ll be all right. There’s no such thing as a new
country for the people who come to it. They bring along their own ways and their own bits of things
and make it like the old as fast as they can.”
“I’m taking along my china dishes,” breathed Sabra through her tears, “and my lovely linen and the
mantel set that Cousin Dabney gave me for a wedding present, and my own rocker to sit in, and my
wine-color silk-warp henrietta, and some slips from the garden, because Yancey says there isn’t
much growing.”
Behind her spectacles the eyes of the wise old nun were soft with pity. “That’ll be lovely.” She
watched the calico pony and the phaëton drive o up the dusty Kansas road. She turned toward the
Mission house. The beads clicked. Hail, Mary, full of grace …

4

The child Cim had got it into his head that this was to be a picnic. He 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 near-by wood which Cim 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. Felice Venable loathed all forms of bucolic
diversion and could, with a glance, cause more discomfort at an al fresco luncheon than a whole
battalion of red ants.
There was a lunatic week preceding their departure from Wichita. Felice fought their going to the
last, and nally took to her bed with threats of impending dissolution which failed to achieve the
desired e ect owing to the preoccupation of the persons supposed to be stricken by her plight. From
time to time, intrigued by the thumpings, scurryings, shouts, laughter, quarrels, 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 can’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 all quite
rough and unsettled—wild, almost.”
“That needn’t prevent you from remembering you’re a lady, I hope. Unless 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, and Southern family tradition dictated. A dozen silver knives, forks, and
spoons in the DeGrasse pattern; actually, too, a dozen silver after- dinner co ee spoons; a silver
cake dish, very handsome, upheld by three solid silver cupids in care-free attitudes; linen that
had been spun by hand and that bore vine-wreathed monograms; many ru ed and embroidered and
starched white muslin petticoats to be sullied in the red clay of the Western muck; her heavy black
grosgrain silk with the three box pleats on each side, and trimmed with black passementerie; her
black hat with the ve black plumes; her beautiful green nun’s veiling; her tulle bonnet with the
little pink owers; forty jars of preserves; her own rocker, a lady’s chair whose seat and back were
upholstered fashionably with bright colored Brussels carpeting. There were two wagons, canvas
covered and lumbering. Dishes, trunks, bedding, boxes were snugly stowed away in the capacious
belly of one; the printing out t, securely roped and lashed, went in the other. This wagon held the
little hand press; two six-column forms; the case rack containing the type (cardboard was tacked
snugly over this to keep the type from escaping); the rollers; a stock of paper; a can of printer’s
ink, tubes of job ink, a box of wooden quoins used in locking the forms.
There was, to the Wichita eye, nothing unusual in the sight of these huge covered freighters that
would soon go lumbering o toward the horizon. Their like had worn many a track in the Kansas
prairie. The wagon train had wound its perilous way westward since the day of the old Spanish
trail, deeply rutted by the heavy wheels of Mexican carts. The very Indians who tra cked in pelts
and furs and human beings had used the white man’s trails for their trading. 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, her
eyes staring with the xed, unseeing gaze of one who knows that to blink but once is to be awash
with tears; the child, out of

hand with excitement and impatience to be gone. From the day of Yancey’s recital of the Run, black
Isaiah had begged to be taken along. Denied 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-pioneering 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. Her eyes were
enormous, her pale face paler. She wore last year’s second best gray cheviot, lined, boned,
basqued, and (though plain for its day) braided all the way down the front with an elaborate
pattern of curlycues. Her gray straw bonnet was trimmed only with a pu of velvet and a bird. Her
feet, in high buttoned shoes, were found to touch the wagon oor with di culty, so at the last
minute a footstool was snatched from the house and placed so that she might brace herself properly
during the long and racking drive. This article of furniture was no more at variance with its
surroundings than the driver herself. A plump round mahogany foot rest it was, covered with a gay
tapestry that had been stitched by Sabra’s grandmother on the dista side. Its pattern of faded
scarlet and yellow and blue represented what seemed to be a pair of cockatoos sparring in a rose
bush. Yancey had swung Cim 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 do. “Giddap in ’ere! Gee-op! G’larng!” His grandmother and
grandfather, gazing up with sudden agony in their faces at sight of this little expedition actually
faring forth so absurdly into the unknown, had ceased to exist for Cim. 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. All through the rst day they

could do nothing with him. He yelled, “Giddap! Whoa! Gee-op!” until he was hoarse, pausing only to
shoot imaginary bears, panthers, wildcats, and Indians, and altogether working himself up into such
a state of excitement and exhaustion that he became glittering eyed and feverish and subsequently
had to be inconveniently dosed with castor oil.
Now, with a lurch and a rattle and a great clatter of hoofs the two wagons were o . Sabra had
scarcely time for one nal frantic look at her father and mother, at minor massed Venables, at the
servants’ black faces that seemed all rolling eyeballs. She was so busy with the horses, with Cim,
so lled with dizzy mixture of fright and exhilaration and a kind of terror-stricken happiness that
she forgot to turn and look back, as she had meant to, like the heroine in a melodrama, at the big
white house, at the hedge, at the lovely untidy garden, at the three great elms. Later she
reproached herself for this. And she would say to the boy, in the bare treeless ugliness of the
town that became their home, “Cim, do you remember the yellow and purple ags that used to come up
rst thing in the spring, in the yard?”
“What yard?”
“Granny’s yard, back home.” “Nope.”
“Oh, Cim!”
It was as though the boy’s life had begun with this trip. The four previous years of his existence
seemed to be sponged from his mind like yesterday’s exercise from a slate. Perched beside his
father on the high wagon seat his thirsty little mind drank in tales that became forever part of
his consciousness and in uenced his whole life.
They had made an early start. By ten the boy’s eyes were heavy with sleep. He refused stubbornly to
lie on the mattress inside the larger wagon; denied that he was sleepy. 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 su cient, they thought, to

last through most of the trip—salt pork, mince and apple pies, bread, doughnuts—but their appetites
were enormous. At midday they stopped and ate in the shade. Sabra prepared the meal while Yancey
tended the horses. Cim, wide awake now and refreshed, ate largely with them of the fried salt pork
and potatoes, the hard- boiled eggs, the mince pie. He was even given one of the precious oranges
with which the journey had been provided by his grandparents. It was all very gay and comfortable
and relaxed. Short as the morning had been, the afternoon stretched out, somehow, endless. Sabra
began to be horribly tired, cramped. The boy whimpered. It was mid-afternoon and hot; it was late
afternoon; then the brilliant Western sunset began to paint the sky. Yancey, 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 come toward her wagon, prepared to lift her down, and the
boy. She was sti , utterly weary. She stared down at him, dully, then around the landscape.
“Camp?”
“Yes. 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. I’ll have a re 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 the duties of this new manner of living had become familiar.
There was wood to gather, a
re 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 co ee revived them
with its promise of stimulation.

“That roll of carpet,” called Sabra, busy at the re, to Yancey at the wagon. “Under the seat. I
want Cim 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 face all open mouth and whites of eyes. Black Isaiah. He had found a
way to come with them to the Indian Territory.

5

By noon next day they were wondering how they had got on at all without him. He gathered wood. He
started res. He tended Cim like a nurse, played with him, sang to him, helped put him to bed, slept
anywhere, like a little dog. He even helped Sabra to drive her team, change and change about, for
after all there was little to it but the holding of the reins slackly in one’s ngers while the
horses plodded across the prairie, mile on mile, mile on mile.
Yancey pointed out the de niteness with which the land changed when they left Kansas and came into
the Oklahoma country. “Oklahoma,” he explained to Cim. “That’s Choctaw. Okla—people. Humma—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. The rivers and little
creeks were sanguine with it, and at sunset the sky seemed to re ect it, so that sometimes Sabra’s
eyes burned with all this scarlet. 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. She longed for the green of
Kansas. The Oklahoma sky was not blue but steel color, and all through the day it was a brazen
sheet of glittering tin over their heads. Its glare seared the eyeballs.
It was a hard trip for the child. He was by turns unruly and listless. He could not run about,
except when they stopped to make camp. Sabra, curiously 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. Like

the songs he sang, these were primitive accounts of the sorrows and the tribulations of a wronged
people and their inevitable reward in after life.
“An’ de angel say to him, he say, ‘Mose, come on up on dis’ya throne an’ eat ’case yo’ hongry, an’
drink ’case yo’ parch, and res’ yo’ weary an’ achin’ feet …’ ”
But when he rode with his father he heard thrilling tales. If it was just before his bedtime, after
their early supper had been eaten, Yancey invariably began his story with the magic words, “It was
on just such a night as this …”
There would follow a legend of buried treasure. Spanish conquistadores wandered weary miles over
plains and prairie and desert, led, perhaps, by the false golden promises of some captured Indian
eager to get back to the home of his own tribe far away. As in all newly settled countries, there
were here hundreds of such tales. The sparsely settled land was full of them. The poorer the class
the more glittering the treasure. These people, wresting a meager living from the barren plains,
consoled themselves with tales of buried Spanish gold; of jewels. No hairy squatter or nester in
his log cabin with his pony parchment-skinned wife and litter of bare- legged brats but had some
tale of long-sought treasure. Cim heard dozens of these tales as they dragged their way across the
red clay of Oklahoma, as they forded rivers, passed little patches of blackjack or cottonwood. He
was full of them. They became as real to him as the rivers and trees themselves.
During the day Yancey told him stories of the Indians. He taught him the names of the Five
Civilized Tribes, and Cim remembered the di cult Indian words and repeated them—Cherokee, Choctaw,
Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw. He heard the Indian story, not in terms of raids, scalpings,
tomahawk, and tom-tom, but as the saga of a tricked and wronged people. Yancey Cravat needed only a
listener. That that listener was four, and quite incapable of comprehending the signi cance of what
he heard, made no di erence to Cravat. He told the boy the terri c story of the Trail of Tears—of
the Cherokee Nation, a simple and unnomadic people, driven from their homes in Georgia, like cattle
across hundreds of miles of plain and prairie to

die by the thousands before they reached the Oklahoma land that had been allotted to them, with two
thousand troops under General Win eld Scott to urge on their agging footsteps.
“Why did they make the Indians go away?” “They wanted the land for themselves.” “Why?”
“It had marble, and gold and silver and iron and lead, and great forests. So they took all this
away from them and drove them out. They promised them things and then broke their promise.”
Sabra was horri ed at Cim’s second-hand recital of this saga. He told her all about it as he later
sat on the seat beside her. “Uncle Sam is a mean bad man. He took all the farms and the gold and
the silver and the bu ’loes away from the Indians and made them go away and they didn’t want to go
and so they went and they died.”
He knew more about David Payne than about Columbus. He was more familiar with Quanah Parker, the
Comanche, with Elias Boudinot and General Stand Waitie, his brother, both full-blooded Cherokees,
than he was with the names of Lincoln and Washington.
Sabra, in her turn, undertook to wipe this impression from the boy’s mind. “Indians are bad people.
They take little boys from their mammas and never bring them back. They burn down people’s houses,
and hurt them. They’re dirty and lazy, and they steal.”
She was unprepared for the hysterical burst of protest that greeted this. The boy grew white with
rage. “They’re not. You’re a liar. I hate you. I won’t ride with you.”
He actually prepared to climb down over the wagon wheel. She clutched at him with one hand, shook
him smartly, cu ed him. He kicked her. She stopped the team, wound the reins, took him over her
knee and spanked him soundly. He announced, through his tears, that he was going to run away and
join the Indians and never come back. If she could have known that his later life was to be shaped
by Yancey’s tales and this incident, certainly her protests would have been even more forceful than
they were.
“Why can’t you talk to him about something besides those dirty thieving Indians? There’s enough to
teach him about the history of

his country, I should think. George Washington and Je erson Davis and Captain John Smith …”
“The one who married Pocahontas, you mean?” “I declare, Yancey, sometimes I wonder if——” “What?”
“Oh—nothing.”
But often the days were gay enough. They fell into the routine, adjusted themselves to the
discomfort. At rst Sabra had been so racked with the jolting of the wagon that she was a cripple by
night. Yancey taught her how to relax; not to brace herself against the wagon’s jolting but to sway
easily with it. By the second day her young body had accustomed itself to the motion. She actually
began to enjoy it, and at the journey’s end missed it as a traveler at sea misses the roll and dip
of a ship. By this time she had the second- best gray cheviot open at the throat and her hair in a
long black braid. She looked like a schoolgirl. She had got out the sunbonnet which one of the less
formidable Venables had jokingly given her at parting, and this she wore to shield her eyes from
the pitiless glare of sky and plain. The gray straw bonnet, with its pu of velvet and its bird,
reposed in its box in the back of the wagon. The sight of her in that prairie wilderness engaged in
the domestic task of beating 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 tted 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 hand plow hitched to a stumbling mule. Yancey roared snatches of cowboy
songs:
When I was young I was a reckless lad, Lots of fun with the gals I had,
I took one out each day fur a ride, An’ I always had one by my side. I’d hug ’em an’ kiss ’em just
fur fun,

An’ I’ve proposed to more’n one,
If there’s a gal here got a kiss for me, She’ll nd me as young as I used to be.
Hi rickety whoop ti do, How I love to sing to you.
Oh, I could sing an’ dance with glee, If I was as young as I used to be.
Once they saw him whip a rattlesnake to death with his wagon whip. They had unhitched the horses to
water them. Yancey, whip in hand, had taken them down to the muddy stream, Cim leaping and shouting
at his side. His two guns, in their holsters, lay on the ground with the belt which he had just now
unstrapped from about his waist. Sabra saw the thick coil, the wicked head. Perhaps she sensed it.
She screamed horribly, stood trans xed. The boy’s face was a mask of fright. Yancey lashed out once
with his whip, the thing struck out, he lashed again, again, again, in a kind of fury. She turned
away, sickened. The whip kept up its whistle, its snap. The coiled thing lay in ribbons. Isaiah,
though ashen with fright, still had to be forcibly restrained from prowling among the mass for the
rattlers which, with some combination of sunset and human saliva, were supposed to be a charm
against practically every misfortune known to man. Cim had nightmares, all that night and awoke
screaming.
Once they saw the gure of a solitary horseman against the sunset sky. Inexplicably the gure
dismounted, stood a moment, mounted swiftly, and vanished.
“What was that?”
“That was an Indian.” “How could you tell?”
“He dismounted on the opposite side from a white man.”
That night it was Sabra who did not sleep. She held the boy tight in her arms. Every snap of a
twig, every stamp of a horse’s hoof caused her to start up in terror.

Yancey tried in vain to reassure her. “Indian? What of it? Indians aren’t anything to be scared of.
Not any more.”
She remembered something that Mother Bridget had said. “They’re no di erent. They haven’t changed
since Joshua.”
“Since what?” He was very sleepy. “Joshua.”
He could make nothing of this. He was asleep again, heavily, worn out with the day’s journey.
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. “Lak yo’ breakfus’ in
bed, Miss Sabra? Mizzly mo’nin’.”
At Pawnee Yancey saw fresh deer tracks. He saddled a horse and was o . They had, before this,
caught bass in the streams, and Yancey had shot prairie chicken and quail, and Sabra had fried them
delicately. But this was their rst promise of big game. Sabra felt no fear at being left alone with
the two children. It was mid-afternoon. She was happy, peaceful. There was about this existence a
delightful detachment. Her prim girlhood, which, because she had continued to live in her parents’
household, had lasted into her marriage, was now behind her. Ahead of her lay all manner of unknown
terrors and strangeness, but here in the wilderness she was secure. She ruled her little world. Her
husband was hers, alone. Her child, too. The little black boy Isaiah was as much her slave as
though the Emancipation Proclamation had never been. Here, in the wide freedom of the prairie, she
was, temporarily at least, suspended out of the reach of human interference.
Now she welcomed this unexpected 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. She set Isaiah to gathering fuel for the evening meal, while Cim played in the
shade of the clump of scrub oak. She was quite serene. She listened for the sound of horse’s hoofs
that would announce Yancey’s triumphant return. She could hear Cim as he played under the trees,
crooning to himself some snatch of song that Yancey had taught him. Vaguely she began to wonder if
Yancey should not have returned by now. She brushed her hair thoroughly, enjoying the motion,
throwing it over her head and bending far forward in that contortionistic attitude 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 things 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. Here was the little clump of scrub oaks. The land just beyond showed a series of tiny
hillocks that rolled gently away toward the horizon—rolled just enough to conceal what not of
horror! A head perhaps even now peering craftily over the slope’s edge to see what it could see.
In a sudden panic she stepped out of the wagon with the feeling that she 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 o with Isaiah to gather fuel, though she had forbidden it. Isaiah, his long arms full
of dead twigs and small branches, was coming toward the wagon now. Cim was not with him.
“Where’s Cim?”
He dropped his load, looked around. “I lef’ him playin’ by hisself right hyah when Ah go fetch de
wood. Ain’ he in de wagon?”
“No. No.”
“Might be he crep’ in de print wagon.”
“Wagon?” 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 run up and down, calling him. She began to scream his name, her voice cracking
grotesquely. Cim! Cim! She prayed as she ran, mumblingly. O God, help me nd him. O God, don’t let
anything happen to him. Dear God, help me nd him— Cim! Cim! Cim!
She had heard among pioneer stories that of the McAlastair wagon train crossing the continent
toward California in ’49. The Benson party had got separated perhaps a half day’s journey from the
front section when scouts brought news of Indians on the trail. Immediately they must break camp
and hurry on to join the section ahead for mutual protection. In the midst of the bustle and
confusion it was discovered that a child—a boy of three—was missing. The whole party searched at
rst con dently, then frenziedly, then despairingly. The parents of the missing child had three
other small children and another on the way. Every second’s delay meant possible death to every
other member of the party. They must push on. They appealed to the mother. “I’ll go on,” she said,
and the wagon train wound its dusty way across the plains. The woman sat ashen faced, stony, her
eyes xed in a kind of perpetual horror. She never spoke of the child again.
O God! whimpered Sabra, running this way and that. O God! Oh, Cim! Cim!
She came to a little mound that dipped suddenly and unexpectedly to a draw. And there, in a hollow,
she came upon 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 within
ve feet of it and never nd it. Four men were seated about the doorstep outside 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 time of it. Sabra’s knees suddenly
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 Cim, sociably, and not especially glad to see her.
The man on whose knee he sat was a slim young fellow with a sandy mustache 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, 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 Cim’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, vanished. Besides, he was so young—scarcely more than a boy.
“Well,” she explained, a little sheepishly, “I was worried.… My husband went o 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 …”
She looked very wan and schoolgirlish in her prim gray dress and with her hair in a braid tied with
a bright red ribbon, and her tear- stained cheeks.
One of the men who had strolled o a little way with the appearance of utmost casualness returned
to the group in time to hear this. “He’ll be back any minute now,” he announced. “He didn’t get no
deer.”
“But how do you know?”
The soft-spoken young man shot a malignant look at the other, the older man looked suddenly
abashed. Sabra’s question went unanswered. “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 Cim 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 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 movin’ on, my friends here and me. Pronto. Floyd, how about you
getting a piece of deer meat for the lady, seeing 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, 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 rst. 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 ash, 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 ies
to the magnet. Cim he drew up to the pommel, holding him with one hand; Sabra, perched on the
horse’s rump, clung with both arms round the lad’s slim waist. Something of a horsewoman, she
noticed his ne 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. The horse had a velvet gait, even with
this triple load. Sabra found herself wishing that this exhilarating ride might go on for miles.
Suddenly she noticed 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, somehow.

A hundred feet or so from the camp he reined in his horse abruptly, half turned in his saddle, and
with his free hand swung Sabra gently to the ground, leaning far from his saddle and keeping a rm
hold on Cim and reins as he did so. He placed the child in her upraised arms, wheeled, and was gone
before she could open her lips to frame a word of thanks. The piece of deer meat, neatly wrapped,
lay on the ground at her feet. She stood staring after the galloping gure, dumbly. She took Cim’s
hand. Together they ran toward the camp. Isaiah had a re going, a pot of co ee bubbling. His
greeting to Cim was sternly admonitory. Ten minutes later Yancey galloped in, empty handed.
“What a chase he led me! Twice I thought I had him. I’d have run him into Texas if I hadn’t thought
you’d be——”
Sabra, for the rst time since her marriage, felt superior to him; was impatient of his tale of
prowess. She had her own story to tell, spiced with indignation. She was not interested in his
mythical deer. She had an actual piece of fresh deer meat to cook for their supper.
“… and just when I was ready to die with fright, there he was, talking to those four men, and
sitting on the knee of one of them as though he’d known him all his life eating nuts.… Anything
might have happened to him and to me while you were o after your old deer.”
Yancey seemed less interested in the part that she and Cim had played in the adventure than in the
appearance and behavior of the four men in the draw, and especially the charming young man who had
so gallantly brought them back.
“Thin faced, was he? And a youngster? About nineteen or twenty?
What else?”
“Oh, a low voice, and kind of sweet, as though he sang tenor. And his teeth——”
Yancey interrupted. “Long, weren’t they? The two at the side, I mean. Like a wolf’s?”
“Yes. How did you—Do you know him?” “Sort of,” Yancey answered, thoughtfully.
Sabra was piqued. “It was lucky for us it was someone who knows you, probably. Because you don’t
seem to care much about what

happened to us—what might have happened.” “You said you wanted to go a-pioneering.” “Well?”
“This is it. Stir that re, Isaiah. Sabra, get that deer meat a- frizzling that your friend gave
you. Because we’re moving on.”
“Now? To-night? But it’s late. I thought we were camping here for the night.”
“We’ll eat and get going. Moonlight to-night. I don’t just like it here. There’s been a lot of time
lost this afternoon. We’ll push on. In another day or so, with luck, we’ll be in Osage, snug and
safe.”
They ate hurriedly. Yancey seemed restless, anxious to be o .
They jolted on. Cim slept, a little ball of weariness, in the back of the wagon. Isaiah drowsed
beside Sabra, and she herself was half asleep, the reins slack in her hands. The scent of the
sun-warmed prairie came up to her, and the pungent smell of the sagebrush. The Indians had swept
over this plain in hordes; and bu alo by the millions. She wondered if the early Spaniards, in
their lust for gold, had trod this ground—perhaps this very trail. Coronado, De Soto, Narvaez. She
had seen pictures of them, these dark-skinned élégantes in their cumbersome trappings of leather
and heavy metal, tramping the pitiless plains of this vast Southwest, searching like children for
cities of gold.… The steady clop-clop of the horses’ feet, the rattle of the wagon, the squeak of
the wheels, the smell of sun- baked earth …
She must have dozed o , for suddenly the sun’s rays were sharply slanted, and she shivered with the
cool of the prairie night air. Voices had awakened her. Three horsemen had dashed out of a little
copse and stood in the path of Yancey’s lead wagon. They were heavily armed. Their hands rested on
their guns. Their faces were grim. They wore the mournful mustaches of the Western plainsman, their
eyes were the eyes of men accustomed to great distances; their gaze was searing. All three wore the
badge of United States marshals, but there was about them something that announced this even before
the eye was caught by their badge of o ce. The leader addressed Yancey, his voice mild, even
gentle.
“Howdy.”

“Howdy.”
“Where you bound for, pardner?” “Osage.”
The questioner’s hand rested lightly on the butt of the six-shooter at his waist. “What might your
name be?”
“Cravat—Yancey Cravat.”
The spokesman’s face lighted up with the slow, incredulous smile of a delighted child. “I’ll be
doggoned!” He turned his slow grin on the man at his right, on the man at his left. “Yancey
Cravat!” he said again, as though they had not heard. “I sure am pleased to make your acquaintance.
Heard about you till I feel like I knew you.”
“Why, thanks,” replied Yancey, unusually modest and laconic. Sabra knew then that Yancey was
playing one of his rôles. He would talk as they talked. Be one of them.
“Aimin’ to make quite a stay in Osage?” “Aim to live there.”
“Go on! I’ve a notion to swear you in as Deputy Marshal right now, darned if I ain’t. Citizens like
you is what we need, and no mistake. Lawy’in’?”
“I’m planning to take up my law practice in Osage, yes,” Yancey answered, “and start a newspaper as
well.”
The three looked a little perturbed at this. They glanced at each other, then at Yancey, then away,
uncomfortably. “Oh, newspaper, huh?” There was little enthusiasm in the marshal’s voice. “Well, we
did have a newspaper there for a little while in Osage, ’bout a week.”
“A daily?” “A weekly.”
There was something sinister in this. “What became of it?” “Well, seems the editor—name of
Pegler—died.”
There was a little silence. Sabra gathered up her reins and brought her team alongside Yancey’s,
the better to hear. The three mustached ones acknowledged her more formal presence by brie y
touching their hat brims with the fore nger of the hand that had rested on their guns.
“Who killed him?”

A little shadow of pained surprise passed over the features of the marshal. “He was just found dead
one morning on the banks of the Canadian. Bullet wounds. But bullets is all pretty much alike, out
here. He might ’a’ killed himself, plumb discouraged.”
The silence fell again. Yancey broke it. “The rst edition of the Oklahoma Wigwam will be o the
press two weeks from to-morrow.” He gathered up the reins as though to end this chance meeting,
however agreeable. “Well, gentlemen, good-evening. Glad to have met you.”
The three did not budge. “What we stopped to ask you,” said the spokesman, in his gentle drawl,
“was, did you happen to glimpse four men anywhere on the road? They’re nesting somewhere in here,
the Kid and his gang. Stole four horses, robbed the bank at Red Fork, shot the cashier, and lit out
for the prairie. Light complected, all of ’em. The Kid is a slim young fella, light hair, red
handkerchief, soft spoken, and rides with gloves on. But then you know what he’s like, Cravat,
well’s I do.”
Yancey nodded in agreement. “Everybody’s heard of the Kid. No, sir, I haven’t seen him. Haven’t
seen anybody the last three days but a Kaw on a pony and a bunch of dirty Cheyennes in a wagon.
Funny thing, I never yet knew a bad man who wasn’t light complected—or, anyway, blue or gray eyes.”
“Oh, say, now!” protested the marshal, stroking his sandy mustache.
“Fact. You take the Kid, and the James boys, and Tom O’Phalliard, and the whole Mullins gang.”
“How about yourself? You’re pretty good with the gun, from all accounts. And black as a crow.”
Yancey lifted his great head and the heavy lids that usually drooped over the gray eyes and looked
at the marshal. “That’s so,” said the other, as though in agreement at the end of an argument. “I
reckon it goes fur killers and fur killers of killers.… Well, boys, we’ll be lopin’. Good luck to
you.”
“Good luck to you!” responded Yancey, politely.
The three whirled their steeds spectacularly, raised their right hands in salute; the horses
pivoted on their hind legs prettily; Cim

crowed with delight. They were o in a cloud of red dust made redder by the last rays of the
setting sun.
Yancey gathered up his reins. Sabra stared at him in bewildered indignation. “But the person who
shields a criminal is just as bad as the criminal himself, isn’t he?”
Yancey looked back at her around the side of his wagon top. His smile was mischievous, sparkling,
irresistible. “Don’t be righteous, Sabra. It’s middle class—and a terrible trait in a woman.”
Late next day, just before sunset, after pushing on relentlessly through the blistering sun of
midday, Yancey pointed with his wagon whip to something that looked like a wallow of mud dotted
with crazy shanties and tents. Theatrically he picked Cim up in his arms so that the child, too,
might see. But he spoke to Sabra.
“There it is,” he said. “That’s our future home.”
Sabra looked. And her brain seemed to have no order or reason about it, for she could think only of
the green nun’s veiling trimmed with ruchings of pink which lay so carefully folded, with its
modish sleeves all stu ed out with soft paper, in the trunk under the canvas of the wagon.
6

Long before the end of that rst nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with
blazing eyes. “I won’t bring up my boy in a town like this!”
It had been a night and a day fantastic with untoward happenings. Their wagons had rumbled wearily
down the broad main street of the settlement—a raw gash in the prairie. All about, on either side,
were wooden shacks, and Indians and dried mud and hitching posts and dogs and crude wagons like
their own. It looked like pictures Sabra had seen of California in ’49. They had supped on ham and
eggs, fried potatoes, and muddy co ee in a place labeled Ice Cream and Oyster Parlor. They spent
that rst night in a rooming house above one of the score of saloons that enlivened the main
street—Pawhuska Avenue, it was called. It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed
to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness. The street stopped
abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.
“Pawhuska Avenue,” said a tipsy sign tacked on the front of a false-front pine shack. Yancey chose
this unfortunate time to impart a little Indian lore to Cim, wide eyed on the wagon seat beside his
mother.
“That’s Osage,” he shouted to the boy. “Pawhu—that means hair. And scah, that means white. White
Hair. Pawhuska—White Hair— was an old Osage Chief——”
“Yancey Cravat!” Sabra called in a shout that almost equaled his own, and in a tone startlingly
like one of Felice Venable’s best (she was, in fact, slightly hysterical, what with weariness and

disappointment and fear), “Yancey Cravat, will you stop talking Indian history and nd us a place to
eat and sleep! Where’s your sense? Can’t you see he’s ready to drop, and so am I?”
The greasy food set before them in the eating house sickened her. She shrank from the slatternly
bold-faced girl who slammed the dishes down in front of them on the oilcloth-covered table. At this
same table with them—there was only one, a long board accommodating perhaps twenty—sat red-faced
men talking in great rough voices, eating with a mechanical and absent-minded thoroughness,
shoveling potatoes, canned vegetables, pie into their mouths with knives. Cim was terribly wide
awake and noisily unruly, excited by the sounds and strangeness about him.
“I’m an Indian!” he would yell, making a great clatter with his spoon on the table. “Ol’ White
Hair! Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!” Being reprimanded, and having the spoon forcibly removed from his
clutching ngers, he burst into tears and howls.
Sabra had taken him up to the bare and clean enough little room which was to be their shelter for
the night. From wide-eyed wakefulness Cim had become suddenly limp with sleep. Yancey had gone out
to see to the horses, to get what information he could about renting a house, and a shack for the
newspaper. A score of plans were teeming in his mind.
“You’ll be all right,” he had said. “A good night’s sleep and everything’ll look rosy in the
morning. Don’t look so down in the mouth, honey. You’re going to like it.”
“It’s horrible! It’s—and those men! Those dreadful men.”
“ ‘For my part, I had rather be the rst man among these fellows than the second man in Rome.’ ”
Yancey struck an attitude.
Sabra looked at him dully. “Rome?”
“Plutarch, my sweet.” He kissed her; was gone with a great irt of his coat tails. She heard his
light step clattering down the imsy wooden stairs. She could distinguish his beautiful vibrant
voice among the raucous speech of the other men below.
The boy was asleep in a rude box bed drawn up beside theirs. Black Isaiah was bedded down somewhere
in a little kennel outside. Sabra sank suspiciously down on the doubtful mattress. The walls of

the room were wafer thin; mere pine slats with cracks between. From the street below came women’s
shrill laughter, the sound of a piano hammered horribly. Horses clattered by. Voices came up in
jocose greeting; there were conversations and arguments excruciatingly prolonged beneath her
window.
“I was sellin’ a thousand beef steers one time—holdin’ a herd of about three thousand—and me and my
foreman, we was countin’ the cattle as they come between us. Well, the steers was wild long- legged
coasters—and run! Say, they come through between us like scairt wolves, and I lost the count …”
“Heard where the Mullins gang rode in there this morning and cleaned up the town—both banks—eleven
thousand in one and nineteen thousand in the other, and when they come out it looked like the whole
county’d rallied against ’em.…”
“Say, he’s a bad hombre, that fella. Got a poisoned tongue, like a rattlesnake.… Spades trump?”
“No, hearts. Say, I would of known how to handle him. One time we was campin’ on Amarillo Creek …”
A loud knock at the door opposite Sabra’s room. The knock repeated. Then a woman’s voice, metallic,
high. “Quien es? Quien es?” The impatient rattle of a door knob, and a man’s gru voice.
A long-drawn wail in the street below, “Oh, Joe! He-e-e-ere’s your mule!” followed by a burst of
laughter.
Yet somehow she had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion, only to be awakened by pistol shots, a
series of blood-curdling yells, the crash and tinkle of broken glass. Then came screams of women,
the sound of horses galloping. She lay there, cowering. Cim stirred in his bed, sighed deeply,
slept again. She was too terri ed to go to the window. Her shivering seemed to shake the bed. She
wanted to waken the child for comfort, for company. She summoned courage to go to the window;
peered fearfully out into the dim street below. Nothing. No one in the street. Yancey’s bleeding
body was not lying in the road; no masked men. Nothing again but the clink of glasses and plates;
the tinny piano, the slap of cards.
She longed with unutterable longing, not for the sweet security of her bed back in Wichita—that
seemed unreal now—but for those

nights in the wagon on the prairie with no sound but the rustle of the scrub oaks, the occasional
stamp of horses’ hoofs on dry clay, the rippling of a near-by stream. She looked at her little gold
watch, all engraved with a bird and a branch and a waterfall and a church spire. It was only nine.
It was midnight when Yancey came in. She sat up in bed in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown.
Her eyes, in her white face, were two black holes burned in a piece of paper.
“What was it? What was it?”
“What was what? Why aren’t you asleep, sugar?”
“Those shots. And the screaming. And the men hollering.” “Shots?” He was unstrapping his broad
leather belt with its twin
six-shooters whose menacing heads peered just above their holsters. He wore it always now. It came,
in time, to represent for her a sinister symbol of all the terrors, all the perils that lay waiting
for them in this new existence. “Why, sugar, I don’t recollect hearing any——Oh—that!” He threw back
his great head and laughed. “That was just a cowboy, feeling high, shooting out the lights over in
Strap Turket’s saloon. On his way home and having a little fun with the boys. Scare you, did it?”
He came over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged away from him, furious. She pressed
her hand frantically to her forehead. It was cold and wet. She was panting a little. “I won’t bring
my boy up in a town like this. I won’t. I’m going back. I’m going back home, I tell you.”
“Wait till morning, anyhow, won’t you, honey?” he said, and took her in his arms.
Next morning was, somehow, magically, next morning, with the terrors of the night vanished quite.
The sun was shining. For a moment Sabra had the illusion that she was again at home in her own bed
at Wichita. Then she realized that this was because she had been awakened by a familiar sound. It
was the sound of Isaiah’s voice somewhere below in the dusty yard. He was polishing Yancey’s boots,
spitting on them industriously and singing as he rubbed. His husky sweet voice came up to her as
she lay there.

Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’ Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’ Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’
Ah wanta go to heab’n when ah die. Come on, sister, wid yo’ ups an’ downs, Wanta go to heab’n when
ah die,
De angels waitin’ fo’ to gib yo’ a crown, Wanta go to heab’n when ah die.
Lugubrious though the words were, Sabra knew he was utterly happy.
There was much to be done—a dwelling to be got somehow—a place in which to house the newspaper
plant. If necessary, Yancey said, they could live in the rear and set up the printing and law o ce
in the front. Almost everyone who conducted a business in the town did this. “Houses are mighty
scarce,” Yancey said, making a great masculine snorting and snu ing at the wash bowl as they
dressed. “It’s take what you can get or live in a tent. I heard last night that Doc Nisbett’s got a
good house. Five rooms, and he’ll furnish us with water. There’s a dozen families after it, and
Doc’s as independent as a hog on ice.”
Sabra rather welcomed this idea of combining o ce and home. She would be near him all day. As soon
as breakfast was over she and Yancey fared forth, leaving Cim in Isaiah’s care (under many and
detailed instructions from Sabra). She had put on her black grosgrain silk with the three box
pleats on each side, trimmed with the passementerie and jet buttons—somewhat wrinkled from its long
stay in the trunk—and her modish hat with the ve ostrich plumes and the pink roses that had cost
twelve dollars and fty cents in Wichita, and her best black buttoned kid shoes and her black kid
gloves. In the tightly basqued black silk she was nineteen inches round the waist and very proud of
it. Her dark eyes, slightly shadowed now, what with weariness, excitement, and loss of sleep, were
enormous beneath the brim of the romantic black plumed hat.

Yancey, seeing her thus attired in splendor after almost a fortnight of the gray cheviot, struck an
attitude of dazzlement. Blank verse leaped to his ready lips. “ ‘But who is this, what thing of sea
or land,—female of sex it seems—that so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, comes this way sailing, like a
stately ship of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles of Javan or Gadire, with all her bravery on.…’ ”
“Oh, now, Yancey, don’t talk nonsense. It’s only my second-best black grosgrain.”
“You’re right, my darling. Even Milton has no words for such beauty.”
“Do hurry, dear. We’ve so much to do.”
With his curling locks, his broad-brimmed white sombrero, his high-heeled boots, his ne white
shirt, the ample skirts of his Prince Albert spreading and swooping with the vigor of his
movements, Yancey was an equally striking gure, though perhaps not so unusual as she, in this day
and place.
The little haphazard town lay broiling in the summer sun. The sky that Sabra was to know so well
hung at and glaring, a gray-blue metal disk, over the prairie.
“Well, Sabra honey, this isn’t so bad!” exclaimed Yancey, and looked about him largely. “ ‘Now
Morning sa ron-robed arose from the streams of Ocean to bring light to gods and men.’ ”
“Ocean!” echoed Sabra, the literal. “Mighty little water I’ve seen around here—unless you call that
desert prairie the ocean.”
“And so it is, my pet. That’s very poetic of you. The prairie’s an ocean of land.” He seemed
enormously elated—jubilant, almost. His coat tails switched; he stepped high in his ne Texas star
boots. She tucked her hand in her handsome husband’s arm. The air was sweet, and they were young,
and it was morning. Perhaps it was not going to be so dreadful, after all.
Somehow, she had yet no feeling that she, Sabra Cravat, was part of this thing. She was an
onlooker. The rst thing she noticed, as she stepped into the dust of the street in her modish dress
and hat, caused her heart to sink. The few women to be seen scuttling about wore sunbonnets and
calico—the kind of garments in which Sabra had seen the women back home in Wichita hanging up the
Monday

wash to dry on the line in the back yard. Here they came out of butcher’s shop or grocery store
with the day’s provisions in their arms; a packet of meat, tins of tomatoes or peaches, unwrapped.
After sharp furtive glances at Sabra, they vanished into this little pine shack or that.
Immediately afterward there was great agitation among the prim coarse window curtains in those
dwellings boasting such elegance.
“But the others—the other kind of women——” Sabra faltered.
Yancey misunderstood. “Plenty of the other kind in a town like this, but they aren’t stirring this
time of day.”
“Don’t be coarse, Yancey. I mean ladies like myself—that I can talk to—who’ll come calling—that
is——”
He waved a hand this way and that. “Why, you just saw some women folks, didn’t you?”
“Those!”
“Well, now, honey, you can’t expect those ladies to be wearing their best bib and tucker mornings
to do the housework in. Besides, most of the men came without their women folks. They’ll send for
them, and then you’ll have plenty of company. It isn’t every woman who’d have the courage you
showed, roughing it out here. You’re the stu that Rachel was made of, and the mother of the
Gracchi.”
Rachel was, she knew, out of the Bible; she was a little hazy about the Gracchi, but basked serene
in the knowledge that a compliment was intended.
There was the absurdly wide street—surely fty feet wide—in this little one-street town. Here and
there a straggling house or so branched o it. But the life of Osage seemed to be concentrated just
here. There were tents still to be seen serving as dwellings. Houses and stores were built of
unpainted wood. They looked as if they had been run up overnight, as indeed they had. They stared
starkly out into the wide-rutted red clay road, and the muddy road glared back at them, and the
brazen sky burned with erce intensity down on both, with never a tree or bit of green to cheer the
spirit or rest the eye. Tied to the crude hitching posts driven well into the ground were all sorts
of vehicles: buckboards, crazy carts, dilapidated wagons, mule drawn; here and there a top buggy
covered with the

dust of the prairie; and everywhere, lording it, those four-footed kings without which life in this
remote place could not have been sustained—horses of every size and type and color and degree.
Indian ponies, pintos, pack horses, lean long-legged range horses, and occasionally a ashing-eyed
creature who spurned the red clay with the disdainful hoof of one whose ancestors have known the
mesas of Spain. Direct descendants, these, of the equine patricians who, almost four hundred years
before, had been brought across the ocean by Coronado or Moscosco to the land of the Seven Cities
of Gold.
There were the sounds of the hammer and the saw, the rattle of chains, the thud of hoofs, all very
sharp and distinct, as though this mushroom town were pulling itself out of the red clay of the
prairie by its own boot straps before one’s very eyes. Crude and ugly though the scene was that now
spread itself before Sabra and Yancey, it still was not squalid. It had vitality. You sensed that
behind those bare boards people were planning and stirring mightily. There was life in the feel of
it. The very names tacked up over the store fronts had bite and sting. Sam Pack. Mott Bixler. Strap
Buckner. Ike Hawes. Clint Hopper. Jim Click.
Though they had come to town but the night before, it seemed to her that a surprising number of
people knew Yancey and greeted him as they passed down the street. “H’are you, Yancey! Howdy,
ma’am.” Loungers in doorways stared at them curiously. Cowboys loping by gave her a long hard look
that still had in it something of shyness—a boyish look, much like that with which the outlaws had
greeted her down in the draw on the prairie when they learned that she was Cim’s mother.
It struck Sabra suddenly with a little shock of discovery that the men really were doing nothing.
They lounged in doorways and against hitching posts and talked; you heard their voices in animated
conversation within saloon and store and o ce; they cantered by gracefully, and wheeled and whirled
and cantered back again. She was to learn that many of these men were not builders but scavengers.
The indomitable old ’49ers were no kin of these. They were, frequently, soft, cruel, furtive, and
avaricious. They had

gathered here to pick up what they could and move on. Some were cowmen, full of resentment against
a government that had taken the free range away from them and given it over to the homesteaders.
Deprived of their only occupation, many of these became outlaws. Equipped with six-shooters, a
deadly aim, and horsemanship that amounted to the miraculous, they took to the Gyp Hills, or the
Osage, swooping down from their hidden haunts to terrorize a town, shoot up a bank, hold up a
train, and dash out again, leaving blood behind them. They risked their lives for a few hundred
dollars. Here was a vast domain without written laws, without precedent, without the customs of
civilization; part of a great country, yet no part of its government. Here a horse was more
valuable than a human life. A horse thief, caught, was summarily hanged to the nearest tree; the
killer of a man often went free.
Down the street these two stepped in their nery, the man swaggering a little as a man should in a
white sombrero and with a pretty woman on his arm; the woman looking about her interestedly, terri
ed at what she saw and determined not to show it. If two can be said to make a procession, then
Yancey and Sabra Cravat formed quite a parade as they walked down Pawhuska Avenue in the blaze of
the morning sun. Certainly they seemed to be causing a stir. Lean rangers in buckboards turned to
stare. Loungers in doorways nudged each other, yawping. Cowboys clattering by whooped a greeting.
It was unreal, absurd, grotesque.
“Hi, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.”
Past the Red Dog Saloon. A group in chairs tilted up against the wall or standing about in
high-heeled boots and sombreros greeted Yancey now with a familiarity that astonished Sabra.
“Howdy, Cim! Hello, Yancey!”
“He called you Cim!”
He ignored her surprised remark. Narrowly he was watching them as he passed. “Boys are up to
something. If they try to get funny while you’re here with me …”
Sabra, glancing at the group from beneath her shielding hat brim, did see that they were behaving
much like a lot of snickering schoolboys who are preparing to let y a bombardment of

snowballs. There was nudging, there was whispering, an air of secret mischief afoot.
“Why are they—what do you think makes them——” Sabra began, a tri e nervously.
“Oh, they’re probably xing up a little initiation for me,” Yancey explained, his tone light but his
eye wary. “Don’t get nervous. They won’t dare try any monkey-shines while you’re with me.”
“But who are they?” He evaded her question. She persisted. “Who are they?”
“I can’t say for sure. But I suspect they’re the boys that did Pegler dirt.”
“Pegler? Who is—oh, isn’t that the man—the editor—the one who was found dead—shot dead on the banks
of the——Yancey! Do you mean they did it!”
“I don’t say they did it—exactly. They know more than is comfortable, even for these parts. I was
inquiring around last night, and everybody shut up like a clam. I’m going to nd out who killed
Pegler and print it in the rst number of the Oklahoma Wigwam.”
“Oh, Yancey! Yancey, I’m frightened!” She clung tighter to his arm. The grinning mirthless faces of
the men on the saloon porch seemed to her like the fanged and snarling muzzles of wolves in a pack.
“Nothing to be frightened of, honey. They know me. I’m no Pegler they can scare. They don’t like my
white hat, that’s the truth of it. Dared me last night down at the Sunny Southwest Saloon to wear
it this morning. Just to try me out. They won’t have the guts to come out in the open——”
The sentence never was nished. Sabra heard a curious buzzing sound past her ear. Something
sang—zing! Yancey’s white sombrero went spinning into the dust of the road.
Sabra’s mouth opened as though she were screaming, but the sounds she would have made emerged,
feebly, as a croak.
“Stay where you are,” Yancey ordered, his voice low and even. “The dirty dogs.” She stood trans
xed. She could not have run if she had wanted to. Her legs seemed suddenly no part of her—remote,
melting beneath her, and yet pricked with a thousand pins and

needles. Yancey strolled leisurely over to where the white hat lay in the dust. He stooped
carelessly, his back to the crowd on the saloon porch, picked up the hat, surveyed it, and reached
toward his pocket for his handkerchief. At that movement there was a rush and a scramble on the
porch. Tilted chairs leaped forward, heels clattered, a door slammed. The white-aproned proprietor
who, tray in hand, had been standing idly in the doorway, vanished as though he had been blotted
out by blackness. Of the group only three men remained. One of these leaned insolently against a
porch post, a second stood warily behind him, and a third was edging prudently toward the closed
door. There was nothing to indicate who had
red the shot that had sent Yancey’s hat spinning.
Yancey, now half turned toward them, had taken his ne white handkerchief from his pocket, had
shaken out its ample folds with a gesture of elegant leisure, and, hat in hand, was icking the dust
from his headgear. This done he surveyed the hat critically, seemed to nd it little the worse for
its experience unless, perhaps, one excepts the two neat round holes that were drilled, back and
front, through the peak of its crown. He now placed it on his head again with a gesture almost
languid, tossed the ne handkerchief into the road, and with almost the same gesture, or with
another so lightning quick that Sabra’s eye never followed it, his hand went to his hip. There was
the crack of a shot. The man who was edging toward the door clapped his hand to his ear and brought
his hand away and looked at it, and it was darkly smeared. Yancey still stood in the road, his hand
at his thigh, one slim foot, in its ne high-heeled Texas star boot, advanced carelessly. His great
head was lowered menacingly. His eyes, steel gray beneath the brim of the white sombrero, looked as
Sabra had never before seen them look. They were terrible eyes, merciless, cold, hypnotic. She
could only think of the eyes of the rattler that Yancey had whipped to death with the wagon whip on
the trip across the prairie.
“A three-cornered piece, you’ll nd it, Lon. The Cravat sheep brand.”
“Can’t you take a joke, Yancey?” whined one of the three, his eyes on Yancey’s gun hand.

“Joke—hell!” snarled the man who had been nicked. His hand was clapped over his ear. “God help you,
Cravat.”
“He always has,” replied Yancey, piously.
“If your missus wasn’t with you——” began the man whom Yancey had called Lon. Perhaps the rough joke
would have ended grimly enough. But here, suddenly, Sabra herself took a hand in the proceedings.
Her fright had vanished. These were no longer men, evil, sinister, to be feared, but mean little
boys to be put in their place. She now advanced on them in the majesty of her plumes and her silk,
her ne eyes ashing, her gloved fore nger admonishing them as if they were indeed naughty
children. She was every inch the descendant of the Marcys of France and the very essence of that
iron woman, Felice Venable.
“Don’t you ‘missus’ me! You’re a lot of miserable, good-for- nothing loafers, that’s what you are!
Shooting at people in the streets. You leave my husband alone. I declare, I’ve a notion to——” For
one ridiculous dreadful moment it looked as though she meant to slap the leathery bearded cheek of
the bad man known as Lon Yountis. Certainly she raised her little hand in its neat black kid. The
eyes of the three were popping. Lon Yountis ducked his head exactly like an urchin who is about to
be smacked by the schoolmarm. Then, with a yelp of pure terror he ed into the
saloon, followed by the other two.
Sabra stood a moment. It really looked as though she might make after them. But she thought better
of it and sailed down the steps in triumph to behold a crushed, a despairing Yancey.
“Oh, my God, Sabra! What have you done to me!” “What’s the matter?”
“This time to-morrow it’ll be all over the whole Southwest, from Mexico to Arkansas, that Yancey
Cravat hid behind a woman’s petticoats.”
“But you didn’t. They can’t say so. You shot him very nicely in the ear, darling.” Thus had a scant
eighteen hours in the Oklahoma country twisted her normal viewpoint so askew that she did not even
notice the grotesquerie of what she had just said.

“They’re telling it now, in there. My God, a woman’s got no call to interfere when men are having a
little dispute.”
“Dispute! Why, Yancey Cravat! He shot your hat right o your head!”
“What of it! Little friendly shooting.”
The enormity of this example of masculine clannishness left her temporarily speechless with
indignation. “Let’s be getting on,” Yancey continued, calmly. “If we’re going to look at Doc
Nisbett’s house we’d better look at it. There are only two or three to be had in the whole town,
and his is the pick of them. It’s central” (Central! she thought, looking about her) “and according
to what he said last night there’s a room in the front big enough for getting out the paper. It’ll
have to be newspaper and law o ce in one. Then there are four rooms in the back to live in.
Plenty.”
“Oh, plenty,” echoed Sabra, thinking of the nine or ten visiting Venables always comfortably tucked
away in the various high- ceilinged bedrooms in the Wichita house.
They resumed their walk. Sabra wondered if she had imagined the shooting outside the Red Dog
Saloon.
Doc Nisbett (veterinarian), shirt sleeved, shrewd, with generations of New England ancestry behind
him, was seated in a chair tipped up against the front of his coveted property. Nothing of the
brilliant Southwest sun had mellowed the vinegar of his chemical make-up. In the rush for Territory
town sites at the time of the Opening he had managed to lay his gnarled hands on ve choice pieces.
On these he erected dwellings, tilted his chair up against each in turn, and took his pick of
late-comers frantic for some sort of shelter they could call a home. That perjury, thieving,
trickery, gun play, and murder had gone into the acquiring of these—as well as many other
—sites was not considered important or, for that matter, especially interesting.
The dwelling itself looked like one of Cim’s childish drawings of a house. The roof was an inverted
V; there was a front door, a side door, and a spindling little porch. It was a box, a shelter
merely, as angular and unlovely as the man who owned it. The walls were no more than partitions,
the oors boards laid on dirt.

Taking her cue from Yancey—“Lovely,” murmured Sabra, agonized. The mantel ornaments that had been
Cousin Dabney’s wedding present! The hand-woven monogrammed linen! The silver cake dish with the
carefree cupids. The dozen solid silver co ee spoons! “Do very nicely. Perfectly comfortable. I
see. I see. I see.”
“There you are!” They stood again on the porch, the tour completed. Yancey clapped his hands
together gayly, as though by so doing he had summoned a genie who had tossed up the house before
their very eyes. In the discussion of monthly rental he had been a child in the hands of this lean
and grasping New Englander. “There you are! That’s all settled.” He struck an attitude. “ ‘Survey
our empire, and behold our home!’ ”
“Heh, hold on a minute,” rasped Doc Nisbett. “How about water?” “Sabra, honey, you settle these
little matters between you—you and the Doc—will you? I’ve got to run down the street and see Jesse
Rickey about putting up the press and setting up the type racks and helping me haul the form
tables, and then we’ve got the furniture to buy for the house. Meet you down the street at Hefner’s
Furniture
Store. Ten minutes.”
He was o , with a irt of his coat tails. She would have called, “Yancey! Don’t leave me!” but for a
prideful reluctance to show fear before this dour-visaged man with the tight lips and the gimlet
eyes. From the rst he had seemed to regard her with disfavor. She could not imagine why. It was, of
course, his Puritan New England revulsion against her plumes, her silks, her faintly Latin beauty.
“Well, now,” repeated Doc Nisbett, nasally, “about water.” “Water?”
“How much you going to need? Renting this house depends on how much water you think you going to
need. How many barrels.”
Sabra had always taken water for granted, like air and sunshine. It was one of the elements. It was
simply there. But since leaving Wichita there was always talk of water. Yancey, on the prairie
journey, made it the basis of their camping site.
“Oh, barrels,” she now repeated, trying to appear intensely practical. “Well, let—me—see. There’s
cooking, of course, and all the cleaning around the house, and drinking, and bathing. I always

give Cim his bath in the evening if I can. You wouldn’t believe how dirty that child gets by the
end of the day. His knees—oh, yes—well, I should think ten barrels a day would be enough.”
“Ten barrels,” said Doc Nesbitt, in a at voice utterly devoid of expression, “a day.”
“I should think that would be ample,” Sabra repeated, judiciously. Doc Nisbett now regarded Sabra
with a look of active dislike. Then he did a strange thing. He walked across the little porch, shut
the front door, locked it, put the key in his pocket, seated himself in the chair and tilted it up
against the wall at exactly the angle at
which they had come upon him.
Sabra stood there. Seeing her, it would have been almost impossible to believe that anyone so
bravely decked out in silk and plumes and pink roses could present a gure so bewildered, so
disconsolate, so defeated. Literally, she did not know what to do. She had met and surmounted many
strange experiences in these last ten days. But she had been born of generations of women to whom
men had paid homage. Perhaps in all her life she had never encountered the slightest discourtesy in
a man, much less this abysmal boorishness.
She looked at him, her face white, shocked. She looked up, in embarrassment, at the glaring steel
sky; she looked down at the blinding red dust, she looked helplessly in the direction that Yancey
had so blithely taken. She glanced again at Doc Nisbett, propped so woodenly against the wall of
his hateful house. His eye was as cold, as glassy, as unseeing as the eye of a dead sh.
She should, of course, have gone straight up to him and said, “Do you mean that ten barrels are too
much? I didn’t know. I am new to all this. Whatever you say.”
But she was young, and inexperienced, and full of pride, and terribly o ended. So without another
word she turned and marched down the dusty street. Her head in its plumed hat was high. On either
cheek burned a scarlet patch. Her eyes, in her e ort to keep back the hot tears, were blazing,
liquid, enormous. She saw nothing. From the saloons that lined the street there came, even at this
hour of the morning, yelps and the sound of music.

And then a fearful thing happened to Sabra Cravat.
Down the street toward her came a galloping cowboy in sombrero and chaps and six-shooters. Sabra
was used to such as he. Full of her troubles, she was scarcely aware that she had glanced at him.
How could she know that he was just up from the plains of Texas, that this raw town represented for
him the height of e ete civilization, that he was, in celebration of his arrival, already howling
drunk as be ts a cowboy just o the range, and that never before in his life (he was barely
twenty-three) had he seen a creature so gorgeous as this which now came toward him, all silk,
plumes, roses, jet, scarlet cheeks, and great liquid eyes. Up he galloped; stared, wheeled, ung
himself o his horse, ran toward her in his high-heeled cowboy boots (strangely enough all that
Sabra could recall about him afterward were those boots as he came toward her. The gay tops were of
shiny leather, and alternating around them was the gure of a dancing girl with aring skirts, and a
poker hand of cards which later she learned was a royal ush, all handsomely embossed on the patent
leather cu s of the boots). She realized, in a ash of pure terror, that he was making straight for
her. She stood, petri ed. He came nearer, he stood before her, he threw his arms like steel bands
about her, he kissed her full on the lips, released her, leaped on his horse, and was o with a
blood-curdling yelp and a clatter and a whirl of dust.
She thought that she was going to be sick, there, in the road. Then she began to run, eetly but
awkwardly, in her ounced and bustled silken skirts. Hefner’s Furniture Store. Hefner’s Furniture
Store. Hefner’s Furniture Store. She saw it at last. Hefner’s Furniture and Undertaking Parlors. A
crude wooden shack, like the rest. She ran in. Yancey. Yancey! Everything looked dim to her
bewildered and sun-blinded eyes. Someone came toward her. A large moist man, in shirt sleeves.
Hefner, probably. My husband. My husband, Yancey Cravat. No. Sorry, ma’am. Ain’t been in, I know
of. Anything I can do for you, ma’am?
She blurted it, hysterically. “A man—a cowboy—I was walking along—he jumped o his horse—he—I never
saw him b——he

kissed me—there on the street in broad daylight—a cowboy—he kissed——”
“Why, ma’am, don’t take on so. Young fella o the range, prob’ly. Up from Texas, more’n likely, and
never did see a gorgeous critter like yourself, if you’ll pardon my mentioning it.”
Her voice rose in her hysteria. “You don’t understand! He kissed me. He k-k-k-k——” racking sobs.
“Now, now, lady. He was drunk, and you kind of went to his head. He’ll ride back to Texas, and
you’ll be none the worse for it.”
At this calloused viewpoint of a tragedy she broke down completely and buried her head on her
folded arms atop the object nearest at hand. Her slim body shook with her sobs. Her tears
owed. She cried aloud like a child.
But at that a plaintive but rm note of protest entered Mr.
Hefner’s voice.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but that’s velvet you’re crying on, and water spots velvet something terrible.
If you’d just lean on something else …”
She raised herself from the object on which she had collapsed, weeping, and looked at it with
brimming eyes that widened in horror as she realized that she had showered her tears on that pride
of Hefner’s Furniture and Undertaking establishment, the newly arrived white velvet co n (child’s
size) intended for show window purposes alone.

7

From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the e ect that the house had been rented
by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra’s. Sabra was inconsolable, but Yancey
did not once reproach her for her mistake. It was characteristic of him that he was most charming
and considerate in crises which might have been expected to infuriate him. “Never mind, sugar.
Don’t take on like that. We’ll nd a house. And, anyway, we’re here. That’s the main thing. God,
when I think of those years in Wichita!”
“Why, Yancey! I thought you were happy there.”
“ ‘A prison’d soul, lapped in Elysium.’ Almost ve years in one place—that’s the longest stretch
I’ve ever done, honey. Five years, back and forth like a trail horse; walking down to the Wigwam o
ce in the morning, setting up personal and local items and writing editorials for a smug citizenry
interested in nothing but the new waterworks. Walking back to dinner at noon, sitting on the
veranda evenings, looking at the vegetables in the garden or the Venables in the house until I
couldn’t tell vegetables from Venables and began to think, by God, that I was turning into one or
the other myself.”
He groaned with relief, stretched his mighty arms, shook himself like a great shaggy lion. In all
this welter of red clay and Indians and shirt sleeves and tobacco juice and drought he seemed to nd
a beauty and an exhilaration that eluded Sabra quite. But then Sabra, after those rst two days,
had ceased to search for a reason for anything. She met and accepted the most grotesque, the most
fantastic happenings. When she looked back on the things she had done and the things she had said
in the rst few hours of her

Oklahoma experience it was as though she were tolerantly regarding the naïvetés of a child. Ten
barrels of water a day! She knew now that water, in this burning land, was a precious thing to be
measured out like wine. Life here was an anachronism, a great crude joke. It was hard to realize
that while the rest of the United States, in this year of 1889, was living a conventionally
civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws,
millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been
set back according to the frontier standards of half a century earlier. Literally she was
pioneering in a wilderness surrounded but untouched by civilization.
Yancey had reverted. Always—even in his staidest Wichita incarnation—a somewhat incredibly romantic
gure, he now was remarkable even in this town of fantastic humans gathered from every corner of the
brilliantly picturesque Southwest. His towering form, his curling locks, his massive head, his
vibrant voice, his dashing dress, his orid speech, his magnetic personality drew attention
wherever he went. On the day following their arrival Yancey had taken from his trunk a pair of
silver-mounted ivory- handled six-shooters and a belt and holster studded with silver. She had
never before seen them. She had not known that he possessed these grim and gaudy trappings. His
white sombrero he had banded with a rattlesnake skin of gold and silver, with glass eyes, a
treasure also produced from the secret trunk, as well as a pair of gold- mounted spurs which
further enhanced the Texas star boots. Thus bedecked for his legal and editorial pursuits he was by
far the best dressed and most spectacular male in all the cycloramic Oklahoma country. He had
always patronized a good tailor, and because the local talent was still so limited in this new
community he later sent as far as San Antonio, Texas, when his wardrobe needed replenishing.
Sabra learned many astounding things in these rst few days, and among the most terrifying were the
things she learned about the husband to whom she had been happily married for more than ve years.
She learned, for example, that this Yancey Cravat was famed

as the deadliest shot in all the deadly shooting Southwest. He had the gift of being able to point
his six-shooters without sighting, as one would point with a nger. It was a direction-born gift in
him and an enviable one in this community. He was one of the few who could draw and re two
six-shooters at once with equal speed and accuracy. His hands would go to his hips with a lightning
gesture that yet was so smooth, so economical that the onlooker’s eye scarcely followed it. He
could hit his mark as he walked, as he ran, as he rode his horse. He practised a great deal. From
the back door of their cabin Sabra and Cim and rolling-eyed Isaiah used to stand watching him. He
sometimes talked of wind and trajectory. You had to make allowance mathematically, he said, for
this ever-blowing Oklahoma wind. Sabra was vaguely uneasy. Wichita had not been exactly e ete, and
Dodge City, Kansas, was notoriously a gun-play town. But here no man walked without his
six-shooters strapped to his body. On the very day of her harrowing encounter with Doc Nisbett and
the cowboy, Sabra, her composure regained, had gone with Yancey to see still another house owner
about the possible renting of his treasure. The man was found in his crude one-room shack which he
used as a combination dwelling and land o ce. He and Yancey seemed to know each other. Sabra was no
longer astonished to nd that Yancey, twenty-four hours after his arrival, appeared to be
acquainted with everyone in the town. The man glanced up at them from the rough pine table at which
he was writing.
“Howdy, Yancey!” “Howdy, Cass!”
Yancey, all grace, performed an introduction. The lean, leather- skinned house owner wiped his palm
on his pants’ seat in courtly fashion and, thus puri ed, extended a hospitable hand to Sabra.
Yancey revealed to him their plight.
“Well, now, say, that’s plumb terr’ble, that is. Might be I can help you out—you and your good lady
here. But say, Yancey, just let me step out, will you, to the corner, and mail this here letter.
The bag’s goin’ any minute now.”

He licked and stamped the envelope, rose, and took from the table beside him his broad leather belt
with its pair of holstered six- shooters, evidently temporarily laid aside for comfort while
writing. This he now strapped quickly about his waist with the same unconcern that another man
would use in slipping into his coat. He merely was donning conventional street attire for the
well-dressed man of the locality. He picked up his sheaf of envelopes and stepped out. In three
minutes he was back, and a ably ready to talk terms with them.
It was, perhaps, this simple and sinister act, more than anything she had hitherto witnessed, that
impressed Sabra with the utter lawlessness of this new land to which her husband had brought her.
This house, so dearly held by the man called Cass, turned out to be a four-room dwelling inadequate
to their needs, and they were in despair at the thought of being obliged to wait until a house
could be built. Then Yancey had a brilliant idea. He found a two-room cabin made of rough boards.
This was hauled to the site of the main house, plastered, and—added to it—provided them with a
six-room combination dwelling, newspaper plant, and law o ce. There was all the splendor of sitting
room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen to live in. One room of the small attached cabin was a
combination law and newspaper o ce. The other served as composing room and print shop. The Hefner
Furniture and Undertaking Parlors provided them with furniture—a large wooden bedstead to t
Sabra’s mattress and spring; a small bed for Cim; tables, chairs—the plainest of everything. The
few bits of furnishing and ornament that Sabra had brought with her from Wichita were
fortunately—or unfortunately—possessed of the enduring beauty of objects which have been carefully
made by hands exquisitely aware of line, texture, color, and further enhanced by the rich mellow
patina that comes with the years. Her pieces of silver, of china, of ne linen were as out of place
in this roughly furnished cabin of unpainted lumber as a court lady in a peasant’s hovel. In two
days Sabra was a housewife established in her routine as though she had been at it for years. A pan
of biscuits in the oven of the wood-burning kitchen

stove; a dress pattern of calico, cut out and ready for basting, on the table in the sitting room.
Setting up the newspaper plant and law o ce was not so simple. Yancey, for example, was inclined to
write his rst editorial entitled Whither Oklahoma? before the hand press had been put together. He
was more absorbed in the e ect of the sign tacked up over the front of the shop than he was in the
proper mechanical arrangement of the necessary appliances inside. THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM, read the
sign in
block letters two feet high, so that the little cabin itself was almost obscured. Then, beneath, in
letters scarcely less impressive: YANCEY CRAVAT, PROP. AND EDITOR. ATTORNEY AT LAW. NOTARY.
The placing of this sign took the better part of a day, during which time all other work was
suspended. While the operation was in progress Yancey crossed the road fty times, ostensibly to
direct matters from a proper vantage point of criticism, but really to bask in the dazzling e ect
of the bold fat black letters. As always in the course of such proceedings on the part of the
laboring male there was much hoarse shouting, gesticulation, and general rumpus. To Sabra, coming
to the door from time to time, dish towel or ladle in hand, the clamor seemed out of all proportion
to the results achieved. She thought (privately) that two women could have
nished the job in half the time with one tenth the fuss. She still was far too feminine, tactful,
and in love with her husband to say so. Cim enjoyed the whole thing enormously, as did his black
satellite, bodyguard, and playmate, Isaiah. They capered, shouted, whooped, and added much to the
din.
Yancey from across the road—“Lift her up a little higher that end!”
“What say?” from the perspiring Jesse Rickey, his assistant. “That end—up! NO! UP! I said, UP!”
“Well, which end, f’r Chris’ sakes, right or left?”
“Right! RIGHT! God Almighty, man, don’t you know your right from your left?”
“Easy now. E-e-e-esy! Over now. Over! There! That’s—no—yeh— now head her a little this way.…”

“How’s that?”
“Oh, my land’s sakes alive!” thought Sabra, going back to her orderly kitchen. “Men make such a lot
of work of nothing.”
It was her rst admission that the male of the species might be fallible. A product of Southern
training, even though a daily witness, during her girlhood, to the dominance of her matriarchal
mother over her weak and war-shattered father, she had been bred to the tradition that the male was
always right, always to be deferred to. Yancey, still her passionate lover, had always treated her
tenderly, as a charming little fool, and this rôle she had meekly—even gratefully—accepted. But now
suspicion began to rear its ugly head. These last three weeks had shown her that the male was often
mistaken, as a sex, and that Yancey was almost always wrong as an individual. But these frightening
discoveries she would not yet admit even to herself. Also that he was enthralled by the dramatics
of any plan he might conceive, but that he often was too impatient of its mechanics to carry it
through to completion.
“Yancey, this case of type’s badly pied.” Jesse Rickey, journeyman printer and periodic drunkard,
was responsible for this misfortune, having dropped a case, face down, in the dust of the road
while assisting Yancey in the moving. “It’ll have to be sorted before you can get out a paper.”
“Oh, Rickey’ll tend to that. I’ve got a lot of important work to do. Editorials to write, news to
get, lot of real estate transfers—and I’m going to nd out who killed Pegler and print it in the rst
issue if it takes the last drop of blood in me.”
“Oh, please don’t. What does it matter! He’s dead. Maybe he did shoot himself. And besides, you’ve
got Cim and me to think of. You can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Let that Yountis gang get away with a thing like that and anything is likely to happen to me; the
same thing that happened to him. No, sir! I’ll show them, rst crack, that the Oklahoma Wigwam
prints all the news, all the time, knowing no law but the Law of God and the government of these
United States! Say, that’s a pretty good slogan. Top of the page, just above the editorial column.”

In the end it was she who sorted the case of pied type. The ve years of Yancey’s newspaper
ownership in Wichita had familiarized her, almost unconsciously, with many of the mechanical
aspects of a newspaper printing shop. She even liked the smell of printer’s ink, of the metal type,
of the paper wet from the hand press. She found that the brass and copper thin spaces, used for
setting up ads, had no proper container, and at a loss to nd one she hit upon the idea of using a
mu n tin until a proper receptacle could be found. It never was found, and the mu n tin still
served after a quarter of a century had gone by. She was, by that time, sentimental about it, and
superstitious.
The hand press was nally set up, and the little job press, and the case rack containing the type.
The rollers were in place, and their little stock of paper. Curiously enough, though neither Yancey
nor Sabra was conscious of it, it was she who had directed most of this manual work and who had
indeed actually performed much of it, with Isaiah and Jesse Rickey to help her. Yancey was o and up
the street every ten minutes. Returning, he would lose himself in the placing of his law library,
his books of reference, and his favorite volumes, for which he contended there was not enough shelf
room in the house proper. He had brought along boxes of books stowed away in the covered wagons. If
the combined book wealth contained in all the houses, o ces, and shops of the entire Oklahoma
country so newly settled could have been gathered in one spot it probably would have been found to
number less than this preposterous library of the paradoxical Yancey Cravat. Glib and showy though
he was with his book knowledge Yancey still had in these volumes of his the absorption of the true
book lover. He gave more attention to the carpenter who put up these crude bookshelves than he had
bestowed upon the actual coupling of the two cabins when rst they had moved in. The books he
insisted on placing himself, picking them up, one by one, and losing himself now in this page, now
in that, so that at the end of the long hot afternoon he had accomplished nothing. Blackstone and
Kent (ine ectual enough in this lawless land) were shocked to nd themselves hobnobbing side by side
with Childe Harold and the Decameron. Culpepper’s Torts

nestled cosily between the shameless tale of the sprightly Wife of Bath and Yancey’s new and
joyously discovered copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyám.
Lost to all else he would call happily in to Sabra as she bent over the case rack, her cheek
streaked with ink, her ngers stained, her head close to Jesse Rickey’s bleary-eyed one as she
sorted type or
lled the mu n tin with the metal thin spaces: “Sabe! Oh, Sabe— listen to this.” He would clear his
throat. “ ‘Son of Nestor, delight of my heart, mark the ashing of bronze through the echoing halls,
and the ashing of gold and of amber and of silver and of ivory. Such like, methinks, is the court
of Olympian Zeus within, for the world of things that are here; wonder comes over me as I look
thereon.’ … God, Sabra, it’s as ne as the Old Testament. Finer!”
“ ‘The world of things that are here,’ ” echoed Sabra, not bitterly, but with grave common sense.
“Perhaps if you’d pay more attention to those, and less to your nonsense in books about gold and
silver and ivory, we might get settled.”
But he was ready with a honeyed reply culled from the same book so dear to his heart and his
grandiloquent tongue. “ ‘Be not wroth with me hereat, goddess and queen.’ ”
The goddess and queen pushed her hair back from her forehead with a sooty hand, leaving still
another smudge of printer’s ink upon that worried surface.
Jesse Rickey, the printer (known, naturally, to his familiars as “Gin” Rickey, owing to his periods
of intemperance), and black Isaiah were, next to Sabra, most responsible for the astounding fact
that the Cravat family nally was settled in house and o ce. The front door, which was the o ce
entrance, faced the wide wallow of the main street. The back and the side doors of the dwelling
looked out on a stretch of Oklahoma red clay, littered with the empty tin cans that mark any new
American settlement, and especially one whose drought is relieved by the thirst-quenching coolness
of tinned tomatoes and peaches. Perhaps the canned tomato, as much as anything, made possible the
settling of the vast West and Southwest. In the midst of this clay and refuse, in a sort of
shed-kennel, lived little Isaiah; rather, he slept there, like a faithful dog, for all day

long he was about the house and the printing o ce, tireless, willing, invaluable. He belonged to
Sabra, body and soul, as completely as though the Civil War had never been. A little servant of
twelve, born to labor, he became as dear to Sabra, as accustomed, as one of her own children,
despite her Southern training and his black skin. He dried the dishes, a towel tied around his
neck; he laid the table; he was playmate and nursemaid for Cim; he ran errands, a swift and
splay-footed Mercury; he was a born reporter, and in the course of his day’s scurrying about the
town on this errand or that brought into Sabra’s kitchen more items of news and gossip (which were
later transferred to the newspaper o ce) than a whole sta of trained newspaper men could have
done. He was so little, so black, so lithe, so harmless looking, that his presence was, more often
than not, completely overlooked. The saloon loungers, cowboys, rangers, and homesteaders in and
about the town alternately spoiled and plagued him. One minute they were throwing him dimes in the
dust for his rendition of his favorite song:
King Jesus come a-ridin’ on a milk-white steed, Wid a rainbow on his shoulder.
The next moment they were making his splay-feet dance frenziedly as the bullets from their
six-shooters plopped playfully all about him and his kinky hair seemed to grow straight and dank
with terror.
Sabra, in time, taught him to read, write, and gure. He was quick to learn, industrious, lovable.
He thought he actually belonged to her. Cim was beginning to learn the alphabet, and as Sabra bent
over the child, Isaiah, too, would bring his little stool out of its corner. Perched on it like an
intelligent monkey he mastered the curlycues in their proper sequence. He cleared the unsightly
back yard of its litter of tin cans and refuse. Together he and Sabra even tried to plant a little
garden in this barren sanguine clay. More than anything else, Sabra missed the trees and owers. In
the whole town of almost ten thousand inhabitants there were two trees: stunted jack oaks.
Sometimes she dreamed of lilies of the valley—the

translucent, almost liquid green of their stems and leaves, the perfumed purity of their white
bells.
All this, however, came later. These rst few days were lled to over owing with the labor of making
the house habitable and the o ce and plant t for Yancey’s professional pursuits. Already his
talents as a silver-tongue were being sought in defense of murderers, horse thieves, land grabbers,
and more civil o enders in all the surrounding towns and counties. It was known that the average
jury was wax in his hands. Once started on his plea it was as though he were painting the emotions
that succeeded each other across the faces of the twelve (or less, depending on the number
available in the community) good men (or good enough) and true. A tremolo tone—their eyes began to
moisten, their mouth muscles to sag with sympathy; a wave of the hand, a lilt of the golden
voice—they gu awed with mirth. Even a horse thief, that blackest of criminals in this country, was
said to have a bare chance for his life if Yancey Cravat could be induced to plead for him—and
provided always, of course, that the posse had not dealt with the o ender rst.
Yancey, from the time he rose in the morning until he went to bed late at night, was always a
little overstimulated by the whisky he drank. This, together with a natural fearlessness, an
enormous vitality, and a devouring interest in everybody and everything in this fantastic Oklahoma
country, gained him friends and enemies in almost equal proportion.
In the ten days following their arrival in Osage, his one interest seemed to be the tracing of the
Pegler murder—for he sco ed at the idea that his predecessor’s death was due to any other cause.
He asked his question everywhere, even in the most foolhardy circumstances, and watched the e ect
of his question. Pegler had been a Denver newspaper man; known, respected, decent. Yancey had sworn
to bring his murderers to justice.
Sabra argued with him, almost hysterically, but in vain. “You didn’t do anything about helping them
catch the Kid, out there on the prairie, when they were looking for him, and you knew where he
was—or just about—and he had killed a man, too, and robbed a bank, and I don’t know what all.”

“That was di erent. The Kid’s di erent,” Yancey answered, unreasonably and infuriatingly.
“Di erent! How di erent? What’s this Pegler to you! They’ll kill you, too—they’ll shoot you
down—and then what shall I do?—Cim
—Cim—and I here, alone—Yancey, darling—I love you so—if anything should happen to you——” She waxed
incoherent.
“Listen, honey. Hush your crying and listen. Try to understand. The Kid’s a terror. He’s a bad one.
But it isn’t his fault. The government at Washington made him an outlaw.”
“Why, Yancey Cravat, what are you talking about? Don’t you ever say a thing like that before Cim.”
“The Kid’s father rode the range before there were fences or railroads in Kansas, and when this
part of the country was running wild with longhorn cattle that had descended straight from the
animals that the Spaniards had brought over four centuries ago. The railroads began coming in. The
settlers came with it, from the Gulf Coast, up across Texas, through the Indian Territory to the
end of steel at Abilene, Kansas. The Kid was brought up to all that. Freighters, bull whackers,
mule skinners, hunters, and cowboys— that’s all he knew. Into Dodge City, with perhaps nine months’
pay jingling in his pocket. I’ll bet neither the Kid nor his father before him ever saw a nickel or
a dime. They wouldn’t have bothered with such chicken feed. Silver dollars were the smallest coin
they knew. They worked for it, too. I’ve seen seventy- ve thousand cattle at a time waiting
shipment to the East, with lads like the Kid in charge. The Kid’s grandfather was a bu alo hunter.
The range was the only life they wanted. Along comes the government. What happens?”
“What?” breathed Sabra, as always enthralled by one of Yancey’s arguments, forgetting quite that
she must oppose this very plea.
“They take the range away from the cattle men and cowboys—the free range that never belonged to
them really, but that they had come to think of as theirs through right of use. Squatters come in,
Sooners, too, and Nesters, and then the whole rush of the Opening. The range is cut up into town
sites, and the town into lots, before their very eyes. Why, it must have sickened them—killed them
almost—to see it.”

“But that’s progress, Yancey. The country’s got to be settled.” “This was di erent. There’s never
been anything like this. Settling
a great section of a country always has been a matter of years— decades—centuries, even. But here
they swept over it in a day. You know that as well as I do. Wilderness one day; town sites the
next. And the cowboys and rangers having no more chance than chips in a ood. Can’t you see it?
Shanties where the horizon used to be; grocery stores on the old bu alo trails. They went plumb
locoed, I tell you. They couldn’t ght progress, but they could get revenge on the people who had
taken their world away from them and cut it into little strips and dirtied it.”
“You’re taking the part of criminals, of murderers, of bad men!
I’m ashamed of you! I’m afraid of you! You’re as bad as they are.”
“Now, now, Sabra. No dramatics. Leave that for me. I’m better at it. The Kid’s bad, yes. They don’t
come worse than he. And they’ll get him, eventually. But he never kills unless he has to. When he
robs a bank or holds up a train it’s in broad daylight, by God, with a hundred guns against him. He
runs a risk. He doesn’t shoot in the dark. The other fellow always has a chance. It’s three or
four, usually, against fty. He was brought up a reckless, lawless, unschooled youngster. He’s a
killer now, and he’ll die by the gun, with his boots on. But the man who fathered him needn’t be
ashamed of him. There’s no yellow in the Kid.”
For one dreadful sickening second something closed with iron
ngers around Sabra Cravat’s heart and squeezed it, and it ceased to beat. White faced, her dark
eyes searched her husband’s face. Wichita whispers. Kansas slander. But that face was all
exaltation, like the face of an evangelist, and as pure. His eyes were glowing. The iron ngers
relaxed.
“But Pegler. The men who killed Pegler. Why are they so much worse——”
“Skunks. Dirty jackals hired by white-livered politicians.” “But why? Why?”
“Because Pegler had the same idea I have—that here’s a chance to start clean, right from scratch.
Live and let live. Clean politics instead of the skulduggery all around; a new way of living and of

thinking, because we’ve had a chance to see how rotten and narrow and bigoted the other way has
been. Here everything’s fresh. It’s all to do, and we can do it. There’s never been a chance like
it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of
the other pioneers to pro t by. New England, and California, and the settlers of the Middle West—it
got away from them, and they fell into the rut. Ugly politics, ugly towns, ugly buildings, ugly
minds.” He was o again. Sabra, all impatience, stopped him.
“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 ngers——”
“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 di erent. 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 nd 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 rmness, and walked out
of the house, through the newspaper o ce, 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 e ect 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 ne 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 o ce 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 de nite strands, coarse and glossy, like ne 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 ngers 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 abby, 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 be ts 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 magni cent
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 ve feet high.
The story was told of him that when he rst 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 rst 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 at 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 gure of Pete Pitchlyn was one to command attention. Above the clamor he ordered
his drink—three ngers 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 sti en, 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 gun re 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
eck—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 o .
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 ne 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 magni cent 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 cu 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 imsy
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 ing 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 rst edition of
the Oklahoma Wigwam. Yancey stoutly maintained it was due o 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 o ce (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 e ect, 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 rst day of her coming to Osage there apparently
glowed the same urge for convention, discipline, and the old order that so red 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
rst. 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 rm 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 rst 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, ags 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 near-by
hills and plains, and all the town women who were not respectable ocked 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 passers- by. The great canvas dome, measuring
ninety by one hundred and
fty feet, was decorated with ags and bunting; cheerful, bright, gay.
It was a question whether the owner and dealer would be willing to sacri ce 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 coi ure, was temporarily unable to proceed further with her toilette
until forti ed by refreshment and repose. To this end she had ung 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 fore nger of a
hand whose little nger 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, anked 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 ction 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
gures, 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 ve-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 ggerin’ 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 near-by 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 ocked 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 nest 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
ngers 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 di culty 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 re 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 e ective entrance. A dozen
times Sabra called to him, as he sat in the front o ce 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 lled 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
rst day. She and Yancey stepped sedately down the street, with Cim’s warm wriggling ngers in her
own clasp. Sabra was a slimly elegant little gure 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 gures,
toward a gambling tent and saloon which, packed to su ocation with the worst and the best that a
frontier town has to o er, was for one short hour to become a House of God.
“Are you nervous, Yancey dear?”
“No, sugar. Though I will say I’d fty 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
o abruptly. “What’s everybody laughing at and pointing to?” Certainly passers-by were acting
strangely. Instinctively Sabra and Yancey turned to look behind them. Down the street, perhaps fty
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
rst 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 débris. 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 nal 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 gure 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
gure 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 ew 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 cu 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 ngers 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 attery, 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 ne 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 ne fo’ chu’ch meetin’ so I crave to dress myself up Sunday style——”
“That’s right, Isaiah. You look ner 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 o ce are left alone. There
are people in town who’d sooner set re 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 sti ened to t the new martial rôle.
“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 led o . 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 fore nger 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 o !” screamed Sabra. “You’ll kill
yourself. The gun. You’ll stumble!”
But he ashed a brilliant, a glori ed smile at her over his shoulder and was o , 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
ed. “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 rst 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 re 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 ap was open. A roar of talk came to them from within. The entrance
was packed with lean gures 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 loa ng 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 ne, honey. Better than I hoped for. Nothing I like better than to have members of my ock
right under my eye.”

9

Ranged along the rear of the tent were the Indians. Osages, Poncas, Cherokees, Creeks. They had
come from miles around. The Osages wore their blankets, striped orange, purple, green, scarlet,
blue. The bucks wore hats—battered and dirty sombreros set high up on their heads. The thin snaky
braids of their long black hair hung like wire ropes over their shoulders and down their breasts.
Though they wore, for the most part, the checked gingham shirt of the white man there was always
about them the gleam of metal, the ash of some brightly dyed fabric, the pattern of colored beads.
The older women were shapeless bundles, with the exception of those of the Osage tribe. The Osage
alone had never intermarried with the negro. Except for intermingled white blood, the tribe was
pure. The Indian children tumbled all about. The savages viewed the proceedings impassively, their
faces bronze masks in which only the eyes moved. Later, on their reservations, with no white man to
see and hear, they would gossip like shwives; they would shake with laughter; they would retail
this or that absurdity which, with their own eyes, they had seen the white man perform. They would
slap their knees and rock with mirth.
“Great jokers, the Indians,” Yancey had once said, o hand, to Sabra. She had felt sure that he was
mistaken. They were sullen, taciturn, grave. They did not speak; they grunted. They never laughed.
Holding Cim’s hand tightly in her own, Sabra, escorted by Yancey, found that two chairs had been
placed for them. Other fortunate ones sat perched on the saloon bar, on the gambling tables, on the

benches, on upturned barrels. The rest of the congregation stood. Sabra glanced shyly about her.
Men—hundreds of men. They were strangely alike, all those faces; young-old, weather-beaten, deeply
seamed, and, for the most part, beardless. The Plains had taken them early, had scorched them with
her sun, parched them with her drought, bu eted them with her wind, stung them with her dust. Sabra
had grown accustomed to these faces during the past two weeks. But the women—she was not prepared
for the women. Calico and sunbonnets there were in plenty; but the wives of Osage’s citizenry had
taken this rst opportunity to show what they had in the way of nery; dresses that they had brought
with them from Kansas, from Texas, from Arkansas, from Colorado, carefully laid away in layers of
papers which in turn were smoothed into pasteboard boxes or into trunks. Headgear trembled with
wired roses. Cheviot and lady’s-cloth and henrietta graced shoulders that had known only cotton
this month past. Near her, and occupying one of the seats evidently reserved for persons of
distinction, was a woman who must be, Sabra thought, about her own age; perhaps twenty or
twenty-one, fair, blue eyed, almost childlike in her girlish slimness and purity of contour. She
was very well dressed in a wine- color silk-warp henrietta, bustled, very tightly basqued, and
elaborate with uting on sleeves and collar. Dress and bonnet were city made and very modish. From
Denver, Sabra thought, or Kansas City, or even Chicago. Sabra further decided, with feminine
unreason, that her nose was the most exquisite feature of the kind she had ever seen; that her fair
skin could not long endure this burning, wind-deviled climate and that the man beside her, who
looked old enough to be her father, must be, after all, her husband. It was in the way he spoke to
her, gazed at her, touched her. Yancey had pointed him out one day. She remembered his name because
it had amused her at the time: Waltz, Evergreen Waltz. He was a notorious Southwest gambler, earned
his living by the cards, and was supposed to be the errant son of the former governor of some state
or other—she thought it was Texas. The girl looked unhappy; and beneath that, rebellious.

Still, the sight of this lovely face, and of the other feminine faces looking out from at least
fairly modish and decent straw bonnets and toques, gave Sabra a glow of reassurance. Immediately
this was quenched at the late, showy, and dramatic entrance, just before Yancey took his place, of
a group of women of whom Sabra had actually been unaware. As a matter of fact, the leader of this
spectacular group, whose appearance caused a buzz and stir throughout the tent, had arrived in
Osage only the day before, accompanied by a bevy of six young ladies. The group had stepped o the
passenger coach of the Katy at the town of Wahoo arrayed in such cinder-strewn splendor as to cause
the depot loafers to reel. The Katy had not yet been brought as far as Osage. It terminated at
Wahoo, twenty-two miles away. The vision, in her purple grosgrain silk, with a parasol to match,
and two purple plumes in her hat, with her six gayly bedecked companions had mounted a buckboard
amid much shrill clamor and many giggles and a striking display of ankle. In this crude vehicle,
their silks outspread, their astounding parasols unfurled, they had bumped their way over the
prairie to the town. Osage, since that rst mad day of its beginning, had had its quota of shady
ladies, but these had been raddled creatures, driftwood from this or that deserted mining camp or
abandoned town site, middle aged, unsavory, and doubtless slightly subnormal mentally.
These were di erent. The leader, a handsome black-haired woman of not more than twenty-two or
-three, had taken for herself and her companions such rooms as they could get in the town. Osage
gazed on the parasols, bedazzled. Within an hour it was known that the woman claimed the name of
Dixie Lee. That she was a descendant of decayed Southern aristocracy. That her blooming companions
boasted such fancy nomenclature as Cherry de St. Maurice, Carmen Brown, Belle Mansero, and the
like. That the woman, shrewd as a man and sharp as a knife, had driven a bargain whereby she was to
come into possession, at a sti price, of the building known as the Elite Rooming House and Café,
situated at the far end of Pawhuska Avenue, near the gambling tent; and that she contemplated
building a house of her own, planned for her own

peculiar needs, if business warranted. Finally, she brought the news, gained God knows how or
where, that the Katy was to be extended to Osage and perhaps beyond it. Thus harlotry, heretofore a
sordid enough slut in a wrapper and curling pins, came to Osage in silks and plumes, with a brain
behind it and a promise of prosperity in its gaudy train.
Dixie Lee, shrewd saleswoman, had been quick to learn of Sunday’s meeting, and quicker still to see
the advantage of this opportunity for a public advertisement of her business. So now, at Osage’s
rst church meeting, in marched the six, with Dixie Lee at their head making a seventh. They rustled
in silks. The air of the close-packed tent became as su ocating with scent as a Persian garden at
sunset. Necks were craned; whispers became a buzz; seats were miraculously found for these
representatives of a recognized social order, as for visiting royalty. The dazzling tent top,
seeming to focus rather than disseminate the glare of the Oklahoma sun, cast its revealing
spotlight upon painted cheeks and beaded lashes. The nude and lolling lady of the cherries in Grat
Gotch’s newly acquired art treasure stared down at them, open-mouthed, with the look of one who is
surprised and vanquished by an enemy from her own camp. The hard-working worthy wives of Osage, in
their cheviots and their faded bonnets and cotton gloves, suddenly seemed sallow, scrawny, and
almost spectacularly unalluring.
All this Sabra beheld in a single glance, as did the entire congregation. Only the Indians,
standing or squatting in a row at the back, like an Egyptian frieze against the white of the tent,
remained unagitated, remote. Yancey, having lifted Cim into the chair next his mother, looked up at
the entrance of this splendid procession.
“God Almighty!” he said. His tone was as irreverent as the words were sacred. A dull ush su used
his face, a thing so rare in him as to startle Sabra more than the words he had uttered or the tone
in which he had said them.
“What is it? Yancey! What’s wrong?” “That’s the girl.”
“What girl?”

“That one—Dixie Lee—she’s the girl in the black tights and the skullcap … in the Run … on the
thoroughbred …” he was whispering.
“Oh, no!” cried Sabra, aloud. It was wrung from her. Those near by stared.
So this was the church meeting toward which she had looked with such hope, such happy assurance.
Harlots, pictures of nude women, Indians, heat, glare, her house probably blazing at this moment,
Isaiah weltering in his own gore, Lon Yountis’s sinister face sneering in the tent entrance. And
now this woman, unscrupulous, evil, who had stolen Yancey’s quarter section from him by a trick.
Yancey made his way through the close-packed crowd, leaped to the top of the roulette table which
was to be his platform, ung his broad-brimmed white sombrero dexterously to the outjutting base of
a suspended oil lamp, where it spun and then clung, cocked rakishly; and, lifting the great lolling
head, swept the expectant congregation with his mysterious, his magnetic eyes.
Probably never in the history of the Christian religion had the Word of God been preached by so
romantic and dashing a gure. His long black locks curled on his shoulders; the ne eyes glowed; the
Prince Albert swayed with his graceful movements; his six- shooters, one on each side, bulged
reassuringly in their holsters.
His thrilling voice sounded through the tent, stilling its buzz and movement.
“Friends and fellow citizens, I have been called on to conduct this opening meeting of the Osage
First Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian
Church. In the course of my career as a lawyer and an editor I have been required to speak on
varied occasions and on many subjects. I have spoken in defense of my country and in criticism of
it; I have been called on to defend and to convict horse thieves, harlots, murderers, samples of
which professions could doubtless be found in any large gathering in the Indian Territory to-day. I
name no names. I point no nger. Whether for good or for evil, the fact remains that any man or
woman, for whatever purpose, found in this great Oklahoma country to-day is here because in his or
her veins, actuated by

motives lofty or base, there is the spirit of adventure. I ask with Shakespeare, ‘Why should a man,
whose blood is warm within, sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?’ Though I know the Bible from
cover to cover, and while many of its passages and precepts are graven on my heart and in my
memory, this, fellow citizens of Osage, is the rst time that I have been required to speak the Word
of God in His Temple.” He glanced around the gaudy, glaring tent. “For any shelter, however sordid,
however humble—no o ense, Grat—becomes, while His Word is spoken within it, His Temple. Suppose,
then, that we unite in spirit by uniting in song. We have, you will notice, no hymn books. We will
therefore open this auspicious occasion in the brief but inevitably glorious history of the city of
Osage by singing—uh—what do you all know boys, anyway?”
There was a moment’s slightly embarrassing pause. The hard- bitten faces of the motley congregation
stared blankly up at Yancey. Yancey, self-possessed, vibrant, looked warmly down on them. He raised
an arm in encouragement. “Come on, boys! Name it! Any suggestions, ladies and gentlemen?”
“How about Who Were You At Home? just for a starter,” called out a voice belonging to a man with a
shining dome-shaped bald head and a owing silky beard, reddish in color. He was standing near the
rear of the tent. It was Shanghai Wiley, up from Texas; owner of more than one hundred thousand
long-horn cattle and of the Rancho Palacios, on Tres Palacios Creek. He was the most famous cattle
singer in the whole Southwest, besides being one of its richest cattle and land owners. Possessed
of a remarkably high sweet tenor voice that just escaped being a clear soprano, he had been known
to quiet a whole herd of restless cattle on the verge of a mad stampede. It was an art he had
learned when a cowboy on the range. Many cowboys had it, but none possessed the magic soothing
quality of Shanghai’s voice. It was reputed to have in it the sorcery of the superhuman. It was
told of him that in a milling herd, their nostrils distended, their anks heaving, he had been seen
to leap from the back of one maddened steer to another, traveling the moving mass that was like a
shifting sea, singing to them in his

magic tenor, stopping them just as they were about to plunge into the Rio Grande.
Yancey acknowledged this suggestion with a grateful wave of the hand. “That’s right, Shanghai.
Thanks for speaking up. A good song, though a little secular for the occasion, perhaps. But anyway,
you all know it, and that’s the main thing. Kindly favor us with the pitch, will you, Shanghai?
Will the ladies kindly join in with their sweet soprano voices? Now, then, all together!”
It was a well-known song in the Territory where, on coming to this new and wild country, so many
settlers with a checkered—not to say plaid—past had found it convenient to change their names.
The congregation took it up feelingly, almost solemnly:
Who were you at home? Who were you at home? God alone remembers
Ere you rst began to roam. Jack or Jo or Bill or Pete, Anyone you chance to meet, Sure to hit it
just as neat,
Oh, who were you at home?
“Now, all together! Again!”
Somebody in the rear suddenly produced an accordion, and from the crowd perched on the saloon bar
came the sound of a jew’s- harp. The chorus now swelled with all the fervor of song’s ecstasy. They
might have been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers. Through it all, high and clear, sounded
Shanghai Wiley’s piercing tenor, like brasses in a band, and sustaining it from the roulette table
platform the ’cello of Yancey Cravat’s powerful, rich barytone.
Oh, WHO were you at home? WHO were you at HOME?

They had not risen to sing for the reason that most of the congregation was already standing, and
the few who were seated were afraid to rise for fear that their seats would be snatched from under
them.
Sabra had joined in the singing, not at rst, but later, timidly. It had seemed, somehow, to relieve
her. This, she thought, was better. Perhaps, after all, this new community was about to make a
proper beginning. Yancey, she thought, looked terribly handsome, towering there on the roulette
table, his eyes alight, his slim foot, in its shining boot, keeping time to the music. She began to
feel prim and good and settled at last.
“Now, then,” said Yancey, all aglow, “the next thing in order is to take up the collection before
the sermon.”
“What for?” yelled Pete De Vargas.
Yancey xed him with a pitying gray eye. “Because, you Spanish in del, part of a church service is
taking up a collection. Southwest Davis, I appoint you to work this side of the house. Ike Bixler,
you take that side. The collection, fellow citizens, ladies and gentlemen
—and you, too, Pete—is for the new church organ.”
“Why, hell, Yancey, we ain’t even got a church!” bawled Pete again, aggrieved.
“That’s all right, Pete. Once we buy an organ we’ll have to build a church to put it in. Stands to
reason. Members of the congregation, anybody putting in less than two bits will be thrown out of
the tent by me. Indians not included.”
The collection was taken up, in two ve-gallon sombreros, the contents of which, as they passed from
one hairy sunburned paw to the next, were watched with eagle eyes by Southwest Davis and Ike
Bixler, and, in fact, by the entire gathering. The sombreros were then solemnly and with some
hesitation brought to the roulette table pulpit for Yancey’s inspection.
“Mr. Grat Gotch, being used to lightning calculations in the matter of coins, will kindly count the
proceeds of the collection.”
Arkansas Grat, red-faced and perspiring, elbowed his way to the pulpit and made his swift and
accurate count. He muttered the result to Yancey. Yancey announced it publicly. “Fellow citizens,
the

sum of the rst collection for the new church organ for the Osage church, whose denomination shall
be nameless, is the gratifying total of one hundred and thirty-three dollars and fty- ve cents.—
Heh, wait a minute, Grat! Fifty- ve—did you say fty- ve cents?”
“That’s right, Yancey.”
Yancey’s eye swept his ock. “Some miserable tight- sted skin-
int of a——But maybe it was a Ponca or an Osage, by mistake.” “How about a Cherokee, Yancey!” came
a taunting voice from
somewhere in the rear.
“No, not a Cherokee, Sid. Recognized your voice by the squeak. A Cherokee—as you’d know if you knew
anything at all—you and Yountis and the rest of your out t—is too smart to put anything in the
contribution box of a race that has robbed him of his birthright.” He did not pause for the titter
that went round. He now took from the rear pocket of the owing Prince Albert the small and worn
little Bible. “Friends! We’ve come to the sermon. What I have to say is going to take fteen
minutes. The rst ve minutes are going to be devoted to a confession by me to you, and I didn’t
expect to make it when I accepted the job of conducting this church meeting. Walt Whitman—say,
boys, there’s a poet with red blood in him, and the feel of the land, and a love of his fellow
beings!—Walt Whitman has a line that has stuck in my memory. It is: ‘I say the real and permanent
grandeur of these states must be their religion.’ That’s what Walt says. And that’s the text I
intended to use for the subject of my sermon, though I know that the Bible should furnish it. And
now, at the eleventh hour, I’ve changed my mind. It’s from the Good Book, after all. I’ll announce
my text, and then I’ll make my confession, and following that, any time left will be devoted to the
sermon. Any lady or gent wishing to leave the tent will kindly do so now, before the confession,
and with my full consent, or remain in his or her seat until the conclusion of the service, on pain
of being publicly held up to scorn by me in the rst issue of my newspaper, the Oklahoma Wigwam, due
o the press next Thursday. Anyone wishing to leave the tent kindly rise now and pass as quietly as
may be to the rear. Please make way for all departing—uh—worshipers.”

An earthquake might have moved a worshiper from his place in that hushed and expectant gathering:
certainly no lesser cataclysm of nature. Yancey waited, Bible in hand, a sweet and brilliant smile
on his face. He waited quietly, holding the eyes of the throng in that sti ing tent. A kind of
power seemed to ow from him to them, drawing them, xing them, enthralling them. Yet in his eyes,
and in the great head raised now as it so rarely was, there was that which sent a warning pang of
fear through Sabra. She, too, felt his magnetic draw, but mingled with it was a dreadful terror—a
stab of premonition. The little pitted places in the skin of forehead and cheeks were somehow more
noticeable. Twice she had seen his eyes look like that.
Yancey waited yet another moment. Then he drew a long breath. “My text is from Proverbs. ‘There is
a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets.’ Friends, there is a lion in the streets of Osage, our
fair city, soon to be Queen of the Great Southwest. A lion is in the streets. And I have been a
liar and a coward and an avaricious knave. For I pretended not to have knowledge which I have; and
I went about asking for information of this lion—though I would change the word lion to jackal or
dirty skunk if I did not feel it to be sacrilege to take liberties with Holy Writ—when already I
had proof positive of his guilt—proof in writing, for which I paid, and about which I said nothing.
And the reason for this deceit of mine I am ashamed to confess to you, but I shall confess it. I
intended to announce to you all to-day that I had this knowledge, and I meant to announce to you
from this pulpit—” he glanced down at the roulette table
—“from this platform—that I would publish this knowledge in the columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam on
Thursday, hoping thereby to gain pro t and fame because of the circulation which this would gain
for my paper, starting it o with a bang!” At the word “bang,” uttered with much vehemence, the
congregation of Osage’s First Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, etc., church jumped noticeably and
nervously. “Friends and fellow citizens, I repent of my greed and of my desire for self-advancement
at the expense of this community. I no longer intend to withhold, for my own pro t, the name of the
jackal in a lion’s skin who, by threats of sudden death, has held this

town abjectly terrorized. I stand here to announce to you that the name of that skunk, that
skulking end and soulless murderer who shot down Jack Pegler when his back was turned—that coward
and poltroon—” he was gesturing with his Bible in his hand, brandishing it aloft—“was none other
than—”
He dropped the Bible to the oor as if by accident, in his rage. As he stooped for it, on that
instant, there was the crack of a revolver, a bullet from a six-shooter in the rear of the tent
sang past the spot where his head had been, and there appeared in the white surface of the tent a
tiny circlet of blue that was the Oklahoma sky. But before that dot of blue appeared Yancey Cravat
had raised himself halfway from the hips, had red from the waist without, seemingly, pausing to
take aim. His thumb icked the hammer. That was all. The crack of his six-shooter was, in fact, so
close on the heels of that rst report that the two seemed almost simultaneous. The congregation was
now on its feet, en masse, its back to the roulette table pulpit. Its eyes were on one gure; its
breath was suspended. That gure— a man—was seen to perform some curious antics. He looked, rst of
all, surprised. With his left hand he had gripped one of the taut tent ropes, and now, with his
hand still grasping the hempen line, his
ngers slipping gently along it, as though loath to let go, he sank to the oor, sat there a moment,
as if in meditation, loosed his hand’s hold of the rope, turned slightly, rolled over on one side
and lay there, quite still.
“—Lon Yountis,” nished Yancey, neatly concluding his sentence and now holding an ivory-mounted
six-shooter in right and left hand.
Screams. Shouts. A stampede for the door. Then the voice of Yancey Cravat, powerful, compelling,
above the roar. He sent one shot through the dome of the tent to command attention. “Stop! Stand
where you are! The rst person who stampedes this crowd gets a bullet. Shut that tent ap, Jesse,
like I told you to this morning. Louie Hefner, remove the body and do your duty.”
“Okeh, Yancey. It’s self-defense and justi able homicide.”
“I know it. Louis, … Fellow citizens! We will forego the sermon this morning, but next Sabbath, if
requested, I shall be glad to take

the pulpit again, unless a suitable and ordained minister of God can be procured. The subject of my
sermon for next Sabbath will be from Proverbs XXVI, 27: ‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein’ …
This church meeting, brethren and sisters, will now be concluded with prayer.” There was a little
thudding, scu ing sound as a
heavy, inert burden was carried out through the tent ap into the noonday sunshine. His six-shooters
still in his hands, Yancey Cravat bowed his magni cent bu alo head—but not too far—and sent the
thrilling tones of his beautiful voice out into the agitated crowd before him.
“… bless this community, O Lord.…”

10

Mournfully, and in accordance with the custom of the community, Yancey carved a notch in the
handsome ivory and silver-mounted butt of his six-shooter. It was then for the rst time that Sabra,
her eyes widening with horror, noticed that there were ve earlier notches cut in the butts of
Yancey’s two guns—two on one, three on the other. This latest addition brought the number up to
six.
Aghast, she gingerly investigated further. She saw that the two terrifying weapons were not worn
completely encased in the holster but each was held within it by an ingenious steel clip, elastic
and sensitive as a watch spring. This spring gripped the barrel securely and yet so lightly that
the least e ort would set it free. Yancey could pull his gun and thumb the hammer with but one
motion, instead of two. The in nitesimal saving of time had saved his life that day.
“Oh, Yancey, you haven’t killed six men!”
“I’ve never killed a man unless I knew he’d kill me if I didn’t.” “But that’s murder!”
“Would you have liked to see Yountis get me?”
“Oh, darling, no! I died a thousand deaths while you were standing there. That terrible prayer,
when I thought surely someone else would shoot you. But wasn’t there some other way? Did you have
to kill him? Like that?”
“Why, no, honey. I could have let him kill me.”
“Cim has seen his own father shoot a man and kill him.” “Better than seeing a man shoot and kill
his own father.”
There was nothing more that she could say on this subject. But still another question was consuming
her.

“That woman. That woman. I saw you talking to her, right on the street, in broad daylight to-day,
after the meeting. All that horrible shooting—all those people around you—Cim screaming—and then to
nd that woman smirking and talking. Bad enough if you’d never seen her before. But she stole your
land from you in the Run. You stood there, actually talking to her. Chatting.”
“I know. She said she had made up her mind that day of the Run to get a piece of land, and farm it,
and raise cattle. She wanted to give up her way of living. She’s been at it since she was eighteen.
Now she’s twenty-six. Older than she looks. She comes of good stock. She was desperate.”
“What she doing here, then!”
“Before the month was up she saw she couldn’t make it go. One hundred and sixty acres. Then the
other women homesteaders found out about her. It was no use. She sold out for ve hundred dollars,
added to it whatever money she had saved, and went to Denver.”
“Why didn’t she stay there?”
“Her business was overcrowded there. She got a tip that the railroad was coming through here. She’s
a smart girl. She got together her out t, and down she came.”
“You talk as though you admired her! That—shat—” Felice Venable’s word came to her lips—“that
hussy!”
“She’s a smart girl. She’s a—” he hesitated, as though embarrassed
—“in a way she’s a—well, in a way, she’s a good girl.” Sabra’s voice rose to the pitch of hysteria.
“Don’t you quote your Bible at me, Yancey Cravat! You with your Lukes and your Johns and your
Magdalenes! I’m sick of them.”
The rst issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam actually appeared on Thursday, as scheduled. It was a
masterly mixture of reticence and indiscretion. A half column, rst page, was devoted to the church
meeting. The incident of the shooting was not referred to in this account. An outsider, reading it,
would have gathered that all had been sweetness and light. On an inside column of the four-page
sheet was a brief notice:

It is to be regretted that an unimportant but annoying shooting a ray somewhat marred the otherwise
splendid and truly impressive religious services held in the recreation tent last Sunday, kindness
of the genial and popular proprietor, Mr. Grat Gotch. A ru an, who too long had been infesting the
streets of our fair city of Osage, terrorizing innocent citizens, and who was of the contemptible
ilk that has done so much toward besmirching the dazzling fame of the magni cent Southwest, took
this occasion to create a disturbance, during which he shot, with intent to kill, at the person
presiding. It was necessary to reply in kind. The body, unclaimed, was interred in Boot Hill, with
only the prowling jackals to mourn him, their own kin. It is hoped that his nameless grave will
serve as a warning to others of his class.
Having thus modestly contained himself in the matter of the actual shooting, Yancey let himself go
a little on the editorial page. His editorials, in fact, for a time threatened the paper’s news
items. Sabra and Jesse Rickey had to convince him that the coming of the Katy was of more interest
to prospective subscribers than was the editorial entitled, Lower than the Rattlesnake. He was
prevailed upon to cut it slightly, though under protest.
The rattlesnake has a bad reputation. People accuse him of a great many mean things, and it cannot
be denied that the world would be better o if his species were exterminated. Nine times out of ten
his bite is fatal, and many homes have been saddened because of his venomous attacks. But the
rattlesnake is a gentleman and a scholar beside some snakes. He always gives warning. It is the
snake that takes you unawares that hurts the worst.…
Thus for a good half column.
Sabra, reading the damp galley proof, was murmurous with admiration. “It’s just wonderful! But,
Yancey, don’t you think we ought to have more news items? Gossip, sort of. I don’t mean gossip,
really, but about people, and what they’re doing, and so on. Those

are the things I like to read in a newspaper. Of course men like editorials and important things
like that. But women——”
“That’s right, too,” agreed Jesse Rickey, looking up, ink smeared, from his case. “Get the women
folks to reading the paper.”
Sabra was emerging slowly from her rôle of charming little fool. By degrees she was to take more
and more of a hand in the assembling of the paper’s intimate weekly items, while Yancey was
concerned with cosmic a airs. Indeed, had it not been for Sabra and Jesse Rickey that rst issue of
the Oklahoma Wigwam might never have appeared, for the front o ce of the little wooden shack that
served as newspaper plant was crowded, following that eventful Sunday, with congratulatory
committees, so that it seemed stu ed to su ocation with sombreros, six-shooters, boots, tobacco,
and repetitious talk.
“Yessir, Yancey, that was one of the quickest draws I ever see.… And you was on to him all the
time, huh? Sa-a-ay, you’re a slick one, all right. They don’t come no slicker.… The rest of the
gang has took to the Hills, I understand. That shows they’re scairt, because they got a feud with
the Kid and his out t, and the Kid sees ’em he’ll drop ’em like a row of gobblers at a turkey
shootin’. Yancey, you’re the kind of stu this country needs out here. First thing you know you’ll
be Governor of the Territory. How’s that, boys! Come on out and have a drink to the future new
Governor, the Honorable Yancey Cravat!”
The group moved in a body across the dusty street into the Sunny Southwest Saloon, from whence came
further and more emphatic sounds of approbation.
Sabra, in her checked gingham kitchen apron, was selecting fascinating facts from the stock of
ready-print brought with them from Wichita, fresh supplies of which they would receive
spasmodically by mail or express via the Katy or the Santa Fé.

SWIMMING BRIDES

Girls inhabiting the Island of Himla, near Rhodes, are not allowed to marry until they have brought
up a speci ed

number of sponges, each taken from a certain depth. The people of the Island earn their living by
the sponge shery.

STRENGTH OF THE THUMB

The thumb is stronger than all the other ngers together.

COMPRESSED AIR FOR MINE HAULAGE

During the last ten years a great many mines have replaced animal haulage with compressed air
motors.
As the printing plant boasted only a little hand press, the two six- column forms had to be inked
with a hand roller. Over this was placed the damp piece of white print paper. Each sheet was done
by hand. The rst issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam numbered four hundred and fty copies, and before it
was run o , Yancey, Jesse Rickey, Sabra, Isaiah—every member of the household except little Cim—had
taken a turn at the roller. Sabra’s back and arm muscles ached for a week.
Yancey made vigorous protest. “What! Ink on the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand! Out, damned
spot! See here, honey. This will never do. My sweet Southern jasmine working over a miserable
roller! I’d rather never get out a paper, I tell you.”
“It looks as if you never would, anyway.” The sweet Southern jasmine did not mean to be acid; but
the events of the past two or three weeks were beginning to tell on her nerves. The ready-print
contained the opening chapters of a novel by Bertha M. Clay in which beauty and virtue triumphed
over evil. An instalment of this would appear weekly. The second half of it was missing. But Sabra
sagely decided that this fragment, for a time at least, would compensate the feminine readers of
the Oklahoma Wigwam for the preponderance of civic and political matter and the scarcity of social
and personal items. She made up her mind that she would conquer her shyness and become better
acquainted with some of those cheviots and straw bonnets seen at the Sunday church meeting.

Yancey and Jesse Rickey seemed to have some joke between them. Sabra, in her kitchen, could hear
them snickering like a couple of schoolgirls. They were up to some mischief. Yancey was possessed
of the rough and childlike notion of humor that was of the day and place.
“What are you boys up to?” she asked him at dinner.
He was all innocence. “Nothing. Not a thing! What a suspicious little puss you’re getting to be.”
The paper came out on Thursday afternoon, as scheduled. Sabra was astonished and a little terri ed
to see the occasion treated as an event, with a crowd of cowboys and local citizens in front of the
house, pistols red, whoops and yells; and Yancey himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, handing out copies
as if they had cost nothing to print. Perhaps twenty- ve of these were distributed, opened eagerly,
perused by citizens leaning against the porch posts, and by cowboys on horseback, before Sabra,
peeking out of the o ce window, saw an unmistakable look of surprise—even of shock—on their faces
and heard Cass Bixby drawl, “Say, Yancey, that’s a hell of a name for a newspaper.”
She sent Isaiah out to get hold of a copy. He came back with it, grinning. It was a single sheet.
The Oklahoma Galoot. Motto: Take It or Leave It. Beneath this a hastily assembled and somewhat pied
collection of very personal items, calculated to reveal the weakness and foibles of certain
prominent citizens now engaged in perusing the false sheet.
The practical joke being revealed and the bona de paper issued, this was considered a superb
triumph for Yancey, and he was again borne away to receive the congratulatory toasts of his
somewhat sheepish associates.
It was a man’s town. The men enjoyed it. They rode, gambled, swore, fought, shed, hunted, drank.
The antics of many of them seemed like those of little boys playing robber’s cave under the porch.
The saloon was their club, the brothel their social rendezvous, the town women their sweethearts.
Literally there were no other young girls of marriageable age; for the men and women who had come
out here were, like Sabra and Yancey, married

couples whose ages ranged between twenty and forty. It was no place for the very young, the very
old, or even the middle-aged. Through it all wove the Indians, making a sad yet colorful pattern.
The Osage reservation was that nearest the town of Osage. There now was some talk of changing the
name of the town because of this, but it never was done. It had been named in the rush of the Run.
The Osages, unlike many of the other Territory Plains tribes, were a handsome people—tall,
broad-shouldered, proud. The women carried themselves well, head up, shoulders rm, their step
leisurely and light. Their garments were mean enough, but over them they wore the striped blanket
of the tribe, orange and purple and scarlet and blue, dyed with the same brilliant lasting dyes
that Mother Bridget had used in Sabra’s coverlet. They came in from the Reservation on foot;
sometimes a family rattled along the red clay road that led into town, huddled in a wagon, rickety,
mud spattered. Sometimes a buck rode a scrofulous horse, his lean legs hugging its sorry anks. The
town treated them with less consideration than the mongrel curs that sunned themselves in the road.
They bought their meager supplies with the stipend that the government allowed them; the men
bought, stole, or begged whisky when they could, though re water was strictly forbidden them, and
to sell or give it to an Indian was a criminal o ense. They lolled or squatted in the sun. They
would not work. They raised a little corn which, mixed with lye, they called so ca. This mess, hot
or cold, was eaten with a spoon made from the horn of a cow. Sabra hated them, even feared them,
though Yancey laughed at her for this. Cim was forbidden by her to talk to them. This after she
discovered that Yancey had taken him out to visit the Reservation one afternoon. Here, then, was
the monstrous society in which Sabra Cravat now found herself. For her, and the other respectable
women of the town, there was nothing but their housework, their children, their memories of the
homes they had left.
And so the woman who was, after all, the most intelligent among them, set about creating some sort
of social order for the good wives of the community. All her life Sabra had been accustomed to the
open-handed hospitality of the South. The Venable household in

Wichita had been as nearly as possible a duplicate of the Mississippi mansion which had housed
generations of Sabra’s luxury-loving and open-handed ancestors. Hordes of relatives came and went.
Food and drink were constantly being passed in abundance. White muslin dresses and blue sashes
whirled at the least provocative tinkle of the handsome old square piano with its great blobs of
grapevine carving. Friends drove up for midday dinner and stayed a week. Felice Venable’s musical
drawl was always tempting the sated guest to further excesses. “I declare, Cousin Flora May, you
haven’t eaten enough to keep a bird alive. Angie’ll think you don’t fancy her cooking.… Lacy, just
another quail. They’re only a mouthful.… Mittie, pass the currant jell.”
Grimly Sabra (and, in time, the other virtuous women of the community) set about making this new
frontier town like the old as speedily as possible. Yancey, almost single handed, tried to make the
new as unlike the old as possible. He fought a losing ght from the rst. He was muddled; frequently
insincere; a brilliant swaggerer. He himself was not very clear as to what he wanted, or how to go
about getting it. He only knew that he was impatient of things as they were; that greed, injustice,
and dishonesty in o ce were everywhere; that here, in this wild and virgin land, was a chance for a
Utopian plan. But he had no plan. He was sentimental about the under dog; overgallant to women;
emotional, quick- tempered, impulsive, dramatic, idealistic. And idealism does not
ourish in a frontier settlement. Yancey Cravat, with his unformed dreams—much less the roistering
play boys of saloon and plain and gambling house—never had a chance against the indomitable
materialism of the women.
Like Sabra, most of the women had brought with them from their homes in Nebraska, in Arkansas, in
Missouri, in Kansas, some household treasure that in their eyes represented elegance or which was
meant to mark them as possessed of taste and background. A chair, a bed, a piece of silver, a vase,
a set of linen. It was the period of the horrible gimcrack. Women all over the country were
covering wire bread toasters with red plush, embroidering sulphurous yellow chenille roses on this,
tying the whole with satin ribbons and

hanging it on the wall to represent a paper rack (to be used on pain of death). They painted the
backsides of frying pans with gold leaf and daisies, enhanced the handles of these, too, with bows
of gay ribbon and, the utilitarian duckling thus turned into a swan, hung it on the wall opposite
the toaster. Rolling pins were gilded or sheathed in velvet. Coal scuttles and tin shovels were
surprised to
nd themselves elevated from the kitchen to the parlor, having rst been subjected to the new
beautifying process. Sabra’s house became a sort of social center following the discovery that she
received copies of Harper’s Bazar with fair regularity. Felice Venable sometimes sent it to her,
prompted, no doubt, by Sabra’s rather guarded account of the lack of style hints for the person or
for the home in this new community. Sabra’s social triumph was complete when she displayed her new
draped jars, done by her after minute instructions found in the latest copy of Harper’s. She then
graciously printed these instructions in the Oklahoma Wigwam, causing a urry of excitement in a
hundred homes and mystifying the local storekeepers by the sudden demand for jars.
As everything [the fashion note announced, haughtily] is now draped, we give an illustration [Sabra
did not—at least in the limited columns of the Wigwam] of a china or glass jar draped with India
silk and trimmed with lace and ribbon, the decoration entirely concealing any native hideousness in
the shape or ornamentation of the jar. Perfectly plain jars can also be draped with a pretty piece
of silk and tied with ribbon bows or ornamented with an odd fragment of lace and thereby makes a
pretty ornament at little or no cost.
Certainly the last four words of the hint were true.
With elegancies such as these the womenfolk of Osage tried to disguise the crudeness and bareness
of their glaring wooden shacks. Usually, there was as well a plush chair which had survived the
wagon journey; a tortured whatnot on which reposed painted seashells and the objets d’art above
described; or, on the wall, a crayon portrait or even an oil painting of some stern and

bewhiskered or black-silk and chued parent looking down in surprised disapproval upon the ructions
that comprised the daily activities of this town. From stark ugliness the house interiors were thus
transformed into grotesque ugliness, but the Victorian sense of beauty was satis ed. The fact was
that these women were hungry for the feel of soft silken things; their eyes, smarting with the
glare, the wind, the dust, ached to rest on that which was rich and soothing; their hands,
roughened by alkali water, and red dust, and burning sun and wind, dwelt lovingly on these absurd
scraps of silk and velvet, snipped from an old wedding dress, from a bonnet, from
nery that had found its way to the scrap bag.
Aside from the wedding silver and linen that she had brought with her, the loveliest thing that
Sabra possessed was the hand- woven blue coverlet that Mother Bridget had given her. It made a true
and brilliant spot of color in the sitting room, where it lay neatly folded at the foot of the
sofa, partly masking the ugliness of that utilitarian piece of furniture. This Sabra did not know.
As silk patchwork quilts, made in wheel and fan patterns, and embroidered in spider webs of
bright-colored threads were quite the fashion, the blue coverlet was looked on with considerable
disrespect. Thirty years later, its color undimmed, Sabra contributed it temporarily to an
exhibition of early American handiwork held in the Venetian room of the Savoy-Bixby Hotel, and it
was cooed and ah’d over by all the members of Osage’s smart set. They said it was quaint and
authentic and very native and a ne example of pioneer handicraft and Sabra said yes indeed, and
told them of Mother Bridget. They said she must have been quaint, too. Sabra said she was.
Slowly, in Sabra’s eyes, the other women of the town began to emerge from a mist of drabness into
distinct personalities. There was one who had been a school teacher in Cairo, Illinois. Her
husband, Tracy Wyatt, ran the spasmodic bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage. They had no
children. She was a sparse and simpering woman of thirty-nine, who talked a good deal of former
trips to Chicago during which she had reveled in the culture of that e ete city. Yancey was heard
learnedly discoursing to her on the

subject of Etruscan pottery, of which he knew nothing. The ex- school teacher rolled her eyes and
tossed her head a good deal.
“You don’t know what a privilege it is, Mr. Cravat, to nd myself talking to someone whose mind can
soar above the sordid life of this horrible town.”
Yancey’s ardent eyes took on their most melting look. “Madam, it is you who have carried me with
you to your heights. ‘In youth and beauty wisdom is but rare!’ ” It was simply his way. He could
not help it.
“Ah, Shakespeare!” breathed Mrs. Wyatt, bridling. “Shakespeare—hell!” said Yancey to Sabra, later.
“She doesn’t
know Pope when she hears him. No woman ought to pretend to be intelligent. And if she is she ought
to have the intelligence to pretend she isn’t. And this one looks like Cornelia Blimber, to boot.”
“Cornelia? …”
“A schoolmarm in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. A magni cent book, honey. I want you to read it. I want
Cim to read it by the time he’s twelve. I’ve got it somewhere here on the shelves.” He was
searching among the jumble of books. Five minutes later he was deep in a copy of Plutarch which he
had bewailed as lost.
Sabra persisted. “But why did you make her think she was so smart and attractive when you were
talking to her?”
“Because she is so plain, darling.”
“It’s just that you can’t bear not to have everybody think you’re fascinating.”
She never read Dombey and Son, after all. She decided that she preferred exchanging recipes and
discussing the rearing of children with the other women to the more intellectual conversation of
Mrs. Wyatt.

It was Sabra who started the Philomathean Club. The other women clutched at the idea. It was part
of their defense against these wilds. After all, a town that boasted a culture club could not be
altogether

lost. Sabra had had no experience with this phase of social activity. The languorous yet acid
Felice Venable had always scorned to take part in any civic social life that Wichita knew. Kansas,
even then, had had its women’s clubs, though they were not known by this title. The Ladies’ Sewing
Circle, one was called; the Twentieth Century Culture Society; the Hypatias.
Felice Venable, approached as a prospective member, had refused languidly.
“I just naturally hate sewing,” she had drawled, looking up from the novel she was reading. “And as
for culture! Why, the Venables and the Marcys have had it in this country for three hundred years,
not to speak of England and France, where they practically started it going. Besides, I don’t
believe in women running around to club meetings. They’ll be going into politics next.”
Sabra timidly approached Mrs. Wyatt with her plan to form a woman’s club, and Mrs. Wyatt snatched
at it with such ferocity as almost to make it appear her own idea. Each was to invite four women of
the town’s élite. Ten, they decided, would be enough as charter members.
“I,” began Mrs. Wyatt promptly, “am going to ask Mrs. Louie Hefner, Mrs. Doc Nisbett——”
“Her husband’s horrid! I hate him. I don’t want her in my club.” The ten barrels of water still
rankled.
“We’re not asking husbands, my dear Mrs. Cravat. This is a ladies’ club.”
“Well, I don’t think the wife of any such man could be a lady.”
“Mrs. Nisbett,” retorted Mrs. Wyatt, introducing snobbery into that welter of mud, Indians, pine
shacks, drought, and semi- barbarism known as Osage, Indian Territory, “was a Krumpf of Ouachita,
Arkansas.”
Sabra, descendant of the Marcys and the Venables, lifted her handsome black eyebrows. Privately,
she decided to select her four from among the less vertebrate and more ebullient of Osage’s
matrons. Culture was all very well, but the thought of mingling once every fortnight with nine
versions of the bony Mrs. Wyatt or the pedigreed Mrs. Nisbett (née Krumpf) was depressing. She made
up

her mind that next day, after the housework was done, she would call on her candidates, beginning
with that pretty and stylish Mrs. Evergreen Waltz. Sabra had inherited a strain of frivolity from
Felice Venable. At supper that evening she told Yancey of her plans.
“We’re going to take up literature, you know. And maybe early American history.”
“Why, honey, don’t you know you’re making it?”
This she did not take seriously. “And then current events, too.”
“Well, the events in this town are current enough. I’ll say that for them. The trick is to catch
them as they go by. You girls’ll have to be quick.” She told him of her four prospective members.
“Waltz’s wife!” Surprise and amusement, too, were in his voice, but she was too full of her plans
to notice. Besides, Yancey often was mystifyingly amused at things that seemed to Sabra quite
serious. “Why, that’s ne, Sabra. That’s ne! That’s the spirit!”
“I noticed her at church meeting last Sunday. She’s so pretty, it rests me to look at her, after
all these—not that they’re—I don’t mean they’re not very nice ladies. But after all, even if it’s a
culture club, someone nearer my own age would be much more fun.”
“Oh, much,” Yancey agreed, still smiling. “That’s what a town like this should be. No class
distinctions, no snobbery, no highfalutin notions.”
“I saw her washing hanging on the line. Just by accident. You can tell she’s a lady. Such pretty
underthings all trimmed with embroidery, and there were two embroidery petticoats all ounced and
every bit as nice as the ones Cousin Belle French Vian made for me by hand, for my trousseau.”
“I’m not surprised.” Yancey was less loquacious than usual. But then, men were not interested in
women’s clothes.
“She looks kind of babyish and lonely, sitting there by the window sewing all day. And her
husband’s so much older, and a cripple, too, or almost. I noticed he limps quite badly. What’s his
trouble?”
“Shot in the leg.”
“Oh.” She had already learned to accept this form of injury as a matter of course. “I thought I’d
ask her to prepare a paper for the

third meeting on Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh.’ I could lend her yours to read up on, if you don’t
mind, just in case she hasn’t got it.”
Yancey thought it unlikely.
Mrs. Wyatt’s house was one of the few in Osage which were used for dwelling purposes alone. No
store or o ce occupied the front of it. Tracy Wyatt’s bus and dray line certainly could not be
contained in a pine shack intended for family use. Mrs. Wyatt had ve rooms. She was annoyingly
proud of this, and referred to it on all possible occasions.
“The rst meeting,” she said, “will be held at my house, of course.
It will be so much nicer.”
She did not say nicer than what, but Sabra’s face set itself in a sort of mask of icy stubbornness.
“The rst meeting of the Philomathean Society will be held at the home of the Founder.” After all,
Mrs. Wyatt’s house could not boast a screen door, as Sabra’s could. It was the only house in Osage
that had one. Yancey had had Hefner order it from Kansas City. The wind and the ies seemed to
torture Sabra. It was so unusual a luxury that frequently strangers came to the door by mistake,
thinking that here was the butcher shop, which boasted the only other screen door in the town.
“I’ll serve co ee and doughnuts,” Sabra added, graciously. “And I’ll move to elect you president.
I”—this not without a ick of malice—“am too busy with my household and my child and the
newspaper—I often assist my husband editorially—to take up with any more work.”
The paper on Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” never was written by the pretty Mrs. Evergreen Waltz.
Three days later Sabra, chancing to glance out of her sitting-room window, saw the crippled and
middle-aged gambler passing her house, and in spite of his in rmity he was walking with great
speed—running, almost. In his hand was a piece of white paper—a letter, Sabra thought. She hoped it
was not bad news. He had looked, she thought, sort of odd and wild.
Evergreen Waltz, after weeks of tireless waiting and watching, had at last intercepted a letter
from his young wife’s lover. As he now came panting up the street the girl sat at the window,
sewing.

The single shot went just through the center of the wide white space between her great babyish blue
eyes. They found her with the gold initialed thimble on her nger, and the bit of work on which she
had been sewing, now brightly spotted with crimson, in her lap.
“Why didn’t you tell me that when she married him she was a girl out of a—out of a—house!” Sabra
demanded, between horror and wrath.
“I thought you knew. Women are supposed to have intuition, or whatever they call it, aren’t they?
All those embroidered underthings on the line in a town where water’s scarce as champagne—scarcer.
And then ‘Aurora Leigh.’ ”
She was thoroughly enraged by now. “What, for pity’s sake, has ‘Aurora Leigh’ got to do with her!”
He got down the volume. “I thought you’d been reading it yourself, perhaps.” He opened it. “
‘Dreams of doing good for good- for-nothing people.’ ”

11

Sabra’s second child, a girl, was born in June, a little more than a year after their coming to
Osage. It was not as dreadful an ordeal there in those crude surroundings as one might have
thought. She refused to send for her mother; indeed, Sabra insisted that Felice Venable be told
nothing of the event until after her granddaughter had wailed her way into the Red Man’s country.
Yancey had been relieved at Sabra’s decision. The thought of his luxury-loving and formidable
mother-in-law with her ounced dimities and her high- heeled slippers in the midst of this Western
wallow to which he had brought her daughter was a thing from which even the redoubtable Yancey
shrank. Curiously enough, it was not the pain, the heat, nor the inexpert attention she received
that most distressed Sabra. It was the wind. The Oklahoma wind tortured her. It rattled the doors
and windows; it whirled the red dust through the house; its hot breath was on her agonized face as
she lay there; if allowed its own way it leaped through the rooms, snatching the cloth o the
table, the sheets o the bed, the dishes o the shelves.
“The wind!” Sabra moaned. “The wind! The wind! Make it stop.” She was a little delirious. “Yancey!
With your gun. Shoot it. Seven notches. I don’t care. Only stop it.”
She was tended, during her accouchement, by the best doctor in the county and certainly the most
picturesque man of medicine in the whole Southwest, Dr. Don Valliant. Like thousands of others
living in this new country, his past was his own secret. He rode to his calls on horseback, in a
black velveteen coat and velveteen trousers tucked into fancy leather boots. His soft black hat,
rivaling

Yancey’s white one, intensi ed the black of his eyes and hair. It was known that he often vanished
for days, leaving the sick to get on as best they could. He would reappear as inexplicably as he
had vanished; and it was noticed then that he was worn looking and his horse was jaded. It was no
secret that he was often called to attend the bandits when one of their number, wounded in some
outlaw raid, had taken to their hiding place in the Hills. He was tender and deft with Sabra,
though between them he and Yancey consumed an incredible quantity of whisky during the racking
hours of her con nement. At the end he held up a caterwauling morsel of esh torn from Sabra’s
esh—a thing perfect of its kind, with an astonishing mop of black hair.
“This is a Spanish beauty you have for a daughter, Yancey. I present to you Señorita Doña Cravat.”
And Donna Cravat she remained. The town, somewhat scandalized, thought she had been named after Dr.
Don himself. Besides, they did not consider Donna a name at all. The other women of the community
fed their hunger for romance by endowing their girl children with such orid names as they could
conjure up out of their imagination or from the novels they read between dish washings. The result
was likely to range from the pathetic to the ridiculous. Czarina McKee; Emmeretta Folsom; Gazelle
Slaughter; Maurine Turket; Cassandra Sipes; Jewel Riggs.
The neighborhood wives showered the Cravat household with the customary cakes, pies, meat loaves,
and bowls of broth. Black Isaiah was touching, was wonderful. He washed dishes, he mopped oors, he
actually cooked as though he had inherited the art from Angie, his vast black mother, left behind
in Wichita. One of Sabra’s gingham kitchen aprons, checked blue and white, was always hitched up
under his arms, and beneath this utilitarian yet coquettish garment his great bare feet slapped in
and out as he did the work of the household. He was utterly fascinated by the new baby. “Looka dat!
She know me! Hi, who yo’ rollin’ yo’ eyes at, makin’ faces!” He danced for her, he sang negro songs
to her, he rocked her to sleep. He was, as Donna grew older, her nursemaid,

pushing her baby buggy up and down the dusty street, and later still her playmate as well as Cim’s.
When Sabra Cravat arose from that bed something in her had crystallized. Perhaps it was that, for
the rst time in a year, she had had hours in which to rest her tired limbs; perhaps the ordeal
itself worked a psychic as well as a physical change in her; it might have been that she realized
she must cut a new pattern in this Oklahoma life of theirs. The boy Cim might surmount it; the girl
Donna never. During the hours through which she had lain in her bed in the sti ing wooden shack,
mists seemed to have rolled away from before her eyes. She saw clearly. She felt light and terribly
capable
—so much so that she made the mistake of getting up, dizzily donning slippers and wrapper, and
tottering into the newspaper o ce where Yancey was writing an editorial and shouting choice
passages of it into the inattentive ear of Jesse Rickey, who was setting type in the printing shop.
“… the most stupendous farce ever conceived by the mind of man in a civilized country.…”
He looked up to see in the doorway a wraith, all eyes and long black braids. “Why, sugar! What’s
this? You can’t get up!”
She smiled rather feebly. “I’m up. I felt so light, so——” “I should think you would. All that
physic.”
“I feel so strong. I’m going to do so many things. You’ll see. I’m going to paper the whole house.
Rosebuds in the bedroom. I’m going to plant two trees in the front. I’m going to start another club
—not like the Philomathean—I think that’s silly now—but one to make this town … no saloons … women
like that Dixie Lee … going to have a real hired girl as soon as the newspaper begins to … feel so
queer … Yancey …”
As she began to topple, Yancey caught the Osage Joan of Arc in his arms.
Incredibly enough, she actually did paper the entire house, aided by Isaiah and Jesse Rickey.
Isaiah’s ebony countenance splashed with the white paste mixture made a bizarre e ect, a tri e
startling to anyone coming upon the scene unawares. Also Jesse Rickey’s inebriate eye, which so
often resulted in many grotesque pied print

lines appearing in unexpected and inconvenient places in the Oklahoma Wigwam columns, was none too
dependable in the matching of rosebud patterns. The result, in spots, was Burbankian, with roses
grafted on leaves and tendrils emerging from petals. Still, the e ect was gay, even luxurious. The
Philomathean Club, as one woman, fell upon wall paper and paste pot, as they had upon the covered
jars in Sabra’s earlier e ort at decoration. Within a month Louie Hefner was compelled to install a
full line of wall paper to satisfy the local demand.
Slowly, slowly, the life of the community, in the beginning so wild, so unrelated in its parts,
began to weave in and out, warp and woof, to make a pattern. It was at rst faint, almost
undiscernible. But presently the eye could trace here a motif, there a gure, here a motif, there a
gure. The shuttle swept back, forward, back, forward.
“It’s almost time for the Jew,” Sabra would say, looking up from her sewing. “I need some number
forty sewing-machine needles.”
And then perhaps next day, or the day after, Cim, playing in the yard, would see a familiar gure,
bent almost double, gnomelike and grotesque, against the western sky. It was Sol Levy, the peddler,
the Alsatian Jew. Cim would come running into the house, Donna, perhaps, trotting at his heels.
“Mom, here comes the Jew!”
Sabra would fold up her work, brush the threads from her apron; or if her hands were in the dough
she would hastily mold and crimp her pie crust so as to be ready for his visit.
Sol Levy had come over an immigrant in the noisome bowels of some dreadful ship. His hair was
blue-black and very thick, and his face was white in spite of the burning Southwest sun. A black
stubble of beard intensi ed this pallor. He had delicate blue-veined hands and narrow arched feet.
His face was delicate, too, and narrow, and his eyes slanted ever so little at the outer corners,
so that he had the faintly Oriental look sometimes seen in the student type of his race. He
belonged in crowded places, in populous places, in the color and glow and swift drama of the
bazaars. God knows how he had found his way to this vast wilderness. Perhaps in Chicago, or in
Kansas City, or Omaha he had heard of this new

country and the rush of thousands for its land. And he had bummed his way on foot. He had started
to peddle with an oilcloth-covered pack on his back. Through the little hot Western towns in
summer. Through the bitter cold Western towns in winter. They turned the dogs on him. The children
cried, “Jew! Jew!” He was only a boy, disguised with that stubble of beard. He would enter the yard
of a farmhouse or a dwelling in a town such as Osage. A wary eye on the dog. Nice Fido. Nice
doggie. Down, down! Pins, sewing-machine needles, rolls of gingham and calico, and last, craftily,
his Hamburg lace. Hamburg lace for the little girls’ petticoats, for the aprons of the lady of the
house; the white muslin apron edged with Hamburg lace, to be donned after the midday dinner dishes
were done, the house set to rights, her hair tidied with a wet comb, the basket of mending got out,
or the roll of strips for the rag rug, to be plaited in the precious hours between three and ve. He
brought news, too.
“The bridge is out below Gray Horse.… The Osages are having a powwow at Hominy. All night they kept
me awake with their drums, those savages.… The Kid and his gang held up the Santa Fé near Wetoka
and got thirty- ve thousand dollars; but one of them will never hold up a train again. A shot in
the head. Verdigris Bob, they call him. A name! They say the posse almost caught the Kid himself
because this Verdigris Bob when he nds he is dying he begs the others to leave him and go on, but
rst they must stop to take his boots o . His boots he wants to have o , that murderer, to die a
respectable man! The Kid stops to oblige him, and the posse in ten more minutes would have caught
him, too. A feather in that sheri ’s cap, to catch the Kid! … A country! My forefathers should have
lived to see me here!”
His beautiful, civilized face, mobile as an actor’s, was at once expressive of despair and bitter
amusement. His long slender hands were spread in a gesture of wondering resignation.
Later he bought a horse—a quadruped possessed unbelievably of the power of locomotion—a thing
rheumy-eyed, cadaverous, high rumped, like a cloth horse in a pantomime. Sol Levy was always a
little afraid of it; timorous of those great square white teeth, like gravestones. He came of a
race of scholars and traders. Horses had

been no part of their experience. He had to nerve himself to wait on it, to give it the feed bag,
an occasional apple or lump of sugar. With the horse and rickety wagon he now added kitchenware to
his stock, coarse china, too; bolts of woollen cloth; and, slyly, bright colored silks and muslin
owers and ribbons. Dixie Lee and her girls fell upon these with feverish ngers and shrill cries,
like children. He spread his wares for them silently. Sometimes they teased him, those pretty
morons; they hung on his meager shoulders, stroked his beard. He regarded them remotely, almost
sadly.
“Come on, Solly!” they said. “Why don’t you smile? Don’t you never have no fun? I bet you’re rich.
Jews is all rich. Ain’t that the truth, Maude?”
His deep-sunk eyes looked at them. Schicksas. They grew uncomfortable under his gaze, then sullen,
then angry. “Go on, get the hell out of here! You got your money, ain’t you? Get, sheeny!”
He sometimes talked to Dixie Lee. There existed between these two a strange relation of
understanding and something resembling respect. Outcasts, both of them, he because of his race, she
because of her calling. “A smart girl like you, what do you want in such a business?”
“I’ve got to live, Solly. God knows why!”
“You come from a good family. You are young yet, you are smart.
There are other ways.”
“Ye-e-e-s? I guess I’ll take up school teaching. Tell a lot of snotty- nosed brats that two and two
make four and get handed eleven dollars at the end of the month for it. I tried a couple of things.
Nix, nix!”
In a year or two he opened a little store in Osage. It was, at rst, only a wooden shack containing
two or three rough pine tables on which his wares were spread. He was the town Jew. He was a person
apart. Sometimes the cowboys deviled him; or the saloon loungers and professional bad men. They
looked upon him as fair game. He thought of them as savages. Yancey came to his rescue one day in
the spectacular fashion he enjoyed. Seated at his desk in the Wigwam o ce Yancey heard hoots,
howls, catcalls, and then the crack and rat-a-tat-tat of a fusillade. The porch of the Sunny

Southwest Saloon was lled with grinning faces beneath sombreros. In the middle of the dusty road,
his back against a Howe scale, stood Sol Levy. They had tried to force him to drink a great glass
of whisky straight. He had struggled, coughed, sputtered; had succeeded in spitting out the burning
stu . They had got another. They were holding it up from their vantage point on the porch. Their
six-shooters were in their hands. And they were shooting at him—at his feet, at his head, at his
hands, expertly, devilishly, miraculously, never hitting him but always careful to come within a
fraction of an inch. He had no weapon. He would not have known how to use it if he had possessed
one. He was not of a race of
ghters.
“Drink it!” the yells were high and less than human. “You’re a dead Jew if you don’t. Dance, gol
darn you! Dance for your drink!”
The bullets spat all about him, sang past his ears, whipped up the dust about his feet. He did not
run. He stood there, facing them, frozen with fear. His arms hung at his sides. His face was
deathly white. They had shot o his hat. He was bareheaded. His eyes were sunken, su ering,
stricken. His head lolled a little on one side. His thick black locks hung dank on his forehead. At
that rst instant of seeing him as he rushed out of his o ce, Yancey thought, subconsciously, “He
looks like—like——” But the resemblance eluded him then. It was only later, after the sickening
incident had ended, that he realized of Whom it was that the Jew had reminded him as he stood
there, cruci ed against the scale.
Yancey ran into the road. It is impossible to say how he escaped being killed by one of the
bullets. He seemed to leap into the thick of them like a charmed thing. As he ran he whipped out
his ivory- handled guns, and at that half the crowd on the saloon porch made a dash for the door
and were caught in it and fell sprawling, and picked themselves up, and crawled or ran again until
they were inside. Yancey stood beside Sol Levy, the terrible look in his eyes, the great head
thrust forward and down, like a bu alo charging. Here was a scene to his liking.
“I’ll drill the rst son of a bitch that res another shot. I will, so help me God! Go on, re now,
you dirty dogs. You lthy loafers.

You stinking spawn of a rattlesnake!”
He was, by now, a person in the community—he was, in fact, the person in the town. The porch
loafers looked sheepish. They sheathed their weapons, or twirled them, sulkily.
“Aw, Yancey, we was foolin’!”
“We was only kiddin’ the Jew.… Lookit him, the white-livered son of a gun. Lookit—Holy Doggie, look
at him! He’s oppin’.”
With a little sigh Sol Levy slid to the dust of the road and lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of
the Howe scale. It was at that moment, so curiously does the human mind work, that Yancey caught
that elusive resemblance. Now he picked the man up and ung him over his great shoulder as he would
a sack of meal.
“Yah!” hooted the jokesters, perhaps a little shame-faced now.
Yancey, on his way to his own house so near by, made rst a small detour that brought him to the
foot of the tobacco-stained saloon porch steps. His eyes were like two sword blades ashing in the
sun.
“Greasers! Scum of the Run! Monkey skulls!”
His limp burden dangling over his shoulder, he now strode through the Wigwam o ce, into the house,
and laid him gently down on the sitting-room couch. Revived, Sol Levy stopped to midday dinner with
the Cravats. He sat, very white, very still, in his chair and made delicate pretense of eating.
Sabra, because Yancey asked her to, though she was mysti ed, had got out her DeGrasse silver and a
set of her linen. His long meager ngers dwelt lingeringly on the ne hand-wrought stu . His
deep-sunk haunting eyes went from Sabra’s clear-cut features, with the bold determined brows, to
Yancey’s massive head, then to the dazzling freshness of the children’s artless countenances.
“This is the rst time that I have sat at such a table in two years. My mother’s table was like
this, in the old country. My father— peace to his soul!—lighted the candles. My mother—sainted—
spread the table with her linen and her precious thin silver. Here in this country I eat as we
would not have allowed a beggar to eat that came to the door for charity.”

“This Oklahoma country’s no place for you, Sol. It’s too rough, too hard. You come of a race of
dreamers.”
The melancholy eyes took on a remote—a prophetic look. There was, suddenly, a slight cast in them,
as though he were turning his vision toward something the others could not see. “It will not always
be like this. Wait. Those savages to-day will be myths, like the pictures of monsters you see in
books of prehistoric days.”
“Don’t worry about those dirty skunks, Sol. I’ll see that they leave you alone from now on.”
Sol Levy smiled a little bitter smile. His thin shoulders lifted in a weary shrug. “Those
barbarians! My ancestors were studying the Talmud and writing the laws the civilized world now
lives by when theirs were swinging from tree to tree.”
12

In the three and a half years of her residence in Osage Sabra had yielded hardly an inch. It was
amazing. It was heroic. She had set herself certain standards, and those she had maintained in
spite of almost overwhelming opposition. She had been bred on tradition. If she had yielded at all
it was in minor matters and because to do so was expedient. True, she could be seen of a morning on
her way to the butcher’s or the grocer’s shielded from the sun by one of the gingham sunbonnets
which in the beginning she had despised. Certainly one could not don a straw bonnet, velvet or
ower trimmed, to dart out in a calico house dress for the purchase of a pound and a half of round
steak, ten cents worth of onions, and a yeast cake.
Once only in those three years had she gone back to Wichita. At the prospect of the journey she had
been in a fever of anticipation for days. She had taken with her Cim and Donna. She was so proud of
them, so intent on out tting them with a wardrobe su ciently splendid to set o their charms, that
she neglected the matter of her own costuming and found herself arriving in Wichita with a trunk
containing the very clothes with which she had departed from it almost four years earlier.
Prominent among these was the green nun’s veiling with the pink ruchings. She had had little enough
use for it in these past years or for the wine-colored silkwarp henrietta.
“Your skin!” Felice Venable had exclaimed at sight of her daughter. “Your hands! Your hair! As dry
as a bone! You look a million. What have you done to yourself?”

Sabra remembered something that Yancey once had said about Texas. Mischievously she paraphrased it
in order to shock her tactless mother. “Oklahoma is ne for men and horses, but it’s hell on women
and oxen.”
The visit was not a success. The very things she had expected to enjoy fell, somehow, at. She
missed the pace, the exhilarating uncertainty of the Oklahoma life. The teacup conversation of her
girlhood friends seemed to lack tang and meaning. Their existence was orderly, calm, accepted. For
herself and the other women of Osage there was everything still to do. There lay a city, a county,
a whole vast Territory to be swept and garnished by an army of sunbonnets. Paradoxically enough,
she was trying to implant in the red clay of Osage the very forms and institutions that now bored
her in Wichita. Yet it was, perhaps, a very human trait. It was illustrated literally by the fact
that she was, on her return, more thrilled to nd that the scrawny elm, no larger than a baby’s arm,
which she had planted outside the doorway in Osage, actually had found some moisture for its
thirsty roots, and was now feebly vernal, than she had been at sight of the cool glossy canopy of
cedar, arbor vitae, sweet locust, and crêpe myrtle that shaded the Kansas garden. She took a
perverse delight in bringing the shocked look to the faces of her Wichita friends, and to all the
horde of Venables and Marcys and Vians that swarmed up from the South to greet the pioneer.
Curiously enough, it was not the shooting a rays and Indian yarns that ru ed them so much as her
stories of the town’s social life.
“… rubber boots to parties, often, because when it rains we wade up to our ankles in mud. We carry
lanterns when we go to the church sociables.… Mrs. Buckner’s sister came to visit her from St.
Joseph, Missouri, and she remarked that she had noticed that the one pattern of table silver seemed
to be such a favorite. She had seen it at all the little tea parties that had been given for her
during her visit. Of course it was my set that had been the rounds. Everybody borrowed it. We
borrow each other’s lamps, too, and china, and even linen.”
At this the Venables and Marcys and Vians and Goforths looked not only shocked but stricken. Chests
of lavender-scented linen,

sideboards ashing with stately silver, had always been part of the Venable and Marcy tradition.
Then the children. The visiting Venables insisted on calling Cim by his full name—Cimarron. Sabra
had heard it so rarely since the day of his birth that she now realized, for the rst time, how
foolish she had been to yield to Yancey’s whim in the naming of the boy. Cimarron. Spanish: wild,
or unruly. The boy had made such an obstreperous entrance into the world, and Yancey had shouted,
in delight, “Look at him! See him kick with his feet and strike out with his sts! He’s a wild one.
Heh, Cimarron! Peceno Gitano.”
Cousin Jouett Goforth or Cousin Dabney Venable said, pompously, “And now, Cimarron, my little man,
tell us about the big red Indians. Did you ever ght Indians, eh, Cimarron?” The boy surveyed them
from beneath his long lashes, his head lowered, looking for all the world like his father.
Cimarron was almost eight now. If it is possible for a boy of eight to be romantic in aspect,
Cimarron Cravat was that. His head was not large, like Yancey’s, but long and ne, like Sabra’s—a
Venable head. His eyes were Sabra’s, too, dark and large, but they had the ardent look of Yancey’s
gray ones, and he had Yancey’s absurdly long and curling lashes, like a beautiful girl’s. His
mannerisms—the head held down, the rare upward glance that cut you like a sword thrust when he
turned it full on you—the swing of his walk, the way he gestured with his delicate hands—all these
were Yancey in startling miniature.
His speech was strangely adult. This, perhaps, because of his close association with his elders in
those rst formative years in Osage. Yancey had delighted in talking to the boy; in taking him on
rides and drives about the broad burning countryside. His skin was bronzed the color of his
father’s. He looked like a little patrician Spaniard or perhaps (the Venables thought privately)
part Indian. Then, too, there had been few children of his age in the town’s beginning. Sabra had
been, at rst, too suspicious of such as there were. He would, probably, have seemed a rather
unpleasant and priggish little boy if his voice and manner had not been endowed

miraculously with all the charm and magnetism that his father possessed in such disarming degree.
He now surveyed his middle-aged cousins with the concentrated and disconcerting gaze of the
precocious child.
“Indians,” he answered, with great distinctness, “don’t ght white men any more. They can’t.
Their—uh—spirit is broken.” Cousin Dabney Venable, who still a ected black stocks (modi ed), now
looked slightly apoplectic. “They only fought in the rst place because the white men took their bu
’loes away from them that they lived on and ate and traded the skins and that was all they had; and
their land away from them.”
“Well,” exclaimed Cousin Jouett Goforth, of the Louisiana Goforths, “this is quite a little Redskin
you have here, Cousin Sabra.”
“And,” continued Cimarron, warming to his subject, “look at the Osage Indians where my father took
me to visit the reservation near where we live. The white people made them move out of Missouri to
Kansas because they wanted their land, and from there to another place—I forget—and then they
wanted that, too, and they said, ‘Look, you go and live in the Indian Territory where we tell you,’
and it’s all bare there, and nothing grows in that place—it’s called the Bad Lands—unless you work
and slave and the Osages they were used to hunting and shing not farming, so they are just starving
to death and my father says some day they will get their revenge on the white——”
Felice Venable turned her ashing dark gaze on her daughter. “Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth.
Cousin Dabney Venable, still the disgruntled suitor, brought malicious eyes to bear on Sabra.
“Well, well, Cousin Sabra! Look out that you don’t have a Pocahontas for a daughter-in-law some ne
day.”
Sabra was furious, though she tried in her pride to conceal it. “Oh, Cim has just heard the talk of
the men around the newspaper o ce—the Indian agent, Mr. Heeney, sometimes drops in on his trips to
Osage—they’re talking now of having the Indian Agent’s o ce transferred to Osage, though Oklahoma
City is ghting for it

—Yancey has always been very much stirred by the wretched Indians—Cim has heard him talking.”
Cim sensed that he had not made his desired e ect on his listeners. “My father says,” he announced,
suddenly, striding up and down the room in absurd and unconscious imitation of his idol—one could
almost see the Prince Albert coat tails switching—“my father says that some day an Indian will be
President of the United States, and then you bet you’ll all be sorry you were such dirty skunks to
’em.”
The eyes of the visiting Venables swung, as one orb, from the truculent gure of the boy to the
agitated face of the mother.
“My poor child!” came from Felice Venable in accents of rage rather than pity. She was addressing
Sabra.
Sabra took refuge in hauteur. “You wouldn’t understand. Our life there is so di erent from yours
here. Yancey’s Indian editorials in the Wigwam have made a sensation. They were spoken of in the
Senate at Washington.” Felice dismissed all Yancey’s written works with a wave of her hand. “In
fact,” Sabra went on—she who hated Indians and all their ways—“in fact, his editorials on the
subject have been so fearless and free that he has been in danger of his life from the people who
have been cheating the Indians. It has been even more dangerous than when he tracked down the
murderer of Pegler.”
“Pegler,” repeated the Venables, disdainfully, and without the slightest curiosity in their voices.
Sabra gave it up. “You don’t understand. The only thing you care about is whether the duck runs red
or not.”
Even little Donna was not much of a success. The baby was an eerie little elf, as plain as the boy
was handsome. She resembled her grandmother, Felice Venable, without a trace of that redoubtable
matron’s former beauty. But she had that almost inde nable thing known as style. At the age of two
she wore with undeniable chic the rather clumsy little garments that Sabra had so painstakingly
made for her; and when she was dressed, for the rst time, in one of the exquisitely hemstitched,
tucked and embroidered white frocks that her grandmother had wrought for her, that gifted though
reluctant

needlewomen said, tartly, “Thank God, she’s got style, at least. She’ll have to make out with
that.”
All in all, Sabra found herself joyously returning to the barren burning country to which, four
years earlier, she had gone in such dread and terror. She resented her mother’s do-this, do-that.
She saw Felice Venable now, no longer as a power, an authority in all matters of importance, but as
a sallow old lady who tottered on heels that were too high and who, as she sat talking, pleated and
unpleated with tremulous ngers the many ru es of her white dimity wrapper. The matriarch had lost
her crown. Sabra was matriarch now of her own little kingdom; and already she was planning to
extend that realm beyond and beyond its present con nes into who knows what vastness of demesne.
She decided that she must take the children more than ever in hand. No more of this talk of
Indians, of freedom, or equality of man. She did not realize (it being long before the day of
psychology as applied so glibly to the training of children) that she was, so far as Cim was
concerned, years too late. At eight his character was formed. She had taught him the things that
Felice Venable had taught her—stand up straight; eat your bread and butter; wash your hands; say
how do you do to the lady; one and one are two; somebody has been eating my porridge, said the
little wee bear. But Yancey had taught him poetry far beyond his years, and accustomed his ears to
the superb cadences of the Bible; Yancey had told him, bit by bit, and all unconsciously, the saga
of the settling of the great Southwest.
“Cowboys wear big sombreros to shield their faces from the rain and the sun when they’re riding the
range, and the snow from dripping down their backs. He wears a handkerchief knotted at the back of
the neck and hanging down in front so that he can wipe the sweat and dust from his face with it,
and then there it is, open, drying in the wind; and in a dust storm he pulls it over his mouth and
nose, and in a blizzard it keeps his nose and chin from freezing. He wears chaps, with the hairy
side out, to keep his legs warm in winter and to protect them from being torn by chaparral and
cactus thorns in summer. His boots are high heeled to keep his feet from

slipping in the stirrups when he has to work standing in the saddle, and because he can sink them
in the sod when he’s o his horse and roping a plunging bronc. He totes a six-shooter to keep the
other fellow from shooting.”
The child’s eyes were enormous, glowing, enthralled. Yancey told him the story of the bu alo; he
talked endlessly of the Indians. He even taught him some words of Comanche, which is the court
language of the Indian. He put him on a horse at the age of six. A sentimentalist and a romantic,
he talked to the boy of the sunset; of Spanish gold; of the wild days of the Cimarron and the
empire so nearly founded there. The boy loved his mother dutifully, and as a matter of course, as a
child loves the fount of food, of tender care, of shelter. But his father he worshiped, he adored.
Sabra’s leave-taking held one regret, one pain. Mother Bridget had died two weeks before Sabra
arrived in Wichita. It was not until she learned this sad news that Sabra realized how tremendously
she had counted on telling her tale of Osage to the nun. She would have understood. She would have
laughed at the story of the ten barrels of water; of the wild cowboy’s kiss in the road; she would
have sympathized with Sabra’s terror during that Sunday church meeting. She had known that very
life a half century ago, there in Kansas. Sabra, during her visit, did not go to the Mission
School. She could not.
She had meant, at the last, to nd occasion to inform her mother and the minor Venables that it was
she who ironed Yancey’s ne white linen shirts. But she was not a spiteful woman. And she re ected
that this might be construed as a criticism of her husband.
So, gladly, eagerly, Sabra went back to the wilds she once had despised.

13

Before the Katy pulled in at the Osage station (the railroad actually had been extended, true to
Dixie Lee’s prediction, from Wahoo to Osage and beyond) Sabra’s eyes were searching the glaring
wooden platform. Len Orson, the chatty and accommodating conductor, took Donna in his arms and
stood with her at the foot of the car steps. His heavy gold plated watch chain, as broad as a
cable, with its concomitant Masonic charm, elk’s tooth, gold pencil, and peach pit carved in the
likeness of an ape, still held Donna enthralled, though she had snatched at it whenever he passed
their seat or stood to relate the gossip of the Territory to Sabra. She was hungry for news, and
Len was a notorious shwife. Now, as she stepped o the train, Sabra’s face wore that look of radiant
expectancy characteristic of the returned traveler, con dent of a welcome.
“Well, I guess I know somebody’ll be pretty sorry to see you,” Len said, archly. He looked about
for powerful waiting arms in which to deposit Donna. The engine bell clanged, the whistle tooted.
His kindly and inquisitive blue eyes swept the station platform. He plumped Donna, perforce, into
Sabra’s strangely slack arms, and planted one foot, in its square-toed easy black shoe, onto the
car step in the nick of time, the other leg swinging out behind him as the train moved on.
Yancey was not there. The stark red-painted wooden station sat blistering in the sun. Yancey simply
was not there. Not only that, the station platform, usually graced by a score of vacuous faces and
limp gures gathered to witness the exciting event of the Katy’s daily arrival and departure, was
bare. Even the familiar gure of Pat

Leary, the station agent, who always ran out in his shirt sleeves to wrestle such freight or
express as was left on the Osage platform, could not be seen. From within the ticket o ce came the
sound of his telegraph instrument. Its click was busy; was frantic. It chattered unceasingly in the
hot afternoon stillness.
Sabra felt sick and weak. Something was wrong. She left her boxes and bags and parcels on the
platform where Len Orsen had obligingly dumped them. Half an hour before their arrival in Osage she
had entrusted the children to the care of a fellow passenger while she had gone to the washroom to
put on one of the new dresses made in Wichita and bearing the style cachet of Kansas City: green,
with cream colored ruchings at the throat and wrists, and a leghorn hat with pink roses. She had
anticipated the look in Yancey’s gray eyes at sight of it. She had made the children spotless and
threatened them with dire things if they sullied their splendor before their father should see
them.
And now he was not there.
With Donna in her arms and Cim at her heels she hurried toward the sound of the clicking. And as
she went her eyes still scanned the dusty red road that led to the station, for sight of a great
gure in a white sombrero, its coat tails swooping as it came.
She peered in at the station window. Pat Leary was bent over his telegraph key. A smart tight
little Irishman who had come to the Territory with the railroad section crew when the Katy was
being built. Station agent now, and studying law at night.
“Mr. Leary! Mr. Leary! Have you seen Yancey?” He looked up at her absently, his hand still on the
key. Click … click … clickclickclickety—clicketyclickclick.
“Wha’ say?”
“I’m Mrs. Cravat. I just got o the Katy. Where’s my husband?
Where’s Yancey?”
He clicked on a moment longer; then wiped his wet forehead with his forearm protected by the black
sateen sleevelet. “Ain’t you heard?”
“No,” whispered Sabra, with sti lips that seemed no part of her. Then, in a voice rising to a
scream, “No! No! No! What? Is he

dead?”
The Irishman came over to her then, as she crouched at the window. “Oh, no, ma’am. Yancey’s all
right. He ain’t hurt to speak of. Just a nick in the arm—and left arm at that.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Don’t take on. You goin’ to faint or——?” “No. Tell me.”
“I been so busy.… Yancey got the Kid, you know. Killed him. The whole town’s gone crazy. Pitched
battle right there on Pawhuska Avenue in front of the bank, and bodies layin’ around like a battle
eld. I’m sending it out. I ain’t got much time, but I’ll give you an idea. Biggest thing that’s
happened in the history of the Territory
—or the whole Southwest, for that matter. Shouldn’t wonder if they’d make Yancey President.
Governor, anyway. Seems Yancey was out hunting up in the Hills last Thursday——”
“Thursday! But that’s the day the paper comes out.”
“Well, the Wigwam ain’t been so regular since you been away.” She allowed that to pass without
comment. “Up in the Hills he stumbles on Doc Valliant, drunk, but not so drunk he don’t recognize
Yancey. Funny thing about Doc Valliant. He can be drunker’n a fool, but one part of his brain stays
clear as a diamond. I seen him take a bullet out of Luke Slaughter once and sew him up when he was
so drunk he didn’t know his right hand from his left, or where he was at, but he done it. What? Oh,
yeh—well, he tells Yancey, drunk as he is, that he’s right in the camp where the Kid and his gang
is hiding out. One of them was hurt bad in that last Santa Fé hold-up at Cimarron. Like to died,
only they sent for Doc, and he came and saved him. They got close to thirty thousand that trick,
and it kind of went to their head. Valliant overheard them planning to ride in here to Osage, like
to-day, and hold up the Citizens’ National in broad daylight like the Kid always does. They was
already started. Well, Yancey o on his horse to warn the town, and knows he’s got to detour or
he’ll come on the gang and they’ll smell a rat. Well, say, he actually did meet ’em. Came on ’em,
accidental. The Kid sees him and grins that wolf grin of his and sings out, ‘Yancey, you still
runnin’ that paper of yourn down at

Osage?’ Yancey says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, say,’ he says, ‘how much is it?’ Yancey says a dollar a year.
The Kid reaches down and throws Yancey a shot sack with ten silver dollars in it. ‘Send me the
paper for ten years,’ he says. ‘Where to?’ Yancey asks him. Well, say, the Kid laughs that wolf
laugh of his again and he says, ‘I never thought of that. I’ll have to leave you know later.’ Well,
Yancey, looking as meek and mealy-mouthed as a baby, he rides his way, he’s got a little book of
poems in his hand and he’s reading as he rides, or pretending to, but rst chance he sees he cuts
across the Hills, puts his horse through the gullies and into the draws and across the scrub oaks
like he was a circus horse or a centipede or something. He gets into Osage, dead tired and his
horse in a lather, ten minutes before the Kid and his gang sweeps down Pawhuska Avenue, their
six-shooters barking like a regiment was coming, and makes a rush for the bank. But the town is
expecting them. Say! Blood!”
Sabra waited for no more. She turned. And as she turned she saw coming down the road in a cloud of
dust a grotesque scarecrow, all shanks and teeth and rolling eyes. Black Isaiah.
“No’m, Miss Sabra, he ain’t hurt—not what yo’ rightly call hurt. No, ma’am. Jes’ a nip in de arm,
and he got it slung in a black silk hank’chief and looks right sma’t handsome. They wouldn’t let
him alone noways. Ev’ybody in town they shakin’ his hand caze he shoot that shot dat kill de Kid.
An’ you know what he do then, Miss Sabra? He kneel down an’ he cry like a baby.… Le’ me tote dis
yere valise. Ah kin tote Miss Donna, too. My, she sho’ growed!”
The newspaper o ce, the print shop, her parlor, her kitchen, her bedroom, were packed with men in
boots, spurs, sombreros; men in overalls; with women; with children. Mrs. Wyatt was there—the
Philomatheans as one woman were there; Dixie Lee actually; everyone but—sinisterly—Louie Hefner.
“Well, Mis’ Cravat, I guess you must be pretty proud of him! … This is a big day for Osage. I guess
Oklahoma City knows this town’s on the map now, all right.… You missed the shootin’, Mis’ Cravat,
but you’re in time to help Yancey celebrate.… Say, the Santa Fé alone o ered ve thousand dollars
for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive. Yancey gets it, all right. And the Katy done the same.
And

they’s a government price on his head, and the Citizens’ National is making up a purse. You’ll be
ridin’ in your own carriage, settin’ in silks, from now.”
Yancey was standing at his desk in the Wigwam o ce. His back was against the desk, as though he
were holding this crowd at bay instead of welcoming them as congratulatory guests. His long locks
hung limp on his shoulders. His face was white beneath the tan, like silver under lacquer. His
great head lolled on his chest. His left arm lay in a black and scarlet silk sling made of one of
his more piratical handkerchiefs.
He looked up as she came in, and at the look in his face she forgave him his neglect of her;
forgave him the house full of what Felice Venable would term ri ra and worse; his faithlessness to
the Wigwam. Donna, tired and frightened, had set up a wail. Cim, bewildered, had gone on a rampage.
But as Yancey took a stumbling step toward her she had only one child, and that one needed her. She
thrust Donna again into Isaiah’s arms; left Cim whirling among the throng; ran toward him. She was
in his great arms, but it was her arms that seemed to sustain him.
“Sabra. Sugar. Send them away. I’m so tired. Oh, God, I’m so tired.”
Next day they exhibited the body of the Kid in the new plate glass show window of Hefner’s
Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlors. All Osage came to view him, all the county came to view
him; they rode in on trains, on horses, in wagons, in ox carts for miles and miles around. The Kid.
The boy who, in his early twenties, had sent no one knew how many men to their death—whose name was
the symbol for terror and daring and merciless marauding throughout the Southwest. Even in the
East—in New York—the name of the Kid was known. Stories had been written about him. He was, long
before his death, a mythical gure. And now he, together with Clay McNulty, his lieutenant, lay side
by side, quite still, quite passive. The crowd was so dense that it threatened Louie Hefner’s
window. He had to put up rope barriers to protect it and when the mob surged through these he
stationed guards with six-shooters, and there was talk of calling out the militia from Fort Tipton.
Sabra said

it was disgusting, uncivilized. She forbade Cim to go within ve hundred yards of the place—kept
him, in fact, virtually a prisoner in the yard. Isaiah she could not hold. His lean black body
could be seen squirming in and out of the crowds; his ebony face, its eyes popping, was always in
the front row of the throng gloating before Hefner’s window. He became, in fact, a sort of guide
and uno cial lecturer, holding forth upon the Kid, his life, his desperate record, the battle in
which he met his death in front of the bank he had meant to despoil.
“Well, you got to hand it to him,” the men said, gazing their ll. “He wasn’t no piker. When he held
up a train or robbed a bank or shot up a posse it was always in broad daylight, by God. Middle of
the day he’d come riding into town. No nitro-glycerin for him, or shootin’ behind fence posts and
trees in the dark. Nosiree! Out in the open, and takin’ a bigger chance than them that was robbed.
Ride! Say, you couldn’t tell which was him and which was horse. They was one piece. And shoot! It
wa’n’t shootin’. It was magic. They say he’s got half a million in gold cached away up in the
Hills.”
For weeks, for months, the hills were honeycombed with prowlers in search for this buried treasure.
Sabra did a strange, a terrible thing. Yancey would not go near the grisly window. Sabra upheld
him; denounced the gaping crowd as scavengers and ghouls. Then, suddenly, at the last minute, as
the sun was setting blood red across the prairie, she walked out of the house, down the road, as if
impelled, as if in a trance, like a sleep walker, and stood before Hefner’s window. The crowd made
way for her respectfully. They knew her. This was the wife of Yancey Cravat, the man whose name
appeared in headlines in every newspaper throughout the United States, and even beyond the ocean.
They had dressed the two bandits in new cheap black suits of store clothes, square in cut, clumsy,
so that they stood woodenly away from the lean hard bodies. Clay McNulty’s face had a faintly
surprised look. His long sandy mustaches drooped over a mouth singularly sweet and resigned. But
the face of the boy was xed in a smile that brought the lips in a sardonic snarl away from the
wolf-

like teeth. He looked older in death than he had in life, for his years had been too few for lines
such as death’s ngers usually erase; and the eyes, whose lightning glance had pierced you through
and through like one of the bullets from his own dreaded six-shooters, now were extinguished
forever behind the waxen shades of his eyelids.
It was at the boy that Sabra looked; and having looked she turned and walked back to the house.
They gave them a decent funeral and a burial with everything in proper order, and when the minister
refused to read the service over these two sinners Yancey consented to do it and did, standing
there with the fresh-turned mounds of red Oklahoma clay sullying his ne high-heeled boots, and the
sun blazing down upon the curling locks of his uncovered head.
“ ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.… His hand will be against every man,
and every man’s hand against him.… The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in
his heart.… Fools make mock at sin.…’ ”
They put up two rough wooden slabs, marking the graves. But souvenir hunters with little bright
knives soon made short work of those. The two mounds sank lower, lower. Soon nothing marked this
spot on the prairie to di erentiate it from the red clay that stretched for miles all about it.
They sent to Yancey, by mail, in checks, and through solemn committees in store clothes and white
collars, the substantial money rewards that, for almost ve years, had been o ered by the Santa Fé
road, the M.K. & T., the government itself, and various banks, for the capture of the Kid, dead or
alive.
Yancey refused every penny of it. The committees, the townspeople, the county, were shocked and
even o ended. Sabra, tight lipped, at last broke out in protest.
“We could have a decent house—a new printing press—Cim’s education—Donna——”
“I don’t take money for killing a man,” Yancey repeated, to each o er of money. The committees and
the checks went back as they had come.

14

Sabra noticed that Yancey’s hand shook with a perceptible palsy before breakfast, and that this was
more than ever noticeable as that hand approached the rst drink of whisky which he always
swallowed before he ate a morsel. He tossed it down as one who, seeking relief from pain, takes
medicine. When he returned the glass to the table he drew a deep breath. His hand was,
miraculously, quite steady.
More and more he neglected the news and business details of the Wigwam. He was restless, moody,
distrait. Sabra remembered with a pang of dismay something that he had said on rst coming to Osage.
“God, when I think of those years in Wichita! Almost ve years in one place—that’s the longest
stretch I’ve ever done.”
The newspaper was prospering, for Sabra gave more and more time to it. But Yancey seemed to have
lost interest, as he did in any venture once it got under way. It was now a matter of getting
advertisements, taking personal and local items, recording the events in legal, real estate,
commercial, and social circles. Mr. and Mrs. Abel Dagley spent Sunday in Chuckmubbee. The Rev.
McAlestar Couch is riding the Doakville circuit.
Even in the courtroom or while addressing a meeting of townspeople Yancey sometimes would behave
strangely. He would stop in the midst of a orid period. At once a creature savage and
overcivilized, the aring lamps, the hot, breathless atmosphere, the vacuous white faces looming up
at him like balloons would repel him. He had been known to stalk out, leaving them staring. In the
courtroom he was an alarming gure. When he was defending a

local county or Territorial case they ocked from miles around to hear him, and the crude pine shack
that was the courtroom would be packed to su ocation. He towered over any jury of frontiersmen
—a behemoth in a Prince Albert coat and ne linen, his great shaggy bu alo’s head charging
menacingly at his opponent. His was the orid hifalutin oratory of the day, full of sentiment,
hyperbole, and wind. But he could be trenchant enough when needs be; and his charm, his magnetic
power, were undeniable, and almost invariably he emerged from the courtroom victorious. He was not
above employing tricks to win his case. On one occasion, when his client was being tried for an a
air of gunplay which had ended disastrously, the jury, in spite of all that Yancey could do, turned
out to be one which would be, he was certain, heavily for conviction. He deliberately worked
himself up into an appearance of Brobdingnagian rage. He thundered, he roared, he stamped, he wept,
he acted out the events leading up to the killing and then, while the jury’s eyes rolled and the
weaker among them wiped the sweat from their brows, he suddenly whipped his two well known and
deadly ivory-handled and silver six-shooters from their holsters in his belt. “And this, gentlemen,
is what my client did.” He pointed them. But at that, with a concerted yelp of pure terror the jury
rose as one man and leaped for the windows, the doors, and ed.
Yancey looked around, all surprise and injured innocence. The jury had disbanded. According to the
law, a new jury had to be impaneled. The case was retried. Yancey won it.
Sabra saw more and more to the editing and to the actual printing of the Oklahoma Wigwam. She got
in as general houseworker and helper an Osage Indian girl of fteen who had been to the Indian
school and who had learned some of the rudiments of household duties: cleaning, dishwashing,
laundering, even some of the simpler forms of cookery. She tended Donna, as well. Her name was
Arita Red Feather, a quiet gentle girl who went about the house in her calico dress and moccasins
and had to be told everything over again, daily. Isaiah was beginning to be too big for these
duties. He was something of a problem in the household. At the suggestion that he be sent back to
Wichita he set up a howling and wailing and would

not be consoled until both Sabra and Yancey assured him that he might remain with them forever. So
he now helped Arita Red Feather with the heavier housework; did odd jobs about the printing shop;
ran errands; saw that Donna kept from under horses’ hoofs; he could even beat up a pan of good
light biscuits in a pinch. When Jesse Rickey was too drunk to stand at the type case and Yancey was
o on some legal matter, he slowly and painstakingly helped Sabra to make possible the weekly issue
of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Arita Red Feather’s dialect became a bewildering thing in which her native
Osage, Sabra’s re ned diction, and Isaiah’s Southern negro accent were rolled into an almost
unintelligible jargon. “I’m gwine wash um clothes big rain water extremely nice um make um clothes
white fo’ true.”
“That’s ne!” Sabra would say. Then, an hour later, “Oh, Arita, don’t you remember I’ve told you a
hundred times you put the bluing in after they’re rubbed, not before?”
Arita’s dead black Indian eyes, utterly devoid of expression, would stare back at her.
Names of families of mixed Indian and white blood appeared from time to time in the columns of the
Wigwam, for Sabra knew by now that there were in the Territory French-Indian families who looked
upon themselves as aristocrats. This was the old French St. Louis, Missouri, background cropping up
in the newly opened land. The early French who had come to St. Louis, there to trade furs and hides
with the Osages, had taken Indian girls as squaws. You saw, sprinkled among the commonplace
nomenclature of the frontier, such proud old names as Bellieu, Revard, Revelette, Tayrien, Perrier,
Chouteau; and their owners had the unmistakable coloring and the bearing of the Indian. These
dark-skinned people bore, often enough, and ridiculously enough, Irish names as well, for the Irish
laborers who had come out with pickax and shovel and crowbar to build the Territory railroads had
wooed and married the girls of the Indian tribes. You saw little Indian Kellys and Flahertys and
Riordans and Caseys.
All this was bewildering to Sabra. But she did a man’s job with the paper, often against
frightening odds, for Yancey was frequently

absent now, and she had no one but the wavering Jesse Rickey to consult. There were times when he,
too, failed her. Still the weekly appeared regularly, somehow.
Grandma Rosey, living eleven miles northwest of town, is very ill with the la grippe. Mrs. Rosey is
quite aged and fears are entertained for her recovery.
Preaching next Sunday morning and evening at the Presbyterian church by Rev. J. H. Canby. Come and
hear the new bell.
Mrs. Wicksley is visiting with the Judge this week.
A movement is on foot to ll up the sink holes on Pawhuska Avenue. The street in its present state
is a disgrace to the community.
C. H. Snack and family expect to leave next week for an extended visit with Mrs. Snack’s relatives
in southeastern Kansas. Mr. Snack disposed of his personal property at public sale last Monday. Our
loss is Kansas’s gain.
(A sinister paragraph this. You saw C. H. Snack, the failure, the defeated, led back to Kansas
there to live the life of the nagged and unsuccessful husband tolerated by his wife’s kin.)
Sabra, in a pinch, even tried her unaccustomed hand at an occasional editorial, though Yancey
seldom failed her utterly in this department. A rival newspaper set up quarters across the street
and, for two or three months, kept up a feeble pretense of existence. Yancey’s editorials, during
this period, were extremely personal.
The so-called publishers of the organ across the street have again been looking through glasses
that re ect their own images. A tree is known by its fruit. The course pursued by the Dispatch does
not substantiate its claim that it is a Republican paper.

The men readers liked this sort of thing. It was Yancey who brought in such items as:
Charles Flasher, wanted for murder, forgery, selling liquor without a license, and breaking jail at
Skiatook, was captured in Oklahoma City as he was trying to board a train in the Choctaw yards.
But it was Sabra who held the women readers with her accounts of the veal loaf, cole slaw, baked
beans, and angel-food cake served at the church supper, and the somewhat touching decorations and
costumes worn at the wedding of a local or county belle.
If, in the quarter of a century that followed, every trace of the settling of the Oklahoma country
had been lost, excepting only the numbers of the Oklahoma Wigwam, there still would have been left
a clear and inclusive record of the lives, morals, political and social and economic workings of
this bizarre community. Week by week, month by month, the reader could have noticed in its columns
whatever of progress was being made in this fantastic slice of the Republic of the United States.
It was the day of the practical joke, and Yancey was always neglecting his newspaper and his law
practice to concoct, with a choice group of conspirators, some elaborate and gaudy scheme for the
comic downfall of a fellow citizen or a newcomer to the region. These jokes often took weeks for
their successful consummation. Frequently they were founded on the newcomer’s misapprehension
concerning the Indians. If this was the Indian Territory, he argued, not unreasonably, it was full
of Indians. He had statistics. There were 200,000 Indians in the Territory. Indians meant
tomahawks, scalping, burnings, raidings, and worse. When the local citizens assured him that all
this was part of the dead past the tenderfoot quoted, sagely, that there was no good Indian but a
dead Indian. Many of the jokes, then, hinged on the mythical bad Indian. The newcomer was told that
there was a threatened uprising; the Cheyennes had been sold calico—bolts and bolts of it—with the
stripes running the wrong way. This, it was explained, was a

mistake most calculated to madden them. The jokesters armed themselves to the teeth. Six-shooters
were put in the clammy, trembling hand of the tenderfoot. He was told that the nights were freezing
cold. He was led to a near-by eld that was man-high with sun owers and cautioned not to re unless
he heard the yells of the maddened savages. There, shaking and sweating in overcoat, overshoes, mu
ers, ear mu s, and leggings, he cowered for hours while all about him (at a safe distance) he heard
the horrid, blood- curdling yells of the supposed Indians. His scalp, when nally he was rescued,
usually was found to be almost lifted of its own accord.
Next day, Yancey would spend hours writing a humorous account of this Indian uprising for the
Thursday issue of the Wigwam. The drinks were on the newcomer. That ceremony also took hours.
O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible, As a nose on a man’s face,
or a weathercock on a steeple.
Thus Yancey’s article would begin with a quotation from his favorite poet.
“Oh, Yancey darling, sometimes I think you’re younger than Cim.” “What would you like me to be,
honey? A venerable Venable? ‘A man whose blood is very snow-broth; one who never feels the
wanton stings and motions of the sense’?”
Sabra, except for Yancey’s growing restlessness, was content enough. The children were well; the
paper was prospering; she had her friends; the house had taken on an aspect of comfort; they had
added another bedroom; Arita Red Feather and Isaiah together relieved her of the rougher work of
the household. She was, in a way, a leader in the crude social life of the community. Church
suppers; sewing societies; family picnics.
One thing rankled deep. Yancey had been urged to accept the o ce of Territorial delegate to
Congress (without vote) and had refused. All sorts of Territorial political positions were held out
to him. The city of Guthrie, Capital of the Territory, wooed him in

vain. He laughed at political position, rejected all o ers of public nature. Now he was being o
ered the position of Governor of the Territory. His oratory, his dramatic quality, his record in
many a airs, including the Pegler murder and the shooting of the Kid, had spread his fame even
beyond the Southwest.
“Oh, Yancey!” Sabra thought of the Venables, the Marcys, the Vians, the Goforths. At last her
choice of a mate was to be vindicated. Governor!
But Yancey shook his great head. There was no moving him. He would go on the stump to make others
Congressmen and Governors, but he himself would not take o ce. “Palavering to a lot of greasy o ce
seekers and panhandlers! Dancing to the tune of that gang in Washington! I know the whole dirty lot
of them.”
Restless. Moody. Irritable. Riding out into the prairies to be gone for days. Coming back to regale
Cim with stories of evenings spent on this or that far-o Reservation, smoking and talking with
Chief Big Horse of the Cherokees, with Chief Bu alo Hide of the Chickasaws, with old Black Kettle
of the Osages.
But he was not always like this. There were times when his old
ery spirit took possession. He entered the ght for the statehood of Oklahoma Territory, and here
he encountered opposition enough even for him. He was for the consolidation of the Oklahoma
Territory and the Indian Territory under single statehood. The thousands who were opposed to the
Indians—who looked upon them as savages totally un t for citizenship—fought him. A year after their
coming to Oklahoma the land had been divided into two territories—one owned and occupied by the
Indian Tribes, the other owned by the whites. Here the Cravats lived, on the border line. And here
was Yancey, ghting week after week, in the editorial and news columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam, for
the rights of the Indians; for the consolidation of the two halves as one state. Yet, unreasonably
enough, he sympathized with the Five Civilized Tribes in their e orts to retain their tribal laws
in place of the United States Court laws which were being forced upon them. He made a thousand
bitter enemies. Many of the Indians themselves were opposed to him. These were for separate
statehood for the Indian

Territory, the state to be known as Sequoyah, after the great Cherokee leader of that name.
Sabra, who at rst had paid little enough heed to these political problems, discovered that she must
know something of them as protection against those times (increasingly frequent) when Yancey was
absent and she must get out the paper with only the uncertain aid of Jesse Rickey.
She dared not, during these absences of Yancey, oppose outright his political and Territorial
stand. But she edged as near the line as she could, for her hatred of the Indians was still deep
and (she insisted) unconquerable. She even published—slyly—the speeches and arguments of the Double
Statehood party leaders, stating simply that these were the beliefs of the opposition. They sounded
very reasonable and convincing as the Wigwam readers perused them.
Sabra came home one afternoon from a successful and stirring meeting of the Twentieth Century
Philomathean Culture Club (the two had now formed a pleasing whole) at which she had read a paper
entitled, Whither Oklahoma? It had been received with much applause on the part of Osage’s twenty
most exclusive ladies, who had heard scarcely a word of it, their minds being intent on Sabra’s new
dress. She had worn it for the rst time at the club meeting, and it was a bombshell far exceeding
any tumult that her paper might create.
Her wealthy Cousin Bella French Vian, visiting the World’s Fair in Chicago, had sent it from
Marshall Field’s store. It consisted of a blue serge skirt, cut wide and aring at the hem but snug
at the hips; a waist-length blue serge Eton jacket trimmed with black soutache braid; and a garment
called a shirtwaist to be worn beneath the jacket. But astounding—revolutionary—as all this was, it
was not the thing that caused the eyes of feminine Osage to bulge with envy and despair. The
sleeves! The sleeves riveted the attention of those present, to the utter neglect of Whither
Oklahoma? The balloon sleeve now appeared for the rst time in the Oklahoma Territory, sponsored by
Mrs. Yancey Cravat. They were bou ant, enormous; a yard of material at least had gone into

each of them. Every woman present was, in her mind, tearing to rag strips, bit by bit, every gown
in her own scanty wardrobe.
Sabra returned home, ushed, elated. She entered by way of the newspaper o ce, seeking Yancey’s
approval. Curtseying and dimpling she stood before him. She wanted him to see the new costume
before she must thriftily take it o for the preparation of supper. Yancey’s comment, as she
pirouetted for his approval, infuriated her.
“Good God! Sleeves! Let the squaws see those and they’ll be throwing away their papoose boards, and
using the new fashion for carrying their babies, one in each sleeve.”
“They’re the very latest thing in Chicago. Cousin Bella French Vian wrote that they’ll be even
fuller than this, by autumn.”
“By autumn,” echoed Yancey. He held in his hand a slip of paper. Later she knew that it was a
telegram—one of the few telegraphic messages which the Wigwam’s somewhat sketchy service received.
He was again completely oblivious of the new costume, the balloon sleeves. “Listen, sugar.
President Cleveland’s just issued a proclamation setting September sixteenth for the opening of the
Cherokee Strip.”
“Cherokee Strip?”
“Six million, three hundred thousand acres of Oklahoma land to be opened for white settlement. The
government has bought it from the Cherokees. It was all to be theirs—all Oklahoma. Now they’re
pushing them farther and farther out.”
“Good thing,” snapped Sabra, still cross about the matter of Yancey’s indi erence to her costume.
Indians. Who cared! She raised her arms to unpin her hat.
Yancey rose from his desk. He turned his rare full gaze on her, his handsome eyes aglow. “Honey,
let’s get out of this. Clubs, sleeves, church suppers—God! Let’s get our hundred and sixty acre
allotment of Cherokee Strip land and start a ranch—raise cattle— live in the open—ride—this town
life is no good—it’s hideous.”
Her arms fell, leaden, to her side. “Ranch? Where?”
“You’re not listening. There’s to be a new Run. The Cherokee Strip Opening. You know. You wrote
news stories about it only last week,

before the opening date had been announced. Let’s go, Sabra. It’s the biggest thing yet. The 1889
Run was nothing compared to it. Sell the Wigwam, take the children, make the Run, get our hundred
and sixty, start a ranch, stock up with cattle and horses, build a ranch house and patio; in the
saddle all day——”
“Never!” screamed Sabra. Her face was distorted. Her hands were clutching the air, as though she
would tear to bits this plan of his for the future. “I won’t. I won’t go. I’d rather die rst. You
can’t make me.”
He came to her, tried to take her in his arms, to pacify her. “Sugar, you won’t understand. It’s
the chance of a lifetime. It’s the biggest thing in the history of Oklahoma. When the Territory’s a
state we’ll own forever one hundred and sixty acres of the nest land anywhere. I know the section
I want.”
“Yes. You know. You know. You knew the last time, too. You let that slut—that hussy—take it away
from you—or you gave it to her. Go and take her with you. You’ll never make me go. I’ll stay here
with my children and run the paper. Mother! Cim! Donna!”
She had a rare and violent t of hysterics, after which Yancey, aided clumsily by Arita Red Feather,
divested her of the new nery, quieted the now screaming children, and nally restored to a
semblance of supper-time order the household into which he had hurled such a bomb. Felice Venable
herself, in her heyday, could not have given a ner exhibition of Marcy temperament. It was
intended, as are all hysterics (no one ever has hysterics in private), to intimidate the beholder
and ll him with remorse. Yancey was properly solicitous, tender, charming, as only he could be.
From the shelter of her husband’s arms Sabra looked about the cosy room, smiled wanly upon her
children, bade Arita Red Feather bring on the belated supper. “That,” thought Sabra to herself,
bathing her eyes, smoothing her hair, and coming pale and wistful to the table, her lip quivering
with a nal e ective sigh, “settles that.”
But it did not. September actually saw Yancey making ready to go. Nothing that Sabra could say,
nothing that she could do, served to stop him. She even negotiated for a little strip of farm land
outside the town of Osage and managed to get Yancey to make a

payment on it, in the hope that this would keep him from the Run. “If it’s land you want you can
stay here and farm the piece at Tuskamingo. You can raise cattle on it. You can breed horses on
it.”
Yancey shook his head. He took no interest in the farm. It was Sabra who saw to the erection of a
crude little farmhouse, arranged for the planting of such crops as it was thought that land would
yield. It was very near the Osage Reservation land and turned out, surprisingly enough, doubtless
owing to some mineral or geological reason (they knew why, later), to be fertile, though the Osage
land so near by was barren and inty.
“Farm! That’s no farm. It’s a garden patch. D’you think I’m settling down to be a potato digger and
chicken feeder, in a hayseed hat and manure on my boots!”
September, the month of the opening of the vast Cherokee Strip, saw him well on his way. Cim howled
to be taken along, and would not be consoled for days.
Sabra’s farewell was intended to be cold. Her heart, she told herself, was breaking. The change
that these last four years had made in her never was more apparent than now.
“You felt the same way when I went o to the rst Run,” Yancey reminded her. “Remember? You carried
on just one degree less than your mother. And if I hadn’t gone you’d still be living in the house
in Wichita, with your family smothering you in Southern fried chicken and advice.” There was much
truth in this, she had to admit. She melted; clung to him.
“Yancey! Yancey!”
“Smile, sugar. Wait till you see Cim and Donna, ve years from now, riding the Cravat acres.”
After all, a hundred other men in Osage were going to make the Cherokee Strip Run. The town—the
whole Territory—had talked of nothing else for months.
She dried her eyes. She even managed a watery smile. He was making the Run on a brilliant,
wild-eyed mare named Cimarron, with a strain of Spanish in her for speed and grace, and a strain of
American mustang for endurance. He had decided to make the trip from Osage to the Cherokee Outlet
on horseback by easy stages so

as to keep the animal in condition, though the Santa Fé and the Rock Island roads were to run
trains into the Strip. He made a dashing, a magni cent gure as he sat the strong, graceful animal
that now was pawing and pirouetting to be o . Though a score of others were starting with him, it
was Yancey that the town turned out to see. He rode in his white sombrero, his ne white shirt, his
suit with the Prince Albert coat, his glittering high-heeled Texas star boots with the gold-plated
spurs. The start was made shortly after sunrise so as to make progress before the heat of the day.
But a cavalcade awoke them before dawn with a rat-a-tat-tat of six- shooters and a blood-curdling
series of cowboy yips. The escort rode with Yancey and the others for a distance out on the Plains.
Sabra, at the last minute, had the family horse hitched to the buggy, bundled Cim and Donna in with
her, and—Isaiah hanging on behind, somehow—the prim little vehicle bumped and reeled its way over
the prairie road in the wake of the departing adventurers.
At the last Sabra threw the reins to Isaiah, sprang from the buggy, ran to Yancey as he pulled up
his horse. He bent far over in his saddle, picked her up in one great arm, held her close while he
kissed her long and hard.
“Sabra, come with me. Let’s get clear away from this.” “You’ve gone crazy! The children!”
“The children, too. All of us. Come on. Now.” His eyes were blazing. She saw that he actually meant
it. A sudden premonition shook her.
“Where are you going? Where are you going?”
He set her down gently and was o , turned halfway in his saddle to face her, his white sombrero
held aloft in his hand, his curling black locks tossing in the Oklahoma breeze.
Five years passed before she saw him again.

15

Dixie Lee’s girls were riding by on their daily afternoon parade. Sabra recognized their laughter
and the easy measured clatter of their horses’ hoofs before they came into view. She knew it was
Dixie Lee’s girls. Somehow, the virtuous women of Osage did not laugh much, though Sabra did not
put this thought into words, ever in her mind. She glanced up now as they drove by. She was seated
at her desk by the window in the front o ce of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Their plumes, their parasols,
their brilliant-hued dresses made a gay garden of color in the monotony of Pawhuska Avenue. They
rode in open phaëtons, but without the usual top, so that they had only their parasols to shade
their brightly painted faces from the ardent Southwest sun. The color of the parasols and plumes
and dresses was changed from day to day, but they always were done in ensemble e ect. One day the
eyes of Osage’s male population were dazzled (and its female population’s eyes a ronted) by a burst
of rosy splendor shading from pale pink to scarlet. The next day they would shade from palest
lavender to deepest purple. The next, from delicate lemon to orange; the day following they ran the
gamut of green. They came four by four, and usually one in each carriage handled the reins, though
occasionally a Negro driver occupied the front seat alone. They were not boisterous. Indeed, they
conducted themselves in seemly enough fashion except perhaps for the little bursts of laughter and
for the fact that they were generous with the ankles beneath the ru ed skirts. Often they carried
dolls in their arms. Sometimes—rarely—they called to each other. Their voices

were high and curiously unformed, like the voices of little children, and yet with a metallic note
in them.
“Madge, looka! When we get to the end of Pawhuska we’ll race you to Coley’s Gulch and back.” These
afternoon races became almost daily sporting events, and the young bloods of Osage got into the
habit of stationing themselves along the road to bet on the pale pink plumes or the deep rose
plumes.
“Heh, go it, Clemmie! Whip him up, Carmen. Give him the whip! Come on! Whoop-ee! Yi!” Plumes
whirling, parasols bobbing, skirts
ying, shrill shouts and screams of laughter from the edge of town. But on the return drive their
behavior was again seemly enough, their cheeks ushed with a natural color beneath the obvious red.
Sabra’s face darkened now as she saw them driving slowly by. Dixie Lee never drove with them. Sabra
knew where she was this afternoon. She was down in the back room of the Osage First National Bank
talking business to the President, Murch Rankin. The business men of the town were negotiating for
the bringing of the packing house and a plough works and a watch factory to Osage. Any one of these
industries required a substantial bonus. The spirit of the day was the boom spirit. Boom the town
of Osage. Dixie Lee was essentially a commercial woman—shrewd, clear headed. She had made a great
success of her business. It was one of the crude town’s industries, and now she, as well as the
banker, the hardware man, the proprietor of the furniture store, the meat market, the clothing
store, contributed her share toward coaxing new industries to favor Osage. That way lay prosperity.
Dixie Lee was a personage in the town. Visitors came to her house now from the cities and counties
round about. She had built for herself and her thriving business the rst brick structure in the
wooden town; a square, solid, and imposing two-story house, its bricks formed from the native
Oklahoma red clay. Cal Bixby had followed close on it with the Bixby Block on Pawhuska Avenue, but
Dixie Lee had led the way. She had commissioned Louie Hefner to buy her red velvet and gold
furniture and her long gilt-framed mirrors, her scarlet deep-pile carpet—that famous velvet-pile
carpet in which Shanghai Wiley, that bearded, cultured, and magnetic

barbarian, said he sank so deep that for a terri ed moment he fell into a panic, being unable to
tell which was red carpet and which his own owing red beard. Dixie herself had gone East for her
statues and pictures. The new house had been opened with a celebration the like of which had never
been seen in the Southwest. Sabra Cravat, mentioning no names, had had an editorial about it in
which the phrases “insult to the fair womanhood of America” and “orgy rivaling the Bacchanalian
revels of history” (Yancey’s library stood her in good stead these days) gured prominently. Both
the Philomathean Society and the Twentieth Century Culture Club had, for the duration of one
meeting at least, deserted literature and culture for the discussion of the more vital topic of
Dixie Lee’s new mansion.
It was—this red brick brothel—less sinister than these good and innocent women suspected. Dixie
Lee, now a woman of thirty or more, ruled it with an iron hand. Within it obtained certain laws and
rules of conduct so rigid as to be almost prim. In a crude, wild, and nearly lawless country the
brick mansion occupied a strange place, lled a want foreign to its original purpose. It was, in a
way, a club, a rendezvous, a salon. For hundreds of men who came there it was all they had ever
known of richness, of color, of luxury. The red and gold, the plush and silk, the perfume, the
draperies, the white arms, the gleaming shoulders sank deep into their hard-bitten senses, long
starved from years on wind-swept ranches, plains dust bedeviled, prairies baked barren by the erce
Southwest sun. Here they lolled, sunk deep in rosy comfort, while they talked Territory politics,
swapped yarns of the old cattle days, played cards, drank wines which tasted like sweet prickling
water to their whisky- scarred palates. They kissed these women, embraced them ercely, thought
tenderly of many of them, and frequently married them; and these women, once married, settled down
contentedly to an almost slavish domesticity.
A hard woman, Dixie Lee; a bad woman. Sabra was morally right in her attitude toward her. Yet this
woman, as well as Sabra, lled her place in the early life of the Territory.

Now, as the laughter sounded nearer and the equipages came within her view, Sabra, seated at her
desk in the newspaper o ce, put down the soft pencil with which she had been lling sheet after
sheet of copy paper. She wrote easily now, with no pretense to style, but concisely and with an
excellent sense of news values. The Oklahoma Wigwam had ourished in these last ve years of her
proprietorship. She was thinking seriously of making it a daily instead of a weekly; of using the
entire building on Pawhuska Avenue for the newspaper plant and building a proper house for herself
and the two children on one of the residence streets newly sprung up—streets that boasted neatly
painted houses and elm and cottonwood trees in the front yards.
Someone came up the steps of the little porch and into the o ce. It was Mrs. Wyatt. She often
brought club notices and social items to the Wigwam: rather fancied herself as a writer; a born
woman’s club corresponding secretary.
“Well!” she exclaimed now, simply, but managing to put enormous bite and signi cance into the
monosyllable. Her glance followed Sabra’s. Together the two women, tight lipped, condemnatory,
watched the gay parade of Dixie Lee’s girls go by.
The ashing company disappeared. A whi of patchouli oated back to the two women standing by the
open window. Their nostrils lifted in disdain. The sound of the horses’ hoofs grew fainter.
“It’s a disgrace to the community”—Mrs. Wyatt’s voice took on its platform note—“and an insult to
every wife and mother in the Territory. There ought to be a law.”
Sabra turned away from the window. Her eyes sought the orderly rows of books, bound neatly in tan
and red—Yancey’s law books, so long unused now, except, perhaps, for occasional newspaper
reference. Her face set itself in lines of resolve. “Perhaps there is.”
It had taken almost three of those ve years to bring those lines into Sabra Cravat’s face. They
were not, after all, lines. Her face was smooth, her skin still fresh in spite of dust and alkali
water and sun and wind. It was, rather, that a certain hardening process had taken place—a
crystallization. Yancey had told her, tenderly, that she was a charming little fool, and she had
believed it—though perhaps with

subconscious reservations. It was not until he left her, and the years rolled round without him,
that she developed her powers. The sombrero had ridden gayly away. The head under the sunbonnet had
held itself high in spite of hints, innuendoes, gossip.
A man like Yancey Cravat—spectacular, dramatic, impulsive—has a thousand critics, scores of bitter
enemies. As the weeks had gone by and Yancey failed to return—had failed to write—rumor, clouded by
scandal, leaped like prairie re from house to house in Osage, from town to town in the Oklahoma
Country, over the Southwest, indeed. All the old stories were revived, and their ugly red tongues
licked a sordid path through the newly opened land.
They say he is living with the Cherokee squaw who is really his wife.
They say he was seen making the Run in the Kickapoo Land Opening in 1895.
They say he killed a man in the Cherokee Strip Run and was caught by a posse and hung.
They say he got a section of land, sold it at a high gure, and was seen lording it around the bar
of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, in his white sombrero and his Prince Albert coat.
They say Dixie Lee is his real wife, and he left her when she was seventeen, came to Wichita, and
married Sabra Venable; and he is the one who has set Dixie up in the brick house.
They say he drank ve quarts of whisky one night and died and is buried in an unmarked grave in
Horseshoe Ranch, where the Doolin gang held forth.
They say he is really the leader of the Doolin gang. They say. They say. They say.
It is impossible to know how Sabra survived those rst terrible weeks that lengthened into months
that lengthened into years. There was in her the wiry endurance of the French Marcys; the pride of
the Southern Venables. Curiously enough, in spite of all that had happened to her she still had
that virginal look—that chastity of lip, that clearness of the eye, that purity of brow. Men come
back to the women who look as Sabra Cravat looked, but the tempests of men’s love pass them by.

She told herself that he was dead. She told the world that he was dead. She knew, by some deep and
unerring instinct, that he was alive. Donna had been so young when he left that he now was all but
wiped from her memory. But Cim, strangely enough, spoke of Yancey Cravat as though he were in the
next room. “My father says …” Sometimes, when Sabra saw the boy coming toward her with that
familiar swinging stride, his head held down and a little thrust forward, she was wrenched by a
physical pang of agony that was almost nausea.
She ran the paper competently; wrung from it a decent livelihood for herself and the two children.
When it had no longer been possible to keep secret from her parents the fact of Yancey’s prolonged
absence, Felice Venable had descended upon her prepared to gather to the family bosom her deserted
child and to bring her, together with her o spring, back to the parental home. Lewis Venable had
been too frail and ill to accompany his wife, so Felice had brought with her the more imposing
among the Venables, Goforths, and Vians who chanced to be visiting the Wichita house at the time of
her departure. Osage had looked upon these stately
gures with much awe, but Sabra’s reception of them had been as coolly cordial as her rejection of
their plans for her future was rm.
“I intend to stay right here in Osage,” she announced, quietly, but in a tone that even Felice
Venable recognized as in exible, “and run the paper, and bring up my children as their father would
have expected them to be brought up.”
“Their father!” Felice Venable repeated, in withering accents.
The boy Cimarron, curiously sensitive to sounds and moods, stood before his grandmother, his head
thrust forward, his handsome eyes glowing. “My father is the most famous man in Oklahoma. The
Indians call him Bu alo Head.”
Felice Venable pounced on this. “If that’s what you mean by bringing them up as their father …”
The meeting degenerated into one of those family bickerings. “I do wish, Mamma, that you wouldn’t
repeat everything I say and twist it by your tone into something poisonous.”

“I say! I can’t help it if the things you say sound ridiculous when they are repeated. I simply
mean——”
“I don’t care what you mean. I mean to stay here in Osage until Yancey—until——” She never nished
that sentence.
The Osage society notes became less simple. From bare accounts of quiltings, sewing bees, and
church sociables they blossomed into
owery imitations of the metropolitan dailies’ descriptions of social events. Refreshments were
termed elegant. Osage matrons turned from the sturdy baked beans, cole slaw, and veal loaf of an
earlier day to express themselves in food terms culled from the pictures in the household
magazines. They heard about fruit salads. They built angel-food cakes whose basis was the whites of
thirteen eggs, and their husbands, at breakfast, said, “What makes these scrambled eggs so yellow?”
Countri ed costumes were described in terms of fashion. The wilted prairie owers that graced
weddings and parties were transformed into rare hothouse blooms by the magic touch of the Oklahoma
Wigwam hand press. Sabra cannily published all the brilliant social news items that somewhat
belatedly came her way via the ready-print and the paper’s scant outside news service.
Newport. Oct. 4—One of the most brilliant weddings which Newport has seen for many years was
solemnized in old Trinity Church today. The principals were Miss Georgina Harwood and Mr. Harold
Blake, both members of families within the charmed circle of the 400. The bride wore a gown of
ivory satin with draperies and ru ings of rarest point lace, the lace veil being caught with a
tiara of pearls and diamonds. After the ceremony a magni cent collation …
The feminine population of Osage—of the county—felt that it had seen the ivory satin, the point
lace, the tiara of pearls and diamonds, as these splendors moved down the aisle of old Trinity on
the person of Miss Georgina Harwood of Newport. They derived from it the vicarious satisfaction
that a dieting dyspeptic gets from reading the cook book.

Sabra was, without being fully aware of it, a power that shaped the social aspect of this crude
Southwestern town. The Ladies of the new Happy Hour Club, on her declining to become a member,
pleading lack of time and press of work (as well she might), made her an honorary member, resolved
to have her in uential name on their club roster, somehow. They were paying unconscious tribute to
Oklahoma’s rst feminist. She still ran the paper single handed, with the aid of Jesse Rickey, the
most expert printer in the Southwest (when sober), and as good as the average when drunk.
Sabra, serene in the knowledge that the attacked could do little to wreak vengeance on a woman,
printed stories and statements which for boldness and downright e rontery would have earned a male
editor a horsewhipping. She publicly scolded the street loafers who, in useless sombreros and
six-shooters and boots and spurs, relics of a bygone day, lolled limply on Pawhuska Avenue corners,
spitting tobacco juice into the gutter. Sometimes she borrowed Yancey’s vigorous and picturesque
phraseology. She denounced a local politician as being too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse, and
the phrase stuck, and in the end defeated him. Law, order, the sanctity of the home, prunes,
prisms. Though the Gyp Hills and the Osage Hills still were as venomous with outlaws as the Plains
were with rattlesnakes; though the six-shooter still was as ordinary a part of the Oklahoma male
costume as boots or trousers; though outlawry still meant stealing a horse rather than killing a
man; though the Territory itself had been settled and peopled, in thousands of cases, by men who
had come to it, not in a spirit of adventure, but from cowardice, rapacity, or worse, Sabra Cravat
and the other basically conventional women of the community were working unconsciously, yet
with a quiet ferocity, toward that day when one of them would be able to say, standing in a doorway
with a sti little smile:
“Awfully nice of you to come.”
“Awfully nice of you to ask me,” the other would reply.
When that day came, Osage would no longer need to feel itself looked down upon by Kansas City,
Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

Slowly, slowly, certain gures began to take on the proportions of personalities. No one had arisen
in the Territory to ll Yancey Cravat’s romantic boots. Pat Leary was coming on as a Territory
lawyer, with an o ce in the Bixby Block and the railroads on which he had worked as section hand
now consulting him on points of Territorial law. In his early railroad days he had married an Osage
girl named Crook Nose. People shook their heads over this and said that he regretted it now, and
that a lawyer could never hope to get on with this marital millstone round his neck.
There still was very little actual money in the Territory. People traded this for that. Sabra often
translated subscriptions to the Oklahoma Wigwam—and even advertising space—into terms of fresh
vegetables, berries, wild turkey, quail, prairie chickens, dress lengths, and shoes and stockings
for the children.
Sol Levy’s store, grown to respectable proportions now, provided Sabra with countless necessities
in return for the advertisement which, sent through the country via the Oklahoma Wigwam, urged its
readers to Trade at Sol Levy’s. Visit the Only Zoo in the Territory. This invitation, a tri e
bewildering to the uninitiated, was meant to be taken literally. In the back of his store Sol Levy
kept a sizable menagerie. It had started through one of those chance encounters. A gaunt and
bearded plainsman had come into the store one day with the suggestion that the proprietor trade a
pair of pants for a bear cub. The idea had amused Sol Levy; then he had glanced out into the glare
of Pawhuska Avenue and had seen the man’s ocherous wife, his litter of spindling children, huddled
together in a crazy wagon attached by what appeared to be ropes, strings, and bits of nail and
wire, to horses so cadaverous that his amusement was changed to pity. He gave the man the pants,
stockings for the children, and—the sentimentalist in him—a piece of bright-colored cotton stu for
the woman.
The bear cub, little larger than a puppy, had been led gingerly into the welter of packing cases,
straw, excelsior, and broken china which was the Levy Mercantile Company’s back yard, and there
tied with a piece of rope which he immediately bit in two. Five minutes later a local housewife,
deep in the purchase of a dress length of

gingham, and feeling something rubbing against her stout calves, looked down to see the bear cub
sociably gnawing his way through her basket of provisions, carelessly placed on the oor by her
side.
One week later the grateful ranger brought in a pair of catamounts. A crude wire cage was built.
There were added coyotes, prairie dogs, an eagle. The zoo became famous, and all the town came to
see it. It brought trade to the Mercantile Company, and free advertising. It was the nucleus for
the zoo which, fteen years later, Sol Levy shyly presented to the Osage City Park, and which
contained every wild thing that the Southwest had known, from the bu alo to the rattlesnake.
In a quiet, dreamy way Sol Levy had managed to buy a surprising amount of Osage real estate by now.
He owned the lot on which his store stood, the one just south of it, and, among other pieces, the
building and lot which comprised the site of the Wigwam and the Cravat house. In the year following
Yancey’s departure Sabra’s economic survival was made possible only through the almost shame-faced
generosity of this quiet, sad-eyed man.
“I’ve got it all down in my books,” Sabra would say, proudly. “You know that it will all be paid
back some day.”
He began in the Oklahoma Wigwam a campaign of advertising out of all proportions to his needs, and
Sabra’s debt to him began to shrink to the vanishing point. She got into the habit of talking to
him about her business problems, and he advised her shrewdly. When she was utterly discouraged, he
would say, not triumphantly, but as one who states an irrefutable and not particularly happy fact:
“Some day, Mrs. Cravat, you and I will look back on this and we will laugh—but not very loud.”
“How do you mean—laugh?”
The little curious cast came into his eyes. “Oh—I will be very rich, and you will be very famous.
And Yancey——”
“Yancey!” The word was wrenched from her like a cry.
“They will tell stories about Yancey until he will grow into a legend. He will be part of the
history of the Southwest. They will remember him and write about him when all these mealy-faced
governors are dead and gone and forgotten. They will tell the little

children about him, and they will dispute about him—he did this, he did that; he was like this, he
was like that. You will see.”
Sabra thought of her own children, who knew so little of their father. Donna, a thin secretive
child of almost seven now, with dark, straight black hair and a sallow skin like Yancey’s; Cim,
almost thirteen, moody, charming, imaginative. Donna was more like her grandmother Felice Venable
than her own mother; Cim resembled Yancey so strongly in mood, manner, and emotions as to have
almost no trace of Sabra. She wondered, with a pang, if she had failed to impress herself on them
because of her absorption in the town, in the newspaper, in the resolve to succeed. She got out a
photograph of Yancey that she had hidden away because to see it was to feel a stab of pain, and had
it framed, and hung it on the wall where the children could see it daily. He was shown in the
familiar costume—the Prince Albert, the white sombrero, the six-shooters, the boots, the spurs, the
long black locks curling beneath the hat brim, the hypnotic eyes startling you with their arresting
gaze, so that it was as if he were examining you rather than that you were seeing his likeness in a
photograph. One slim foot, in its high-heeled boot, was slightly advanced, the coat tails ared, the
whole picture was somehow endowed with a sense of life and motion.
“Your father——” Sabra would begin, courageously, resolved to make him live again in the minds of
the children. Donna was not especially interested. Cim said, “I know it,” and capped her story with
a tale of his own in which Yancey’s feat of derring-do outrivaled any swashbuckling escapade of
D’Artagnan.
“Oh, but Cim, that’s not true! You mustn’t believe stories like that about your father.”
“It is true. Isaiah told me. I guess he ought to know.” And then the question she dreaded. “When
are Isaiah and Father coming back?”
She could answer, somehow, evasively, about Yancey, for her instinct concerning him was sure and
strong. But at the fate that had overtaken the Negro boy she cowered, afraid even to face the
thought of it. For the thing that had happened to the black boy was so dreadful, so remorseless
that when the truth of it came to Sabra she felt all this little world of propriety, of
middle-class Middle West

convention that she had built up about her turning to ashes under the sudden aring re of hidden
savagery. She tried never to think of it, but sometimes, at night, the hideous thing took
possession of her, and she was swept by such horror that she crouched there under the bedclothes,
clammy and shivering with the sweat of utter fear. Her hatred of the Indians now amounted to an
obsession.
It was in the fourth year of Yancey’s absence that, coming suddenly and silently into the kitchen
from the newspaper o ce, where she had been busy as usual, she saw Arita Red Feather twisted in a
contortion in front of the table where she had been at work. Her face was grotesque, was wet, with
agony. It was the agony which only one kind of pain can bring to a woman’s face. The Indian girl
was in the pangs of childbirth. Even as she saw her Sabra realized that something about her had
vaguely disturbed her in the past few weeks. Yet she had not known, had not dreamed of this. The
loose garment which the girl always wore—her strong natural slenderness—the erect dignity of her
Indian carriage—the stoicism of her race—had served to keep secret her condition. She had had, too,
Sabra now realized in a ash, a way of being out of the room when her mistress was in it; busy in
the pantry when Sabra was in the kitchen; busy in the kitchen when Sabra was in the dining room; in
and out like a dark, swift shadow.
“Arita! Here. Come. Lie down. I’ll send for your father—your mother.” Her father was Big Knee, well
known and something of a power in the Osage tribe. Of the tribal o cers he was one of the eight
members of the Council and as such was part of the tribe’s governing body.
Dreadful as the look on Arita Red Feather’s face had been, it was now contorted almost beyond
recognition. “No! No!” She broke into a storm of pleading in her own tongue. Her eyes were black
pools of agony. Sabra had never thought that one of pure Indian blood would thus give way to any
emotion before a white person.
She put the girl to bed. She sent Isaiah for Dr. Valliant, who luckily was in town and sober. He
went to work quietly, e ciently, aided by Sabra, making the best of such crude and hasty
necessities as came to hand. The girl made no outcry. Her eyes were a dull,

dead black; her face was rigid. Sabra, passing from the kitchen to the girl’s bedroom with hot
water, cloths, blankets, saw Isaiah crouched in a corner by the wood box. He looked up at her
mutely. His face was a curious ash gray. As Sabra looked at him she knew.
The child was a boy. His hair was coarse and kinky. His nose was wide. His lips were thick. He was
a Negro child. Doc Valliant looked at him as Sabra held the writhing red-purple bundle in her arms.
“This is a bad business.”
“I’ll send for her parents. I’ll speak to Isaiah. They can marry.” “Marry! Don’t you know?”
Something in his voice startled her. “What?”
“The Osages don’t marry Negroes. It’s forbidden.”
“Why, lots of them have. You see Negroes who are Indians every day. On the street.”
“Not Osages. Seminoles, yes. And Creeks, and Choctaws, and even Chickasaws. But the Osages, except
for intermarriage with whites, have kept the tribe pure.”
This information seemed to Sabra to be unimportant and slightly silly. Purity of the tribe, indeed!
Osages! She resolved to be matter of fact and sensible now that the shocking event was at hand,
waiting to be dealt with. She herself felt guilty, for this thing had happened in her own house.
She should have foreseen danger and avoided it. Isaiah had been a faithful black child in her mind,
whereas he was, in reality, a man grown.
Dr. Valliant had nished his work. The girl lay on the bed, her dull black eyes xed on them;
silent, watchful, hopeless. Isaiah crouched in the kitchen. The child lay now in Sabra’s arms.
Donna and Cim were, fortunately, asleep, for it was now long past midnight. The tense excitement
past, the whole a air seemed to Sabra sordid, dreadful. What would the town say? What would the
members of the Philomathean Club and the Twentieth Century Culture Club think?
Doc Valliant came over to her and looked down at the queer shriveled morsel in her arms. “We must
let his father see him.”
Sabra shrank. “Oh, no!”

He took the baby from her and turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll do it. Let me have a drink of
whisky, will you, Sabra? I’m dead tired.”
She went past him into the dining room, without a glance at the Negro boy cowering in the kitchen.
Doc Valliant followed her. As she poured a drink of Yancey’s store of whisky, almost untouched
since he had left, she heard Valliant’s voice, very gentle, and then the sound of Isaiah’s
blubbering. All the primness in her was outraged. Her rm mouth took on a still straighter line.
Valliant took the child back to the Indian girl’s bed and placed it by her side. He stumbled with
weariness as he entered the dining room where Sabra stood at the table. As he reached for the drink
Sabra saw that his hand shook a little as Yancey’s used to do in that same gesture. She must not
think of that. She must not think of that.
“There’s no use talking now, Doctor, about what the Osages do or don’t do that you say is so pure.
The baby’s born. I shall send for the old man—what’s his name?—Big Knee. As soon as Arita can be
moved he must take her home. As for Isaiah, I’ve a notion to send him back to Kansas, as I wanted
to do years ago, only he begged so to stay, and Yancey let him. And now this.”
Doc Valliant had swallowed the whisky at a gulp—had thrown it down his throat as one takes medicine
to relieve pain. He poured another glass. His face was tired and drawn. It was late. His nerves
were not what they had been, what with drink, overwork, and countless nights without sleep as he
rode the country on his black horse, his handsome gure grown a little soft and sagging now. But he
still was a dashing sight when he sat the saddle in his black corduroys and his soft-brimmed black
hat.
He swallowed his second drink. His face seemed less drawn, his hand steadier, his whole bearing
more alert. “Now listen, Sabra. You don’t understand. You don’t understand the Osages. This is
serious.” Sabra interrupted quickly. “Don’t think I’m hard. I’m not condemning her altogether, or
Isaiah, either. I’m partly to blame. I should have seen. But I am so busy. Anyway, I can’t have her
here
now, can I? With Isaiah. Even you …”
He lled his glass. She wished he would stop drinking; go home. She would sit up the night with the
Indian girl. And in the morning

—well, she must get someone in to help. They would know, sooner or later.
He was repeating rather listlessly what he had said. “The Osages have kept the tribe absolutely
free of Negro blood. This is a bad business.”
Her patience was at an end. “What of it? And how do you know?
How do you know?”
“Because they remove any member of the tribe that has had to do with a Negro.”
“Remove!”
“Kill. By torture.”
She stared at him. He was drunk, of course. “You’re talking nonsense,” she said crisply. She was
very angry.
“Don’t let this get around. They might blame you. The Osages.
They might——I’ll just go and take another look at her.”
The girl was sleeping. Sabra felt a pang of pity as she gazed down at her. “Go to bed—o with you,”
said Doc Valliant to Isaiah. The boy’s face was wet, pulpy with tears and sweat and fright. He
walked slackly, as though exhausted.
“Wait.” Sabra cut him some bread from the loaf, sliced a piece of meat left from supper. “Here. Eat
this. Everything will be all right in the morning.”
The news got round. Perhaps Doc Valliant talked in drink. Doubtless the girl who came in to help
her. Perhaps Isaiah, who after a night’s exhausted sleep had suddenly become proudly paternal and
boasted loudly about the house (and no doubt out of it) of the size, beauty, and intelligence of
the little lump of dusky
esh that lay beside Arita Red Feather’s bed in the very cradle that had held Donna when an infant.
Arita Red Feather was frantic to get up. They had to keep her in bed by main force. She had not
spoken a dozen words since the birth of the child.
On the fourth day following the child’s birth Sabra came into Arita Red Feather’s room early in the
morning and she was not there. The infant was not there. Their beds had been slept in and now were
empty. She ran straight into the yard where Isaiah’s little hut stood. He was not there. She
questioned the girl who now

helped with the housework and who slept on a couch in the dining room. She had heard nothing, seen
nothing. The three had vanished in the night.
Well, Sabra thought, philosophically, they have gone o . Isaiah can make out, somehow. Perhaps he
can even get a job as a printer somewhere. He was handy, quick, bright. He had some money, for she
had given him, in these later years, a little weekly wage, and he had earned a quarter here, a half
dollar there. Enough, perhaps, to take them by train back to Kansas. Certainly they had not gone to
Arita’s people, for Big Knee, questioned, denied all knowledge of his daughter, of her child, of
the black boy. He behaved like an Indian in a Cooper novel. He grunted, looked blank, folded his
arms, stared with dead black, expressionless eyes. They could make nothing of him. His squaw,
stout, silent, only shook her head; pretended that she neither spoke nor understood English.
Then the rumor rose, spread, received credence. It was started by Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian
guide and plainsman who sometimes lived with the Indians for months at a time on their
reservations, who went with them on their visiting jaunts, hunted, shed, ate with them, who was
married to a Cherokee, and who had even been adopted into the Cherokee tribe. He had got the story
from a Cherokee who in turn had had it from an Osage. The Osage, having managed to lay hands on
some whisky, and becoming very drunk, now told the grisly tale for the rst time.
There had been an Osage meeting of the Principal Chief, old Howling Wolf; the Assistant Chief; the
eight members of the Council, which included Big Knee, Arita’s father. There the news of the girl’s
dereliction had been discussed, her punishment gravely decided upon, and that of Isaiah.
They had come in the night and got them—the black boy, the Indian girl, the infant—by what means no
one knew. Arita Red Feather and her child had been bound together, placed in an untanned and
uncured steer hide, the hide was securely fastened, they were carried then to the open, sun-baked,
and deserted prairie and left there, with a guard. The hide shrank and shrank and shrank

in the burning sun, closer and closer, day by day, until soon there was no movement within it.
Isaiah, already half dead with fright, was at noonday securely bound and fastened to a stake. Near
by, but not near enough quite to touch him, was a rattlesnake so caught by a leather thong that,
strike and coil and strike as it might, it could not quite reach, with its venomous head, the
writhing, gibbering thing that lay staring with eyes that protruded out of all semblance to human
features. But as dusk came on the dew fell, and the leather thong stretched a little with the wet.
And as twilight deepened and the dew grew heavier the leather thong holding the horrible reptile
stretched more and more. Presently it was long enough.

16

“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” You read this in aming sentiment on posters and banners
and on little white buttons pinned to coat lapels or dress fronts. There were other buttons and
pennants bearing the likeness of an elderly gentleman with a mild face disguised behind a martial
white mustache; and thousands of male children born within the United States in 1898 grew up under
the slight handicap of the christened name of Dewey. The Oklahoma Wigwam bristled with new words:
Manila Bay—Hobson— Philippines. Throughout the Southwest sombreros suddenly became dust-colored
army hats with broad, at brims and peaked crowns. People who, if they had thought of Spain at all,
saw it in the romantic terms of the early Southwest explorers—Coronado, De Soto, Moscoso—and, with
admiration for these intrepid and mistaken seekers after gold, now were told that they must hate
Spain and the Spanish and kill as many little brown men living in the place called the Philippines
as possible. This was done as dutifully as could be, but with less than complete enthusiasm.
Rough Riders! That was another matter. Here was something that the Oklahoma country knew and
understood—tall, lean, hard young men who had practically been born with a horse under them and a
gun in hand; riders, hunters, dead shots; sunburned, keen eyed, daredevil. Their uniforms, worn
with a swagger, had about them a dashing something that the other regiments lacked. Their hat
crowns were dented, not peaked, and the brims were turned romantically up at one side and caught
with the insignia of the Regiment—the crossed sabers. And their lieutenant-colonel and

leader was that energetic, toothy young fellow who was making something of a stir in New York
State—Roosevelt, his name was. Theodore Roosevelt.
Osage was shaken by chills and fever; the hot spasms of patriotism, the cold rigors of virtue. One
day the good wives of the community would have a meeting at which they arranged for a home-cooked
supper, with co ee, to be served to this or that regiment. Their features would soften with
sentiment, their bosoms heave with patriotic pride. Next day, eyes narrowed, lips forming a
straight line, they met to condemn Dixie Lee and her ilk, and to discuss ways and means for ridding
the town of their contaminating presence.
The existence of this woman in the town had always been a festering sore to Sabra. Dixie Lee, the
saloons that still lined Pawhuska Avenue, the gambling houses, all the paraphernalia of vice, were
anathema lumped together in the minds of the redoubtable sunbonnets. A new political group had
sprung up, ostensibly on the platform of civic virtue. In reality they were tired of seeing all the
plums dropping into the laps of the early-day crew, made up of such strong-arm politicians as had
been the rst to shake the Territorial tree. In the righteous ladies of the Wyatt type they saw
their chance for a strong ally. The saloons and the gamblers were too rmly intrenched to be moved
by the reform element: they had tried it. Sabra had been urged to help. In the columns of the
Oklahoma Wigwam she had unwisely essayed to conduct a campaign against Wick Mongold’s saloon, in
whose particularly lawless back room it was known that the young boys of the community were in the
habit of meeting. With Cim’s future in mind (and as an excuse) she wrote a stirring editorial in
which she said bold things about shielding criminals and protecting the Flower of our Southwest’s
Manhood. Two days later a passer-by at seven in the morning saw brisk ames licking the foundations
of the Oklahoma Wigwam o ce and the Cravat dwelling behind it. The whole had been nicely soaked in
coal oil. But for the chance passer- by, Sabra, Cim, Donna, newspaper plant, and house would have
been charred beyond recognition. As the town re protection was

still of the scantiest, the alarmed neighbors beat out the re with blankets wet in the near-by
horse trough. It was learned that a Mexican had been hired to do the job for twenty dollars.
Mongold skipped out.
After an interval reform turned its attention to that always vulnerable objective known then as the
Scarlet Woman. Here it met with less opposition. Almost ve years after Yancey’s departure it
looked very much as though Dixie Lee and her ne brick house and her plumed and parasoled girls
would soon be routed by the spiritual broom sticks and sunbonnets of the purity squad.
It was characteristic that at this moment in Osage’s history, when the town was torn, now by
martial music, now by the call of civic virtue, Yancey Cravat should have chosen to come riding
home; and not that alone, but to come riding home in pull panoply of war, more dashing, more
romantic, more mysterious than on the day he had ridden away.
It was eight o’clock in the morning. The case of Dixie Lee (on the charge of disorderly conduct)
was due to come up at ten in the local court. Sabra had been at her desk in the Wigwam o ce since
seven. One ear was cocked for the sounds that came from the house; the other was intent on Jesse
Rickey’s erratic comings and goings in the printing shop just next the o ce.
“Cim! Cim Cravat! Will you stop teasing Donna and eat your breakfast. Miss Swisher’s report said
you were late three times last month, and all because you dawdle while you dress, you dawdle over
breakfast, you dawdle——Jesse! Oh, Jesse! The Dixie Lee case will be our news lead. Hold two columns
open.…”
Horse’s hoofs at a gallop, stopping spectacularly in front of the Wigwam o ce in a whirl of dust. A
quick, light step. That step! But it couldn’t be. Sabra sprang to her feet, one hand at her breast,
one hand on the desk, to steady herself. He strode into the o ce. For
ve years she had pictured him returning to her in dramatic fashion; in his white sombrero, his
Prince Albert, his high-heeled boots. For
ve years she had known what she would say, how she would look at him, in what manner she would
conduct herself toward him— toward this man who had deserted her without a word, cruelly. In

an instant, at sight of him, all this left her mind, her consciousness. She was in his arms with an
inarticulate cry, she was weeping, her arms were about him, the buttons of his uniform crushed her
breasts. His uniform. She realized then, without surprise, that he was in the uniform of the
Oklahoma Rough Riders.
It is no use saying to a man who has been gone for ve years, “Where have you been?” Besides, there
was not time. Next morning he was on his way to the Philippines. It was not until he had gone that
she realized her failure actually to put this question that had been haunting her for half a
decade.
Cim and Donna took him for granted, as children do. So did Jesse Rickey, with his mind of a child.
For that matter, Yancey took his own return for granted. His manner was nonchalant, his spirits
high, his exuberance infectious. He set the pitch. There was about him nothing of the delinquent
husband.
He now strode magni cently into the room where the children were at breakfast, snatched them up,
kissed them. You would have thought he had been gone a week.
Donna was shy of him. “Your daughter’s a Venable, Mrs. Cravat,” he said, and turned to the boy.
Cim, slender, graceful, taller than he seemed because of that trick of lowering his ne head and
gazing at you from beneath his too-long lashes, reached almost to Yancey’s broad shoulders. But he
had not Yancey’s heroic bulk, his vitality. The Cravat skull structure was contradicted by the
narrow Venable face. The mouth was over-sensitive, the hands and feet too exquisite, the smile
almost girlish in its wistful sweetness. “ ‘Gods! How the son degenerates from the sire!’ ”
“Yancey!” cried Sabra in shocked protest. It was as though the
ve years had never been.
“Do you want to see my dog?” Cim asked. “Have you got a pony?”
“Oh, no.”
“I’ll buy you one this afternoon. A pinto. Here. Look.”
He took from his pocket a little soft leathern pouch soiled and worn from much handling. It was
laced through at the top with a bit of stout string. He loosed this, poured the bag’s contents onto
the

breakfast table; a little heap of shining yellow. The three stood looking at it. Cim touched it
with one nger.
“What is it?”
Yancey scooped up a handful of it and let it trickle through his
ngers. “That’s gold.” He turned to Sabra. “It’s all I’ve got to show, honey, for two years and
more in Alaska.”
“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 rst 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 fore nger 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 ve 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
ngers. 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 ba ing 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, outing 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 gure 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 gure towered even above these tall plainsmen; the ne eyes glowed; the melli uous 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 sacri ced
honor, home, happiness in the hope of nding it. And here was the precious yellow stu from far-o
Alaska trickling through Yancey Cravat’s slim white ngers.
“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
irt 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 gure of the cheated Aztec princess,
encountered the level gaze, the unsmiling lips; swung back again hastily to the dashing, the
martial
gure 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 lled 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 fty
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 rst she had encountered it years ago.
Yukon. Chilkoot Pass. Skagway. Kuskokwim. Klondike. Moose. Caribou. Huskies. Sledges. Nome. Sitka.
Blizzards. Snow blindness. Frozen ngers. Pemmican. Cold. Cold. Cold. Gold. Gold. Gold. To the
fascinated gures crowded into the stu y 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
nger.
They, too, looked. Two years. Two years, and he had been gone
ve. 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 inde nable break that
had come to the magni cent gure—not a break, really, but a loosening, a lowering of the resistance
such as comes to steel that has been too often in the aming furnace. You looked at the massive
shoulders—they did not droop. The rare glance still pierced you like a sword thrust. The bu alo
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 ve 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 oor of the newspaper o ce. They swept the towering gure 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, ushed, 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 t 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.
Cli Means, the ink-smeared printer’s devil who, at fteen, served as Jesse Rickey’s sole assistant
in the mechanical end of the Wigwam o ce, 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 ve years,” Sabra said, almost de antly.
Suddenly, sharp and clear, Yancey’s voice calling her from the o ce porch, from the front o ce,
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 ghting 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 ve
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 ght 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 rst. That scum!
That lth! 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 re leaping from tree to tree. Mad Yancey Cravat’s latest freak. Men left their o ces, their
stores; women their cooking, their cleaning. The courtroom, sti ing, y infested, baked by the
morning sun, was packed beyond

endurance. The crowd perched on the window sills, stood on boxes outside the windows, su ocated in
the doorway, squatted on the
oor. 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 sh- 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!”
“Your Honor!”
Towering above the crowd, forging his way through like some relentless force of nature, came the
great bu alo head, the romantic Rough Rider hat with its turned-up brim caught by the crossed
sabers; the massive khaki-clad gure. It was dramatic, it was melodramatic, it was ridiculous. It
was superb. The sh faces turned their staring eyes and their gasping mouths away from the white-
faced woman and upon him. Here was the kind of situation that the Southwest loved and craved; here
was action, here was blood-and- thunder, here was adventure. Here, in a word, was Cimarron.
He stood before the shoddy judge. He swept o his hat with a gesture that invested it with plumes.
“If it please Your Honor, I represent the defendant, Dixie Lee.”

No Territorial judge, denying Yancey Cravat, would have dared to face that crowd. He cast another
glance round—a helpless, ba ed one, this time—waved the approaching Gwin Larkin back with a feeble
gesture, and prepared to proceed with the case according to the laws of the Territory. Certainly
the look that he turned on Sabra Cravat as she entered a scant ten minutes later, white faced,
resolute, and took her place as representative of the press, was one of such mingled bewilderment
and reproach as would have embarrassed anyone less utterly preoccupied than the editor and
publisher of the Oklahoma Wigwam.
Objection on the part of the slick Pat Leary. Overruled, perforce, by the Judge. A shout from the
crowd. Order! Bang! Another shout. Law in a lawless community not yet ten years old; a community
made up, for the most part, of people whose very presence there meant impatience with the old
order, de ance of the conventions. Ten minutes earlier they had been all for the cocky little
Leary, erstwhile station agent; eager to cast the rst stone at the woman in the temple. Now, with
the inexplicable ckleness of the mob, the electric current of sympathy owed out from them to the
woman to be tried, to the man who would defend her. Hot and swift and plenty of action—that was the
way the Southwest liked its justice.
Pat Leary. Irish, ambitious, ery. His temper, none too even at best, had been lost before he ever
rose. The thought of Yancey ahead of him, the purity brigade behind him, spurred him to his
frantic, his disorderly charge.
His years as section hand on the railroad had equipped him with a vocabulary well suited to scourge
this woman in black who sat so quietly, so white faced, before him, for all the crowd to see.
Adjective on adjective; vituperation; words which are considered obscenity outside the Bible and
the courtroom.
“… all the vicious in uences, your Honor, with which our glorious Territory is infested, can be
laid at this woman’s leprous door.… A refuge for the evil, for the diseased, for the criminal …
waxed fat and sleek in her foul trade, on the money that should have been spent to help build up,
to ennoble this fair Southwest land of ours … scavenger … vilest of humans … disgrace to the fair

name of woman.…” Names, then, that writhed from his tongue like snakes.
A curious embarrassment seized the crowd. There were many in the packed room who had known the easy
hospitality of Dixie’s ménage; who had eaten at her board, who had been broken in Grat Gotch’s
gambling place and had borrowed money from Dixie to save themselves from rough frontier revenge.
She had plied her trade and taken the town’s money and given it out again with the other merchants
of the town. The banker could testify to that; the mayor; this committee; that committee. Put Dixie
Lee’s name down for a thousand. Part of the order of that disorderly, haphazard town.
Names. Names. Names. The dull red of resentment deepened the natural red of their sunburned faces.
The jurors shifted in their places. A low mutter, ominous, like a growl, sounded its distant
thunder. Blunt. Sharp. Ruthless. Younger than Yancey, less experienced, he still should have known
better. These men of the inadequate jury, these men in the courtroom crowd, had come of a frontier
background, had lived in the frontier atmosphere. In their rough youth, and now, women were scarce,
with the scarcity that the hard life predicated. And because they were scarce they were precious.
No woman so plain, so hard, so undesirable that she did not take on, by the very fact of her sex, a
value far beyond her deserts. The attitude of a whole nation had been touched by this sentimental
fact which was, after all, largely geographic. For a full century the countries of Europe,
bewildered by it, unable to account for it, had laughed at this adolescent reverence of the
American man for the American woman.
Here was Pat Leary, jumping excitedly about, mouthing execrations, when he himself, working on the
railroads ten years before, had married an Indian girl out of the scarcity of girls in the Oklahoma
country. Out of the corner of his eye, as he harangued, he saw the great lolling gure of Yancey
Cravat. The huge head was sunk on the breast; the eyelids were lowered. Beaten, Pat Leary thought.
Defeated, and he knows it. Cravat, the windbag, the wife deserter. He nished in a burst of oratory
so ruthless, so brutal that he had the satisfaction of seeing the painful, unaccustomed red

surge thickly over Dixie Lee’s pale face from her brow down to where the ladylike white turnover of
her high collar met the line of her throat.
The pompous little Irishman seated himself, chest out, head high, eye roving the crowd and the
bench, lips open with self-satisfaction. A few more cases like this and maybe they’d see there was
material for a Territory governor right here in Osage.
The crowd shifted, murmured, gabbled. Yancey still sat sunk in his chair as though lost in thought.
The gabble rose, soared. “He’s given it up,” thought Sabra, exulting. “He sees how it is.”
The eyes of the crowd so close packed in that su ocating little courtroom were concentrated on the
inert gure lolling so limply in its chair. Perhaps they were going to be cheated of their show
after all.
Slowly the big head lifted, the powerful shoulders straightened, he rose, he seemed to rise
endlessly, he walked to Judge Sipes’s crude desk with his light, graceful stride. The lids were
still cast down over the lightning eyes. He stood a moment, that singularly sweet and winning smile
wreathing his lips. He began to speak. The vibrant voice, after Leary’s shouts, was so low pitched
that the crowd held its breath in order to hear.
“Your Honor. Gentlemen of the Jury. I am the rst to bow to achievement. Recognition where
recognition is due—this, gentlemen, has ever been my way. May I, then, before I begin my poor
plea in defense of this lady, my client, most respectfully call your attention to that which, in my
humble opinion, has never before been achieved, much less duplicated, in the whole of the
Southwest. Turn your eye to the gure which has so recently and so deservedly held your attention.
Gaze once more upon him. Regard him well. You will not look upon his like again. For, gentlemen, in
my opinion this gifted person, Mr. Patrick Leary, is the only man in the Oklahoma Territory—in the
Indian Territory—in the whole of the brilliant and glorious Southwest—nay, I may even go so far as
to say the only man in this magni cent country, the United States of America!—of whom it actually
can be said that he is able to strut sitting down.”

The pu ed little gure in the chair collapsed, then bounded to its feet, red faced, gesticulating.
“Your Honor! I object!”
But the rest was lost in the gigantic roar of the delighted crowd. “Go it, Yancey!”
“That’s the stu , Cimarron!”
Here was what they had come for. Doggone, there was nobody like him, damn if they was!
Even to-day, though more than a quarter of a century has gone by, there still are people in
Oklahoma who have kept a copy, typed neatly now from records made by hand, of the speech made that
day by Yancey Cravat in defense of the town woman, Dixie Lee. Yancey Cravat’s Plea for a Fallen
Woman, it is called; and never was speech more sentimental, windy, false, and utterly moving. The
slang words hokum and bunk were not then in use, but even had they been they never would have been
applied, by that appreciative crowd, at least, to the owery and impassioned oratory of the
Southwest Silver Tongue, Yancey Cravat.
Cheap, melodramatic, gorgeous, impassioned. A quart of whisky in him; an enthralled audience behind
him; a white-faced woman with hopeless eyes to spur him on; the cry of his wronged and righteous
wife still sounding in his ears—Booth himself, in his heyday, never gave a more brilliant, a more
false performance.
“Your Honor! Gentlemen of the Jury! You have heard with what cruelty the prosecution has referred
to the sins of this woman, as if her condition was of her own preference. A dreadful—a vicious—a
revolting picture has been painted for you of her life and surroundings. Tell me—tell me—do you
really think that she willingly embraced a life so repellent, so horrible? No, gentlemen! A
thousand times, no! This girl was bred in such luxury, such re nement, as few of us have known. And
just as the young girl was budding into womanhood, cruel fate snatched all this from her, bereft
her of her dear ones, took from her, one by one, with a terrible and erce rapidity, those upon whom
she had come to look for love and support. And then in that moment of darkest terror and
loneliness, came one of our sex, gentlemen. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A end in the guise of a
human. False promises. Lies.

Deceit so palpable that it would have deceived no one but a young girl as innocent, as pure, as
starry eyed as was this woman you now see white and trembling before you. One of our sex was the
author of her ruin, more to blame than she. What could be more pathetic than the spectacle she
presents? An immortal soul in ruin. The star of purity, once glittering on her girlish brow, has
set its seal, and forever. A moment ago you heard her reviled, in the lowest terms a man can employ
toward a woman, for the depths to which she has sunk, for the company she keeps, for the life she
leads. Yet where can she go that her sin does not pursue her? You would drive her out. But where?
Gentlemen, the very promises of God are denied her. Who was it said, ‘Come unto me all ye that are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest’? She is indeed heavy laden, this trampled
ower of the South, but if at this instant she were to kneel down before us all and confess her
Redeemer, where is the Church that would receive her, where the community that would take her in?
Scorn and mockery would greet her; those she met of her own sex would gather their skirts the more
closely to avoid the pollution of her touch. Our sex wrecked her once pure life. Her own sex
shrinks from her as from a pestilence. Society has reared its relentless walls against her. Only in
the friendly shelter of the grave can her betrayed and broken heart ever nd the Redeemer’s promised
rest. The gentleman who so eloquently spoke before me told you of her assumed names, of her sins,
of her habits. He never, for all his eloquence, told you of her sorrows, her agonies, her hopes,
her despairs. But I could tell you. I could tell you of the desperate day— the red-letter day in
the banner of the great Oklahoma country— when she tried to win a home for herself where she could
live in decency and quiet.… When the remembered voices of father and mother and sisters and
brothers fall like music on her erring ears … who shall tell what this heavy heart, sinful though
it may seem to you and to me … understanding, pity, help, like music on her erring soul … oh,
gentlemen … gentlemen …”
But by this time the gentlemen, between emotion and tobacco juice, were having such di culty with
their Adam’s apples as to make a wholesale strangling seem inevitable. The beautiful exible

voice went on, the hands wove their enchantment, the eyes held you in their spell. The pompous
gure of little Pat Leary shrank, dwindled, disappeared before their mind’s eye. The harlot Dixie
Lee, in her black, became a woman romantic, piteous, appealing. Sabra Cravat, her pencil ying over
her paper, thought grimly:
“It isn’t true. Don’t believe him. He is wrong. He has always been wrong. For fteen years he has
always been wrong. Don’t believe him. I shall have to print this. How lovely his voice is. It’s
like a knife in my heart. I mustn’t look at his eyes. His hands—what was that he said?—I must keep
my mind on … music on her erring soul … oh, my love … I ought to hate him … I do hate him.…”
Dixie Lee’s head drooped on her ravaged breast. Even her plumed satellites had the wit to languish
like crushed lilies and to wipe their eyes with lmy handkerchiefs the while they sni ed audibly.
It was nished. Yancey walked to his seat, sat as before, the great bu alo head lowered, the lids
closed over the compelling eyes, the beautiful hands folded, relaxed.
The good men and true of the jury led solemnly out through the crowd that made way for them. As
solemnly they crossed the dusty road and repaired to draw at the roadside, where they squatted on
such bits of rock or board as came to hand. Solemnly, brie y, and with utter disregard of its legal
aspect, they discussed the case—if their inarticulate monosyllables could be termed discussion. The
courtroom throng, scattering for refreshment, had barely time to down its drink before the jury
stamped heavily across the road and into the noisome courtroom.
“… nd the defendant, Dixie Lee, not guilty.”

18

It was as though Osage and the whole Oklahoma country now stopped and took a deep breath. Well it
might. Just ahead of it, all unknown, waited years of such clangor and strife as would make the
past years seem uneventful in comparison. Ever since the day of the Run, more than fteen years ago,
it had been racing helter-skelter, devil take the hindmost; shooting into the air, prancing and
yelping out of sheer vitality and cussedness. A rough roof over its head; coarse food on its table;
a horse to ride; a burning drink to toss down its throat; border justice; gyp water; a girl to hug;
mud roads to the edge of the sun-baked prairie, and thereafter no road; grab what you need; ght for
what you want—the men who had come to the wilderness of the Oklahoma country had expected no more
than this; and this they had got. A man’s country it seemed to be, ruled by men for men. The women
allowed them to think so. The word feminism was unknown to the Sabra Cravats, the Mrs. Wyatts, the
Mrs. Hefners, the Mesdames Turket and Folsom and Sipes. Prim, good women and courageous, banded
together by their goodness and by their common resolve to tame the wilderness. Their power was the
more tremendous because they did not know they had it. They never once said, during those fteen
years, “We women will do this. We women will change that.” Quietly, indomitably, relentlessly,
without even a furtive glance of understanding exchanged between them, but secure in their common
knowledge of the sentimental American male, they went ahead with their plans.
The Philomathean Club. The Twentieth Century Culture Club. The Eastern Star. The Daughters of
Rebekah. The Venus Lodge.

“Ha-ha!” and “Ho-ho!” roared their menfolk. “What do you girls do at these meetings of yours? Swap
cooking receipts and dress patterns?”
“Oh, yes. And we talk.”
“I bet you do. Say, you don’t have to tell any man that. Talk! Time about ten of you women folks
start gabblin’ together I bet you get the whole Territory settled—politics, Injuns, land ghts, and
all.”
“Just about.”
Yancey had come home from the Spanish-American War a hero. Other men from Osage had been in the
Philippines. One had even died there (dysentery and ptomaine from bad tinned beef). But Yancey was
the town’s Rough Rider. He had charged up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt. Osage, knowing Yancey and
never having seen Roosevelt, assumed that Yancey Cravat—the Southwest Cimarron— had led the way, an
ivory- and silver-mounted six-shooter in either hand, the great bu alo head lowered with such
menace that the little brown men had ed to their jungles in terror.
His return had been the occasion for such a celebration as the town had never known and never would
know again, they assured each other, between drinks, until the day when statehood should come to
the Territory. He returned a captain, unwounded, but thin and yellow, with the livery look that con
rmed the stories one had heard of putrid food, typhoid, dysentery, and mosquitoes more deadly, in
this semitropical country, than bullets or cannon.
Poisoned and enfeebled though he was, his return seemed to energize the crude little town. Wherever
he might be he lived in a swirl of events that drew into its eddy all that came within its radius.
Hi, Yancey! Hi, Clint! He shed the khaki and the cocked hat and actually appeared again in the
familiar white sombrero, Prince Albert, and high-heeled boots. Osage breathed a sigh of
satisfaction. His dereliction was forgiven, the rumors about him forgotten—or allowed to subside,
at least. Again the editorial columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam blazed with hyperbole.
It was hard for Sabra to take second place (or to appear to take second place) in the o ce of the
Wigwam. She had so long ruled

there alone. Her word had been law to the wavering Jesse Rickey and to the worshiping Cli Means.
And now to say, “You’d better ask Mr. Cravat.”
“He says leave it to you. He’s went out.”
Yancey did a good deal of going out. Sabra, after all, still did most of the work of the paper
without having the satisfaction of dictating its policy. A linotype machine, that talented iron
monster, now chattered and chittered and clanked in the composing room of the Wigwam. It was the
rst of its kind in the Oklahoma country. Very costly and uncannily human, Sabra never quite got
over her fear of it. The long arm reached down with such leisurely assurance, snatched its handful
of metal, carried it over, descended, dropped it. It opened its capacious maw to be fed bars of
silvery lead which it spat forth again in the shape of neat cakes of type. Its keys were like
grinning teeth. It grunted, shivered, clumped, spoke—or nearly.
“I never come near it,” Sabra once admitted, “that I don’t expect the thing to reach down with its
iron arm and clap me on the shoulder and clatter, ‘Hello, Sabra!’ ”
She was proud of the linotype machine, for it had been her ve years at the head of the Wigwam that
had made it possible. It was she who had gone out after job printing contracts; who had educated
the local merchants to the value of advertising. Certainly Yancey, prancing and prating, had never
given a thought to these substantial foundations on which the entire business success of the paper
rested. They now got out with ease the daily Wigwam for the Osage townspeople and the weekly for
county subscribers. Passing the windows of the Wigwam o ce on Pawhuska Avenue you could hear the
thump and rattle of the iron monster. Between them Jesse Rickey and Cli Means ran the linotype.
Often they labored far into the night on job work, and the late passer-by would see the little
light burning in the printing shop and hear the rattle and thump of the machine. In a pinch Sabra
herself could run it. Yancey never went near it, and, strangely enough, young Cim had a horror of
it, as he had of most things mechanical. After one attempt at the keyboard, during which he had
hopelessly jammed the machine’s delicate insides, he was forbidden ever to go near it again. For
that

matter, Cim had little enough taste for the newspaper business. He pied type at the case rack. He
had no news sense. He had neither his father’s gift for mingling with people and winning their con
dence nor his mother’s more orderly materialistic mind. He had much of Yancey Cravat’s charm, and
something of the vagueness of his grandfather, old Lewis Venable (dead these two years), but
combining the worst features of both.
“Stop dreaming!” Sabra said to him, often and often. “What are you dreaming about?”
She had grown to love the atmosphere of the newspaper o ce and resented the boy’s indi erence to
it. She loved the very smell of it—the mixed odor of hot metal, printer’s ink, dust, white paper,
acid, corncob pipe, and cats.
“Stop dreaming!” Yancey hearing her thus admonishing Cim, whirled on her in one of his rare moments
of utter rage. “God a’mighty, Sabra! That’s what Ann Hathaway said to Shakespeare. Don’t you women
know that ‘Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming’? Leave the boy
alone! Let him dream! Let him dream!”
“One starry dreamer in a family is enough,” Sabra retorted, tartly. Five years had gone by—six
years since Yancey’s return. Yet,
strangely enough, Sabra never had a feeling of security. She never forgot what he had said about
Wichita. “Almost ve years in one place. That’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey.” Five
years. And this was well into the sixth. He had plunged head rst into the statehood ght, into the
Indian Territory situation. The anti-Indian faction was bitterly opposed to the plan for combining
the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory under the single state of Oklahoma. Their slogan
was The White Man’s State for the White Man.
“Who brought the Indian here to the Oklahoma country in the
rst place?” shouted Yancey in the editorial columns of the Wigwam. “White men. They hounded them
from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern
Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which
they now live in squalor and

misery. It isn’t t for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now.
Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like
wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the
country that has taken their country away from them. Give them at least the right to become
citizens of the state of Oklahoma.”
He was obsessed by it. He traveled to Washington in the hope of lobbying for it, and made quite a
stir in that formal capital with his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his Texas star boots, his
great bu alo head, his charm, his grace, his manner. Roosevelt was characteristically cordial to
his old campaign comrade. Washington ladies were captivated by the owery speeches of this romantic
this story-book swaggerer out of the Southwest.
It was rumored on good authority that he was to be appointed the next Governor of the Oklahoma
Territory.
“Oh, Yancey,” Sabra said, “do be careful. Governor of the Territory! It would mean so much. It
would help Cim in the future. Donna, too. Their father a governor.” She thought, “Perhaps
everything will be all right now. Perhaps all that I’ve gone through in the last ten years will be
worth it, now. Perhaps it was for this. He’ll settle down.… Mamma can’t say now … and all the
Venables and the Vians and the Goforths and the Greenwoods.…” She had had to endure their pity,
even from a distance, all these years.
The rumor took on substance. My husband, Yancey Cravat, Governor of the Territory of Oklahoma. And
then, when statehood came, as it must in the next few years, perhaps Governor of the state of
Oklahoma. Why not!
At which point Yancey blasted any possibility of his appointment to the governorship by hurling a
red-hot editorial into the columns of the Wigwam. The gist of it was that the hundreds of thousands
of Indians now living on reservations throughout the United States should be allowed to live where
they pleased, at liberty. The whites of the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory, with an
Indian population of about one hundred and twenty thousand of various tribes—Poncas, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Creeks, Osages, Kiowas,

Comanches, Kaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and a score of others— read, emitted a roar of rage, and
brandishing the paper ran screaming into the streets, cursing the name of Yancey Cravat.
Sabra had caught the editorial in the wet proof sheet. Her eye leaped down its lines.
Herded like sheep in a corral—no, like wild animals in a cage— they are left to rot on their
reservations by a government that has taken rst their land, then their self-respect, then their
liberty from them. The land of the free! When the very people who rst dwelt on it are prisoners!
Slaves, but slaves deprived of the solace of work. What hope have they, what ambition, what object
in living! Their spirit is broken. Their pride is gone. Slothful, yes. Why not? Each month he
receives his dole, his pittance. Look at the Osage Nation, now dwindled to a wretched two thousand
souls. The men are still handsome, strong, vital; the women beautiful, digni ed, often intelligent.
Yet there they huddle in their miserable shanties like beaten animals eating the food that is
thrown them by a great—a muni cent—government. The government of these United States! Let them be
free. Let the Red Man live a free man as the White Man lives.…
Much that he wrote was true, perhaps. Yet the plight of the Indian was not as pitiable as Yancey
painted it. He cast over them the glamour of his own romantic nature. The truth was that they
themselves cared little—except a few of their tribal leaders, more intelligent than the rest. They
hunted a little, shed, slept, visited from tribe to tribe, the Poncas visiting the Osages, the
Osages the Poncas, gossiping, eating, holding powwows. The men were great poker players, having
learned the game from the white man, and spent hours at it.
They passed through the town of Osage in their brilliant striped blankets, sometimes walking,
sometimes on sorry nags, sometimes in rickety wagons laden with pots, poles, rags, papooses,
hounds. The townspeople hastily removed such articles as might please the pilfering fancy.

Sabra picked up the proof sheet, still damp from the press, and walked into Yancey’s o ce. Her face
was white, set.
“You’re going to run this, Yancey?” “Yes.”
“You’ll never be Governor of the Territory.” “Never.”
She stood a moment, her face working. She crushed the galley proof in her hand so that her knuckles
stood out, white.
“I’ve forgiven you many, many things, God knows, in the last ten years. I’ll never forgive you for
this. Never.”
“Yes, you will, honey. Never is a long time. Not while I’m alive, maybe. But some day, a long time
from now—though not so very long, maybe—you’ll be able to turn back to the old les of the Oklahoma
Wigwam and lift this editorial of mine right out of it, word for word, and run it as your own.”
“Never.… Donna … Cim …”
“I can’t live my children’s lives for them, Sabra, honey. They’ve got to live their own. I believe
what I believe. This town is rotten— the Territory—the whole country. Rotten.”
“You’re a ne one to say what is or isn’t rotten. You with your whisky and your Indians and your
women. I despise you. So does everyone in the town—in the Territory.”
“ ‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own home.’ ” A tri e
sonorously.
She never really knew whether he had done this thing with the very purpose of making his
governorship impossible. It was like him.
Curiously enough, the editorial, while it maddened the white population of the Territory, gained
the paper many readers. The Wigwam prospered. Osage blossomed. The town was still rough, crude,
wide open, even dangerous. But it began to take on an aspect of permanence. It was no longer a
camp; it was a town. It began to build schools, churches, halls. Arkansas Grat’s gambling tent had
long ago been replaced by a solid wooden structure, just as gambling terms of the West and the
Southwest had slowly been incorporated into the language of daily use. I’m keeping cases on

him … standing pat … blu ng … bucking the tiger. Terms lched from the gaming table; poker and faro
and keno.
Sol Levy’s store—the Levy Mercantile Company—had two waxen ladies in the window, their features
only slightly a ected by the burning Southwest sun. Yancey boomed Sol Levy for mayor of Osage, but
he never had a chance. It was remarkable how the Oklahoma Wigwam persisted, though its position in
most public questions was violently unpopular. Perhaps it, like Yancey, had a vitality and a charm
that no one could withstand.
Although Sol Levy was still the town Jew, respected, prosperous, the town had never quite absorbed
this Oriental. A citizen of years’ standing, he still was a stranger. He mingled little with his
fellow townsmen outside business hours. He lived lonesomely at the Bixby House and ate the
notoriously bad meals served by Mrs. Bixby. He was shy of the town women though the Women of the
Town found him kindly, passionate, and generous. The business men liked him. They put him on
committees. Occasionally Sabra or some other woman who knew him well enough would say, half
playfully, half seriously, “Why don’t you get married, Sol? A nice fellow like you. You’d make some
girl happy.”
Sometimes he thought vaguely of going to Wichita or Kansas City or even Chicago to meet some nice
Jewish girl there, but he never did. It never entered his head to marry a Gentile. The social life
of the town was almost unknown to him. Sometimes if a big local organization—the Elks, the Odd
Fellows, the Sons of the Southwest
—gave a bene t dance, you would glimpse him brie y, in the early part of the evening, standing
shyly against the wall or leaning half hidden in the doorway, a darkling, remote, curiously
Oriental gure in the midst of these robust red-faced plainsmen and ex-cowmen.
“Come on, Sol, mix in! Grab o one of the girls and get to dancin’, why don’t you? What you scairt
of?” But Sol remained aloof. He regarded the hot, sweaty, shouting dancers with a kind of
interested bewilderment and wonder, much as the dancers themselves sometimes watched the Indians
during one of the Festival Dances on the outlying reservations. On occasion he made himself
politely agreeable to a stout matron well past middle age. They looked up at

his tragic dark eyes; they noticed his slim ivory hand as it passed them a plate of cake or a cup
of co ee. “He’s real nice when you get to know him,” they said. “For a Jew, that is.”
Between him and Yancey there existed a deep sympathy and understanding. Yancey campaigned for Sol
Levy in the mayoralty race—if a thing so one-sided could be called a race. The Wigwam extolled him.
Sol Levy, the genial proprietor of the Levy Mercantile Company, is the Wigwam’s candidate for
mayor. It behooves the people of Osage to do honor to one of its pioneer citizens whose career,
since its early days, has been marked by industry, prosperity, generosity. He comes of a race of
dreamers and doers.…
“Why, the very idea!” snorted the redoubtable virago, Mrs. Tracy Wyatt, whose husband was the
opposing candidate. “A Jew for mayor of Osage! They’ll be having an Indian mayor next. Mr. Wyatt’s
folks are real Americans. They helped settle Arkansas. And as for me, why, I can trace my ancestry
right back to William Whipple, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”
Sol Levy never had a chance for public honor. He, in fact, did practically nothing to further his
own possible election. He seemed to regard the whole matter with a remoteness slightly tinged with
ironic humor. Yancey dropped into Sol’s store to bring him this latest pronouncement of the
bristling Mrs. Wyatt. Sol was busy in the back of the store, where he was helping the boy unpack a
new invoice of china and lamps just received, for the Levy Mercantile Company had blossomed into a
general store of parts. His head was in a barrel, and when he straightened and looked up at the
towering Yancey there were bits of straw and excelsior clinging to his shirt sleeves and necktie
and his black hair.
“Declaration of Independence!” he exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Tell her one of my ancestors wrote the
Ten Commandments. Fella name of Moses.”

Yancey, roaring with laughter, used this in the Wigwam, and it naturally helped as much as anything
to defeat the already defeated candidate.
Sometimes the slim, white-faced proprietor, with his friend Yancey Cravat, stood in the doorway of
the store, watching the town go by. They said little. It was as though they were outsiders, looking
on at a strange pageant.
“What the hell are you doing here in this town, anyway, Sol?” Yancey would say, as though musing
aloud.
“And you?” Sol would retort. “A civilized barbarian.”
The town went by—Indians, cowboys up from Texas, plainsmen, ranchers. They still squatted at the
curb, as in the early days. They chewed tobacco and spat. The big sombrero persisted, and even the
boots and spurs.
“Howdy, Yancey! Howdy, Sol! H’are you, Cim!”
There was talk of paving Pawhuska Avenue, but this did not come for years. The town actually
boasted a waterworks. The Wigwam o ce still stood on Pawhuska, but it now occupied the entire
house. Two years after Yancey’s return they had decided to build a home on Kihekah Street, where
there actually were trees now almost ten years old.
Sabra had built the house as she wanted it, though at rst there had been a spirited argument about
this. Yancey’s idea had been, of course, ridiculous, fantastic. He said he wanted the house built
in native style.
“Native! What in the world! A wickiup?”
“Well, a house in the old Southwest Indian style—almost pueblo, I mean. Or Spanish, sort of, made
of Oklahoma red clay—plaster, maybe. Not brick. And low, with a patio where you can be out of doors
and yet away from the sun. And where you can have privacy.”
Sabra made short work of that idea. Or perhaps Yancey did not persist. He withdrew his plan as
suddenly as he had presented it; shrugged his great shoulders as though the house no longer
interested him.
Osage built its new houses with an attached front porch gaping socially out into the street. It sat
on the front porch in its shirt

sleeves and kitchen apron. It called from porch to porch, “How’s your tomato plants doing? I see
the Packses got out-of-town company visiting.” It didn’t in the least want privacy.
Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas,
and scroll work. There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and
yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with
bubonic plague. There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the rst oor; four bedrooms
on the second oor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble
washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace. In the parlor were brown
brocade- and-velvet settee and stu ed chairs. In the sitting room was a lamp with a leaded glass
shade in the shape of a strange and bloated
ower—a Burbankian monstrosity, half water lily, half petunia.
“As long as we’re building and furnishing,” Sabra said, “it might as well be the best.” She had
gone about planning the house, and furnishing it, with her customary energy and capability. With it
all she found time to do her work on the Wigwam—for without her the paper would have been run to
the ground in six months. Osage had long since ceased to consider it queer that she, a woman, and
the wife of one of its most prominent citizens, should go to work every morning like a man.
By ten every morning she had attended to her household, seen it started for the day, had planned
the meals, ordered them on her way downtown, and was at her desk in the Wigwam o ce, sorting mail,
reading exchanges, taking ads, covering news, writing heads, pasting up. Yancey’s contributions
were brilliant but spasmodic. The necessary departmental items—real estate transfers, routine court
news, out-of-town district and county gleanings—bored him, though he knew well that they were
necessary to the success of the paper. He left these to Sabra, among many other things.
Sabra, in common with the other well-to-do housewives of the community, employed an Indian girl as
a house servant. There was no other kind of help available. After her hideous experience with Arita
Red Feather she had been careful to get Indian girls older,

more settled, though this was di cult. She preferred Osage girls. These married young, often before
they had nished their studies at the Indian school.
Ruby Big Elk had been with Sabra now for three years. A curious, big, silent girl of about
twenty-two—almost handsome—one of six children—a large family for an Osage. Sabra was somewhat
taken aback, after the girl had been with her for some months, to learn that she already had been
twice married.
“What became of your husbands, Ruby?” “Died.”
She had a manner that bordered on the insolent. Sabra put it down to Indian dignity. When she
walked she scu ed her feet ever so little, and this, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to add
insolence to her bearing. “Oh, do lift your feet, Ruby! Don’t scu e when you walk.” The girl made
no reply. Went on scu ing. Sabra discovered that she was lame; the left leg was slightly shorter
than the right. She did not limp—or, rather, hid the tendency to limp by the irritating sliding
sound. Her walk was straight, leisurely, measured. Sabra was terribly embarrassed; apologized to
the Indian girl. The girl only looked at her and said nothing. Sabra repressed a little shiver. She
had never got accustomed to the Indians.
Sabra was a bustler and a driver. As she went about the house in the morning, performing a dozen
household duties before leaving for the Wigwam o ce, her quick tapping step drummed like hail on a
tin roof. It annoyed her intensely, always, to see Ruby Big Elk making up the beds with that regal
manner, or moving about the kitchen with the pace and air of a Lady Macbeth. The girl’s broad,
immobile face, her unspeaking eyes, her secret manner all worked a slow constant poison in Sabra.
She spoke seldom; never smiled. When Sabra spoke to her about some household task she would regard
her mistress with an unblinking gaze that was highly disconcerting.
“Did you understand about the grape jell, Ruby? To let it get thoroughly cool before you pour on
the wax?”
Ruby would majestically incline her ne head, large, like a man’s head. The word sinister came into
Sabra’s mind. Still, Sabra argued,

she was good to the children, fed them well, never complained about the work. Sometimes—on rare
occasions—she would dig a little pit in the back yard and build a slow hot smothered re by some
secret Indian process, and there, to the intense delight of young Cim, she would roast meats
deliciously in the Indian fashion, crisp and sweet, skewered with little shafts of wood that she
herself whittled down. Donna refused to touch the meat, as did Sabra. Donna shared her mother’s
dislike of the Indians—or perhaps she had early been impressed with her mother’s feeling about
them. Sometimes Donna, the spoiled, the pampered, the imperious (every inch her grandmother Felice
Venable), would feel Ruby Big Elk’s eye on her—that expressionless, dead black Indian eye. Yet back
of its deadness, its utter lack of expression, there still seemed to lurk a cold contempt.
“What are you staring at, Ruby?” Donna would cry, pettishly. Ruby would walk out of the room with
her slow scu ing step, her body erect, her head regal, her eyes looking straight ahead. She said
nothing. “Miserable squaw!” Donna would hiss under her breath. “Gives herself the airs of a
princess because her greasy old father runs the tribe or something.”
Ruby’s father, Big Elk, had in fact been Chief of the Osage tribe by election for ten years, and
though he no longer held this highest o ce, was a man much looked up to in the Osage Nation. He had
sent his six children and actually his fat wife to the Indian school, but he himself steadfastly
refused to speak a word of English, though he knew enough of the language. He conversed in Osage,
and when necessary used an interpreter. It was a kind of stubborn Indian pride in him. It was his
enduring challenge to the white man. “You have not defeated me.”
His pride did not, however, extend to more material things, and Sabra was frequently annoyed by the
sight of the entire Big Elk family, the old ex-Chief, his squaw, and the ve brothers and sisters,
squatting in her kitchen doorway enjoying such juicy bits as Ruby saw t to bestow upon them from
the Cravat larder. When Sabra would have put a stop to this, Yancey intervened.

“He’s a wise old man. If he had a little white blood in him he’d be as great as Quanah Parker was,
or Sequoyah. Everything he says is wisdom. I like to talk with him. Leave him alone.”
This did not serve to lessen Sabra’s irritation. Often she returned home to nd Yancey squatting on
the ground with old Big Elk, smoking and conversing in a mixture of Osage and English, for Big Elk
did not refuse to understand the English language, even though he would not speak it. Yancey had
some knowledge of Osage. Sabra, coming upon the two grunting and muttering and smoking and staring
ahead into nothingness or (worse still) cracking some Indian joke and shaking with silent laughter,
Indian fashion, was lled with fury. Nothing so maddened her.
It slowly dawned on Sabra that young Cim was always to be found lolling in the kitchen, talking to
Ruby. Ruby, she discovered to her horror, was teaching Cim to speak Osage. A di cult language to
the white, he seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She came upon them, their heads close
together over the kitchen table, laughing and talking and singing. Rather, Ruby Big Elk was singing
a song with a curious rhythm, and (to Sabra’s ear, at least) no melody. There was a pulsation of
the girl’s voice on sustained notes such as is sometimes produced on a violin when the same note is
sounded several times during a single bow stroke. Cim was trying to follow the strange gutturals,
slurs, and accents, his eyes xed on Ruby’s face, his own expression utterly absorbed, rapt.
“What are you doing? What is this?”
The Indian girl’s face took on its customary expression of proud disdain. She rose. “Teach um
song,” she said; which was queer, for she spoke English perfectly.
“Well, I must say, Cimarron Cravat! When you know your father is expecting you down at the o ce——”
She stopped. Her quick eye had leaped to the table where lay the little round peyote disk or mescal
button which is the hashish of the Indian.
She had heard about it; knew how prevalent among the Indian tribes from Nebraska down to Mexico had
become the habit of eating this little buttonlike top of a Mexican cactus plant. In shape a disk
about an inch and a half in diameter and a quarter of an inch

thick, the mescal or peyote gave the eater a strange feeling of lightness, dispelled pain and
fatigue, caused visions of marvelous beauty and grandeur. The use of it had become an Indian
religious rite.
Like a fury Sabra advanced to the table, snatched up the little round button of soft green.
“Peyote!” She whirled on Cim. “What are you doing with this thing?”
Cim’s eyes were cast down sullenly. His hands in his pockets, he leaned against the wall, very
limp, very bored, very infuriating and insolent.
“Ruby was just teaching me one of the Mescal Ceremony songs. Darned interesting. It’s the last
song. They sing it at sunrise when they’re just about all in. Goes like this.”
To Sabra’s horror he began an eerie song as he stood there leaning against the kitchen wall, his
eyes half closed.

“Stop it!” screamed Sabra. With the gesture of a tragedy queen she motioned him out of the kitchen.
He obeyed with very bad grace, his going more annoying, in its manner, than his staying. Sabra
followed him, silently. Suddenly she realized she hated his walk, and knew why. He walked with a
queer little springing gait, on the very soles of his feet. It came over her that it always had
annoyed her. She remembered that someone had laughingly told her what Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian
scout, lounging on his street corner, had said about young Cim:
“Every time I see that young Cimarron Cravat a-comin’ down the street I expect to hear a twig snap.
Walks like a story-book Injun.”

In the privacy of the sitting room Sabra confronted her son, the bit of peyote still crushed in her
hand.
“So you’ve come to this! I’m ashamed of you!” “Come to what?”
She opened her hand to show the button of pulpy green crushed in her palm. “Peyote. A son of mine.
I’d rather see you dead——”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom, don’t get Biblical, like Dad. To hear you a person would think you’d
found me drugged in a Chinese opium den.”
“I think I’d almost rather.”
“It’s nothing but a miserable little piece of cactus. And what was I doing but sitting in the
kitchen listening to Ruby tell how her father
——”
“I should think a man of almost eighteen could nd something better to do than sit in a kitchen in
the middle of the day talking to an Indian hired girl. Where’s your pride!”
Cim’s eyes were still cast down. He still lounged insolently, his hands in his pockets. “How about
these stories you’ve told me all your life about the love you Southerners had for your servants and
how old Angie was like a second mother to you?”
“Niggers are di erent. They know their place.”
He raised the heavy eyelids then and lifted his ne head with the menacing look that she knew so
well in his father. “You’re right. They are di erent. In the rst place, Ruby isn’t an Indian hired
girl. She is the daughter of an Osage chief.”
“Osage ddlesticks! What of it!”
“Ruby Big Elk is just as important a person in the Osage Nation as Alice Roosevelt is in
Washington.”
“Now, listen here, Cimarron Cravat! I’ve heard about enough. A lot of dirty Indians! Just you march
yourself down to the Wigwam o ce, young man, and don’t you ever again let me catch you talking in
that disrespectful manner about the daughter of the President of the United States. And if I ever
hear that you’ve eaten a bite of this miserable stu ”—she held out her hand, shaking a little, the
mescal button crushed in her palm—“I’ll have your father thrash

you within an inch of your life, big as you are. As it is, he shall hear of this.”
But Yancey, on being told, only looked thoughtful and a little sad. “It’s your own fault, Sabra.
You’re bound that the boy shall live the life you’ve planned for him instead of the one he wants.
So he’s trying to escape into a dream life. Like the Indians. It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you know, either.”
“The Indians started to eat peyote after the whites had taken their religious and spiritual and
decent physical life away from them. They had owned the plains and the prairies for centuries. The
whites took those. The whites killed o the bu alo, whose esh had been the Indians’ food, and whose
skins had been their shelter, and gave them bacon and tumbledown wooden houses in their place. The
whites told them that the gods they had worshiped were commonplace things. The Sun was a dying
planet—the Stars lumps of hot metal—the Rain a thing that could be regulated by tree planting—the
Wind just a current of air that a man in Washington knew all about and whose travels he could
prophesy by looking at a piece of machinery.”
“And they ought to be grateful for it. The government’s given them food and clothes and homes and
land. They’re a shiftless good- for-nothing lot and won’t work. They won’t plant crops.”
“ ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ He has got to have dreams, or life is unendurable. So the
Indian turned to the peyote. He nds peace and comfort and beauty in his dreams.”
A horrible suspicion darted through Sabra. “Yancey Cravat, have you ever——”
He nodded his magni cent head slowly, sadly. “Many times.
Many times.”

19

Cim was nineteen, Donna fteen. And now Sabra lived quite alone in the new house on Kihekah Street,
except for a colored woman servant sent from Kansas. She ran the paper alone, as she wished it run.
She ordered the house as she wished it. She very nearly ran the town of Osage. She was a power in
the Territory. And Yancey was gone, Cim was gone, Donna was gone. Sabra had refused to compromise
with life, and life had take matters out of her hands.
Donna was away at an Eastern nishing school—Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson. Yancey had opposed that,
of course. It had been Sabra’s idea to send Donna east to school.
“East?” Yancey had said. “Kansas City?” “Certainly not.”
“Oh—Chicago.”
“I mean New York.” “You’re crazy.”
“I didn’t expect you to approve. I suppose you’d like her to go to an Indian school. Donna’s an
unusual girl. She’s not a beauty and never will be, but she’s brilliant, that’s what she is.
Brilliant. I don’t mean intellectual. You needn’t smile. I mean that she’s got the ambition and the
insight and the foresight, too, of a woman of twice her age.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not. She’s like Mamma in many ways, only she’s got intelligence and drive. She doesn’t get
along with the girls here— Maurine Turket and Gazelle Slaughter and Jewel Riggs and Czarina McKee,
and those. She’s di erent. They go switching up and down

Pawhuska Avenue. They’ll marry one of these tobacco-chewing loafers and settle down like
vegetables. Well, she won’t. I’ll see to that.”
“Going to marry her o to an Eastern potentate—at fteen?”
“You wait. You’ll see. She knows what she wants. She’ll get it, too.”
“Sure it isn’t you who know what you want her to want?”
But Sabra had sent her o to Miss Dignum’s on a diet of prunes and prisms that even her
high-and-mighty old grandmother Felice Venable approved.
Cim, walking the prairies beyond Osage with that peculiar light step of his, his eyes cast down;
prowling the draws and sprawling upon the clay banks of the rivers that ran so red through the Red
Man’s Territory, said that he wanted to be a geologist. He spoke of the Colorado School of Mines.
He worked in the Wigwam o ce and hated it. He could pi a case of type more quickly and completely
than a drunken tramp printer. The familiar “shrdlu etaoin” was likely to appear in any column in
which he had a hand. Even Jesse Rickey, his mournful mustaches more drooping than ever, protested
to Yancey.
“She can’t make a newspaper man out of that kid,” he said. “Not in a million years. Newspaper men
are born, not made. Cim, he just naturally hates news, let alone a newspaper o ce. He was born
without a nose for news, like a fellow that’s born without an arm, or something. You can’t grow it
if you haven’t got it.”
“I know it,” said Yancey, wearily. “He’ll nd a way out.”
For the rst time a rival newspaper ourished in the town of Osage. The town was scarcely large
enough to support two daily papers, but Yancey’s political attitude so often was at variance with
the feeling of the Territory politicians that the new daily, slipshod and dishonest though it was,
and owned body and soul by Territorial interests, achieved a degree of popularity.
Sabra, unable to dictate the policy of the Wigwam with Yancey at its head, had to content herself
with the management of its mechanical workings and with its increasingly important social and club
columns. Osage swarmed with meetings, committees, lodges,

Knights of This and Sisters of That. The Philomathean and the Twentieth Century clubs began to go
in for Civic Betterment, and no Osage merchant or professional man was safe from cajoling and
unattractive females in shirtwaists and skirts and eyeglasses demanding his name signed to this or
that petition (with a contribution. Whatever you feel that you can give, Mr. Hefner. Of course, as
a leading business man …).
They planted shrubs about the cinder-strewn environs of the Santa Fé and the Katy depots. They
agitated for the immediate paving of Pawhuska Avenue (it wasn’t done). The Ladies of the Eastern
Star. The Venus Lodge. Sisters of Rebekah. Daughters of the Southwest. They came into the Wigwam o
ce with notices to be printed about lodge suppers and church sociables. Strangely enough, they were
likely to stay longer and to chat more freely if Yancey and not Sabra were there to receive them.
Sabra was polite but businesslike to her own sex encountered in o ce hours. But Yancey made himself
utterly charming. He could no more help it than he could help breathing. It was almost functional
with him. He made the stout, commonplace, middle-aged women feel that they were royal—and
seductive. He attered them with his ne eyes; he bowed them to the door; their eyeglasses
quivered. He was likely, on their departure, to crumple their carefully worded notice and throw it
on the oor. Sabra, though she made short work of the visiting Venuses and Rebekahs, ran their
notice and, if necessary, carefully rewrote it.
“God A’mighty!” he would groan at noonday dinner. “The o ce was full of Wenuses this morning. Like
a swarm of overstu ed locusts.”
Sabra was at the head of many of these Betterment movements. Also if there could be said to be
anything so formal as society in Osage, Sabra Cravat was the leader of it. She was the rst to
electrify the ladies of the Twentieth Century Culture Club by serving them Waldorf salad—that
abominable mixture of apple cubes, chopped nuts, whipped cream, and mayonnaise. The club fell upon
it with little cries and murmurs. Thereafter it was served at club meetings until Osage husbands,
returning home to supper after a

day’s work, and being o ered this salvage from the feast, would push it aside with masculine
contempt for its contents and roar, “I can’t eat this stu . Fix me some bacon and eggs.”
From this culinary and social triumph Sabra proceeded to pineapple and marshmallow salad, the
recipe for which had been sent her by Donna in the East. Its indirect e ects were fatal.
When it again became her turn to act as hostess to the members of the club she made her
preparations for the afternoon meeting, held at the grisly hour of half-past two. Refreshments were
invariably served at four. With all arrangements made, she was confronted by Ruby Big Elk with the
astounding statement that this was a great Indian Festival day (September, and the corn dances were
on) and that she must go to the Reservation in time for the Mescal Ceremony.
“You can’t go,” said Sabra, atly. Midday dinner was over. Yancey had returned to the o ce. Cim was
lounging in the hammock on the porch. For answer Ruby turned and walked with her stately,
irritating step into her own room just o the kitchen and closed the door.
“Well,” shouted Sabra in the tones of Felice Venable herself, “if you do go you needn’t come back.”
She marched out to the front porch, where the sight of the lounging Cim only aggravated her
annoyance.
“This ends it. That girl has got to leave.” “What girl?”
“Ruby. Twenty women this afternoon, and she says she’s going to the Reservation. They’ll be here at
half-past two.” It was rather incoherent, but Cim, surprisingly enough, seemed to understand.
“But she told you a month ago.” “Told me what? How do you know?”
“Because she told me she told you, ever so long ago.”
“Maybe she did. She never mentioned it again. I can’t be expected to remember every time the
Indians have one of their powwows. I told her she couldn’t go. She’s in there getting ready. Well,
this ends it. She needn’t come back.”

She ounced into the kitchen. There stood a mild-mannered young Indian girl unknown to her.
“What do you want?”
“I am here,” the girl answered, composedly, “to take Ruby Big Elk’s place this afternoon. I am
Cherokee. She told me to come.” She plucked Ruby’s blue and white checked gingham apron o the hook
behind the door and tied it around her waist.
“Well!” gasped Sabra, relieved, but still angry. Through the kitchen window she saw Cim hitching up
the two pintos to the racy little yellow phaëton that Yancey had bought. She must run out and tell
him before he left. He had seemed disturbed. She was glad he was clearing out. She liked having the
men folks out of the way when afternoon company was due.
Ruby’s door opened. The girl came out. Her appearance was amazing. She wore a dress of white
doeskin hanging straight from shoulders to ankles, and as soft and pliable as velvet. The hem was
fringed. Front, sleeves, collar were nely beaded in an intricate pattern that was more like
embroidery than beading. On her feet were moccasins in ivory white and as exquisitely beaded as the
dress. It was the robe of a princess. Her dark Indian eyes were alive. Her skin seemed to glow in
contrast with the garment. The girl was, for the moment, almost beautiful.
“Hello, Theresa Jump.… This is Theresa Jump. She will do my work this day. I have told her. She
knows about the pineapple and marshmallow salad.” For a moment it seemed to Sabra that just the
faintest shadow of amusement itted over Ruby’s face as she said this. But then, Sabra never had
pretended to understand these Indians. “I will be back to-morrow morning.”
She walked slowly out of the house by way of the kitchen door, across the yard with her slow
insolent dragging step. A stab of suspicion cut Sabra. She ew to the back porch, stood there a
moment. Ruby Big Elk walked slowly toward the barn. Cim drove out with the phaëton and pintos. He
saw the Indian woman in her white doeskin dress. His eyes shone enormous. He lifted his head as
though to breathe deeply. At that look in his face Sabra ran across the yard. One hand was at her
breast, as though an Indian arrow

had pierced her. Ruby had set one foot in its cream white moccasin on the buggy step. Cim held out
his free hand.
Sabra reached them, panting. “Where are you going?” “I’m driving Ruby out to the Reservation.”
“No, you’re not. No, you’re not.” She put one hand in a futile gesture on the buggy wheel, as
though to stop them by main force. She knew she must not lose her dignity before this Indian woman—
before her son. Yet this thing was, to her way of thinking, monstrous.
Cim gathered up the reins, his eyes on the restive ponies. “I may stay to see some of the dancing
and the Mescal Ceremony. Father says it’s very interesting. Big Elk has invited me.”
“Your father knows you’re going? Like this?”
“Oh, yes.” He cast a slight, an oblique glance at her hand on the wheel. Her hand dropped heavily
to her side. He spoke to the horses. They were o . Ruby Big Elk looked straight ahead. She had
uttered no word. Sabra turned and walked back to the house. The hot tears blinded her. She was
choking. But her pride spoke, even then. You must not go the kitchen way. That Indian girl will see
you. They are all alike. You must go around by the front way. Pretend it is nothing. Oh, God, what
shall I do! All those women this afternoon. Perhaps I am making a fuss over nothing. Why shouldn’t
he take the Indian girl out to the Reservation and stop an hour or two to see the dances and the
rites? … His face! His face when he saw her in that dress.
She bathed her eyes, powdered her nose, changed her dress, came into the kitchen, smiling. “… the
pineapple cut into chunks about like this. Then you snip the marshmallow into it with the scissors.
Mix whipped cream into your mayonnaise … a cherry on top … little thin sandwiches … damp napkin …”
She went into the sitting doom, adjusted a shade, plumped a pillow. The door bell rang. “Howdy-do,
Mrs. Nisbett.… No, you’re not. You’re just on time. It’s everybody else who’s late.” She thought,
“Women are wonderful. No man could do what I am doing. Smiling and chatting when I am almost
crazy.” Her ne dark eyes were luminous. Her clear ivory

skin was tinged now with a spot of red on either cheek. She looked very handsome.
Theresa Jump proved clumsy and unteachable. Sabra herself mixed and served the pineapple and
marshmallow salad, and though this novelty proved a great success, the triumph of serving it was
spoiled for Sabra. She bundled the girl o at six, after the dishes were done. Wearily she began to
set the house to rights, but Yancey came home to a confusion of chairs and squashed pillows, a
mingled odor of perfumery and co ee; a litter of cake crumbs, bits of embroidery silk, and crumpled
tea napkins. His huge frame moving about the cluttered sitting room made these feminine remnants
seem ridiculous. The disorder of the household irked him. Worst of all, Sabra, relieved now of her
guests, was free to pour out upon him all the pent-up wrath, anxiety, and shock of the past few
hours. Ruby. Cim. Theresa Jump. Peyote. Osages. If his own father allows such things—what will
people say—no use trying to make something of yourself.
Yancey, usually so glib with quotations from this or that sonorous passage of poetry, said little.
He did not even try to cajole her into a better humor with his attery, his charm, his tenderness.
His eyes were bloodshot, his hand more unsteady than usual. He had been drinking even more than was
his wont, she knew that at once. By no means drunk (she had never seen him really drunk—no one had—
he was seemingly incapable of reaching a visible state of drunkenness), he was in one of his ts of
moody depression. The great shoulders sagged. The splendid head lolled on his breast. He seemed
sunk in gloomy thought. She felt that he hardly heard what she was saying. She herself could eat
nothing. She set a place for him at the dining-room table and plumped down before him a dish of the
absurd salad, a cup of co ee, some cake, a plate of the leftover sandwiches, their edges curled
dismally.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Pineapple and marshmallow salad. With Ruby gone and all, I didn’t get anything for your supper—I
was so upset—all those women …”

He sat looking down at the slippery mass on his plate. His great arms were spread out on the table
before him. The beautiful hands were opening and closing convulsively. So a mastodon might have
looked at a worm. “Pineapple and marshmallow salad,” he repeated, thoughtfully, almost wonderingly.
Suddenly he threw back the magni cent head and began to laugh. Peal after peal of Herculean
laughter. “Pineapple and marsh——” choking, the tears running down his cheeks. Sabra was angry, then
frightened. For as suddenly as he had begun to laugh he became serious. He stood up, one hand on
the table. Then he seemed to pull his whole body together like a tiger who is about to spring. He
stood thus a moment, swaying a little. “ ‘Actum est de republica.’ ”
“What?” said Sabra, sharply.
“Latin, Latin, my love. Pineapple and marshmallow salad! ‘It is all over with the Republic.’ ” She
shrugged her shoulders impatiently. Yancey turned, sti y, like a soldier, walked out of the room,
icked his white sombrero o the hall rack and put it on at the usual jaunty angle, went down the
porch stair with his light, graceful step, to the sidewalk and up the street, the great head
lowered, the arms swinging despondently at his sides.
Sabra went on with her work of tidying up the house. Her eyes burned, her throat was constricted.
Men! Men! Cim o with that squaw. Yancey angry because she had given him this very feminine dish of
left-overs. What was the use of working, what was the use of pride, what was the use of ambition
for your children, your home, your town if this was all it amounted to? Her work done, she allowed
herself the luxury of a deliberate and cleansing storm of tears.
Eight o’clock. She heated some of the afternoon co ee and drank it sitting at the kitchen table.
She went out on the front porch. Darkness had come on. A hot September evening. The crickets
squeaked and ground away in the weeds. She was conscious of an aching weariness in all her body,
but she could not sleep. Her eyes felt as though they were being pulled apart by invisible ngers.
She put her palms over them, to shut them, to cool them. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. She undressed,
unpinned the braids of her thick

hair, brushed it, plaited it for the night. All the time she was listening. Listening. One.
Suddenly she began to dress again with icy fumbling ngers. She did up her hair, put on her hat and
a jacket. She closed the door behind her, locked it, slipped the key into the mail box. The Wigwam
o ce. Yancey was not there. The o ce was dark. She shook the door, rattled the knob, peered in,
unlocked it with the key in her handbag. Her heart was pounding, but she was not afraid of the
darkness. A cat’s eyes gleamed at her from the printing shop. She struck a light. No one. No one.
The linotype machine grinned at her with its white teeth. Its iron arm and hand shook tauntingly at
her in the wavering light. With a sudden premonition she ran to Yancey’s desk, opened the drawer in
which he kept his holster and six-shooters, now that Osage had become so e ete as to make them an
unessential article of dress. They were not there. She knew then that Yancey had gone.
Doc Valliant. She closed and locked the door after her, stepped out into the quiet blackness of
Pawhuska Avenue. Doc Valliant. He would go with her. He would drive her out there. But his o ce and
the room at the rear, which was his dwelling, gave forth no response. Gone out somewhere—a case.
Down the rickety wooden steps of the two-story brick building. She stood a moment in the street,
looking this way and that. She struck her palms together in a kind of agony of futility. She would
go alone if she had a horse and buggy. She could rent one at the livery stable. But what would they
think—those men at the livery stable? They were the gossips of the town. It would be all over
Osage, all over the county. Sabra Cravat driving out into the prairie alone in the middle of the
night. Something up. Well, she couldn’t help that. She had to go. She had to get him.
Toward the livery stable, past the Bixby House. A quiet little
gure rose from the blackness of the porch where all through the day the traveling men and loafers
sat with their chairs tilted back against the wall. The red coal of his cigar was an eye in the
darkness.

“Sabra! What is this! What are you doing running around at this hour of the night?”
Sol Levy, sitting there in the Oklahoma night, a lonely little
gure, sleepless, brooding. He had never before called her Sabra. “Sol! Sol! Cim’s out at the
Reservation. Something’s happened. I
know. I feel it.”
He did not sco at this, as most men would. He seemed to understand her fear, her premonition, and
to accept it with Oriental fatalism.
“What do you want to do?”
“Take me out there. Hitch up and drive me out there. Cim’s got the buggy. He went out with her.”
He did not ask where Yancey was. He asked nothing. “Go home,” he said. “Wait on your porch. I will
get my rig and come for you. They shouldn’t see you. Do you want me to go home with you
rst?”
“No, no. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Sol Levy had two very ne horses; really good animals. They won the races regularly at the local
fairs. The little light rig with its smart rubber tires whirled behind them over the red dusty
Oklahoma prairie roads. His slim hands were not expert with horses. He was a nervous, jerky driver.
They left the town behind them, were swallowed up by the prairie. The Reservation was a full two
hours distant. Sabra took o her hat. The night air rushed against her face, cooling it. A half
hour.
“Let me drive, will you, Sol?”
Without a word he entrusted the reins to her strong, accustomed hands; the hands of one who had
come of generations of horse lovers. The animals sensed the change. They leaped ahead in the
darkness. The light buggy rocked and bounced over the rutted roads. Sol asked her nothing. They
drove in silence. Presently she began to talk, disjointedly. Yet, surprisingly enough, he seemed
intuitively to understand—to ll in the gaps with his own instinct and imagination. What she said
sounded absurd; he knew it for tragedy.

“… pineapple and marshmallow salad … hates that kind of thing … queer for a long time … moody …
drinking … Ruby Big Elk … Cim … his face … peyote … Mescal Ceremony … Osage … white doeskin dress …
Theresa Jump …”
“I see,” said Sol Levy, soothingly. “Sure. Well, sure. The boy will be all right. The boy will be
all right. Well, Yancey—you know how he is—Yancey. Do you think he has gone away again? I mean—
gone?”
“I don’t know.” Then, “Yes.”
Three o’clock and after. They came in sight of the Osage Reservation, a scattered settlement of
sterile farms and wooden shanties sprawled on the bare unlovely prairie.
Darkness. The utter darkness that precedes the dawn. Stillness, except for the thud of their
horses’ ying hoofs and the whir and bump of the buggy wheels. Then, as Sabra slowed them down,
uncertainly, undecided as to what they might best do, they heard it
—the weird wavering cadences of the Mescal song, the hail-like clatter of the gourd rattle shaken
vigorously and monotonously; and beneath and above and around it all, reverberating, haunting,
ominous, the beat of the buckskin drum. Through the still, cool night air of the prairie it came to
them—to the overwrought woman, and to the little peaceful Jew. Barbaric sounds, wild, sinister. She
pulled up the horses. They sat a moment, listening. Listening. The drum. The savage sound of the
drum.
Fear was gnawing at her vitals, wringing her very heart with clammy ngers, yet Sabra spoke
matter-of-factly, her voice holding a hard little note because she was trying to keep it from
quavering.
“He’ll be in the Mescal tepee next to Big Elk’s House. They built it there when he was Chief, and
they still use it regularly for the ceremony. Yancey showed it to me once, when he drove me out
here.” She stopped and cleared her throat, for her voice was suddenly husky. She wondered,
confusedly, if that sound was the drum or her own heart beating. She gave a little cracked laugh
that bordered on hysteria. “A drum in the night. It sounds so terrible. So savage.”

Sol Levy took the reins from her shaking ngers. “Nothing to be frightened about. A lot of poor
ignorant Indians trying to forget their misery. Come.” Perhaps no man ever made a more courageous
gesture, for the little sensitive Jew was terribly frightened.
Uncertainly, in the blackness, they made their way toward the drum beat. Nearer and nearer, louder
and louder. And yet all about, darkness, silence. Only that pulsing cry and rattle and beat
pounding through the night like the tide. What if he is not there? thought Sabra.
Sol Levy pulled up in the roadway before the trampled yard that held the Mescal tepee, round, to
typify the sun, built of wood, larger than any other building on the Reservation. The horses were
frightened, restive. All about in the blackness you heard the stamp of other horses’ hoofs, heard
them crunching the dried herbage of the autumn prairie. With di culty he groped his way to a stump
that served as hitching post, tied the horses. As he helped Sabra down her knees suddenly bent, and
he caught her as she sank. “Oh! It’s all right. Sti , I guess—from the ride.” She leaned against
him a moment, then straightened determinedly. He took her arm rmly. Together they made their way
toward the tent-shaped wooden tepee.
Two great, silent blanketed gures at the door through which the
tful ame of the sacred re ared. The gures did not speak. They stood there, barring the way. The
little Jew felt Sabra’s arm trembling in his hand. He peered up into the faces of the silent,
immobile gures.
Suddenly, “Hello, Joe!” He turned to Sabra. “It’s Joe Yellow Eyes. He was in the store only
yesterday. Say, Joe, the lady here—Mrs. Cravat—she wants her son should come out and go home.”
The blanketed gures stood silent.
Suddenly Sabra thought, “This is ridiculous.”
She loosed her arm. She took a step forward, her pro le sharp and clear in the relight. “I am the
woman of Yancey Cravat, the one you call Bu alo Head. If my son is in there I want to take him home
now. It is time.”

“Sure take um home,” replied the blanket that Sol had addressed as Joe Yellow Eyes. He stood aside.
Blinking, stumbling a little, Sol and Sabra entered the crowded Mescal tepee.
The ceremony was almost at an end. With daybreak it would be
nished. Blinded by the light, Sabra at rst could discern nothing except the central re and the
gure crouched before it. Yet her eyes went this way and that, searching for him. Gradually her
vision cleared. The gures within the tepee paid no attention to those two white intruders. They
stood there in the doorway, bewildered, terri ed; brave.
In the center a crescent of earth about six inches high curved around a re built of sticks so
arranged that as the ashes fell they formed a second crescent within the other. A man squatted,
tending this re, watchfully, absorbedly. In the center of the crescent, upon a little star of sage
twigs, lay the mescal, symbol of the rite. Facing them was the Chief, old Stump Horn, in the place
of honor, the emblems of o ce in his hands—the rattle, the wand, the fan of eagle plumes. All about
the tepee crouched or lay blanketed motionless gures. Some sat with heads bowed, other gazed xedly
upon the central mescal button. All had been eating the mescal or drinking a brew in which it had
steeped. Now and then a gure would slowly draw the blanket over his head and sink back to receive
the vision. And the song went on, the shaking of the gourd rattle, the beat-beat of the buckskin
drum. The air of the room was sti ing, the room itself scrupulously clean.
At intervals around the wall, and almost level with the dirt oor, were apertures perhaps sixteen
inches square. A little wooden door was shut upon most of these. Near each lay gures limper, more
spent even than the other inert bodies. As Sabra and Sol stood, blinking, they learned the use of
these openings. For suddenly nausea overcame one of the Indians crouched in the semicircle near the
ame. The man crawled swiftly to one of the little doors, opened it, thrust head and shoulders out
into the night air, relieved his body of the drug’s overdose.
Sabra only turned her eyes away, searching, searching. Then she saw where the boy lay under his gay
striped blanket. His face was

covered, but she knew. She knew well how the slim body curled in its blankets, how it lay at night,
asleep. This was a di erent sleep, but she knew. They went to him, picking their way over the
crouching gures with the xed trancelike gaze; the recumbent forms that lay so still. She turned
back the blanket. His face was smiling, peaceful, lovely.
She thought, “This is the way I should look at him if he were dead.” Then, “He is dead.” The boy
lay breathing quietly. All about the room was an atmosphere of reverie, of swooning bliss. If the
Indians looked at all at Sabra, at the Jew, at their e orts to rouse the boy, it was with the eyes
of sleep-walkers. Their lips were gently smiling. Sometimes they swayed a little. The sacred re
leaped orange and scarlet and gold. Old Stump Horn wielded his eagle feather fan, back and forth,
back and forth. The quavering cadences of the Mescal song rose and fell to the accompaniment of the
gourd rattle and the unceasing drum. The white man and woman, frail both, tugged and strained at
the inert gure of the boy.
“Oh, God!” whimpered Sabra. “He’s so heavy. What shall we do?” They bent again, tugged with all
their strength, lifted but could not carry him.
“We must drag him,” Sol said, at last.
They took an arm each. So, dragging, tugging, past those rapt still forms, past those mazed smiling
faces, they struggled with him to the door. The little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, on
her lip. She breathed in choking gasps. Her eyes were wide and staring and dreadful in their
determination. The rattle. The drum beat. The high eerie song notes, wordless.
The blackness of the outer air; past the two towering motionless blanketed gures at the door.
Dragging him along the earth, through the trampled weeds.
“We can’t lift him into the buggy. We can’t——” She ran back to the two at the door. She clasped her
hands before the one called Joe Yellow Eyes. She lifted her white, agonized face to him. “Help me.
Help me.” She made a futile gesture of lifting.
The Indian looked at her a moment with a dead, unseeing gaze. Flecks of gold and red and yellow
danced, re ected in the black

pools of his eyes, and died there. Leisurely, wordless, he walked over to where the boy lay, picked
him up lightly in his great arms as though he were a sack of meal, swung him into the buggy seat.
He turned, then, and went back to his place at the door.
They drove back to the town of Osage. Cim’s body leaned heavily, slackly against hers; his head lay
in her lap, like a little boy’s. One aching arm she held rmly about him to keep him from slipping
to the oor of the buggy, so that nally it ceased to ache and became numb. The dawn came, and then
the sunrise over the prairie, its red meeting the red of the Oklahoma earth, so that they drove
through a
ery furnace.
She had been quiet enough until now, with a kind of stony quiet.
She began to sob; a curious dry racking sound, like a hiccough.
“Now, now,” said Sol Levy, and made a little comforting noise between tongue and teeth. “So bad it
isn’t. What did the boy do, he went out to see the sights on the Reservation and try what it was
like to eat this dope stu —this peyote. Say, when I was a boy I did lots worse.”
She did not seem to pay much heed to this, but it must have penetrated her numbed brain at last,
for presently she stopped the painful sobbing and looked down at his lovely smiling face in her
lap, the long lashes, like a girl’s, resting so fragilely on the olive cheek.
“He wanted to go. I wouldn’t let him. Is is too late, Sol?” “Go? Go where?”
“The Colorado School of Mines. Geology.”
“Too late! That kid there! Don’t talk foolish. September. This is the time to go. It just starts.
Sure he’ll go.”
They drove through the yard, over Sabra’s carefully tended grass, of which she was so proud, right
to the edge of the porch steps, and so, dragging again and pulling, they got him in, undressed him;
she washed his dust-smeared face.
“Well,” said Sol Levy. “I guess I go and open the store and then have a good cup of co ee.”
She put out her hand. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, sharp and tight. Her face was
distorted absurdly with her

e ort not to cry. But when he would have patted her grimed and trembling hand with his own, in a
gesture of comforting, she caught his hand to her lips and kissed it.
The sound of the horses’ hoofs died away on the still morning air. She looked down at Cim. She
thought, I will take a bath, and then I will have some co ee, too. Yancey has gone again. Has left
me. I know that. How do I know it? Well, nothing more can happen to me now. I have had it all, and
I have borne it. Nothing more can happen to me now.
OceanofPDF.com

20

For years Oklahoma had longed for statehood as a bride awaits the dawn of her wedding day. At last,
“Behold the bridegroom!” said a paternal government, handing her over to the Union. “Here is a star
for your forehead. Meet the family.”
Then, at the very altar, the nal words spoken, the pact sealed, the bride had turned to encounter
a stranger—an unexpected guest, dazzling, breath-taking, embodying all her wildest girlish dreams.
“Bridegroom—hell!” yelled Oklahoma, hurling herself into the stranger’s arms. “What’s family to me!
Go away! Don’t bother me. I’m busy.”
The name of the gorgeous stranger was Oil.
Oil. Nothing else mattered. Oklahoma, the dry, the wind-swept, the burning, was a sea of hidden
oil. The red prairies, pricked, ran black and slimy with it. The work of years was undone in a day.
The sunbonnets shrank back, aghast. Compared to that which now took place the early days following
the Run in ’89 were idyllic. They swarmed on Oklahoma from every state in the Union. The plains
became black with little eager delving gures. The sanguine roads were choked with every sort of
vehicle. Once more tent and shanty towns sprang up where the day before had been only open prairie
staring up at a blazing sky. Again the gambling tent, the six-shooter, the roaring saloon, the
dance hall, the harlot. Men fought, stole, killed, died for a piece of ground beneath whose arid
surface lay who knew what wealth of uid richness. Every barren sun-baked farm was a potential
fortune; every ditch and draw and dried-up creek bed might conceal liquid treasure. The Wildcat
Field—

Panhandle—Cimarron—Crook Nose—Cartwright—Wahoo—Bear Creek—these became magic names; these were the
Seven Cities of Cibola, rich beyond Coronado’s wildest dream. Millions of barrels of oil burst
through the sand and shale and clay and drenched the parched earth. Drill, pump, blast.
Nitroglycerin. Here she comes. A roar. Oklahoma went stark raving mad.
Sabra Cravat went oil mad with the rest of them. Just outside the town of Osage, for miles around,
they were drilling. There was that piece of farm land she had bought years ago, when Yancey rst
showed signs of restlessness. She had thought herself shrewd to have picked up this fertile little
oasis in the midst of the bare unlovely plain. She was proud of her bit of farm land with its plump
yield of alfalfa, corn, potatoes, and garden truck. She knew now why it had been so proli c. By a
whim of nature rich black oil lay under all that surrounding land, rendering it barren through its
hidden riches. No taint of corroding oil ran beneath that tract of Cravat farm land, and because of
this it lay there now, so green, so lush, with its beans, its squash, its ridiculous onions,
taunting her, deriding her, like a mirage in the desert. Queerly enough, she had no better luck
with her share in an oil lease for which she had paid a substantial sum— much more than she could a
ord to lose. Machinery, crew, days of drilling, weeks of drilling, sand, shale, salt. The well had
come up dry—a duster.
That which happened to Sabra happened to thousands. The stu was elusive, tantalizing. Here might be
a gusher vomiting millions. Fifty feet away not so much as a spot of grease could be forced to the
surface. Fortune seemed to take a delight in choosing strange victims for her pranks. Erv Wissler,
the gawk who delivered the milk to Sabra’s door each morning, found himself owner of a gusher whose
outpourings yielded him seven thousand dollars a day. He could not grasp it. Seven dollars a day
his mind might have encompassed. Seven thousand had no meaning.
“Why, Erv!” Sabra exclaimed, when he arrived at her kitchen door as usual, smelling of the
barnyard. “Seven thousand dollars a day! What in the world are you going to do with it!”

Erv’s putty features and all his loose-hung frame seemed to sti en with the e ort of his new and
momentous resolve. “Well, I tell you, Mis’ Cravat, I made up my mind I ain’t going to make no more
Sunday delivery myself. I’m a-going to hire Pete Lynch’s boy to take the milk route Sundays.”
Everyone in Osage knew the story of Ferd Sloat’s wife when the news was brought to her that weeks
of drilling on the sterile little Sloat farm had brought up a gusher. They had come running to her
across the trampled elds with the news. She had stood there on the back porch of the shabby
farmhouse, a bony drudge, as weather- beaten and unlovely as the house itself.
“Millions!” they shouted at her. “Millions and millions! What are you going to do?”
Ferd Sloat’s wife had looked down at her hands, shriveled and gnarled from alkali water and rough
work. She wiped them now on a corner of her gingham apron with a gesture of utter nality. Her
meager shoulders straightened. The querulous voice took on a note of de ance.
“From now on I’m goin’ to have the washin’ done out.”
In those rst few frenzied weeks there was no time for scienti c methods. That came later. Now, in
the rush of it, they all but burrowed in the red clay with their nger nails. Men prowled the plains
with divining rods, with absurd things called witch sticks, hoping thus to detect the precious stu
beneath the earth’s surface.
For years the meandering red clay roads that were little more than trails had seen only occasional
buggies, farm wagons, horsemen, an Indian family creeping along in a miserable cart or— rarely—an
automobile making perilous progress through the thick dust in the dry season or the slippery dough
in the wet. Now those same roads were choked, impassable. The frail wooden one-way bridges over
creeks and draws sagged and splintered with the stream of tra c, but no one took the time to repair
them. A torrent of vehicles of every description owed without ceasing, night and day. Frequently
the torrent choked itself with its own volume, and then the thousands were piled there, locked,
cursing, writhing, battling, on their way to the oil elds. From the Crook Nose eld to

Wahoo was a scant four miles; it sometimes took half a day to cover it in a motor car. Trucks,
drays, wagons, rigs, Fords, buckboards. Every day was like the day of the Opening back in ’89.
Millionaire promoters from the East, engineers, prospectors, drillers, tool dressers, shooters,
pumpers, roustabouts, Indians. Men in oil-soaked overalls that hadn’t been changed for days. Men in
London tailored suits and shirts from Charvet’s. Only the ruthless and desperate survived. In the
days of the covered wagon scarcely twenty years earlier those roads had been trails over the hot,
dry plains marked by the bleaching skull of a steer or the carcass of a horse, picked clean by the
desert scavengers and turned white and desolate to the blazing sky. A wagon wheel, a rusted rim, a
split wagon tongue lay at the side of the trail, mute evidence of a traveler laboriously crawling
his way across the prairie. Now the ditches by the side of these same roads were strewn with the
bodies of wrecked and abandoned automobiles, their skeletons stripped and rotting, their lamps
staring up at the sky like sightless eyes, testimony to the passing of the modern ravisher of that
tortured region. Up and down the dust-choked roads, fenders ripped o like ies’ wings, wheels
interlocking, trucks overturned, loads sunk in the mud, plank bridges splitting beneath the strain.
Devil take the hindmost. It was like an army push, but without an army’s morale or discipline. Bear
Creek boasted a killing a day and not a jail nor a courthouse for miles around. Men and women,
manacled to a common chain, were marched like slave convicts down the road to the nearest temple of
justice, a rough pine shack in a town that had sprung overnight on the prairie. There were no
railroads where there had been no towns.
Boilers loaded on two wagons were hauled by twenty-mule-team out ts. Stuck in the mud as they
inevitably were, only mules could have pulled the loads out. Long lines of them choked the already
impassable road. Wagons were heaped with the pipes through which the oil must be led; with lumber,
hardware, rigs, tools, portable houses—all the vast paraphernalia of sudden wealth and growth in a
frontier community.
Tough careless young boys drove the nitroglycerin cars, a deadly job on those rough and crowded
roads. It was this precious and

dreadful stu that shot the oil up out of the earth. Hard lads in corduroys took their chances and
pocketed their high pay, driving the death-dealing wagons, singing as they drove, a red shirt tail
tied to a pole aunting its warning at the back of the load. Often an expected wagon would fail to
appear. The workers on the eld never took the trouble to trace it or the time to wait for it. They
knew that somewhere along the road was a great gaping hole, with never a sizable fragment of wood
or steel or bone or esh anywhere for yards around to tell the tale they already knew.
Acres that had been carefully tended so that they might yield their scanty crop of cabbages,
onions, potatoes were abandoned to oil, the garden truck rotting in the ground. Rawboned farmers
and their scrawny wives and pindling brats, grown spectacularly rich overnight, walked out of their
houses without taking the trouble to move the furniture or lock the door. It was not worth while.
They left the sleazy curtains on the windows, the pots on the stove. The oil crew, clanking in, did
not bother to wreck the house unless they found it necessary. In the midst of an inferno of oil
rigs, drills, smoke, steam, and seeping oil itself the passer-by would often see a weather-beaten
farmhouse, its windows broken, its front askew, like a beldame gone mad, gray hair streaming about
her crazed face as she stared out at the pandemonium of oil hell about her.
The farmers moved into Osage, or Oklahoma City, or Wahoo. They bought automobiles and silk shirts
and gew-gaws, like children. The men sat on the front porch in shirt sleeves and stocking feet and
spat tobacco juice into the fresh young grass.
Mile on mile, as far as the eye could see, were the skeleton frames of oil rigs outlined against
the sky like giant Martian gures stalking across the landscape. Horrible new towns—Bret Harte
wooden-front towns—sprang up overnight on the heels of an oil strike; towns inhabited by people who
never meant to stay in them; stark and hideous houses thrown up by dwellers who never intended to
remain in them; rude frontier crossroad stores stu ed with the necessities of frontier life and the
luxuries of sudden wealth all jumbled together in a sort of mercantile miscegenation. The thump and
clank of the pump and drill; curses, shouts; the clatter of thick

dishes, the clink of glasses, the shrill laughter of women; y-infested shanties. Oil, smearing
itself over the prairies like a plague, killing the grass, blighting the trees, spreading over the
surface of the creeks and rivers. Signs tacked to tree stumps or posts; For Ambulance Call 487. Sim
Neeley Undertaker. Call 549. Call Dr. Keogh 735.
Oklahoma—the Red People’s Country—lay heaving under the hot summer sun, a scarred and dreadful
thing with the oil drooling down its face a viscid stream.
Tracy Wyatt, who used to drive the bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage, standing up to the
reins like a good-natured red- faced charioteer as the wagon bumped over the rough roads, was one
of the richest men in Oklahoma—in the whole of the United States, for that matter. Wyatt. The Wyatt
Oil Company. In another
ve years the Wyatt Oil Companies. You were to see their signs all over the world. The Big Boys
from the East were to come to him, hat in hand, to ask his advice about this; to seek his favor for
that. The sum of his daily income was fantastic. The mind simply did not grasp it. Tracy himself
was, by now, a portly and not undigni ed looking man of a little more than fty. His good-natured
rubicund face wore the grave slightly astonished look of a common-place man who suddenly nds
himself a personage.
Mrs. Wyatt, plainer, more horse-faced than ever in her expensive New York clothes, tried to
patronize Sabra Cravat, but the Whipple blood was no match for the Marcy. The new money a ected her
queerly. She became nervous, full of spleen, and the Eastern doctors spoke to her of high blood
pressure.
Sabra frankly envied these lucky ones. A letter from the adder- tongued Felice Venable to her
daughter was characteristic of that awesome old matriarch. Sabra still dreaded to open her mother’s
letters. They always contained a sting.
All this talk of oil and millions and everyone in Oklahoma rolling in it. I’ll be bound that you
and that husband of yours haven’t so much as enough to ll a lamp. Trust Yancey Cravat to get hold
of the wrong piece of land. Well, at least you can’t be

disappointed. It has been like that from the day you married him, though you can’t say your mother
didn’t warn you. I hope Donna will show more sense.
Donna, home after two years at Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson, seemed indeed to be a granddaughter
after Felice Venable’s own heart. She was, in coloring, contour, manner, and outlook, so unlike the
other Oklahoma girls—Czarina McKee, Gazelle Slaughter, Jewel Riggs, Maurine Turket—as to make that
tortured, wind-deviled day of her birth on the Oklahoma prairie almost nineteen years ago seem
impossible. Even during her homecomings in the summer vacations she had about her an air of cool
disdain together with a kind of disillusioned calculation very disconcerting to her former
intimates, not to speak of her own family.
The other girls living in Osage and Oklahoma City and Guthrie and Wahoo were true products of the
new raw Southwest country. They liked to dress in crude high colors—glaring pinks, cerise, yellow,
red, vivid orange, magenta. They made up naïvely with white powder and big daubs of carmine paint
on either cheek. The daughters of more wealthy parents drove their own cars in a day when this was
considered rather daring for a woman. Donna came home tall, thin to the point of scrawniness in
their opinion; sallow, unrouged, drawling, mysterious. She talked with an Eastern accent, ignored
the letter r, said eyether and nyether and rih’ally and altogether made herself poisonously
unpopular with the girls and undeniably stirring to the boys. She paid very little heed to the
clumsy attentions of the Oklahoma hometown lads, adopting toward them a serpent-of-the-Nile
attitude very ba ing to these frank and open-faced prairie products.
Her school days nished, and she a nished product of those days, she now looked about her coolly,
calculatingly. Her mother she regarded with a kind of a ectionate amusement.
“What a rotten deal you’ve had, Sabra dear,” she would drawl. “Really, I don’t see how you’ve stood
it all these years.”
Sabra would come to her own defense, goaded by something strangely hostile in herself toward this
remote, disdainful o spring.

“Stood what?”
“Oh—you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional Marcy, and head-held-high in spite of a
bum of a husband.”
“Donna Cravat, if you ever again dare to speak like that of your father I shall punish you, big as
you are.”
“Sabra darling, how can you punish a grown woman? You might slap me, and I wouldn’t slap you back,
of course. But I’d be terribly embarrassed for you. As for Father—he is a museum piece. You know
it.”
“Your father is one of the greatest gures the Southwest has ever produced.”
“Mm. Well, he’s picturesque enough, I suppose. But I wish he hadn’t worked so hard at it. And Cim!
There’s a brother! A great help to me in my career, the men folks of this quaint family.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were planning a career,” Sabra retorted, very much in the manner of Felice
Venable. “Unless getting up at noon, slopping around in a kimono most of the day, and lying in the
hammock reading is called a career by Dignum graduates. If it is, you’re the outstanding success of
your class.”
“Darling, I adore you when you get viperish and Venable like that. Perhaps you in uenced me in my
early youth. That’s the new psychology, you know. You used to tell me about Grandma trailing around
in her white ru ed dimity wrappers and her high heels, never lifting a lily hand.”
“At least your grandmother didn’t consider it a career.”
“Neither do I. This lovely ower-like head isn’t so empty as you think, lolling in the front porch
hammock. I know it’s no use counting on Father, even when he’s not o on one of his mysterious
jaunts. What is he doing, anyway? Living with some squaw? … Forgive me, Mother darling. I didn’t
mean to hurt you.… Cim’s just as bad, and worse, because he’s weak and hasn’t even Dad’s phony
ideals. You’re busy with the paper. That’s all right. I’m not blaming you. If it weren’t for you
we’d all be on the town—or back in Wichita living on Grandma in genteel poverty. I think you’re
wonderful, and I ought to try to be like you. But I don’t want to be a

girl reporter. Describing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sun owers at one of Cassandra
Sipes’ parties.”
Goaded by curiosity and a kind of wonder at this unnatural creature, Sabra must put her question:
“What do you want to do, then?”
“I want to marry the richest man in Oklahoma, and build a palace that I’ll hardly ever live in, and
travel like royalty, and clank with emeralds. With my skin and hair they’re my stone.”
“Oh, emeralds, by all means,” Sabra agreed, cuttingly. “Diamonds are so ordinary. And the gentleman
that you consider honoring—let me see. From your requirements that would have to be Tracy Wyatt,
wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Donna, calmly.
“You’ve probably overlooked Mrs. Wyatt. Of course, Tracy’s only
fty-one, and you being nineteen, there’s plenty of time if you’ll just be patient.” She was too
amused to be really disturbed.
“I don’t intend to be patient, Mamma darling.”
Something in her hard, ruthless tone startled Sabra. “Donna Cravat, don’t you start any of your
monkey business. I saw you cooing and ah-ing at him the other day when we went over the Wyatts’ new
house. And I heard you saying some drivel about his being a man that craved beauty in his life, and
that he should have it; and sneering politely at the new house until I could see him beginning to
doubt everything in it, poor fellow. He had been so proud to show it. But I thought you were just
talking that New York talk of yours.”
“I wasn’t. I was talking business.”
Sabra was revolted, alarmed, and distressed, all at once. She gained reassurance by telling herself
that this was just one of Donna’s queer jokes—part of the streak in her that Sabra had never
understood and that corresponded to the practical joker in Yancey. That, too, had always bewildered
her. Absorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper, Sabra let the conversation fade
to a dim and almost unimportant memory.
Sabra was su ciently shrewd and level headed to take Sol Levy’s sound advice. “You settle down to
running your paper, Sabra, and

you won’t need any oil wells. You can have the best-paying paper and the most powerful in the
Southwest. Bigger than Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. Because Osage is going to be bigger and
richer than any of them. You mark what I say. Hardly any oil in the town of Osage, but billions of
barrels of oil all around it. This town won’t be torn to pieces, then. It’ll grow and grow. Five
years from now it’ll look like Chicago.”
“Oh, Sol, how can that be?”
“You’ll see. There where the gambling tent stood with a mud hole in front of it a few years ago
you’ll see in another ve years a skyscraper like those in New York.”
She laughed at that.
Just as she had known that Yancey had again left her on that night of the Mescal ceremony, so now
she sensed that he would come back in the midst of this new insanity that had seized all Oklahoma.
And come back he did, from God knows where, on the very crest of the oil wave, and bringing with
him news that overshadowed his return. He entered as he had left, with no word of explanation, and,
as always, his entrance was so dramatic, so bizarre as to cause everything else to fade into the
background.
He came riding, as always, but it was a sorry enough nag that he bestrode this time; and his white
sombrero was grimed and battered, the Prince Albert coat was spotted, the linen frayed, the whole
gure covered with the heavy red dust of the trampled road. He must have ridden like an avenging
angel, for his long black locks were damp, his eyes red rimmed. And when she saw this Don Quixote,
so sullied, so shabby, her blood turned to water within her veins for pity.
She thought, it will always be like this as long as he lives, and each time he will be a little
more broken, older, less and less the
gure of splendor I married, until at last … She only said, “Yancey,” quietly.
He was roaring, he was reeling with Jovian laughter as he strode into the Wigwam o ce where she sat
at her neat orderly desk just as she had sat on that day years before. For a dreadful moment she
thought that he was drunk or mad. He ung his soiled white

sombrero to the desk top, he swept her into his arms, he set her down.
“Sabra! Here’s news for you. Jesse! Heh, Jesse! Where’s that rum- soaked son of a printer’s devil?
Jesse! Come in here! God, I’ve been laughing so that I almost rolled o my horse.” He was striding
up and down as of old, his shabby coat tails spreading with the vigor of his movements, the
beautiful hands gesticulating, the ne eyes— bloodshot now—still ashing with the re that would burn
until it consumed him.
“Oil, my children! More oil than anybody ever thought there was in any one spot in the world. And
where! Where! On the Osage Indian Reservation. It came in an hour ago, like the ocean. It makes
every other eld look like the Sahara. There never was such a joke! It’s cosmic—it’s terrible. How
the gods must be roaring. ‘Laughter unquenchable among the blessed gods!’ ”
“Yancey dear, we’re used to oil out here. It’s an old story. Come now. Come home and have a hot
bath and clean clothes.” In her mind’s eye she saw those ne white linen shirts of his all neatly
stacked in the drawer as he had left them.
For answer he reached out with one great arm and swept a pile of exchanges, copy paper, galley
proofs, and clippings o the desk, while with the other hand he seized the typewriter by its steel
bar and plumped it to the oor with a force that wrung a protesting whine and zing from its startled
insides. He had always scorned to use a typewriter. The black swathes of his herculean pencil bit
deeper into the paper’s surface than any typewriter’s metal teeth.
“Hot bath! Hot hell, honey! Do you realize what this means? Do you understand that two thousand
Osage Indians, squatting in their rags in front of their miserable shanties, are now the richest
nation in the world? In the world, I tell you. They were given that land— the barest, meanest
desert land in the whole of the Oklahoma country. And the government of these United States said,
‘There, you red dogs, take that and live on it. And if you can’t live on it, then die on it.’ God
A’mighty, I could die myself with laughing. Millions and millions of dollars. They’re spattering, I
tell you, all over the Osage Reservation. There’s no stopping that ow. Every

buck and squaw on the Osage Reservation is a millionaire. They own that land, and, by God, I’m
going to see that no one takes it away from them!”
“Oh, Yancey, be careful.”
He was driving his pencil across the paper. “Send this out A.P. They tried to keep it dark when the
ow came, but I’ll show them. Sabra, kill your editorial lead, whatever it was. I’ll write it. Make
this your news lead, too. Listen. ‘The gaudiest star-spangled cosmic joke that ever was played on a
double-dealing government burst into reworks to-day when, with a roar that could be heard for
miles around, thousands of barrels of oil shot into the air on the miserable desert land known as
the Osage Indian Reservation and occupied by those duped and wretched——!”
“We can’t use that, I tell you.” “Why not?”
“This isn’t the Cimarron. It’s the state of Oklahoma. That’s treason
—that’s anarchy——”
“It’s the truth. It’s history. I can prove it. They’ll be down on those Osages like a pack of
wolves. At least I’ll let them know they’re expected. I’ll run the story, by God, as I want it run,
and they can shoot me for it.”
“And I say you won’t. You can’t come in here like that. I’m editor of this paper.”
He turned quietly and looked at her, the great head jutting out, the eyes like cold steel. “Who
is?”
“I am.”
Without a word he grasped her wrist and led her out, across the old porch, down the steps and into
the street. There, on Pawhuska Avenue, in the full glare of noonday, he pointed to the weatherworn
sign that he himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, had hung there almost twenty years before. She had had
it painted and repainted. She had had it repaired. She had never replaced it with another.

THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM YANCEY CRAVAT PROP. AND EDITOR.

“When you take that down, Sabra honey, and paint your own name up in my place, you’ll be the editor
of this newspaper. Until you do that, I am.”
As they stood there, she in her neat blue serge, he in his crumpled and shabby attire, she knew
that she never would do it.
OceanofPDF.com

21

Young Cim came home from Colorado for the summer vacation, was caught up in the oil ood, and never
went back. With his geological knowledge, slight as it was, and his familiarity with the region, he
was shuttled back and forth from one end of the state to the other. Curiously enough Cim, like his
father, was more an onlooker than a participant in this fantastic spectacle. The quality of
business acumen seemed to be lacking in both these men; or perhaps a certain mad fastidiousness in
them kept them from taking part in the feverish ght. A hint of oil in this corner, a trace of oil
in that, and the thousands were upon it, pushing, scrambling, nose to the ground, down on all-fours
like pigs in a trough. A hundred times Yancey could have bought an oil lease share for a song. Head
lolling on his breast, lids lowered over the lightning eyes, he shrugged indi erent shoulders.
“I don’t want the lthy muck,” he said. “It stinks. Let the Indians have it. It’s theirs. And the
Big Boys from the East—let them sweat and scheme for it. They know where Oklahoma is now, all
right.”
His comings and goings had ceased to cause Sabra the keen agony of earlier days. She knew now that
their existence, so long as Yancey lived, would always be made up of just such unexplained absences
and melodramatic homecomings. She had made up her mind to accept the inevitable.
She did not mind that Yancey spent much time on the old elds. He knew the men he called the Big
Boys from the East, and they often sought him out for his company, which they found amusing, and
for a certain regional wisdom that they considered valuable. He

despised them and spent more of his time with the pumpers and roustabouts, drillers and tool
dressers and shooters—a hard- drinking, hard-talking, hard- ghting crew. In his white sombrero and
his outdated Prince Albert and his high-heeled boots he was known as a picturesque character. Years
of heavy drinking were taking their toll of the magni cent body and mind. The long locks showed
streaks of gray.
Local townsmen who once had feared and admired him began to patronize him or to laugh at him,
tolerantly. Many of them were rich now, counting their riches not in thousands but in millions.
They had owned a piece of Oklahoma dirt, or a piece of a piece of dirt—and suddenly, through no act
of theirs, it was worth its weight in diamonds. Pat Leary, the pugnacious little Irish lawyer who
had once been a section hand in the early days of the building of the Santa Fé road, was now so
rich through his vast oil holdings that his Indian wife, Crook Nose, was considered a quaint and
picturesque note by the wives of Eastern operators who came down on oil business.
After the rst shrill excitement of it Sabra Cravat relinquished the hope of making sudden millions
as other luckier ones had done. Her land had yielded no oil; she owned no oil leases. It was a
curious fact that Sabra still queened it in Osage and had actually become a power in the state. The
paper was read, respected, and feared throughout the Southwest. It was said with pride by Osage’s
civic minded that no oil was rich enough to stain the pages of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Though few
realized it, and though Sabra herself never admitted it, it was Yancey who had made this true. He
neglected it for years together, but he always turned up in a crisis, whether political, economic,
or social, to hurl his barbed editorials at the heads of the o enders, to sting with the poison of
his ridicule. He championed the Indians, he denounced the oil kings, he laughed at the money
grabbers, he exposed the land thieves. He was afraid of nothing. He would absent himself for six
months. The Wigwam would run along smoothly, placidly. He would return, torch in hand, again set re
to the paper until the town, the county, the state were ablaze. The Osages came to him with their
legal problems, and he

advised them soundly and took a minimum fee. He seemed always to sense an important happening from
afar and to emerge, growling like an old lion, from his hidden jungle lair, broken, mangy, but
ghting, the ne eyes still alight, the magni cent head still as menacing as that of a bu alo
charging. He had, on one occasion, come back just in time to learn of Dixie Lee’s death.
Dixie had struck oil and had retired, a rich woman. She had closed her house and gone to Oklahoma
City, and there she bought a house in a decent neighborhood and adopted a baby girl. She had gone
to Kansas City for it, and though she had engaged a capable and somewhat bewildered nurse on that
trip, Dixie herself carried the child home in her arms, its head close against the expansive satin
bosom.
No one knew what means she had used to pull the wool over the eyes of the Kansas City authorities.
She never could have done it in Oklahoma. She had had the child almost a year when the women of
Osage got wind of it. They say she took it out herself in its perambulator daily, and perhaps
someone recognized her on the street, though she looked like any plump and respectable matron now,
in her rich, quiet dress and her pince nez, a little gray showing in the black, abundant hair.
Sabra Cravat heard of it. Mrs. Wyatt. Mrs. Doc Nisbett. Mrs. Pack. They took the child away from
her by law. Six months later Dixie
Lee died; the sentimental said of a broken heart. It was Yancey Cravat who wrote her obituary:
Dixie Lee, for years one of the most prominent citizens of Osage and a pioneer in the early days of
Oklahoma, having made the Run in ’89, one of the few women who had the courage to enter that
historic and terrible race, is dead.
She was murdered by the good women of Osage.…
The story was a nine-days’ wonder, even in that melodramatic state. Sabra read it, white faced. The
circulation of the Wigwam took another bound upward.

“Some day,” said Osage, over its afternoon paper, “somebody is going to come along and shoot old
Cimarron.”
“I should think his wife would save them the trouble,” someone suggested.
If Yancey’s sporadic contributions increased the paper’s circulation it was Sabra’s steady drive
that maintained it. It was a gigantic task to keep up with the changes that were sweeping over
Osage and all of Oklahoma. Yet the columns of the Wigwam recorded these changes in its news
columns, in its editorial pages, in its personal and local items and its advertisements, as
faithfully as on that day of its rst issue when Yancey had told them who killed Pegler. Perhaps it
was because Sabra, even during Yancey’s many absences, felt that the paper must be prepared any day
to meet his scathing eye.
Strange items began to appear daily in the paper’s columns— strange to the eye not interested in
oil; but there was no such eye in Oklahoma, nor, for that matter, in the whole Southwest. Cryptic
though these items might be to dwellers in other parts of the United States, they were of more
absorbing interest to Oklahomans than front-page stories of war, romance, intrigue, royalty, crime.
Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company swabbed 42 barrels in its No. 3 Lizzie in the northwest
corner of the southwest of the northwest of 11-8-6 after having plugged back to 4,268 feet, and
shooting with 52 quarts.
The wildcat test of McComb two miles north of Kewoka which is No. 1 Sutton in the southwest corner
of the southeast of the northeast of 35-2-9 was given a shot of 105 quarts in the sand from 1,867
feet and hole bridged. As it stands it is estimated good for 450 barrels daily.
The paper’s ads re ected the change. The old livery stable, with its buggies and phaëtons, its
plugs to be hired, its tobacco-chewing loungers, its odor of straw, manure, and axle grease, was
swept away, and in its place was Fink’s Garage and Auto Livery. Repairs of All Kinds. Buy a Stimson
Salient Six. The smell of gasoline, the hiss

of the hose, lean young lads with grease-grimed ngers, engine wise.
Come to the Chamber of Commerce Dinner. The Oklahoma City College Glee Club will sing.
Osage began to travel, to see the world. Their wanderings were no longer local. Where, two years
ago, you read that Dr. and Mrs. Horace McGill are up from Concho to do their Christmas buying, you
now saw that Mr. and Mrs. W. Fletcher Busby have left for a trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy
Land. You know that old Wick Busby had made his pile in oil and that Nettie Busby was out to see
the world.
Most astounding of all were the Indian items, for now the Oklahoma Wigwam and every other paper in
the county regularly ran news about those incredible people who in one short year had leaped from
the Neolithic Age to Broadway.
The Osage Indians, a little more than two thousand in number, who but yesterday were a ragged,
half-fed, and listless band, squatting wretchedly on the Reservation allotted them, waiting until
time, sickness, and misery should blot them forever from the land, were now, by a miracle of
nature, the richest nation in the world. The barren ground on which they had lived now yielded the
most lavish oil ow in the state. Yancey Cravat’s news story and editorial had been copied and read
all over the country. A stunned government tried to bring order out of a chaos of riches. The two
thousand Osages were swept o the Reservation to make way for the ood of oil that was transmuted
into a ood of gold. They were transported to a new section called Wazhazhe, which is the ancient
Indian word for Osage.
Agents appointed. O ces established. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of dollars. Millions of
dollars yearly to be divided somehow among two thousand Osage Indians, to whom a blanket, a bowl of
So ca, a mangy pony, a bit of tobacco, a disk of peyote had meant riches. And now every
full-blood, half-blood, or quarter-blood Osage was put on the Indian Roll, and every name on the
Indian Roll was entitled to a Head Right. Every head right meant a de nite share in the millions.
Five in a family— ve head rights. Ten in a family—ten

head rights. The Indian Agent’s o ce was full of typewriters, les, pads, ledgers, neat young clerks
all occupied with papers and documents that read like some fantastic nightmare. The white man’s
eye, traveling down the tidy list, with its storybook Indian names and its hard, cold,
matter-of-fact gures, rejected what it read as being too absurd for the mind to grasp.
Clint Tall Meat $523,000
Benny Warrior $192,000
Ho ki ah se $265,887
Long Foot Magpie $387,942
The government bought them farms with their own oil money, and built big red brick houses near the
roadside and furnished them in plush and pianos and linoleum and gas ranges and phonographs. You
saw their powerful motor cars, dust covered, whirling up and down the red clay Oklahoma roads—those
roads still rutted, unpaved, hazardous, for Oklahoma had had no time to attend to such matters.
Fifty years before, whole bands of Osages on their wiry little ponies had traveled south in the
winter and north in the summer to visit their Indian cousins. Later, huddled miserably on their
Reservation, they had issued forth on foot or in wretched wagons to pay their seasonal visits and
to try to recapture, by talk and song and dance and ritual, some pale ghost of their departed
happiness. A shabby enough procession, guarded, furtive, smoldering.
But now you saw each Osage buck in his high-powered car, his inexpert hands grasping the wheel, his
enormous sombrero—larger even than the white man’s hat— apping in the breeze that he made by his
speed. In the back you saw the brilliance of feathers and blankets worn by the beady-eyed children
and the great placid squaw crouched in the bottom of the car. The white man driving the same road
gave these Indian cars a wide berth, for he knew they stopped for no one, kept the middle of the
road, ew over bridges, draws, and ditches like mad things.

Grudgingly, for she still despised them, Sabra Cravat devoted a page of the Wigwam to news of the
Osages, those moneyed, petted wards of a bewildered government. The page appeared under the title
of Indian News, and its contents were more than tinged with the grotesque.
Long Foot Magpie and wife were week-end visitors of Plenty Horses at Watonga recently.
Grandma Standing Woman of near Hominy was a visitor at the home of Red Paint Woman.
Mr. and Mrs. Sampson Lame Bull have returned from Osage after accompanying Mrs. Twin Woman, who is
now a patient in the Osage Hospital.
Albert Short Tooth and Robert White Eyes are batching it at the home of Mrs. Ghost Woman during her
absence.
Laura Bird Woman and Thelma Eagle Nest of near here motored to Grey Horse to visit Sore Head but he
was not at home.
Woodson Short Man and wife were shopping in Osage one day last week.
Red Bird Scabby has left the Reservation for a visit to Colorado Springs and Manitou.
Squaw Iki has returned recently after being a patient at the Concho Hospital for some time.
Joe Stump Horn and his wife Mrs. Long Dead are visiting Red Nose Scabby for a few days.
Sun Maker has given up the e ort to nd a rst-class cook in Wazhazhe and is looking around in Osage.
The Osages were Wigwam subscribers. They read the paper, or had it read to them if they were of the
older and less literate generation. Sabra was accustomed to seeing the doorway suddenly darkened by
a huge blanketed form or to look up, startled, to behold the brilliant striped gure standing beside
her desk in the business o ce. If Yancey chanced to be in the occasion became very social.
“How!”

“How!”
“Want um paper.”
“All right, Short Tooth. Five dollars.”
The blanketed gure would produce a wallet whose cheeks were plump to bursting with round silver
dollars, for the Osage loved the sound and feel of the bright metal disks. Down on the desk they
clinked.
The huge Osage stood then, waiting. Yancey knew what was wanted, as did Sabra.
“Me want see iron man. Make um name.”
Whereupon Yancey or Sabra would conduct the visitor into the composing room. There were three
linotype machines now, clanking and chattering away. Once Yancey had taken old Big Elk, Ruby’s
father, back there to see how the linotype turned liquid lead into printed words. He had had Jesse
Rickey, at the linotype’s keyboard, turn out old Big Elk’s name in the form of a neat metal bar,
together with the paper slip of its imprint.
There was no stopping it. The story of the iron monster that could talk and write and move spread
like a prairie re through Wazhazhe. Whole families subscribed separately for the Oklahoma
Wigwam—bucks, squaws, girls, boys, papooses in arms. The iron monster had for them a fascination
that was a mingling of admiration, awe, and fear. It was useless to explain that they need not take
out a subscription in order to own one of these coveted metal bars. It had been done once. They
always would do it that way. Sabra, if she happened to be in charge, always gave the ve dollars to
her pet charity, after trying in vain to refuse it when pro ered. Yancey took it cheerfully and
treated the boys at the new Sunny South Saloon, now a thing of splendor with its mahogany bar, its
brass rail, its mirror, chandeliers, and esh-tinted oil paintings.
Up and down the dusty Oklahoma roads at terri c speed, up and down Pawhuska Avenue, went the
blanketed gures in their Packard and Pierce Arrow cars. The merchants of Osage liked to see them
in town. It meant money freely spent on luxuries. The Osage Indian men were broad shouldered, magni
cent, the women tall,

stately. Now they grew huge with sloth and overfeeding. They ate enormously and richly. They paced
Pawhuska Avenue with slow measured tread; calm, complete, grandly content. The women walked
bareheaded, their brilliant blankets, striped purple and orange and green and red, wrapped about
their shoulders and enveloping them from neck to heels. But beneath this you saw dresses of silk,
American in make and style. On their feet were slippers of pale ne kid, high-heeled, or of
patent-leather, ornamented with buckles of cut steel, shining and costly. The men wore the blanket,
too, but beneath it they liked a shirt of silk brocade in gorgeous colors—bright green or purple or
cerise—its tail worn outside the trousers, and the trousers often as not trimmed with a pattern of
beadwork at the side. On their heads they wore huge sombreros trimmed with bands of snakeskin
ornamented with silver. They hired white chau eurs to drive their big sedan cars and sat back
grandly after ordering them to drive round and round and round the main business block. Jewelry
shops began to display their glistening ware in Osage, not so much in the hope of winning the favor
of the white oil millionaire as the red. Bracelets, watches, gaudy rings and pins and bangles and
beads and combs and buckles. Diamonds. These the Indians seemed instinctively to know about, and
they bought them clear and blue-white and costly.
The Levy Mercantile Company had added a fancy grocery and market department to its three-story
brick store. It was situated on the street oor and enhanced with a great plate-glass window. In
this window Sol displayed a mouth-watering assortment of foods. Juicy white stalks of asparagus in
glass, as large around as a man’s two thumbs; great ripe olives, their purple-black cheeks
glistening with oil; lobster, mushrooms, French peas, sardines, mountainous golden cheeses, tender
broilers, peaches in syrup, pork roasts dressed in frills. Dozens of chickens, pounds of pork,
baskets of delicacies were piled in the cars of homeward bound Osages. Often, when the food bills
mounted too high, the Indian Agent at Wazhazhe threatened to let the bill go unpaid. He alone had
the power to check the outpouring of Indian gold, and even he frequently was unable to cope with
their mad extravagances.

“It’s disgusting,” Sabra Cravat said, again and again. “What are they good for? What earthly good
are they? Ignorant savages who do nothing but eat and sleep and drive around in their ridiculous
huge automobiles.”
“Keep money in circulation,” Sol Levy replied, for she often took him to task after seeing a line
of Indian cars parked outside the Osage Mercantile Company’s store.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Now, now, Sabra. Not so grand, please. I don’t do like dozens of other merchants here in town.
Make out bills for goods they haven’t bought and give them the money. Or charge them double on the
bill that the Indian Agent sees, and return them the overcharge. They come in my store, they buy,
they pay what the article is marked, and they get what they pay for. Inez Bull comes in and gets a
silk step-in, or Sun Maker he buys twelve pounds of chicken and ten pounds of pork. I should tell
them they can’t have it! Let the President of the United States do it. The Big White Father.”
Not only did Yancey agree with Sol, he seemed to nd enormous satisfaction in the lavishness with
which they spent their oil money; in the very absurdity of the things they bought.
“The joke gets better and better. We took their land away from them and exterminated the bu alo,
then expected them to squat on the Reservations weaving baskets and molding pottery that nobody
wanted to buy. Well, at least the Osages never did that. They’re spending their money just as the
white people do when they get a handful of it—chicken and plush and automobiles and phonographs and
silk shirts and jewelry.”
“Why don’t they do some good with it?” Sabra demanded.
“What good’s Wyatt doing? Or Nisbett, or old Buckner, or Ike Hawes, or their wives! Blowing it on
houses and travel and diamonds and high-priced cars.”
“The Osages could help the other tribes—poor Indian tribes that haven’t struck oil.”
“Maybe they will—when Bixby gives away his millions to down- and-out hotel keepers who are as poor
as he was when he ran the Bixby House, back in the old days.”

“Filthy savages!”
“No, honey. Just blanket Indians—horse Indians—Plains Indians, with about twenty- ve millions of
dollars a year gushing up out of the earth and splattering all around them. The wonder to me is
that they don’t die laughing and spoil their own good time.”
Sometimes Sabra encountered old Big Elk and his vast squaw and Ruby Big Elk, together with others
of the family—a large one for an Osage—driving through Pawhuska Avenue. With their assembled head
rights the family was enormously rich—one of the wealthiest on the Wazhazhe Reservation. When the
Big Elks drove through the town it was a parade. No one car could have contained the family, though
they would have scorned such economy even if it had been possible.
They made a brilliant Indian frieze in the modern manner. Old Big Elk and his wife, somewhat
conservatively, lolled in a glittering Lincoln driven by a white chau eur. Through the generous
glass windows you saw the two fat bronze faces, the massive bodies, the brilliant colors of their
blankets and chains and beads. One of the Big Elk boys drove a snow-white Pierce Arrow roadster
that tore and shrieked like an avenging demon up and down the dusty road between Osage and
Wazhazhe. Ruby herself, and a sister-in-law or so, and a brother, might follow in one of the
Packards, while still another brother or sister preferred a Cadillac. If they walked at all it was
to ascend with stately step the entrance to the Indian Agent’s O ce. The boys wore American dress,
with perhaps an occasional Indian incongruity—beaded pants, a ve-gallon hat with an eagle feather
in it, sometimes moccasins. Ruby and her sisters and her sister-in-law wore the ne and gaudy
blanket over their American dresses, they were hatless, and their long bountiful hair was done
Indian fashion. The dress of old Big Elk and his wife was a gorgeous mixture of Indian and
American, with the Indian triumphantly predominating. About the whole party, as in the case of any
of the Osage oil families, there was an air of quiet insolence, of deep rich triumph.
Sabra always greeted them politely enough. “How do you do, Ruby,” she would say. “What a beautiful
dress.” Ruby would say

nothing. She would look at Sabra’s neat business dress of dark blue or gray, at Sabra’s plain
little hat and sensible oxford ties. “Give my regards to your father and mother,” Sabra would
continue, blandly, but inwardly furious to nd herself feeling uncomfortable and awkward beneath
this expressionless Indian gaze. She fancied that in it there was something menacing, something
triumphant. She wondered if Ruby, the oft-married, had married yet again. Once she asked young Cim
about her, making her tone casual. “Do you ever see that girl who used to work here—Ruby, wasn’t
that it? Ruby Big Elk?”
Cim’s tone was even more casual than hers. “Oh, yes. We were working out Wazhazhe way, you know, on
the Choteau eld. That’s near by.”
“They’re terribly rich, aren’t they?”
“Oh, rotten. A eet of cars and a regular ock of houses.”
“It’s a wonder that some miserable white squaw man hasn’t married that big greasy Ruby for her head
right. Mrs. Conn Sanders told me that one of the Big Elk boys was actually playing golf out at the
Westchester Apawamis Club last Saturday. It’s disgusting. He must know there’s a rule against
Indians. Mrs. Sanders reported him to the house committee.”
“There’s a rule, all right. But you ought to see the gallery when Standing Bear whams it out so
straight and so far that he makes the pro look like a ping-pong player.”
“How is he in a tomahawk contest?”
“Oh, Mother, you talk like Grandma when she used to visit here.” “The Marcys and the Venables
didn’t hobnob with dirty savages in
blankets.”
“Standing Bear doesn’t wear his blanket when he plays golf,” retorted Cim, coolly. “And he took a
shower after he’d made the course in seven below par.”
Donna came home from a bridge party one afternoon a week later, the creamy Venable pallor showing
the Marcy tinge of ocherous rage. She burst in upon Sabra, home from the o ce.
“Do you know that Cim spends his time at the Big Elks’ when we think he’s out in the oil elds?”

Sabra met this as calmly as might be. “He’s working near there.
He told me he had seen them.”
“Seen them! That miserable Gazelle Slaughter said that he’s out there all the time. All the time, I
tell you, and that he and Ruby drive around in her car, and he eats with them, he stays there, he
——”
“I’ll speak to your father. Cim’s coming home Saturday. Gazelle is angry at Cim, you know that,
because he won’t notice her and she likes him.”
She turned her clear appraising gaze upon this strange daughter of hers. She thought, suddenly,
that Donna was like a cobra, with that sleek black head, that cold and slanting eye, that long
creamy throat in which a pulse sometimes could be seen to beat and swell a little—the only sign of
emotion in this ba ing creature.
“I’ll tell you what, Donna. If you’d pay a little less attention to your brother’s social lapses
and a little more to your own vulgar conduct, perhaps it would be better.”
Donna bestowed her rare and brilliant smile upon her forthright mother. “Now, now, darling! I
suppose I say, ‘What do you mean?’ And you say, ‘You know very well what I mean.’ ”
“You certainly do know what I mean. If you weren’t my own daughter I’d say your conduct with Tracy
Wyatt was that of a—a
——”
“Harlot,” put in Donna, sweetly.
“Donna! How can you talk like that? You are breaking my heart. Haven’t I had enough? I’ve never
complained, have I? But now— you——”
Donna came over to her and put her arms about her, as though she were the older woman protecting
the younger. “It’s all right, Mamma darling. You just don’t understand. Life isn’t as simple as it
was when you were a frontier gal. I know what I want and I’m going to get it.”
Sabra shrugged away from her; faced her with scorn. “I’ve seen you. I’m ashamed for you. You press
against him like a—like a——” Again she could not say it. Another generation. “And that horse you

ride. You say he loans it to you. He gave it to you. It’s yours. What for?”
She was weeping.
“I tell you it’s all right, Mamma. He did give it to me. He wants to give me lots of things, but I
won’t take them, yet. Tracy’s in love with me. He thinks I’m young and beautiful and stimulating
and wonderful. He’s married to a dried-up, vinegary, bitter old hag who was just that when he
married her, years ago. He’s never known what love is. She has never given him children. He’s
insanely rich, and not too old, and rather sweet. We’re going to be married. Tracy will get his
divorce. Money does anything. It has taken me a year and a half to do it. I’ve never worked so hard
in all my life. But it’s going to be worth it. Don’t worry, darling. Tracy’s making an honest woman
of your wayward daughter.”
Sabra drew herself up, every inch the daughter of her mother, Felice Venable, née Marcy. “You are
disgusting.”
“Not really, if you just look at it without a lot of sentiment. I shall be happy, and Tracy, too.
His wife will be unhappy, I suppose, for a while. But she isn’t happy anyway, as it is. Better one
than three. It’ll work out. You’ll see. Don’t bother about me. It’s Cim that needs looking after.
He’s got a streak of—of——” She looked at her mother. Did not nish the sentence. “When he comes
home Saturday I wish you’d speak to him.”
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But Cim did not come home on Saturday. On Saturday, at noon, when Sabra and Yancey drove from the o
ce in their little utility car to the house on Kihekah Street for their noonday dinner they saw a
great limousine drawn up at the curb. A chau eur, vaguely familiar, lounged in front. The car was
thick with the red dust of the country road.
A vague pang of premonition stabbed at Sabra’s vitals. She clutched Yancey’s arm. “Whose car is
that?”
Yancey glanced at it indi erently. “Somebody drove Cim home, I suppose. Got enough dinner for
company?”
Donna had gone to Oklahoma City to spend the week-end. It must be Cim.
“Cim!” Sabra called, as she entered the front door. “Cim!” But there was no answer. She went
straight to the sitting room. Empty. But in the sti little parlor, so seldom used, sat two massive,
silent
gures. With the Indian sense of ceremony and formality old Big Elk and his squaw had known the
proper room to use for an occasion such as this.
“Why—Big Elk!”
“How!” replied Big Elk, and held up his palm in the gesture of greeting.
“Yancey!” cried Sabra suddenly, in a terrible voice. The two pairs of black Indian eyes stared at
her. Sabra saw that their dress was elaborate; the formal dress reserved for great occasions. The
woman wore a dark skirt and a bright cerise satin blouse, ample and shaped like a dressing sacque.
Over her shoulders was the ne bright-hued

blanket. Her hair was neatly braided and wound about her hatless head. She wore no ornaments. That
was the prerogative of the male. Old Big Elk was a structure of splendor. His enormous bulk lled
the chair. His great knees were wide apart. His blue trousers were slashed and beaded elaborately
at the sides and on his feet were moccasins heavy with intricate beadwork. His huge upper body was
covered with a shirt of brilliant green brocade worn outside the trousers, and his striped blanket
hung regally from his shoulders. About his neck and on his broad breast hung chains, beads,
necklaces. In the bright silk neckerchief knotted about his throat you saw the silver emblem of his
former glory as chief of the tribe. There were other insignia of distinction made of beaten
silver—the star, the crescent, the sun. On his head was a round high cap of brown beaver like a
Cossack’s. Up the back of this was stuck an eagle feather. His long locks, hanging about his
shoulders, straight and sti , were dyed a brilliant orange, like an old burlesque queen’s, a
startling, a fantastic background for the parchment face, lined and creased and crisscrossed with a
thousand wrinkles. One hand rested on his knee. The other wielded languidly, back and forth, back
and forth, an enormous semicircular fan made of eagle feathers. Side by side the two massive gures
sat like things of bronze. Only their eyes moved, and that nightmarish eagle feather fan, back and
forth, back and forth, regally.
Those dull black unsmiling eyes, that weaving fan, moved Sabra to nameless terror. “Yancey!” she
cried again, through sti lips. “Yancey!”
At the note of terror in her voice he was down the stairs and in the room with his quick light
step. But at sight of old Big Elk and his wife his look of concern changed to one of relief. He
smiled his utterly charming smile.
“How!”
“How!” croaked Big Elk.
Mrs. Big Elk nodded her greeting. She was a woman younger, perhaps, by thirty years than her aged
husband; his third wife. She spoke English; had even attended an Indian Mission school in her

girlhood. But through carelessness or indi erence she used the broken, slovenly English of the
unlettered Indian.
Now the two relapsed into impassive silence.
“What do they want? Ask them what they want.”
Yancey spoke a few words in Osage. Big Elk replied with a monosyllable.
“What did he say? What is it?”
“I asked them to eat dinner with us. He says he cannot.”
“I should hope not. Tell her to speak English. She speaks English.” Big Elk turned his great head,
slowly, as though it moved on a mechanical pivot. He stared at his fat, round-faced wife. He
uttered a brief command in his own tongue. The squaw smiled a little strange, embarrassed smile,
like a schoolgirl—it was less a smile than a contortion of the face, so rare in her race as to be
more
frightening than a scowl.
“Big Elk and me come take you back to Wazhazhe.” “What for?” cried Sabra, sharply.
“Four o’clock big dinner, big dance. Your son want um come tell you. Want um know he marry Ruby
this morning.”
She was silent again, smiling her foolish xed smile. Big Elk’s fan went back and forth, back and
forth.
“God A’mighty!” said Yancey Cravat. He looked at Sabra, came over to her quickly, but she waved him
away.
“Don’t. I’m not going to—it’s all right.” It was as though she shrank from his touch. She stood
there, staring at the two barbaric
gures staring so stonily back at her with their dead black Indian eyes. It was at times like this
that the Marcy in her stood her in good stead. She came of iron stock, t to stand the re. Only
beneath her ne dark eyes you now suddenly saw a smudge of purplish brown, as though a dirty thumb
had rubbed there; and a sagging of all the muscles of her face, so that she looked wattled, lined,
old.
“Don’t look like that, honey. Come. Sit down.”
Again the groping wave of her hand. “I’m all right, I tell you.
Come. We must go there.”

Yancey came forward. He shook hands formally with Big Elk, with the Indian woman. Sabra, seeing
him, suddenly realized that he was not displeased. She knew that no formal politeness would have
prevented him from voicing his anger if this monstrous announcement had shattered him as it
had her, so that her very vitals seemed to be withering within her.
“Sugar, shake hands with them, won’t you?”
“No. No.” She wet her dry lips a little with her tongue, like one in a fever. She turned, woodenly,
and walked to the door, ignoring the Indians. Across the hall, slowly, like an old woman, down the
porch steps, toward the shabby little car next to the big rich one. As she went she heard Yancey’s
voice (was there an exultant note in it?) at the telephone.
“Jesse! Take this. Get it in. Ready! … Ex-Chief Big Elk, of the Osage Nation, and Mrs. Big Elk,
living at Wazhazhe, announce the marriage of their daughter Ruby Big Elk to Cimarron Cravat, son of
—don’t interrupt me—I’m in a hurry—son of Mr. and Mrs. Yancey Cravat, of this city. The wedding was
solemnized at the home of the bride’s parents and was followed by an elaborate dinner made up of
many Indian and American dishes, partaken of by the parents of the bride and the groom, many
relatives and numerous friends of the young …”
Sabra climbed heavily into the car and sat staring at the broad back of the car ahead of her. Chief
Big Elk and his wife came out presently, unreal, bizarre in the brilliant noonday Oklahoma
sunshine, ushered by Yancey. He was being charming. They heaved their ponderous bulk into the big
car. Yancey got in beside Sabra. She spoke to him once only.
“I think you are glad.”
“This is Oklahoma. In a way it’s what I wanted it to be when I came here twenty years ago. Cim’s
like your father, Lewis Venable. Weak stu , but good stock. Ruby’s pure Indian blood and a magni
cent animal. It’s hard on you now, my darling. But their children and their grandchildren are going
to be such stu as Americans are made of. You’ll see.”
“I hope I shall die before that day.”

The shabby little middle-class car followed the one whirling ahead of them over the red clay
Oklahoma roads. Eating the dust of the big car just ahead.
She went through it and stood it, miraculously, until one grotesquerie proved too much for her
strained nerves and broke them. But she went into the Indian house, and saw Cim sitting beside the
Indian woman, and as she looked at his beautiful weak face she thought, I wish that I had never
found him that day when he was lost on the prairie long ago. He came toward her, his head lowered
with that familiar look, his ne eyes hidden by the lids.
“Look at me!” Sabra commanded, in the voice of Felice Venable. The boy raised his eyes. She looked
at him, her face stony. Ruby Big Elk came toward her with that leisurely, insolent, scu ing step.
The two women gazed at each other; rather, their looks clashed, like swords held high. They did not
shake hands.
There were races, there were prizes, there was dancing. In the old Indian days the bucks had raced
on foot for a prize that was a pony tethered at a distance and won by the eetest to reach him,
mount, and ride him back to the starting point. To-day the prize was a magni cent motor car that
stood glittering in the open eld half a mile distant. Sabra thought, I am dying, I am dying. And
Donna. This squaw is her sister-in-law. Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson.
Ruby’s handsome head right had bought the young couple the house just across the road from Big
Elk’s—a one-story red brick bungalow, substantial, ugly. They showed Sabra and Yancey through it.
It was furnished complete. Mongrel Spanish furniture in the living room—red plush, fringe, brass
nail heads as big as twenty- dollar gold pieces. An upright piano. An oak dining-room set. A ne
bathroom with heavy rich bath towels neatly hung on the racks. A shining stained oak bedroom set
with a rose-colored ta eta spread. Sabra felt a wave of nausea. Cim’s face was smiling, radiant.
Yancey was joking and laughing with the Indians. In the kitchen sat a white girl in a gingham dress
and a kitchen apron. The girl’s hair was so light a yellow as to appear almost white. Her
unintelligent eyes were palest blue. Her skin was so fair as to be quite colorless. In the midst of
the roomful of dark Indian faces the white face of the new

Cravat hired girl seemed to swim in a hazy blob before Sabra’s eyes. But she held on. She felt
Ruby’s scornful dark eyes on her. Sabra had a feeling as though she had been disemboweled and now
was a hollow thing, an empty shell that moved and walked and talked.
Dinner. White servants and negro servants to wait on them. A long table seating a score or more,
and many such tables. Bowls and plates piled with food all down the length of it. Piles of crisp
pork, roasted in the Indian fashion over hot embers sunk in a pit in the yard, and skewered with a
sharp pointed stick. Bowls of dried corn. Great fat, black ripe olives. Tinned lobster. Chicken.
Piles of dead ripe strawberries. Vast plateaus of angel-food cake covered with snow elds of icing.
Sabra went through the motions of eating. Sometimes she put a morsel into her mouth and actually
swallowed it. There was a great clatter of knives and forks and dishes. Everything was eaten out of
one plate. Platters and bowls were replenished. Sabra found herself seated beside Mrs. Big Elk. On
her other side was Yancey. He was eating and laughing and talking. Mrs. Big Elk was being almost
comically polite, solicitous. She pressed this tidbit, that dainty, on her stony guest.
Down the center of the table, at intervals, were huge bowls piled with a sort of pastry stu ed with
forcemeat. It was like a great ravioli, and piles of it vanished beneath the onslaught of
appreciative guests.
“For God’s sake, pretend to eat something, Sabra,” Yancey murmured, under his breath. “It’s done
now. They consider it an insult. Try to eat something.”
She stirred the pastry and chopped meat that had been put on her plate.
“Good,” said Mrs. Big Elk, beside her, and pointed at the mass with one dusky maculate nger.
Sabra lifted her fork to her lips and swallowed a bit of it. It was delicious—spicy, rich,
appetizing. “Yes,” she said, and thought, I am being wonderful. This is killing me. “Yes, it is
very good. This meat
—this stu ng—is it chopped or ground through a grinder?”

The huge Indian woman beside her turned her expressionless gaze on Sabra. Ponderously she shook her
head from side to side in negation.
“Naw,” she answered, politely. “Chawed.”
The clatter of a fork dropped to the plate, a clash among the cups and saucers. Sabra Cravat had
fainted.
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23

Osage was so sophisticated that it had again become simple. The society editor of the Oklahoma
Wigwam used almost no adjectives. In the old days, you had read that “the house was beautifully
decorated with an artistic arrangement of smilax, sent from Kansas City, pink and purple asters in
profusion making a bower before which the young couple stood, while in the dining room the
brilliance of golden glow, scarlet salvia, and autumn leaves gave a seasonal touch.” But now the
society column said, austerely, “The decorations were orchids and Pernet roses.”
Osage, Oklahoma, was a city.
Where, scarcely two decades ago, prairie and sky had met the eye with here a bu alo wallow, there
an Indian encampment, you now saw a twenty-story hotel: the Savoy-Bixby. The Italian head waiter
bent from the waist and murmured in your ear his secret about the veal sauté with mushrooms or the
spaghetti Caruso du jour. Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, lunching in the Louis XIV room
with the members of the Women’s State Republican Committee, would say, looking up at him with those
intelligent dark eyes, “I’ll leave it to you, Nick. Only quickly. We haven’t much time.” Niccolo
Mazzarini would say yes, he understood. No one had much time in Osage, Oklahoma. A black jackanapes
in a tight scarlet jacket with brass buttons and even tighter bright blue pants, an impudent round
red cap cocked over one ear, strolled through the dining room bawling, “Mistah Thisandthat! Mistah
Whoandwhat!” He carried messages on a silver salver. There were separate ice-

water taps in every bedroom. Servidors. Ring once for the waiter. Twice for the chambermaid. A
valet is at your service.
Twenty- ve years earlier anybody who was anybody in Oklahoma had dilated on his or her Eastern
connections. Iowa, if necessary, was East.
They had been a little ashamed of the Run. Bragged about the splendors of the homes from which they
had come.
Now it was considered the height of chic to be able to say that your parents had come through in a
covered wagon. Grandparents were still rather rare in Oklahoma. As for the Run of ’89—it was
Osage’s May ower. At the huge dinner given in Sabra Cravat’s honor when she was elected
Congresswoman, and from which they tried to exclude Sol Levy over Sabra’s vigorous (and triumphant)
protest, the chairman of the Committee on Arrangements explained it all to Sol, patronizingly.
“You see, we’re inviting only people who came to Oklahoma in the Run.”
“Well, sure,” said the former peddler, genially. “That’s all right. I walked.”
The Levy Mercantile Company’s building now occupied an entire square block and was fteen stories
high. In the huge plate-glass windows on Pawhuska postured ladies waxen and coquettish, as on Fifth
Avenue. You went to the Salon Moderne to buy Little French Dresses, and the saleswomen of this
department wore black satin and a very nice little strand of imitation pearls, and their eyes were
hard and shrewd and their phrases the latest. The Osage Indian women had learned about these Little
French Dresses, and they often came in with their stately measured stride: soft and accid from
easy living, rolls of fat about their hips and thighs. They tried on sequined dresses, satin
dresses, chi on. Sometimes even the younger Osage Indian girls still wore the brilliant striped
blanket, in a kind of contemptuous de ance of the whites. And to these, as well as to the other
women customers, the saleswomen said, “That’s awfully good this year.… That’s dreadfully smart on
you, Mrs. Bu alo Hide.… I think that line isn’t the thing for your gure, Mrs.

Plenty Vest.… My dear, I want you to have that. It’s perfect with your coloring.”
The daughter of Mrs. Pat Leary (née Crook Nose) always caused quite a utter when she came in, for
accustomed though Osage was to money and the spending of it, the Learys’ lavishness was something
spectacular. Hand-made silk underwear, the sheerest of cobweb French stockings, model hats,
dresses—well, in the matter of gowns it was no good trying to in uence Maude Leary or her mother.
They frankly wanted beads, spangles, and paillettes on a foundation of crude color. The saleswomen
were polite and acquiescent, but they cocked an eyebrow at one another. Squaw stu . Now that little
Cravat girl—Felice Cravat, Cimarron Cravat’s daughter—was di erent. She insisted on plain, smart
tailored things. Young though she was, she was Oklahoma State Woman Tennis Champion. She always
said she looked a freak in u y things
—like a boy dressed up in girl’s clothes. She had long, lean, muscular arms and a surprising
breadth of shoulder, was slim
anked and practically stomachless. She had a curious trick of holding her head down and looking up
at you under her lashes and when she did that you forgot her boyishness, for her lashes were like
fern fronds, and her eyes, in her dark face, an astounding ocean gray. She was a good sport, too.
She didn’t seem to mind the fact that her mother, when she accompanied her, wore the blanket and
was hatless, just like any poor Kaw, instead of being one of the richest of the Osages. She was
rather handsome for a squaw, in a big, insolent, slow-moving way. Felice Cravat, everyone agreed,
was a chip of the old block, and by that they did not mean her father. They were thinking of Yancey
Cravat—old Cimarron, her grandfather, who was now something of a legend in Osage and throughout
Oklahoma. Young Cim and his Osage wife had had a second child—a boy—and they had called him Yancey,
after the old boy. Young Yancey was a bewilderingly handsome mixture of a dozen types and
forbears—Indian, Spanish, French, Southern, Southwest. With that long narrow face, the
dolichocephalic head, people said he looked like the King of Spain—without that dreadful Hapsburg
jaw. Others said he was the image of his grandmother,

Sabra Cravat. Still others contended that he was his Indian mother over again—insolence and all. A
third would come along and say, “You’re crazy. He’s old Yancey, born again. I guess you don’t
remember him. There, look, that’s what I mean! The way he closes his eyes as if he were sleepy, and
then when he does look at you straight you feel as if you’d been struck by lightning. They say he’s
so smart that the Osages believe he’s one of their old gods come back to earth.”
Mrs. Tracy Wyatt (she who had been Donna Cravat) had tried to adopt one of her brother’s children,
being herself childless, but Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk had never consented to this. She was a
case, that Donna Cravat, Oklahoma was agreed about that. She could get away with things that any
other woman would be shot for. When old Tracy Wyatt had divorced his wife to marry this girl local
feeling had been very much against her. Everyone had turned to the abandoned middle-aged wife with
attentions and sympathy, but she had met their warmth and friendliness with such vitriol that they
fell back in terror and nally came to believe the stories of how she had deviled and nagged old
Tracy all through their marriage. They actually came to feel that he had been justi ed in deserting
her and taking to wife this young and fascinating girl. Certainly he seemed to take a new lease on
life, lost ve inches around the waist line, played polo, regained something of the high color and
good spirits of his old dray-driving days, and made a great hit in London during the season when
Donna was presented at court. Besides, there was no withstanding the Wyatt money. Even in a country
blasé of millionaires Tracy Wyatt’s fortune was something to marvel about. The name of Wyatt seemed
to be everywhere. As you rode in trains you saw the shining round black anks of oil cars, thousands
of them, and painted on them in letters of white, “Wyatt Oils.” Motoring through Oklahoma and the
whole of the Southwest you passed miles of Wyatt oil tanks, whole silent cities of monoliths, like
something grimly Egyptian, squatting eunuch-like on the prairies.
As for the Wyatt house—it wasn’t a house at all, but a combination of the palace of Versailles and
the Grand Central Station in New York. It occupied grounds about the size of the

duchy of Luxembourg, and on the ground, once barren plain, had been set great trees brought from
England.
A mile of avenue, planted in elms, led up to the mansion, and each elm, bought, transported, and
stuck in the ground, had cost
fteen hundred dollars. There were rare plants, farms, forests, lakes, tennis courts, golf links,
polo elds, race tracks, airdromes, swimming pools. Whole paneled rooms had been brought from
France. In the bathrooms were electric cabinets, and sunken tubs of rare marble, and shower baths
glass enclosed. These bathrooms were the size of bedrooms, and the bedrooms the size of ballrooms,
and the ballroom as big as an auditorium. There was an ice plant and cooling system that could
chill the air of every room in the house, even on the hottest Oklahoma windy day. The kitchen range
looked like a house in itself, and the kitchen looked like that of the Biltmore, only larger. When
you entered the dining room you felt that here should be seated solemn diplomats in gold braid
signing world treaties and having their portraits painted doing it. Sixty gardeners manned the
grounds. The house servants would have peopled a village.
Sabra Cravat rarely came to visit her daughter’s house, and when she did the very simplicity of her
slim straight little gure in its dark blue georgette or black crêpe was startling in the midst of
these marble columns and vast corridors and royal hangings. She did come occasionally, and on those
occasions you found her in the great central apartment that was like a throne room, standing there
before the portraits of her son’s two children, Felice and Yancey Cravat. Failing to possess either
of the children for her own, Donna had had them painted and hung there, one either side of the
enormous replace. She had meant them to be a gift to her mother, but Sabra Cravat had refused to
take them.
“Don’t you like them, Sabra darling? They’re the best things Segovia has ever done. Is it because
they’re modern? I think they look like the kids—don’t you?”
“They’re just wonderful.” “Well, then?”

“I’d have to build a house for them. How would they look in the sitting room of the house on
Kihekah! No, let me come here and look at them now and then. That way they’re always a fresh
surprise to me.”
Certainly they were rather surprising, those portraits. Rather, one of them was. Segovia had got
little Felice well enough, but he had made the mistake of painting her in Spanish costume, and
somehow her angular contours and boyish frame had not lent themselves to these gorgeous lace and
satin trappings. The boy, Yancey, had refused to dress up for the occasion—had, indeed, been
impatient of posing at all. Segovia had caught him quickly and brilliantly, with startling results.
He wore a pair of loose, rather grimy white tennis pants, a white woolly sweater with a hole in the
elbow, and was hatless. In his right hand—that slim, beautiful, speaking hand—he held a limp,
half-smoked cigarette, its blue-gray smoke spiraling faintly, its dull red eye the only note of
color in the picture. Yet the whole portrait was colorful, moving, alive. The boy’s pose was so
insolent, so lithe, so careless. The eyes followed you. He was a person.
“Looks like Ruby, don’t you think?” Donna had said, when rst she had shown it to her mother.
“No!” Sabra had replied, with enormous vigor. “Not at all. Your father.”
“Well—maybe—a little.”
“A little! You’re crazy! Look at his eyes. His hands. Of course they’re not as beautiful as your
father’s hands were—are …”
It had been ve years since Sabra had heard news of her husband, Yancey Cravat. And now, for the rst
time, she felt that he was dead, though she had never admitted this. In spite of his years she had
heard that Yancey had gone to France during the war. The American and the English armies had
rejected him, so he had dyed his graying hair, lied about his age, thrown back his still magni cent
shoulders, and somehow, by his eyes, his voice, his hands, or a combination of all these, had
hypnotized them into taking him. An uno cial report had listed him among the missing

after the carnage had ceased in the shambles that had been a wooded plateau called the Argonne.
“He isn’t dead,” Sabra had said, almost calmly. “When Yancey Cravat dies he’ll be on the front
page, and the world will know it.”
Donna, in talking it over with her brother Cim, had been inclined to agree with this, though she
did not put it thus to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t let himself die in a list. He’s too good an actor
to be lost in a mob scene.”
But a year had gone by.
The Oklahoma Wigwam now issued a morning as well as an afternoon edition and was known as the most
powerful newspaper in the Southwest. Its presses thundered out tens of thousands of copies an hour,
and hour on hour— ve editions. Its linotype room was now a regiment of iron men, its sta boasted
executive editor, editor in chief, managing editor, city editor, editor, and on down into the
dozens of minor minions. When Sabra was in town she made a practice of driving down to the o ce at
eleven every night, remaining there for an hour looking over the layout, reading the wet galley
proof of the night’s news lead, scanning the A. P. wires. Her entrance was in the nature of the
passage of royalty, and when she came into the city room the sta all but saluted. True, she wasn’t
there very much, except in the summer, when Congress was not in session.
The sight of a woman on the oor of the Congressional House was still something of a novelty.
Sentimental America had shrunk from the thought of women in active politics. Woman’s place was in
the Home, and American Womanhood was too exquisite a ower to be subjected to the harsh atmosphere
of the Assembly oor and the committee room.
Sabra stumped the state and developed a surprising gift of oratory.
“If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there’s something wrong with
American politics.… We weren’t too delicate and owerlike to cross the plains and prairies and
deserts in a covered wagon and to stand the hardships and heartbreaks of frontier life … history of
France peeking through a bedroom

keyhole … history of England a joust … but here in this land the women have been the hewers of wood
and drawers of water … thousands of unnamed heroines with weather-beaten faces and mud- caked boots
… alkali water … sun … dust … wind.… I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as
well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.…”
It had been so many years since she had heard this—it had sunk so deep into her consciousness—that
perhaps she actually thought she had originated this speech. Certainly it was received with
tremendous emotional response, copied throughout the Southwest, the Far West, the Mid-West states,
and it won her the election and gained her fame that was nation wide.
Perhaps it was not altogether what Sabra Cravat said that counted in her favor. Her appearance must
have had something to do with it. A slim, straight, digni ed woman, yet touchingly feminine. Her
voice not loud, but clear. Her white hair was shingled and beautifully waved and beneath this her
soft dark eyes took on an added depth and brilliance. Her eyebrows had remained black and thick,
still further enhancing her nest feature. Her dress was always dark, becoming, smart, and her
silken ankles above the slim slippers with their cut-steel buckles were those of a young girl. The
aristocratic Marcy feet and ankles.
Her speeches were not altogether romantic, by any means. She knew her state. Its politics were
notoriously rotten. Governor after governor was impeached with musical comedy swiftness and
regularity, and the impeachment proceedings stank to Washington. This governor was practically an
outlaw and desperado; that governor, who resembled a traveling evangelist with his long locks and
his sanctimonious face, aunted his mistress, and all the o ce plums fell to her rapscallion kin.
Sabra had statistics at her tongue’s end. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of tons of zinc.
Third in mineral products. First in oil. Coal. Gypsum. Granite. Live stock.
In Washington she was quite a belle among the old boys in Congress and even the Senate. The
opposition party tried to blackmail her with publicity about certain unproved items in the life of
her dead (or missing) husband Yancey Cravat: a two-gun man, a

desperado, a killer, a drunkard, a squaw man. Then they started on young Cim and his Osage Indian
wife, but Sabra and Donna were too quick for them.
Donna Wyatt leased a handsome Washington house in Dupont Circle, sta ed it, brought Tracy Wyatt’s
vast wealth and in uence to bear, and planned a coup so brilliant that it routed the enemy forever.
She brought her handsome, sleepy-eyed brother Cim and his wife Ruby Big Elk, and the youngsters
Felice and Yancey to the house in Dupont Circle, and together she and Sabra gave a reception for
them to which they invited a group so precious that it actually came.
Sabra and Donna, exquisitely dressed, stood in line at the head of the magni cent room, and between
them stood Ruby Big Elk in her Indian dress of creamy white doeskin all embroidered in beads from
shoulder to hem. She was an imposing gure, massive but not o ensively fat as were many of the
older Osage women, and her black abundant hair had taken on a mist of gray.
“My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat, of the Osage Indian tribe.”
“My son’s wife, Ruby Big Elk—Mrs. Cimarron Cravat.”
“My sister-in-law, Mrs. Cimarron Cravat. A full-blood Osage Indian.… Yes, indeed. We think so,
too.”
And, “How do you do?” said Ruby, in her calm, insolent way.
For the bene t of those who had not quite been able to encompass the Indian woman in her native
dress Ruby’s next public appearance was made in a Paris gown of white. She became the rage, was
considered picturesque, and left Washington in disgust, her work done. No one but her husband, whom
she loved with a dog-like devotion, could have induced her to go through this ceremony.
The opposition retired, vanquished.
Donna and Tracy Wyatt then hired a special train in which they took fty Eastern potentates on a
tour of Oklahoma. One vague and not very bright Washington matron, of great social prestige,
impressed with what she saw, voiced her opinion to young Yancey Cravat, quite confused as to his
identity and seeing only an

attractive and very handsome young male seated beside her at a country club luncheon.
“I had no idea Oklahoma was like this. I thought it was all oil and dirty Indians.”
“There is quite a lot of oil, but we’re not all dirty.” “We?”
“I’m an Indian.”
Osage, Oklahoma, was now just as much like New York as Osage could manage to make it. They built
twenty-story o ce buildings in a city that had hundreds of miles of prairie to spread in. Tracy
Wyatt built the rst skyscraper—the Wyatt building. It was pointed out and advertised all over the
at prairie state. Then Pat Leary, dancing an Irish jig of jealousy, built the Leary building,
twenty- three stories high. But the sweet fruits of triumph soon turned to ashes in his mouth. The
Wyatt building’s foundations were not built to stand the added strain of ve full stories. So he had
built a ve- story tower, slim and tapering, a taunting nger pointing to the sky. Again Tracy Wyatt
owned the tallest building in Oklahoma.
On the roof of the Levy Mercantile Company’s Building Sol had had built a penthouse after his own
plans. It was the only one of its kind in all Oklahoma. That small part of Osage which did not make
an annual pilgrimage to New York was slightly bewildered by Sol Levy’s roof life. They fed one
another with scraps of gossip got from servants, clerks, stenographers who claimed to have seen the
place at one time or another. It was, these said, lled with the rarest of carpets, rugs, books,
hangings. Super radio, super phonograph, super player piano. Music hungry. There he lived, alone,
in luxury, of the town, yet no part of it. At sunset, in the early morning, late of a star-spangled
night he might have been seen leaning over the parapet of his sky house, a lonely little gure,
lean, ivory, aloof, like a gargoyle brooding over the ridiculous city sprawled below; over the oil
rigs that encircled it like giant Martian guards holding it in their power; beyond, to where the
sky, in a veil of gray chi on that commerce had wrought, stooped to meet the debauched red prairie.
Money was now the only standard. If Pat Leary had sixty-two million dollars on Tuesday he was
Oklahoma’s leading citizen. If

Tracy Wyatt had seventy-eight million dollars on Wednesday then Tracy Wyatt was Oklahoma’s leading
citizen.
Osage had those fascinating little specialty shops and interior decorating shops on Pawhuska just
like those you see on Madison Avenue, whose owners are the daughters of decayed Eastern aristocracy
on the make. The head of the shop appeared only to special clients and then with a hat on. She wore
the hat from morning until night, her badge of revolt against this position of service. “I am a
lady,” the hat said. “Make no mistake about that. Just because I am a shopkeeper don’t think you
can patronize me. I am not working. I am playing at work. This is my fad. At any moment I can walk
out of here, just like any of you.”
Feminine Osage’s hat, by the way, was cut and tted right on its head, just like Paris.
Sabra probably was the only woman of her own generation and social position in Osage who still wore
on the third nger of her left hand the plain broad gold band of a long-past day. Synchronous with
the permanent wave and the reducing diet the oil-rich Osage matrons of Sabra’s age cast sentiment
aside for fashion, quietly placed the clumsy gold band in a bureau drawer and appeared with a slim
platinum circlet bearing, perhaps, the engraved anachronism, “M. G.-K. L. 1884.” Certainly it was
much more at ease among its square-cut emerald and oblong-diamond neighbors. These ladies explained
(if at all) that the gold band had grown too tight for the
nger, or too loose. Sabra looked down at the broad old-fashioned wedding ring on her own gemless
nger. She had not once taken it o in over forty years. It was as much a part of her as the nger
itself.
Osage began to rechristen streets, changing the ne native Indian names to commonplace American
ones. Hetoappe Street became the Boston Road; very fashionable it was, too. Still, the very nicest
people were building out a ways on the new section (formerly Okemah Hill) now River View. The river
was the ruddy Canadian, the view the forest of oil rigs bristling on the opposite shore. The
grounds sloped down to the river except on those occasions when the river rose in red anger and
sloped down to the houses. The

houses themselves were Italian palazzi or French châteaux or English manors; none, perhaps, quite
so vast or inclusive as Tracy Wyatt’s, but all provided with such necessities as pipe organs,
sunken baths, Greek temples, ancient tapestries, Venetian glass, billiard rooms, and butlers. Pat
Leary, the smart little erstwhile section hand, had a melodramatic idea. Not content with peacocks,
golf links, and swimming pools on his estate he now had placed an old and weathered covered wagon,
a rusted and splintered wagon tongue, the bleached skull of a bu alo, an Indian tepee, and a
battered lantern on a little island at the foot of the arti cial lake below the heights on which
his house stood. At night a searchlight, red, green, or orange, played from the tower of the house
upon the mute relics of frontier days.
“The covered wagon my folks crossed the prairies in,” Pat Leary explained, with shy pride. Eastern
visitors were much impressed. It was considered a great joke in Osage, intimately familiar with
Pat’s Oklahoma beginnings.
“Forgot something, ain’t you Pat, in that out t you got rigged up in the yard?” old Bixby asked.
“What’s that?”
“Pickax and shovel,” Bixby replied, laconically. “Keg of spikes and a hand car.”
Old Sam Pack, who had made the Run on a mule, said that if Pat Leary’s folks had come to Oklahoma
in a covered wagon then his had made the trip in an airplane.
All the Oklahoma millionaire houses had libraries. Yards and yards of ne leather libraries, with
gold tooling. Ike Hawkes’s library had ve sets of Dickens alone, handsomely bound in red, green,
blue, brown, and black, and Ike all unaware of any of them.
Moving picture palaces, with white-gloved ushers, had all the big Broadway super- lms. Gas lling
stations on every corner. Hot dog, chili con carne, and hamburger stands on the most remote country
road. The Arverne Grand Opera Company at the McKee Theater for a whole week every year, and the
best of everything—Traviata, Bohème, Carmen, Louise, The Barber of Seville. The display of jewels

during that week made the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan look like the Black Hole of
Calcutta.

SMART DANCING PARTY

Social events of the week just closed were worthily concluded with the smart dancing party at which
Mr. and Mrs. Clint Hopper entertained a small company at the Osage Club. The roof garden of the
club …

SMALL DINNER

Mr. and Mrs. James Click honored two distinguished Eastern visitors on Wednesday at the small
dinner at which they entertained in courtesy to Mr. and Mrs. C. Swearingen Church, of St. Paul,
Minnesota. There were covers for eighty.…
Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan Ketcham and Miss Patricia Ketcham left for New York last night, from which
city they will sail for Europe, there to meet the J. C. McConnells on their yacht at Monaco.…
Le Cercle Français will meet Tuesday evening at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Everard Pack.…
The sunbonnets had triumphed.
OceanofPDF.com

24

Still, oil was oil, and Indians were Indians. There was no way in which either of those native
forces could quite be molded to t the New York pattern.
The Osages still whirled up and down the Oklahoma roads, and those roads, for hundreds of miles,
were still unpaved red prairie dust. They crashed into ditches and draws and culverts as of old,
walked back to town and, entering the automobile salesroom in which they had bought the original
car, pointed with one dusky
nger at a new and glittering model.
“ ’Nother,” they said, succinctly. And drove out with it.
It was common news that Charley Vest had smashed eight Cadillac cars in a year, but then Charley
had a mysterious source through which he procured re water. They bought airplanes now, but they
were forbidden the use of local and neighboring ying
elds after a series of fatal smashes. They seemed, for the most part (the full bloods, at least),
to be totally lacking in engine sense.
They had electric refrigerators—sometimes in the parlor, very proud. They ate enormously and waxed
fatter and fatter. The young Osages now wore made-to-order shirts with monograms embroidered
on them the size of a saucer. The Osages had taken to spending their summers in Colorado Springs or
Manitou. At rst the white residents of those cities had refused to rent their ne houses, furnished,
to the Indians for the season. But the vast sums o ered them soon overcame their reluctance. The
Indian problem was still a problem, for he was considered legitimate prey, and thousands of prairie
buzzards fed on his richness.

Sabra Cravat had introduced a bill for the further protection of the Osages, and rather took away
the breath of the House assembled by advocating abolition of the Indian Reservation system. Her
speech, radical though it was, and sensational, was greeted with favor by some of the more liberal
of the Congressmen. They even conceded that this idea of hers, to the e ect that the Indian would
never develop or express himself until he was as free as the Negro, might some day become a
reality. These were the reformers—the long-hairs—fanatics.
Oklahoma was very proud of Sabra Cravat, editor, Congresswoman, pioneer. Osage said she
embodied the nest spirit of the state and of the Southwest. When ten of Osage’s most unctuous
millionaires contributed fty thousand dollars each for a
ve-hundred-thousand-dollar statue that should embody the Oklahoma Pioneer no one was surprised to
hear that the sculptor, Masja Krbecek, wanted to interview Sabra Cravat.
Osage was not familiar with the sculpture of Krbecek, but it was impressed with the price of it.
Half a million dollars for a statue!
“Certainly,” said the committee, calmly. “He’s the best there is. Half a million is nothing for his
stu . He wouldn’t kick a pebble for less than a quarter of a million.”
“Do you suppose he’ll do her as a pioneer woman in a sunbonnet? Holding little Cim by the hand,
huh? Or maybe in a covered wagon.”
Sabra received Krbecek in a simple (draped) dress. He turned out to be a quiet, rather snu y little
Pole in eyeglasses, who looked more like a tailor—a “little” tailor—than a sculptor. His eye roamed
about the living room of the house on Kihekah. The old wooden house had been covered with plaster
in a deep warm shade much the color of the native clay; the gimcrack porch and the cupolas had been
torn away and a great square veranda and a terrace built at the side, away from the street and
screened by a thick hedge and an iron grille. It was now, in fact, much the house that Yancey had
planned when Sabra rst built it years ago. The old pieces of mahogany and glass and silver were
back, triumphant again over the plush and brocade with which Sabra had furnished the house

when new. The old, despised since pioneer days, was again the fashion in Osage. There was the
DeGrasse silver, the cake dish with the carefree cupids, the mantelpiece gures of china, even the
hand- woven coverlet that Mother Bridget had given her that day in Wichita so long ago. Its rich
deep blue was unfaded.
“You are very comfortable here in Oklahoma,” said Masja Krbecek. He pronounced it syllable by
syllable, painfully. O-kla-ho- ma.
“It is a very simple home,” Sabra replied, “compared to the other places you have seen hereabouts.”
“It is the home of a good woman,” said Krbecek, dryly.
Sabra was a tri e startled, but she said thank you, primly.
“You are a Congress member, you are editor of a great newspaper, you are well known through the
country. You American women, you are really amazing.”
Again Sabra thanked him.
“Tell me, will you, my dear lady,” he went on, “some of the many interesting things about your life
and that of your husband, this Yancey Cravat who so far preceded his time.”
So Sabra told him. Somehow, as she talked, the years rolled back, curtain after curtain, into the
past. The Run. Then they were crossing the prairie, there was the rst glimpse of the mud wallow
that was Osage, the church meeting in the tent, the Pegler murder, the outlaws, the early years of
the paper, the Indians, oil. She talked very well in her clear, decisive voice. At his request she
showed him the time-yellowed photographs of Yancey, of herself. Krbecek listened. At the end, “It
is touching,” he said. “It makes me weep.” Then he kissed her hand and went away, taking one or two
of the old photographs with him.
The statue of the Spirit of the Oklahoma Pioneer was unveiled a year later, with terri c
ceremonies. It was an heroic gure of Yancey Cravat stepping forward with that light graceful
stride in the high-heeled Texas star boots, the skirts of the Prince Albert billowing behind with
the vigor of his movements, the sombrero atop the great menacing bu alo head, one beautiful hand
resting lightly on the weapon in his two-gun holster. Behind him, one hand

just touching his shoulder for support, stumbled the weary, blanketed gure of an Indian.
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25

Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, had started a campaign against the disgraceful condition
of the new oil towns. With an imposing party of twenty made up of front-page oil men, Senators,
Congressmen, and editors, she led the way to Bowlegs, newest and crudest of the new oil strikes.
Cities like Osage were suave enough in a surface way. But what could a state do when oil was
forever surging up in unexpected places, bringing the days of the Run back again? At each newly
discovered pool there followed the rush and scramble. Another Bret Harte town sprang up on the
prairie; elds oozed slimy black; oil rigs clanked; false-front wooden shacks lined a one-street
village. Dance halls. Brothels. Gunmen. Brawls. Heat. Flies. Dirt. Crime. The clank of machinery.
The roar of tra c boiling over a road never meant for more than a plodding wagon. Nitroglycerin
cars bearing their deadly freight. Overalls, corduroys, blue prints, engines. The human scum of
each new oil town was like the scum of the Run, but harder, crueler, more wol sh and degraded.
The imposing party, in high-powered motor cars, bumped over the terrible roads, creating a red dust
barrage.
“It is all due to our rotten Oklahoma state politics,” Sabra explained to the great Senator from
Pennsylvania who sat at her right and the great editor from New York who sat at her left in the big
luxurious car. “Our laws are laughed at. The Capitol is rotten with graft. Anything goes. Oklahoma
is still a Territory in everything but title. This town of Bowlegs. It’s a throwback to the
frontier days of forty years ago—and worse. It’s like the old

Cimarron. People who have lived in Osage all their lives don’t know what goes on out here. They
don’t care. It’s more oil, more millions. That’s all. Any one of you men, well known as you are,
could come out here, put on overalls, and be as lost as though you had vanished in the wilderness.”
The Pennsylvania Senator laughed a plump laugh and with the elbow nearest Sabra made a little
movement that would have amounted to a nudge—in anyone but a Senator from Pennsylvania. “What they
need out here is a woman Governor—eh, Lippmann!” to the great editor.
Sabra said nothing.
On the drive out from Osage they stopped for lunch in an older oil town hotel dining room—a
surprisingly good lunch, the Senators and editors were glad to nd, with a tender steak, and little
green onions, and near beer, and cheese, and co ee served in great thick cups, hot and strong and
refreshing. The waitress was deft and friendly: a tall angular woman with something frank and
engaging about the two circles of vermilion on the parchment of her withered cheeks.
“How are you, Nettie?” Sabra said to her.
“I’m grand, Mis’ Cravat. How’s all your folks?”
The Senator from Ohio winked at Sabra. “You’re a politician, all right.”
Arrived at Bowlegs, Sabra showed them everything, pitilessly. The dreadful town lay in the hot June
sun, a scarred thing, ies buzzing over it, the oil drooling down its face, a slimy stream. A
one-street wooden shanty town, like the towns of the old Territory days, but more sordid. A
red-cheeked young Harvard engineer was their o cial guide: an engaging boy in bone-rimmed glasses
and a very blue shirt that made his pink cheeks pinker. That is what I wanted my Cim to be, Sabra
thought with a great wrench at her heart. I mustn’t think of that now.
The drilling of the oil. The workmen’s shanties. The trial of a dance-hall girl in the one-room
pine shack that served as courtroom. The charge, nonpayment of rent. The little room, sti ing,
stinking, was already crowded. Men and women lled the doorway, lounged

in the windows. The judge was a yellow-faced fellow with a cud of tobacco in his cheek, and a
Sears-Roebuck catalogue and a single law book on a shelf as his library. It was a trial by jury.
The jurors were nine in number, their faces a rogues’ gallery. There had happened to be nine men
loa ng near by. It might have been less or more. Bowlegs did not consider these ne legal points.
They wore overalls and shirts. The defendant was a tiny rat-faced girl in a soiled green dress that
parodied the fashions, a pathetic green poke bonnet, down-at-heel shoes, and a great run in her
stocking. Her friends were there—a dozen or more dance-hall girls in striped overalls and jockey
caps or knee-length gingham dresses with sashes. Their ages ranged from sixteen to nineteen,
perhaps. It was incredible that life, in those few years, could have etched that look on their
faces.
The girls were charming, hospitable. They made way for the imposing visitors. “Come on in,” they
said. “How-do!”—like friendly children. The mid-afternoon sun was pitiless on their sick eyes,
their bad skin, their unhealthy hair. Clustered behind the rude bench on which the jury sat, the
girls, from time to time, leaned a sociable elbow on a juryman’s shoulder, occasionally enlivening
the judicial proceedings by a spirited comment uttered in defense of their sister, and spoken in
the near-by ear or aloud, for the bene t of the close- packed crowd.
“She never done no such thing!” “He’s a damn liar, an’ I can prove it.”
No one, least of all the tobacco-chewing judge, appeared to nd these girlish informalities at all
unusual in the legal conduct of the case.
In the corner of the little room was a kind of pen made of wooden slats, like a sizable chicken
coop, and in it, on the oor, lay a man.
“What’s he there for?” Sabra asked one of the girls. “What is that?”
“That’s Bill. He’s in jail. He shot a man last night, and he’s up for carrying concealed weapons.
It ain’t allowed.”
“I’m going to talk to him,” said Sabra. And crossed the room, through the crowd. The jurors had
just led out. They repaired to a

draw at the side of the road to make their nding. Two or three of the dance-hall girls, squatted on
the oor, were talking to Bill through the bars. They asked Sabra her name, and she told them, and
they gave her their own. Toots. Peewee. Bee.
The face of the boy on the oor was battered and blood-caked. There was a festering sore on his left
hand, and the hand and arm were swollen and angry looking.
“You were carrying a concealed weapon?” Sabra asked, squatting there with the girls. A Senator or
two and an editor were just behind her.
An injured look softened Bill’s battered features. He pouted like a child. “No, ma’am. I run the
dance hall, see? And I was standing in the middle of the oor, working, and I had the gun right in
my hand. Anybody could see. I wasn’t carrying no concealed weapon.”
The jury led back. Not guilty. The rat-faced girl’s shyster lawyer said something in her ear. She
spoke in a dreadful raucous voice, simpering.
“I sure thank you, gents.”
The dance-hall girls cheered feebly.
Out of that fetid air into the late afternoon blaze. “The dance halls open about nine,” Sabra said.
“We’ll wait for that. In the meantime I’ll show you their rooms. Their rooms——” she looked about
for the fresh-cheeked Harvard boy. “Why, where——”
“There’s some kind of excitement,” said the New York editor. “People have been running and
shouting. Over there in that eld we visited a while ago. Here comes our young friend now. Perhaps
he’ll tell us.”
The Harvard boy’s color was higher still. He was breathing fast. He had been running. His eyes
shone behind the bone-rimmed spectacles.
“Well, folks, we’ll never have a narrower squeak than that.” “What?”
“They put fty quarts in the Gypsy pool but before she got down the oil came up——”
“Quarts of what?” interrupted an editorial voice. “Oh—excuse me—quarts of nitroglycerin.”

“My God!”
“It’s in a can, you know. A thing like a can. It never had a chance to explode down there. It just
shot up with the gas and oil. If it had hit the ground everything for miles around would have been
shot to hell and all of us killed. But he caught it. They say he just ran back like an out elder
and gauged it with his eye while it was up in the air, and ran to where it would fall, and caught
it in his two arms, like a baby, right on his chest. It didn’t explode. But he’s dying. Chest all
caved in. They’ve sent for the ambulance.”
“Who? Who’s he?”
“I don’t know his real name. He’s an old bum that’s been around the eld, doing odd jobs and
drinking. They say he used to be quite a fellow in Oklahoma in his day. Picturesque pioneer or
something. Some call him old Yance and I’ve heard others call him Sim or Simeon or——”
Sabra began to run across the road.
“Mrs. Cravat! You mustn’t—where are you going?”
She ran on, across the oil-soaked eld and the dirt, in her little buckled high-heeled slippers. She
did not even know that she was running. The crowd was dense around some central object. They formed
a wall—roustabouts, drillers, tool dressers, shooters, pumpers. They were gazing down at something
on the ground.
“Let me by! Let me by!” They fell back before this white-faced woman with the white hair.
He lay on the ground, a queer, crumpled, broken gure. She ung herself on the oil-soaked earth
beside him and lifted the magni cent head gently, so that it lay cushioned by her arm. A little
purplish bubble rose to his lips, and she wiped it away with her ne white handkerchief, and
another rose to take its place.
“Yancey! Yancey!”
He opened his eyes—those ocean-gray eyes with the long curling lashes like a beautiful girl’s. She
had thought of them often and often, in an agony of pain. Glazed now, unseeing.
Then, dying, they cleared. His lips moved. He knew her. Even then, dying, he must speak in measured
verse.

“ ‘Wife and mother—you stainless woman—hide me—hide me in your love!’ ”
She had never heard a line of it. She did not know that this was Peer Gynt, humbled before Solveig.
The once magnetic eyes glazed, stared; were eyes no longer.
She closed them, gently. She forgave him everything. Quite simply, all unknowing, she murmured
through her tears the very words of Solveig.
“Sleep, my boy, my dearest boy.”

THE END
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For certain descriptive passages in the portion of this book concerned with the Opening of Oklahoma
in 1889 acknowledgment is made to Hands Up, by Fred E. Sutton and A. B. MacDonald, published and
copyrighted 1927 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company.
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Movie Adaptations of Edna Ferber’s
CIMARRON

1931: Produced by RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures. Directed by Wesley Ruggles. Starring Richard
Dix, Irene Dunne, and Estelle Taylor. Screenplay by Howard Estabrook. Academy Award winner for
Outstanding Production, Best Writing/Adaptation, and Best Art Direction. Academy Award nominee for
Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography.

1960: Produced by MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Directed by Anthony Mann. Starring Glenn Ford, Maria
Schell, Anne Baxter, and Arthur O’Connell. Screenplay by Arnold Schulman. Academy Award nominee for
Best Art Direction (Color) and Best Sound.
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Edna Ferber
CIMARRON

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Her bestselling novels
were especially popular and included the Pulitzer Prize–winning So Big, Show Boat, Giant, and
Cimarron, which was made into the 1931 lm that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. She died in
1968.
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BOOKS BY EDNA FERBER

American Beauty Cimarron
Come and Get It

Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed Fanny Herself
Giant Gigolo
The Girls Great Son Ice Palace
A Kind of Magic One Basket
A Peculiar Treasure Saratoga Trunk Show Boat
So Big
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Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap, 1926

THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK

Copyright, 1926, By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

To Punkie, who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!

---

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	DR. SHEPPARD AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE	1
II	WHO’S WHO IN KING’S ABBOT	7
III	THE MAN WHO GREW VEGETABLE MARROWS	17
IV	DINNER AT FERNLY	31
V	MURDER	49
VI	THE TUNISIAN DAGGER	65
VII	I LEARN MY NEIGHBOR’S PROFESSION	75
VIII	INSPECTOR RAGLAN IS CONFIDENT	92
IX	THE GOLDFISH POND	106
X	THE PARLORMAID	118
XI	POIROT PAYS A CALL	136
XII	ROUND THE TABLE	145
XIII	THE GOOSE QUILL	156
XIV	MRS. ACKROYD	165
XV	GEOFFREY RAYMOND	178
XVI	AN EVENING AT MAH JONG	190
XVII	PARKER	202
XVIII	CHARLES KENT	218
XIX	FLORA ACKROYD	226
XX	MISS RUSSELL	238
XXI	THE PARAGRAPH IN THE PAPER	251
XXII	URSULA’S STORY	260
XXIII	POIROT’S LITTLE REUNION	269
XXIV	RALPH PATON’S STORY	284
XXV	THE WHOLE TRUTH	289
XXVI	AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH	298
XXVII	APOLOGIA	303

---

THE MURDER OF
ROGER ACKROYD

---

1

CHAPTER I

DR. SHEPPARD AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th–17th September—a Thursday. I was sent for at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some hours.

It was just a few minutes after nine when I reached home once more. I opened the front door with my latch-key, and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the light overcoat that I had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. To tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my instinct told me that there were stirring times ahead.

From the dining-room on my left there came the rattle of tea-cups and the short, dry cough of my sister Caroline.

“Is that you, James?” she called.

An unnecessary question, since who else could it be? To tell the truth, it was precisely my sister Caroline who was the cause of my few minutes’ delay. The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr. Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One2 might omit the first part of the motto. Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesmen constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out, it is not to gather in information, but to spread it. At that, too, she is amazingly expert.

It was really this last named trait of hers which was causing me these pangs of indecision. Whatever I told Caroline now concerning the demise of Mrs. Ferrars would be common knowledge all over the village within the space of an hour and a half. As a professional man, I naturally aim at discretion. Therefore I have got into the habit of continually withholding all information possible from my sister. She usually finds out just the same, but I have the moral satisfaction of knowing that I am in no way to blame.

Mrs. Ferrars’ husband died just over a year ago, and Caroline has constantly asserted, without the least foundation for the assertion, that his wife poisoned him.

She scorns my invariable rejoinder that Mr. Ferrars died of acute gastritis, helped on by habitual over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages. The symptoms of gastritis and arsenical poisoning are not, I agree, unlike, but Caroline bases her accusation on quite different lines.

“You’ve only got to look at her,” I have heard her say.

Mrs. Ferrars, though not in her first youth, was a very attractive woman, and her clothes, though simple, always seemed to fit her very well, but all the same, lots of women buy their clothes in Paris and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.

3

As I stood hesitating in the hall, with all this passing through my mind, Caroline’s voice came again, with a sharper note in it.

“What on earth are you doing out there, James? Why don’t you come and get your breakfast?”

“Just coming, my dear,” I said hastily. “I’ve been hanging up my overcoat.”

“You could have hung up half a dozen overcoats in this time.”

She was quite right. I could have.

I walked into the dining-room, gave Caroline the accustomed peck on the cheek, and sat down to eggs and bacon. The bacon was rather cold.

“You’ve had an early call,” remarked Caroline.

“Yes,” I said. “King’s Paddock. Mrs. Ferrars.”

“I know,” said my sister.

“How did you know?”

“Annie told me.”

Annie is the house parlormaid. A nice girl, but an inveterate talker.

There was a pause. I continued to eat eggs and bacon. My sister’s nose, which is long and thin, quivered a little at the tip, as it always does when she is interested or excited over anything.

“Well?” she demanded.

“A bad business. Nothing to be done. Must have died in her sleep.”

“I know,” said my sister again.

This time I was annoyed.

“You can’t know,” I snapped. “I didn’t know myself4 until I got there, and I haven’t mentioned it to a soul yet. If that girl Annie knows, she must be a clairvoyant.”

“It wasn’t Annie who told me. It was the milkman. He had it from the Ferrars’ cook.”

As I say, there is no need for Caroline to go out to get information. She sits at home, and it comes to her.

My sister continued:

“What did she die of? Heart failure?”

“Didn’t the milkman tell you that?” I inquired sarcastically.

Sarcasm is wasted on Caroline. She takes it seriously and answers accordingly.

“He didn’t know,” she explained.

After all, Caroline was bound to hear sooner or later. She might as well hear from me.

“She died of an overdose of veronal. She’s been taking it lately for sleeplessness. Must have taken too much.”

“Nonsense,” said Caroline immediately. “She took it on purpose. Don’t tell me!”

It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by some one else will rouse you to a fury of denial. I burst immediately into indignant speech.

“There you go again,” I said. “Rushing along without rhyme or reason. Why on earth should Mrs. Ferrars wish to commit suicide? A widow, fairly young still, very well off, good health, and nothing to do but enjoy life. It’s absurd.”

5

“Not at all. Even you must have noticed how different she has been looking lately. It’s been coming on for the last six months. She’s looked positively hag-ridden. And you have just admitted that she hasn’t been able to sleep.”

“What is your diagnosis?” I demanded coldly. “An unfortunate love affair, I suppose?”

My sister shook her head.

“Remorse,” she said, with great gusto.

“Remorse?”

“Yes. You never would believe me when I told you she poisoned her husband. I’m more than ever convinced of it now.”

“I don’t think you’re very logical,” I objected. “Surely if a woman committed a crime like murder, she’d be sufficiently cold-blooded to enjoy the fruits of it without any weak-minded sentimentality such as repentance.”

Caroline shook her head.

“There probably are women like that—but Mrs. Ferrars wasn’t one of them. She was a mass of nerves. An overmastering impulse drove her on to get rid of her husband because she was the sort of person who simply can’t endure suffering of any kind, and there’s no doubt that the wife of a man like Ashley Ferrars must have had to suffer a good deal——”

I nodded.

“And ever since she’s been haunted by what she did. I can’t help feeling sorry for her.”

I don’t think Caroline ever felt sorry for Mrs. Ferrars whilst she was alive. Now that she has gone where (presumably)6 Paris frocks can no longer be worn, Caroline is prepared to indulge in the softer emotions of pity and comprehension.

I told her firmly that her whole idea was nonsense. I was all the more firm because I secretly agreed with some part, at least, of what she had said. But it is all wrong that Caroline should arrive at the truth simply by a kind of inspired guesswork. I wasn’t going to encourage that sort of thing. She will go round the village airing her views, and every one will think that she is doing so on medical data supplied by me. Life is very trying.

“Nonsense,” said Caroline, in reply to my strictures. “You’ll see. Ten to one she’s left a letter confessing everything.”

“She didn’t leave a letter of any kind,” I said sharply, and not seeing where the admission was going to land me.

“Oh!” said Caroline. “So you did inquire about that, did you? I believe, James, that in your heart of hearts, you think very much as I do. You’re a precious old humbug.”

“One always has to take the possibility of suicide into consideration,” I said repressively.

“Will there be an inquest?”

“There may be. It all depends. If I am able to declare myself absolutely satisfied that the overdose was taken accidentally, an inquest might be dispensed with.”

“And are you absolutely satisfied?” asked my sister shrewdly.

I did not answer, but got up from table.

---

7

CHAPTER II

WHO’S WHO IN KING’S ABBOT

Before I proceed further with what I said to Caroline and what Caroline said to me, it might be as well to give some idea of what I should describe as our local geography. Our village, King’s Abbot, is, I imagine, very much like any other village. Our big town is Cranchester, nine miles away. We have a large railway station, a small post office, and two rival “General Stores.” Able-bodied men are apt to leave the place early in life, but we are rich in unmarried ladies and retired military officers. Our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in the one word, “gossip.”

There are only two houses of any importance in King’s Abbot. One is King’s Paddock, left to Mrs. Ferrars by her late husband. The other, Fernly Park, is owned by Roger Ackroyd. Ackroyd has always interested me by being a man more impossibly like a country squire than any country squire could really be. He reminds one of the red-faced sportsmen who always appeared early in the first act of an old-fashioned musical comedy, the setting being the village green. They usually sang a song about going up to London. Nowadays we have revues, and the country squire has died out of musical fashion.

Of course, Ackroyd is not really a country squire. He8 is an immensely successful manufacturer of (I think) wagon wheels. He is a man of nearly fifty years of age, rubicund of face and genial of manner. He is hand and glove with the vicar, subscribes liberally to parish funds (though rumor has it that he is extremely mean in personal expenditure), encourages cricket matches, Lads’ Clubs, and Disabled Soldiers’ Institutes. He is, in fact, the life and soul of our peaceful village of King’s Abbot.

Now when Roger Ackroyd was a lad of twenty-one, he fell in love with, and married, a beautiful woman some five or six years his senior. Her name was Paton, and she was a widow with one child. The history of the marriage was short and painful. To put it bluntly, Mrs. Ackroyd was a dipsomaniac. She succeeded in drinking herself into her grave four years after her marriage.

In the years that followed, Ackroyd showed no disposition to make a second matrimonial adventure. His wife’s child by her first marriage was only seven years old when his mother died. He is now twenty-five. Ackroyd has always regarded him as his own son, and has brought him up accordingly, but he has been a wild lad and a continual source of worry and trouble to his stepfather. Nevertheless we are all very fond of Ralph Paton in King’s Abbot. He is such a good-looking youngster for one thing.

As I said before, we are ready enough to gossip in our village. Everybody noticed from the first that Ackroyd and Mrs. Ferrars got on very well together. After her husband’s death, the intimacy became more marked. They were always seen about together, and it was freely9 conjectured that at the end of her period of mourning, Mrs. Ferrars would become Mrs. Roger Ackroyd. It was felt, indeed, that there was a certain fitness in the thing. Roger Ackroyd’s wife had admittedly died of drink. Ashley Ferrars had been a drunkard for many years before his death. It was only fitting that these two victims of alcoholic excess should make up to each other for all that they had previously endured at the hands of their former spouses.

The Ferrars only came to live here just over a year ago, but a halo of gossip has surrounded Ackroyd for many years past. All the time that Ralph Paton was growing up to manhood, a series of lady housekeepers presided over Ackroyd’s establishment, and each in turn was regarded with lively suspicion by Caroline and her cronies. It is not too much to say that for at least fifteen years the whole village has confidently expected Ackroyd to marry one of his housekeepers. The last of them, a redoubtable lady called Miss Russell, has reigned undisputed for five years, twice as long as any of her predecessors. It is felt that but for the advent of Mrs. Ferrars, Ackroyd could hardly have escaped. That—and one other factor—the unexpected arrival of a widowed sister-in-law with her daughter from Canada. Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd, widow of Ackroyd’s ne’er-do-well younger brother, has taken up her residence at Fernly Park, and has succeeded, according to Caroline, in putting Miss Russell in her proper place.

I don’t know exactly what a “proper place” constitutes—it sounds chilly and unpleasant—but I know that10 Miss Russell goes about with pinched lips, and what I can only describe as an acid smile, and that she professes the utmost sympathy for “poor Mrs. Ackroyd—dependent on the charity of her husband’s brother. The bread of charity is so bitter, is it not? I should be quite miserable if I did not work for my living.”

I don’t know what Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd thought of the Ferrars affair when it came on the tapis. It was clearly to her advantage that Ackroyd should remain unmarried. She was always very charming—not to say gushing—to Mrs. Ferrars when they met. Caroline says that proves less than nothing.

Such have been our preoccupations in King’s Abbot for the last few years. We have discussed Ackroyd and his affairs from every standpoint. Mrs. Ferrars has fitted into her place in the scheme.

Now there has been a rearrangement of the kaleidoscope. From a mild discussion of probable wedding presents, we have been jerked into the midst of tragedy.

Revolving these and sundry other matters in my mind, I went mechanically on my round. I had no cases of special interest to attend, which was, perhaps, as well, for my thoughts returned again and again to the mystery of Mrs. Ferrars’s death. Had she taken her own life? Surely, if she had done so, she would have left some word behind to say what she contemplated doing? Women, in my experience, if they once reach the determination to commit suicide, usually wish to reveal the state of mind that led to the fatal action. They covet the limelight.

11

When had I last seen her? Not for over a week. Her manner then had been normal enough considering—well—considering everything.

Then I suddenly remembered that I had seen her, though not to speak to, only yesterday. She had been walking with Ralph Paton, and I had been surprised because I had had no idea that he was likely to be in King’s Abbot. I thought, indeed, that he had quarreled finally with his stepfather. Nothing had been seen of him down here for nearly six months. They had been walking along, side by side, their heads close together, and she had been talking very earnestly.

I think I can safely say that it was at this moment that a foreboding of the future first swept over me. Nothing tangible as yet—but a vague premonition of the way things were setting. That earnest tête-à-tête between Ralph Paton and Mrs. Ferrars the day before struck me disagreeably.

I was still thinking of it when I came face to face with Roger Ackroyd.

“Sheppard!” he exclaimed. “Just the man I wanted to get hold of. This is a terrible business.”

“You’ve heard then?”

He nodded. He had felt the blow keenly, I could see. His big red cheeks seemed to have fallen in, and he looked a positive wreck of his usual jolly, healthy self.

“It’s worse than you know,” he said quietly. “Look here, Sheppard, I’ve got to talk to you. Can you come back with me now?”

12

“Hardly. I’ve got three patients to see still, and I must be back by twelve to see my surgery patients.”

“Then this afternoon—no, better still, dine to-night. At 7.30? Will that suit you?”

“Yes—I can manage that all right. What’s wrong? Is it Ralph?”

I hardly knew why I said that—except, perhaps, that it had so often been Ralph.

Ackroyd stared blankly at me as though he hardly understood. I began to realize that there must be something very wrong indeed somewhere. I had never seen Ackroyd so upset before.

“Ralph?” he said vaguely. “Oh! no, it’s not Ralph. Ralph’s in London——Damn! Here’s old Miss Ganett coming. I don’t want to have to talk to her about this ghastly business. See you to-night, Sheppard. Seven-thirty.”

I nodded, and he hurried away, leaving me wondering. Ralph in London? But he had certainly been in King’s Abbot the preceding afternoon. He must have gone back to town last night or early this morning, and yet Ackroyd’s manner had conveyed quite a different impression. He had spoken as though Ralph had not been near the place for months.

I had no time to puzzle the matter out further. Miss Ganett was upon me, thirsting for information. Miss Ganett has all the characteristics of my sister Caroline, but she lacks that unerring aim in jumping to conclusions which lends a touch of greatness to Caroline’s13 maneuvers. Miss Ganett was breathless and interrogatory.

Wasn’t it sad about poor dear Mrs. Ferrars? A lot of people were saying she had been a confirmed drug-taker for years. So wicked the way people went about saying things. And yet, the worst of it was, there was usually a grain of truth somewhere in these wild statements. No smoke without fire! They were saying too that Mr. Ackroyd had found out about it, and had broken off the engagement—because there was an engagement. She, Miss Ganett, had proof positive of that. Of course I must know all about it—doctors always did—but they never tell?

And all this with a sharp beady eye on me to see how I reacted to these suggestions. Fortunately long association with Caroline has led me to preserve an impassive countenance, and to be ready with small non-committal remarks.

On this occasion I congratulated Miss Ganett on not joining in ill-natured gossip. Rather a neat counterattack, I thought. It left her in difficulties, and before she could pull herself together, I had passed on.

I went home thoughtful, to find several patients waiting for me in the surgery.

I had dismissed the last of them, as I thought, and was just contemplating a few minutes in the garden before lunch when I perceived one more patient waiting for me. She rose and came towards me as I stood somewhat surprised.

I don’t know why I should have been, except that there14 is a suggestion of cast iron about Miss Russell, a something that is above the ills of the flesh.

Ackroyd’s housekeeper is a tall woman, handsome but forbidding in appearance. She has a stern eye, and lips that shut tightly, and I feel that if I were an under housemaid or a kitchenmaid I should run for my life whenever I heard her coming.

“Good morning, Dr. Sheppard,” said Miss Russell. “I should be much obliged if you would take a look at my knee.”

I took a look, but, truth to tell, I was very little wiser when I had done so. Miss Russell’s account of vague pains was so unconvincing that with a woman of less integrity of character I should have suspected a trumped-up tale. It did cross my mind for one moment that Miss Russell might have deliberately invented this affection of the knee in order to pump me on the subject of Mrs. Ferrars’s death, but I soon saw that there, at least, I had misjudged her. She made a brief reference to the tragedy, nothing more. Yet she certainly seemed disposed to linger and chat.

“Well, thank you very much for this bottle of liniment, doctor,” she said at last. “Not that I believe it will do the least good.”

I didn’t think it would either, but I protested in duty bound. After all, it couldn’t do any harm, and one must stick up for the tools of one’s trade.

“I don’t believe in all these drugs,” said Miss Russell, her eyes sweeping over my array of bottles disparagingly.15 “Drugs do a lot of harm. Look at the cocaine habit.”

“Well, as far as that goes——”

“It’s very prevalent in high society.”

I’m sure Miss Russell knows far more about high society than I do. I didn’t attempt to argue with her.

“Just tell me this, doctor,” said Miss Russell. “Suppose you are really a slave of the drug habit. Is there any cure?”

One cannot answer a question like that offhand. I gave her a short lecture on the subject, and she listened with close attention. I still suspected her of seeking information about Mrs. Ferrars.

“Now, veronal, for instance——” I proceeded.

But, strangely enough, she didn’t seem interested in veronal. Instead she changed the subject, and asked me if it was true that there were certain poisons so rare as to baffle detection.

“Ah!” I said. “You’ve been reading detective stories.”

She admitted that she had.

“The essence of a detective story,” I said, “is to have a rare poison—if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of—something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with. Death is instantaneous, and Western science is powerless to detect it. That is the kind of thing you mean?”

“Yes. Is there really such a thing?”

I shook my head regretfully.

“I’m afraid there isn’t. There’s curare, of course.”

I told her a good deal about curare, but she seemed to16 have lost interest once more. She asked me if I had any in my poison cupboard, and when I replied in the negative I fancy I fell in her estimation.

She said she must be getting back, and I saw her out at the surgery door just as the luncheon gong went.

I should never have suspected Miss Russell of a fondness for detective stories. It pleases me very much to think of her stepping out of the housekeeper’s room to rebuke a delinquent housemaid, and then returning to a comfortable perusal of The Mystery of the Seventh Death, or something of the kind.

---

17

CHAPTER III

THE MAN WHO GREW VEGETABLE MARROWS

I told Caroline at lunch time that I should be dining at Fernly. She expressed no objection—on the contrary——

“Excellent,” she said. “You’ll hear all about it. By the way, what is the trouble with Ralph?”

“With Ralph?” I said, surprised; “there’s isn’t any.”

“Then why is he staying at the Three Boars instead of at Fernly Park?”

I did not for a minute question Caroline’s statement that Ralph Paton was staying at the local inn. That Caroline said so was enough for me.

“Ackroyd told me he was in London,” I said. In the surprise of the moment I departed from my valuable rule of never parting with information.

“Oh!” said Caroline. I could see her nose twitching as she worked on this.

“He arrived at the Three Boars yesterday morning,” she said. “And he’s still there. Last night he was out with a girl.”

That did not surprise me in the least. Ralph, I should say, is out with a girl most nights of his life. But I did rather wonder that he chose to indulge in the pastime in King’s Abbot instead of in the gay metropolis.

“One of the barmaids?” I asked.

18

“No. That’s just it. He went out to meet her. I don’t know who she is.”

(Bitter for Caroline to have to admit such a thing.)

“But I can guess,” continued my indefatigable sister.

I waited patiently.

“His cousin.”

“Flora Ackroyd?” I exclaimed in surprise.

Flora Ackroyd is, of course, no relation whatever really to Ralph Paton, but Ralph has been looked upon for so long as practically Ackroyd’s own son, that cousinship is taken for granted.

“Flora Ackroyd,” said my sister.

“But why not go to Fernly if he wanted to see her?”

“Secretly engaged,” said Caroline, with immense enjoyment. “Old Ackroyd won’t hear of it, and they have to meet this way.”

I saw a good many flaws in Caroline’s theory, but I forbore to point them out to her. An innocent remark about our new neighbor created a diversion.

The house next door, The Larches, has recently been taken by a stranger. To Caroline’s extreme annoyance, she has not been able to find out anything about him, except that he is a foreigner. The Intelligence Corps has proved a broken reed. Presumably the man has milk and vegetables and joints of meat and occasional whitings just like everybody else, but none of the people who make it their business to supply these things seem to have acquired any information. His name, apparently, is Mr. Porrott—a name which conveys an odd feeling of unreality. The one thing we do know about him is that19 he is interested in the growing of vegetable marrows.

But that is certainly not the sort of information that Caroline is after. She wants to know where he comes from, what he does, whether he is married, what his wife was, or is, like, whether he has children, what his mother’s maiden name was—and so on. Somebody very like Caroline must have invented the questions on passports, I think.

“My dear Caroline,” I said. “There’s no doubt at all about what the man’s profession has been. He’s a retired hairdresser. Look at that mustache of his.”

Caroline dissented. She said that if the man was a hairdresser, he would have wavy hair—not straight. All hairdressers did.

I cited several hairdressers personally known to me who had straight hair, but Caroline refused to be convinced.

“I can’t make him out at all,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “I borrowed some garden tools the other day, and he was most polite, but I couldn’t get anything out of him. I asked him point blank at last whether he was a Frenchman, and he said he wasn’t—and somehow I didn’t like to ask him any more.”

I began to be more interested in our mysterious neighbor. A man who is capable of shutting up Caroline and sending her, like the Queen of Sheba, empty away must be something of a personality.

“I believe,” said Caroline, “that he’s got one of those new vacuum cleaners——”

I saw a meditated loan and the opportunity of further20 questioning gleaming from her eye. I seized the chance to escape into the garden. I am rather fond of gardening. I was busily exterminating dandelion roots when a shout of warning sounded from close by and a heavy body whizzed by my ear and fell at my feet with a repellant squelch. It was a vegetable marrow!

I looked up angrily. Over the wall, to my left, there appeared a face. An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense mustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes. It was our mysterious neighbor, Mr. Porrott.

He broke at once into fluent apologies.

“I demand of you a thousand pardons, monsieur. I am without defense. For some months now I cultivate the marrows. This morning suddenly I enrage myself with these marrows. I send them to promenade themselves—alas! not only mentally but physically. I seize the biggest. I hurl him over the wall. Monsieur, I am ashamed. I prostrate myself.”

Before such profuse apologies, my anger was forced to melt. After all, the wretched vegetable hadn’t hit me. But I sincerely hoped that throwing large vegetables over walls was not our new friend’s hobby. Such a habit could hardly endear him to us as a neighbor.

The strange little man seemed to read my thoughts.

“Ah! no,” he exclaimed. “Do not disquiet yourself. It is not with me a habit. But can you figure to yourself, monsieur, that a man may work towards a certain object, may labor and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation, and then find that, after all, he yearns for21 the old busy days, and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I fancy that that is a common enough occurrence. I myself am perhaps an instance. A year ago I came into a legacy—enough to enable me to realize a dream. I have always wanted to travel, to see the world. Well, that was a year ago, as I said, and—I am still here.”

My little neighbor nodded.

“The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil. And mark you, monsieur, my work was interesting work. The most interesting work there is in the world.”

“Yes?” I said encouragingly. For the moment the spirit of Caroline was strong within me.

“The study of human nature, monsieur!”

“Just so,” I said kindly.

Clearly a retired hairdresser. Who knows the secrets of human nature better than a hairdresser?

“Also, I had a friend—a friend who for many years never left my side. Occasionally of an imbecility to make one afraid, nevertheless he was very dear to me. Figure to yourself that I miss even his stupidity. His naïveté, his honest outlook, the pleasure of delighting and surprising him by my superior gifts—all these I miss more than I can tell you.”

“He died?” I asked sympathetically.

“Not so. He lives and flourishes—but on the other side of the world. He is now in the Argentine.”

“In the Argentine,” I said enviously.

22

I have always wanted to go to South America. I sighed, and then looked up to find Mr. Porrott eyeing me sympathetically. He seemed an understanding little man.

“You will go there, yes?” he asked.

I shook my head with a sigh.

“I could have gone,” I said, “a year ago. But I was foolish—and worse than foolish—greedy. I risked the substance for the shadow.”

“I comprehend,” said Mr. Porrott. “You speculated?”

I nodded mournfully, but in spite of myself I felt secretly entertained. This ridiculous little man was so portentously solemn.

“Not the Porcupine Oilfields?” he asked suddenly.

I stared.

“I thought of them, as a matter of fact, but in the end I plumped for a gold mine in Western Australia.”

My neighbor was regarding me with a strange expression which I could not fathom.

“It is Fate,” he said at last.

“What is Fate?” I asked irritably.

“That I should live next to a man who seriously considers Porcupine Oilfields, and also West Australian Gold Mines. Tell me, have you also a penchant for auburn hair?”

I stared at him open-mouthed, and he burst out laughing.

“No, no, it is not the insanity that I suffer from. Make your mind easy. It was a foolish question that I put to you there, for, see you, my friend of whom I spoke was23 a young man, a man who thought all women good, and most of them beautiful. But you are a man of middle age, a doctor, a man who knows the folly and the vanity of most things in this life of ours. Well, well, we are neighbors. I beg of you to accept and present to your excellent sister my best marrow.”

He stooped, and with a flourish produced an immense specimen of the tribe, which I duly accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.

“Indeed,” said the little man cheerfully, “this has not been a wasted morning. I have made the acquaintance of a man who in some ways resembles my far-off friend. By the way, I should like to ask you a question. You doubtless know every one in this tiny village. Who is the young man with the very dark hair and eyes, and the handsome face. He walks with his head flung back, and an easy smile on his lips?”

The description left me in no doubt.

“That must be Captain Ralph Paton,” I said slowly.

“I have not seen him about here before?”

“No, he has not been here for some time. But he is the son—adopted son, rather—of Mr. Ackroyd of Fernly Park.”

My neighbor made a slight gesture of impatience.

“Of course, I should have guessed. Mr. Ackroyd spoke of him many times.”

“You know Mr. Ackroyd?” I said, slightly surprised.

“Mr. Ackroyd knew me in London—when I was at work there. I have asked him to say nothing of my profession down here.”

24

“I see,” I said, rather amused by this patent snobbery, as I thought it.

But the little man went on with an almost grandiloquent smirk.

“One prefers to remain incognito. I am not anxious for notoriety. I have not even troubled to correct the local version of my name.”

“Indeed,” I said, not knowing quite what to say.

“Captain Ralph Paton,” mused Mr. Porrott. “And so he is engaged to Mr. Ackroyd’s niece, the charming Miss Flora.”

“Who told you so?” I asked, very much surprised.

“Mr. Ackroyd. About a week ago. He is very pleased about it—has long desired that such a thing should come to pass, or so I understood from him. I even believe that he brought some pressure to bear upon the young man. That is never wise. A young man should marry to please himself—not to please a stepfather from whom he has expectations.”

My ideas were completely upset. I could not see Ackroyd taking a hairdresser into his confidence, and discussing the marriage of his niece and stepson with him. Ackroyd extends a genial patronage to the lower orders, but he has a very great sense of his own dignity. I began to think that Porrott couldn’t be a hairdresser after all.

To hide my confusion, I said the first thing that came into my head.

“What made you notice Ralph Paton? His good looks?”

“No, not that alone—though he is unusually good-looking25 for an Englishman—what your lady novelists would call a Greek God. No, there was something about that young man that I did not understand.”

He said the last sentence in a musing tone of voice which made an indefinable impression upon me. It was as though he was summing up the boy by the light of some inner knowledge that I did not share. It was that impression that was left with me, for at that moment my sister’s voice called me from the house.

I went in. Caroline had her hat on, and had evidently just come in from the village. She began without preamble.

“I met Mr. Ackroyd.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I stopped him, of course, but he seemed in a great hurry, and anxious to get away.”

I have no doubt but that that was the case. He would feel towards Caroline much as he had felt towards Miss Ganett earlier in the day—perhaps more so. Caroline is less easy to shake off.

“I asked him at once about Ralph. He was absolutely astonished. Had no idea the boy was down here. He actually said he thought I must have made a mistake. I! A mistake!”

“Ridiculous,” I said. “He ought to have known you better.”

“Then he went on to tell me that Ralph and Flora are engaged.”

“I know that too,” I interrupted, with modest pride.

“Who told you?”

26

“Our new neighbor.”

Caroline visibly wavered for a second or two, much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers. Then she declined the tempting red herring.

“I told Mr. Ackroyd that Ralph was staying at the Three Boars.”

“Caroline,” I said, “do you never reflect that you might do a lot of harm with this habit of yours of repeating everything indiscriminately?”

“Nonsense,” said my sister. “People ought to know things. I consider it my duty to tell them. Mr. Ackroyd was very grateful to me.”

“Well?” I said, for there was clearly more to come.

“I think he went straight off to the Three Boars, but if so he didn’t find Ralph there.”

“No?”

“No. Because as I was coming back through the wood——”

“Coming back through the wood?” I interrupted.

Caroline had the grace to blush.

“It was such a lovely day,” she exclaimed. “I thought I would make a little round. The woods with their autumnal tints are so perfect at this time of year.”

Caroline does not care a hang for woods at any time of year. Normally she regards them as places where you get your feet damp, and where all kinds of unpleasant things may drop on your head. No, it was good sound mongoose instinct which took her to our local wood. It is the only place adjacent to the village of King’s Abbot27 where you can talk with a young woman unseen by the whole of the village. It adjoins the Park of Fernly.

“Well,” I said, “go on.”

“As I say, I was just coming back through the wood when I heard voices.”

Caroline paused.

“Yes?”

“One was Ralph Paton’s—I knew it at once. The other was a girl’s. Of course I didn’t mean to listen——”

“Of course not,” I interjected, with patent sarcasm—which was, however, wasted on Caroline.

“But I simply couldn’t help overhearing. The girl said something—I didn’t quite catch what it was, and Ralph answered. He sounded very angry. ‘My dear girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t you realize that it is quite on the cards the old man will cut me off with a shilling? He’s been pretty fed up with me for the last few years. A little more would do it. And we need the dibs, my dear. I shall be a very rich man when the old fellow pops off. He’s mean as they make ’em, but he’s rolling in money really. I don’t want him to go altering his will. You leave it to me, and don’t worry.’ Those were his exact words. I remember them perfectly. Unfortunately, just then I stepped on a dry twig or something, and they lowered their voices and moved away. I couldn’t, of course, go rushing after them, so wasn’t able to see who the girl was.”

“That must have been most vexing,” I said. “I suppose, though, you hurried on to the Three Boars, felt28 faint, and went into the bar for a glass of brandy, and so were able to see if both the barmaids were on duty?”

“It wasn’t a barmaid,” said Caroline unhesitatingly. “In fact, I’m almost sure that it was Flora Ackroyd, only——”

“Only it doesn’t seem to make sense,” I agreed.

“But if it wasn’t Flora, who could it have been?”

Rapidly my sister ran over a list of maidens living in the neighborhood, with profuse reasons for and against.

When she paused for breath, I murmured something about a patient, and slipped out.

I proposed to make my way to the Three Boars. It seemed likely that Ralph Paton would have returned there by now.

I knew Ralph very well—better, perhaps, than any one else in King’s Abbot, for I had known his mother before him, and therefore I understood much in him that puzzled others. He was, to a certain extent, the victim of heredity. He had not inherited his mother’s fatal propensity for drink, but nevertheless he had in him a strain of weakness. As my new friend of this morning had declared, he was extraordinarily handsome. Just on six feet, perfectly proportioned, with the easy grace of an athlete, he was dark, like his mother, with a handsome, sunburnt face always ready to break into a smile. Ralph Paton was of those born to charm easily and without effort. He was self-indulgent and extravagant, with no veneration for anything on earth, but he was lovable nevertheless, and his friends were all devoted to him.

Could I do anything with the boy? I thought I could.

29

On inquiry at the Three Boars I found that Captain Paton had just come in. I went up to his room and entered unannounced.

For a moment, remembering what I had heard and seen, I was doubtful of my reception, but I need have had no misgivings.

“Why, it’s Sheppard! Glad to see you.”

He came forward to meet me, hand outstretched, a sunny smile lighting up his face.

“The one person I am glad to see in this infernal place.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“What’s the place been doing?”

He gave a vexed laugh.

“It’s a long story. Things haven’t been going well with me, doctor. But have a drink, won’t you?”

“Thanks,” I said, “I will.”

He pressed the bell, then, coming back, threw himself into a chair.

“Not to mince matters,” he said gloomily, “I’m in the devil of a mess. In fact, I haven’t the least idea what to do next.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked sympathetically.

“It’s my confounded stepfather.”

“What has he done?”

“It isn’t what he’s done yet, but what he’s likely to do.”

The bell was answered, and Ralph ordered the drinks. When the man had gone again, he sat hunched in the arm-chair, frowning to himself.

30

“Is it really—serious?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I’m fairly up against it this time,” he said soberly.

The unusual ring of gravity in his voice told me that he spoke the truth. It took a good deal to make Ralph grave.

“In fact,” he continued, “I can’t see my way ahead…. I’m damned if I can.”

“If I could help——” I suggested diffidently.

But he shook his head very decidedly.

“Good of you, doctor. But I can’t let you in on this. I’ve got to play a lone hand.”

He was silent a minute and then repeated in a slightly different tone of voice:—

“Yes—I’ve got to play a lone hand….”

---

31

CHAPTER IV

DINNER AT FERNLY

It was just a few minutes before half-past seven when I rang the front door bell of Fernly Park. The door was opened with admirable promptitude by Parker, the butler.

The night was such a fine one that I had preferred to come on foot. I stepped into the big square hall and Parker relieved me of my overcoat. Just then Ackroyd’s secretary, a pleasant young fellow by the name of Raymond, passed through the hall on his way to Ackroyd’s study, his hands full of papers.

“Good-evening, doctor. Coming to dine? Or is this a professional call?”

The last was in allusion to my black bag, which I had laid down on the oak chest.

I explained that I expected a summons to a confinement case at any moment, and so had come out prepared for an emergency call. Raymond nodded, and went on his way, calling over his shoulder:—

“Go into the drawing-room. You know the way. The ladies will be down in a minute. I must just take these papers to Mr. Ackroyd, and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

On Raymond’s appearance Parker had withdrawn, so I was alone in the hall. I settled my tie, glanced in a large mirror which hung there, and crossed to the door32 directly facing me, which was, as I knew, the door of the drawing-room.

I noticed, just as I was turning the handle, a sound from within—the shutting down of a window, I took it to be. I noted it, I may say, quite mechanically, without attaching any importance to it at the time.

I opened the door and walked in. As I did so, I almost collided with Miss Russell, who was just coming out. We both apologized.

For the first time I found myself appraising the housekeeper and thinking what a handsome woman she must once have been—indeed, as far as that goes, still was. Her dark hair was unstreaked with gray, and when she had a color, as she had at this minute, the stern quality of her looks was not so apparent.

Quite subconsciously I wondered whether she had been out, for she was breathing hard, as though she had been running.

“I’m afraid I’m a few minutes early,” I said.

“Oh! I don’t think so. It’s gone half-past seven, Dr. Sheppard.” She paused a minute before saying, “I—didn’t know you were expected to dinner to-night. Mr. Ackroyd didn’t mention it.”

I received a vague impression that my dining there displeased her in some way, but I couldn’t imagine why.

“How’s the knee?” I inquired.

“Much the same, thank you, doctor. I must be going now. Mrs. Ackroyd will be down in a moment. I—I only came in here to see if the flowers were all right.”

She passed quickly out of the room. I strolled to the33 window, wondering at her evident desire to justify her presence in the room. As I did so, I saw what, of course, I might have known all the time had I troubled to give my mind to it, namely, that the windows were long French ones opening on the terrace. The sound I had heard, therefore, could not have been that of a window being shut down.

Quite idly, and more to distract my mind from painful thoughts than for any other reason, I amused myself by trying to guess what could have caused the sound in question.

Coals on the fire? No, that was not the kind of noise at all. A drawer of the bureau pushed in? No, not that.

Then my eye was caught by what, I believe, is called a silver table, the lid of which lifts, and through the glass of which you can see the contents. I crossed over to it, studying the things. There were one or two pieces of old silver, a baby shoe belonging to King Charles the First, some Chinese jade figures, and quite a number of African implements and curios. Wanting to examine one of the jade figures more closely, I lifted the lid. It slipped through my fingers and fell.

At once I recognized the sound I had heard. It was this same table lid being shut down gently and carefully. I repeated the action once or twice for my own satisfaction. Then I lifted the lid to scrutinize the contents more closely.

I was still bending over the open silver table when Flora Ackroyd came into the room.

Quite a lot of people do not like Flora Ackroyd, but34 nobody can help admiring her. And to her friends she can be very charming. The first thing that strikes you about her is her extraordinary fairness. She has the real Scandinavian pale gold hair. Her eyes are blue—blue as the waters of a Norwegian fiord, and her skin is cream and roses. She has square, boyish shoulders and slight hips. And to a jaded medical man it is very refreshing to come across such perfect health.

A simple straight-forward English girl—I may be old-fashioned, but I think the genuine article takes a lot of beating.

Flora joined me by the silver table, and expressed heretical doubts as to King Charles I ever having worn the baby shoe.

“And anyway,” continued Miss Flora, “all this making a fuss about things because some one wore or used them seems to me all nonsense. They’re not wearing or using them now. The pen that George Eliot wrote The Mill on the Floss with—that sort of thing—well, it’s only just a pen after all. If you’re really keen on George Eliot, why not get The Mill on the Floss in a cheap edition and read it.”

“I suppose you never read such old out-of-date stuff, Miss Flora?”

“You’re wrong, Dr. Sheppard. I love The Mill on the Floss.”

I was rather pleased to hear it. The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.

“You haven’t congratulated me yet, Dr. Sheppard,” said Flora. “Haven’t you heard?”

35

She held out her left hand. On the third finger of it was an exquisitely set single pearl.

“I’m going to marry Ralph, you know,” she went on. “Uncle is very pleased. It keeps me in the family, you see.”

I took both her hands in mine.

“My dear,” I said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

“We’ve been engaged for about a month,” continued Flora in her cool voice, “but it was only announced yesterday. Uncle is going to do up Cross-stones, and give it to us to live in, and we’re going to pretend to farm. Really, we shall hunt all the winter, town for the season, and then go yachting. I love the sea. And, of course, I shall take a great interest in the parish affairs, and attend all the Mothers’ Meetings.”

Just then Mrs. Ackroyd rustled in, full of apologies for being late.

I am sorry to say I detest Mrs. Ackroyd. She is all chains and teeth and bones. A most unpleasant woman. She has small pale flinty blue eyes, and however gushing her words may be, those eyes of hers always remain coldly speculative.

I went across to her, leaving Flora by the window. She gave me a handful of assorted knuckles and rings to squeeze, and began talking volubly.

Had I heard about Flora’s engagement? So suitable in every way. The dear young things had fallen in love at first sight. Such a perfect pair, he so dark and she so fair.

“I can’t tell you, my dear Dr. Sheppard, the relief to a mother’s heart.”

36

Mrs. Ackroyd sighed—a tribute to her mother’s heart, whilst her eyes remained shrewdly observant of me.

“I was wondering. You are such an old friend of dear Roger’s. We know how much he trusts to your judgment. So difficult for me—in my position, as poor Cecil’s widow. But there are so many tiresome things—settlements, you know—all that. I fully believe that Roger intends to make settlements upon dear Flora, but, as you know, he is just a leetle peculiar about money. Very usual, I’ve heard, amongst men who are captains of industry. I wondered, you know, if you could just sound him on the subject? Flora is so fond of you. We feel you are quite an old friend, although we have only really known you just over two years.”

Mrs. Ackroyd’s eloquence was cut short as the drawing-room door opened once more. I was pleased at the interruption. I hate interfering in other people’s affairs, and I had not the least intention of tackling Ackroyd on the subject of Flora’s settlements. In another moment I should have been forced to tell Mrs. Ackroyd as much.

“You know Major Blunt, don’t you, doctor?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said.

A lot of people know Hector Blunt—at least by repute. He has shot more wild animals in unlikely places than any man living, I suppose. When you mention him, people say: “Blunt—you don’t mean the big game man, do you?”

His friendship with Ackroyd has always puzzled me a little. The two men are so totally dissimilar. Hector Blunt is perhaps five years Ackroyd’s junior. They made37 friends early in life, and though their ways have diverged, the friendship still holds. About once in two years Blunt spends a fortnight at Fernly, and an immense animal’s head, with an amazing number of horns which fixes you with a glazed stare as soon as you come inside the front door, is a permanent reminder of the friendship.

Blunt had entered the room now with his own peculiar, deliberate, yet soft-footed tread. He is a man of medium height, sturdily and rather stockily built. His face is almost mahogany-colored, and is peculiarly expressionless. He has gray eyes that give the impression of always watching something that is happening very far away. He talks little, and what he does say is said jerkily, as though the words were forced out of him unwillingly.

He said now: “How are you, Sheppard?” in his usual abrupt fashion, and then stood squarely in front of the fireplace looking over our heads as though he saw something very interesting happening in Timbuctoo.

“Major Blunt,” said Flora, “I wish you’d tell me about these African things. I’m sure you know what they all are.”

I have heard Hector Blunt described as a woman hater, but I noticed that he joined Flora at the silver table with what might be described as alacrity. They bent over it together.

I was afraid Mrs. Ackroyd would begin talking about settlements again, so I made a few hurried remarks about the new sweet pea. I knew there was a new sweet pea because the Daily Mail had told me so that morning.38 Mrs. Ackroyd knows nothing about horticulture, but she is the kind of woman who likes to appear well-informed about the topics of the day, and she, too, reads the Daily Mail. We were able to converse quite intelligently until Ackroyd and his secretary joined us, and immediately afterwards Parker announced dinner.

My place at table was between Mrs. Ackroyd and Flora. Blunt was on Mrs. Ackroyd’s other side, and Geoffrey Raymond next to him.

Dinner was not a cheerful affair. Ackroyd was visibly preoccupied. He looked wretched, and ate next to nothing. Mrs. Ackroyd, Raymond, and I kept the conversation going. Flora seemed affected by her uncle’s depression, and Blunt relapsed into his usual taciturnity.

Immediately after dinner Ackroyd slipped his arm through mine and led me off to his study.

“Once we’ve had coffee, we shan’t be disturbed again,” he explained. “I told Raymond to see to it that we shouldn’t be interrupted.”

I studied him quietly without appearing to do so. He was clearly under the influence of some strong excitement. For a minute or two he paced up and down the room, then, as Parker entered with the coffee tray, he sank into an arm-chair in front of the fire.

The study was a comfortable apartment. Book-shelves lined one wall of it. The chairs were big and covered in dark blue leather. A large desk stood by the window and was covered with papers neatly docketed and filed. On a round table were various magazines and sporting papers.

39

“I’ve had a return of that pain after food lately,” remarked Ackroyd casually, as he helped himself to coffee. “You must give me some more of those tablets of yours.”

It struck me that he was anxious to convey the impression that our conference was a medical one. I played up accordingly.

“I thought as much. I brought some up with me.”

“Good man. Hand them over now.”

“They’re in my bag in the hall. I’ll get them.”

Ackroyd arrested me.

“Don’t you trouble. Parker will get them. Bring in the doctor’s bag, will you, Parker?”

“Very good, sir.”

Parker withdrew. As I was about to speak, Ackroyd threw up his hand.

“Not yet. Wait. Don’t you see I’m in such a state of nerves that I can hardly contain myself?”

I saw that plainly enough. And I was very uneasy. All sorts of forebodings assailed me.

Ackroyd spoke again almost immediately.

“Make certain that window’s closed, will you?” he asked.

Somewhat surprised, I got up and went to it. It was not a French window, but one of the ordinary sash type. The heavy blue velvet curtains were drawn in front of it, but the window itself was open at the top.

Parker reëntered the room with my bag while I was still at the window.

“That’s all right,” I said, emerging again into the room.

40

“You’ve put the latch across?”

“Yes, yes. What’s the matter with you, Ackroyd?”

The door had just closed behind Parker, or I would not have put the question.

Ackroyd waited just a minute before replying.

“I’m in hell,” he said slowly, after a minute. “No, don’t bother with those damned tablets. I only said that for Parker. Servants are so curious. Come here and sit down. The door’s closed too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Nobody can overhear; don’t be uneasy.”

“Sheppard, nobody knows what I’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours. If a man’s house ever fell in ruins about him, mine has about me. This business of Ralph’s is the last straw. But we won’t talk about that now. It’s the other—the other——! I don’t know what to do about it. And I’ve got to make up my mind soon.”

“What’s the trouble?”

Ackroyd remained silent for a minute or two. He seemed curiously averse to begin. When he did speak, the question he asked came as a complete surprise. It was the last thing I expected.

“Sheppard, you attended Ashley Ferrars in his last illness, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

He seemed to find even greater difficulty in framing his next question.

“Did you never suspect—did it ever enter your head—that—well, that he might have been poisoned?”

I was silent for a minute or two. Then I made up my mind what to say. Roger Ackroyd was not Caroline.

41

“I’ll tell you the truth,” I said. “At the time I had no suspicion whatever, but since—well, it was mere idle talk on my sister’s part that first put the idea into my head. Since then I haven’t been able to get it out again. But, mind you, I’ve no foundation whatever for that suspicion.”

“He was poisoned,” said Ackroyd.

He spoke in a dull heavy voice.

“Who by?” I asked sharply.

“His wife.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me so herself.”

“When?”

“Yesterday! My God! yesterday! It seems ten years ago.”

I waited a minute, and then he went on.

“You understand, Sheppard, I’m telling you this in confidence. It’s to go no further. I want your advice—I can’t carry the whole weight by myself. As I said just now, I don’t know what to do.”

“Can you tell me the whole story?” I said. “I’m still in the dark. How did Mrs. Ferrars come to make this confession to you?”

“It’s like this. Three months ago I asked Mrs. Ferrars to marry me. She refused. I asked her again and she consented, but she refused to allow me to make the engagement public until her year of mourning was up. Yesterday I called upon her, pointed out that a year and three weeks had now elapsed since her husband’s death, and that there could be no further objection to making the42 engagement public property. I had noticed that she had been very strange in her manner for some days. Now, suddenly, without the least warning, she broke down completely. She—she told me everything. Her hatred of her brute of a husband, her growing love for me, and the—the dreadful means she had taken. Poison! My God! It was murder in cold blood.”

I saw the repulsion, the horror, in Ackroyd’s face. So Mrs. Ferrars must have seen it. Ackroyd is not the type of the great lover who can forgive all for love’s sake. He is fundamentally a good citizen. All that was sound and wholesome and law-abiding in him must have turned from her utterly in that moment of revelation.

“Yes,” he went on, in a low, monotonous voice, “she confessed everything. It seems that there is one person who has known all along—who has been blackmailing her for huge sums. It was the strain of that that drove her nearly mad.”

“Who was the man?”

Suddenly before my eyes there arose the picture of Ralph Paton and Mrs. Ferrars side by side. Their heads so close together. I felt a momentary throb of anxiety. Supposing—oh! but surely that was impossible. I remembered the frankness of Ralph’s greeting that very afternoon. Absurd!

“She wouldn’t tell me his name,” said Ackroyd slowly. “As a matter of fact, she didn’t actually say that it was a man. But of course——”

“Of course,” I agreed. “It must have been a man. And you’ve no suspicion at all?”

43

For answer Ackroyd groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

“It can’t be,” he said. “I’m mad even to think of such a thing. No, I won’t even admit to you the wild suspicion that crossed my mind. I’ll tell you this much, though. Something she said made me think that the person in question might be actually among my household—but that can’t be so. I must have misunderstood her.”

“What did you say to her?” I asked.

“What could I say? She saw, of course, the awful shock it had been to me. And then there was the question, what was my duty in the matter? She had made me, you see, an accessory after the fact. She saw all that, I think, quicker than I did. I was stunned, you know. She asked me for twenty-four hours—made me promise to do nothing till the end of that time. And she steadfastly refused to give me the name of the scoundrel who had been blackmailing her. I suppose she was afraid that I might go straight off and hammer him, and then the fat would have been in the fire as far as she was concerned. She told me that I should hear from her before twenty-four hours had passed. My God! I swear to you, Sheppard, that it never entered my head what she meant to do. Suicide! And I drove her to it.”

“No, no,” I said. “Don’t take an exaggerated view of things. The responsibility for her death doesn’t lie at your door.”

“The question is, what am I to do now? The poor lady is dead. Why rake up past trouble?”

“I rather agree with you,” I said.

44

“But there’s another point. How am I to get hold of that scoundrel who drove her to death as surely as if he’d killed her. He knew of the first crime, and he fastened on to it like some obscene vulture. She’s paid the penalty. Is he to go scot-free?”

“I see,” I said slowly. “You want to hunt him down? It will mean a lot of publicity, you know.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that. I’ve zigzagged to and fro in my mind.”

“I agree with you that the villain ought to be punished, but the cost has got to be reckoned.”

Ackroyd rose and walked up and down. Presently he sank into the chair again.

“Look here, Sheppard, suppose we leave it like this. If no word comes from her, we’ll let the dead things lie.”

“What do you mean by word coming from her?” I asked curiously.

“I have the strongest impression that somewhere or somehow she must have left a message for me—before she went. I can’t argue about it, but there it is.”

I shook my head.

“She left no letter or word of any kind. I asked.”

“Sheppard, I’m convinced that she did. And more, I’ve a feeling that by deliberately choosing death, she wanted the whole thing to come out, if only to be revenged on the man who drove her to desperation. I believe that if I could have seen her then, she would have told me his name and bid me go for him for all I was worth.”

He looked at me.

45

“You don’t believe in impressions?”

“Oh, yes, I do, in a sense. If, as you put it, word should come from her——”

I broke off. The door opened noiselessly and Parker entered with a salver on which were some letters.

“The evening post, sir,” he said, handing the salver to Ackroyd.

Then he collected the coffee cups and withdrew.

My attention, diverted for a moment, came back to Ackroyd. He was staring like a man turned to stone at a long blue envelope. The other letters he had let drop to the ground.

“Her writing,” he said in a whisper. “She must have gone out and posted it last night, just before—before——”

He ripped open the envelope and drew out a thick enclosure. Then he looked up sharply.

“You’re sure you shut the window?” he said.

“Quite sure,” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“All this evening I’ve had a queer feeling of being watched, spied upon. What’s that——?”

He turned sharply. So did I. We both had the impression of hearing the latch of the door give ever so slightly. I went across to it and opened it. There was no one there.

“Nerves,” murmured Ackroyd to himself.

He unfolded the thick sheets of paper, and read aloud in a low voice.

46

“My dear, my very dear Roger,—A life calls for a life. I see that—I saw it in your face this afternoon. So I am taking the only road open to me. I leave to you the punishment of the person who has made my life a hell upon earth for the last year. I would not tell you the name this afternoon, but I propose to write it to you now. I have no children or near relations to be spared, so do not fear publicity. If you can, Roger, my very dear Roger, forgive me the wrong I meant to do you, since when the time came, I could not do it after all….”

Ackroyd, his finger on the sheet to turn it over, paused.

“Sheppard, forgive me, but I must read this alone,” he said unsteadily. “It was meant for my eyes, and my eyes only.”

He put the letter in the envelope and laid it on the table.

“Later, when I am alone.”

“No,” I cried impulsively, “read it now.”

Ackroyd stared at me in some surprise.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, reddening. “I do not mean read it aloud to me. But read it through whilst I am still here.”

Ackroyd shook his head.

“No, I’d rather wait.”

But for some reason, obscure to myself, I continued to urge him.

“At least, read the name of the man,” I said.

Now Ackroyd is essentially pig-headed. The more you urge him to do a thing, the more determined he is not to do it. All my arguments were in vain.

47

The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone. I could think of nothing. With a shake of the head I passed out and closed the door behind me.

I was startled by seeing the figure of Parker close at hand. He looked embarrassed, and it occurred to me that he might have been listening at the door.

What a fat, smug, oily face the man had, and surely there was something decidedly shifty in his eye.

“Mr. Ackroyd particularly does not want to be disturbed,” I said coldly. “He told me to tell you so.”

“Quite so, sir. I—I fancied I heard the bell ring.”

This was such a palpable untruth that I did not trouble to reply. Preceding me to the hall, Parker helped me on with my overcoat, and I stepped out into the night. The moon was overcast and everything seemed very dark and still. The village church clock chimed nine o’clock as I passed through the lodge gates. I turned to the left towards the village, and almost cannoned into a man coming in the opposite direction.

“This the way to Fernly Park, mister?” asked the stranger in a hoarse voice.

I looked at him. He was wearing a hat pulled down over his eyes, and his coat collar turned up. I could see little or nothing of his face, but he seemed a young fellow. The voice was rough and uneducated.

“These are the lodge gates here,” I said.

48

“Thank you, mister.” He paused, and then added, quite unnecessarily, “I’m a stranger in these parts, you see.”

He went on, passing through the gates as I turned to look after him.

The odd thing was that his voice reminded me of some one’s voice that I knew, but whose it was I could not think.

Ten minutes later I was at home once more. Caroline was full of curiosity to know why I had returned so early. I had to make up a slightly fictitious account of the evening in order to satisfy her, and I had an uneasy feeling that she saw through the transparent device.

At ten o’clock I rose, yawned, and suggested bed. Caroline acquiesced.

It was Friday night, and on Friday night I wind the clocks. I did it as usual, whilst Caroline satisfied herself that the servants had locked up the kitchen properly.

It was a quarter past ten as we went up the stairs. I had just reached the top when the telephone rang in the hall below.

“Mrs. Bates,” said Caroline immediately.

“I’m afraid so,” I said ruefully.

I ran down the stairs and took up the receiver.

“What?” I said. “What? Certainly, I’ll come at once.”

I ran upstairs, caught up my bag, and stuffed a few extra dressings into it.

“Parker telephoning,” I shouted to Caroline, “from Fernly. They’ve just found Roger Ackroyd murdered.”

---

49

CHAPTER V

MURDER

I got out the car in next to no time, and drove rapidly to Fernly. Jumping out, I pulled the bell impatiently. There was some delay in answering, and I rang again.

Then I heard the rattle of the chain and Parker, his impassivity of countenance quite unmoved, stood in the open doorway.

I pushed past him into the hall.

“Where is he?” I demanded sharply.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Your master. Mr. Ackroyd. Don’t stand there staring at me, man. Have you notified the police?”

“The police, sir? Did you say the police?” Parker stared at me as though I were a ghost.

“What’s the matter with you, Parker? If, as you say, your master has been murdered——”

A gasp broke from Parker.

“The master? Murdered? Impossible, sir!”

It was my turn to stare.

“Didn’t you telephone to me, not five minutes ago, and tell me that Mr. Ackroyd had been found murdered?”

“Me, sir? Oh! no indeed, sir. I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.”

“Do you mean to say it’s all a hoax? That there’s nothing the matter with Mr. Ackroyd?”

50

“Excuse me, sir, did the person telephoning use my name?”

“I’ll give you the exact words I heard. ‘Is that Dr. Sheppard? Parker, the butler at Fernly, speaking. Will you please come at once, sir. Mr. Ackroyd has been murdered.’”

Parker and I stared at each other blankly.

“A very wicked joke to play, sir,” he said at last, in a shocked tone. “Fancy saying a thing like that.”

“Where is Mr. Ackroyd?” I asked suddenly.

“Still in the study, I fancy, sir. The ladies have gone to bed, and Major Blunt and Mr. Raymond are in the billiard room.”

“I think I’ll just look in and see him for a minute,” I said. “I know he didn’t want to be disturbed again, but this odd practical joke has made me uneasy. I’d just like to satisfy myself that he’s all right.”

“Quite so, sir. It makes me feel quite uneasy myself. If you don’t object to my accompanying you as far as the door, sir——?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Come along.”

I passed through the door on the right, Parker on my heels, traversed the little lobby where a small flight of stairs led upstairs to Ackroyd’s bedroom, and tapped on the study door.

There was no answer. I turned the handle, but the door was locked.

“Allow me, sir,” said Parker.

Very nimbly, for a man of his build, he dropped on one knee and applied his eye to the keyhole.

51

“Key is in the lock all right, sir,” he said, rising. “On the inside. Mr. Ackroyd must have locked himself in and possibly just dropped off to sleep.”

I bent down and verified Parker’s statement.

“It seems all right,” I said, “but, all the same, Parker, I’m going to wake your master up. I shouldn’t be satisfied to go home without hearing from his own lips that he’s quite all right.”

So saying, I rattled the handle and called out, “Ackroyd, Ackroyd, just a minute.”

But still there was no answer. I glanced over my shoulder.

“I don’t want to alarm the household,” I said hesitatingly.

Parker went across and shut the door from the big hall through which we had come.

“I think that will be all right now, sir. The billiard room is at the other side of the house, and so are the kitchen quarters and the ladies’ bedrooms.”

I nodded comprehendingly. Then I banged once more frantically on the door, and stooping down, fairly bawled through the keyhole:—

“Ackroyd, Ackroyd! It’s Sheppard. Let me in.”

And still—silence. Not a sign of life from within the locked room. Parker and I glanced at each other.

“Look here, Parker,” I said, “I’m going to break this door in—or rather, we are. I’ll take the responsibility.”

“If you say so, sir,” said Parker, rather doubtfully.

“I do say so. I’m seriously alarmed about Mr. Ackroyd.”

52

I looked round the small lobby and picked up a heavy oak chair. Parker and I held it between us and advanced to the assault. Once, twice, and three times we hurled it against the lock. At the third blow it gave, and we staggered into the room.

Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the arm-chair before the fire. His head had fallen sideways, and clearly visible, just below the collar of his coat, was a shining piece of twisted metalwork.

Parker and I advanced till we stood over the recumbent figure. I heard the butler draw in his breath with a sharp hiss.

“Stabbed from be’ind,” he murmured. “’Orrible!”

He wiped his moist brow with his handkerchief, then stretched out a hand gingerly towards the hilt of the dagger.

“You mustn’t touch that,” I said sharply. “Go at once to the telephone and ring up the police station. Inform them of what has happened. Then tell Mr. Raymond and Major Blunt.”

“Very good, sir.”

Parker hurried away, still wiping his perspiring brow.

I did what little had to be done. I was careful not to disturb the position of the body, and not to handle the dagger at all. No object was to be attained by moving it. Ackroyd had clearly been dead some little time.

Then I heard young Raymond’s voice, horror-stricken and incredulous, outside.

“What do you say? Oh! impossible! Where’s the doctor?”

53

He appeared impetuously in the doorway, then stopped dead, his face very white. A hand put him aside, and Hector Blunt came past him into the room.

“My God!” said Raymond from behind him; “it’s true, then.”

Blunt came straight on till he reached the chair. He bent over the body, and I thought that, like Parker, he was going to lay hold of the dagger hilt. I drew him back with one hand.

“Nothing must be moved,” I explained. “The police must see him exactly as he is now.”

Blunt nodded in instant comprehension. His face was expressionless as ever, but I thought I detected signs of emotion beneath the stolid mask. Geoffrey Raymond had joined us now, and stood peering over Blunt’s shoulder at the body.

“This is terrible,” he said in a low voice.

He had regained his composure, but as he took off the pince-nez he habitually wore and polished them I observed that his hand was shaking.

“Robbery, I suppose,” he said. “How did the fellow get in? Through the window? Has anything been taken?”

He went towards the desk.

“You think it’s burglary?” I said slowly.

“What else could it be? There’s no question of suicide, I suppose?”

“No man could stab himself in such a way,” I said confidently. “It’s murder right enough. But with what motive?”

54

“Roger hadn’t an enemy in the world,” said Blunt quietly. “Must have been burglars. But what was the thief after? Nothing seems to be disarranged?”

He looked round the room. Raymond was still sorting the papers on the desk.

“There seems nothing missing, and none of the drawers show signs of having been tampered with,” the secretary observed at last. “It’s very mysterious.”

Blunt made a slight motion with his head.

“There are some letters on the floor here,” he said.

I looked down. Three or four letters still lay where Ackroyd had dropped them earlier in the evening.

But the blue envelope containing Mrs. Ferrars’s letter had disappeared. I half opened my mouth to speak, but at that moment the sound of a bell pealed through the house. There was a confused murmur of voices in the hall, and then Parker appeared with our local inspector and a police constable.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the inspector. “I’m terribly sorry for this! A good kind gentleman like Mr. Ackroyd. The butler says it is murder. No possibility of accident or suicide, doctor?”

“None whatever,” I said.

“Ah! A bad business.”

He came and stood over the body.

“Been moved at all?” he asked sharply.

“Beyond making certain that life was extinct—an easy matter—I have not disturbed the body in any way.”

“Ah! And everything points to the murderer having55 got clear away—for the moment, that is. Now then, let me hear all about it. Who found the body?”

I explained the circumstances carefully.

“A telephone message, you say? From the butler?”

“A message that I never sent,” declared Parker earnestly. “I’ve not been near the telephone the whole evening. The others can bear me out that I haven’t.”

“Very odd, that. Did it sound like Parker’s voice, doctor?”

“Well—I can’t say I noticed. I took it for granted, you see.”

“Naturally. Well, you got up here, broke in the door, and found poor Mr. Ackroyd like this. How long should you say he had been dead, doctor?”

“Half an hour at least—perhaps longer,” I said.

“The door was locked on the inside, you say? What about the window?”

“I myself closed and bolted it earlier in the evening at Mr. Ackroyd’s request.”

The inspector strode across to it and threw back the curtains.

“Well, it’s open now anyway,” he remarked.

True enough, the window was open, the lower sash being raised to its fullest extent.

The inspector produced a pocket torch and flashed it along the sill outside.

“This is the way he went all right,” he remarked, “and got in. See here.”

In the light of the powerful torch, several clearly defined footmarks could be seen. They seemed to be those56 of shoes with rubber studs in the soles. One particularly clear one pointed inwards, another, slightly overlapping it, pointed outwards.

“Plain as a pikestaff,” said the inspector. “Any valuables missing?”

Geoffrey Raymond shook his head.

“Not so that we can discover. Mr. Ackroyd never kept anything of particular value in this room.”

“H’m,” said the inspector. “Man found an open window. Climbed in, saw Mr. Ackroyd sitting there—maybe he’d fallen asleep. Man stabbed him from behind, then lost his nerve and made off. But he’s left his tracks pretty clearly. We ought to get hold of him without much difficulty. No suspicious strangers been hanging about anywhere?”

“Oh!” I said suddenly.

“What is it, doctor?”

“I met a man this evening—just as I was turning out of the gate. He asked me the way to Fernly Park.”

“What time would that be?”

“Just nine o’clock. I heard it chime the hour as I was turning out of the gate.”

“Can you describe him?”

I did so to the best of my ability.

The inspector turned to the butler.

“Any one answering that description come to the front door?”

“No, sir. No one has been to the house at all this evening.”

“What about the back?”

57

“I don’t think so, sir, but I’ll make inquiries.”

He moved towards the door, but the inspector held up a large hand.

“No, thanks. I’ll do my own inquiring. But first of all I want to fix the time a little more clearly. When was Mr. Ackroyd last seen alive?”

“Probably by me,” I said, “when I left at—let me see—about ten minutes to nine. He told me that he didn’t wish to be disturbed, and I repeated the order to Parker.”

“Just so, sir,” said Parker respectfully.

“Mr. Ackroyd was certainly alive at half-past nine,” put in Raymond, “for I heard his voice in here talking.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“That I don’t know. Of course, at the time I took it for granted that it was Dr. Sheppard who was with him. I wanted to ask him a question about some papers I was engaged upon, but when I heard the voices I remembered that he had said he wanted to talk to Dr. Sheppard without being disturbed, and I went away again. But now it seems that the doctor had already left?”

I nodded.

“I was at home by a quarter-past nine,” I said. “I didn’t go out again until I received the telephone call.”

“Who could have been with him at half-past nine?” queried the inspector. “It wasn’t you, Mr.—er——”

“Major Blunt,” I said.

“Major Hector Blunt?” asked the inspector, a respectful tone creeping into his voice.

Blunt merely jerked his head affirmatively.

“I think we’ve seen you down here before, sir,” said the58 inspector. “I didn’t recognize you for the moment, but you were staying with Mr. Ackroyd a year ago last May.”

“June,” corrected Blunt.

“Just so, June it was. Now, as I was saying, it wasn’t you with Mr. Ackroyd at nine-thirty this evening?”

Blunt shook his head.

“Never saw him after dinner,” he volunteered.

The inspector turned once more to Raymond.

“You didn’t overhear any of the conversation going on, did you, sir?”

“I did catch just a fragment of it,” said the secretary, “and, supposing as I did that it was Dr. Sheppard who was with Mr. Ackroyd, that fragment struck me as distinctly odd. As far as I can remember, the exact words were these. Mr. Ackroyd was speaking. ‘The calls on my purse have been so frequent of late’—that is what he was saying—‘of late, that I fear it is impossible for me to accede to your request….’ I went away again at once, of course, so did not hear any more. But I rather wondered because Dr. Sheppard——”

“——Does not ask for loans for himself or subscriptions for others,” I finished.

“A demand for money,” said the inspector musingly. “It may be that here we have a very important clew.” He turned to the butler. “You say, Parker, that nobody was admitted by the front door this evening?”

“That’s what I say, sir.”

“Then it seems almost certain that Mr. Ackroyd himself59 must have admitted this stranger. But I don’t quite see——”

The inspector went into a kind of day-dream for some minutes.

“One thing’s clear,” he said at length, rousing himself from his absorption. “Mr. Ackroyd was alive and well at nine-thirty. That is the last moment at which he is known to have been alive.”

Parker gave vent to an apologetic cough which brought the inspector’s eyes on him at once.

“Well?” he said sharply.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, Miss Flora saw him after that.”

“Miss Flora?”

“Yes, sir. About a quarter to ten that would be. It was after that that she told me Mr. Ackroyd wasn’t to be disturbed again to-night.”

“Did he send her to you with that message?”

“Not exactly, sir. I was bringing a tray with soda and whisky when Miss Flora, who was just coming out of this room, stopped me and said her uncle didn’t want to be disturbed.”

The inspector looked at the butler with rather closer attention than he had bestowed on him up to now.

“You’d already been told that Mr. Ackroyd didn’t want to be disturbed, hadn’t you?”

Parker began to stammer. His hands shook.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Quite so, sir.”

“And yet you were proposing to do so?”

“I’d forgotten, sir. At least I mean, I always bring60 the whisky and soda about that time, sir, and ask if there’s anything more, and I thought—well, I was doing as usual without thinking.”

It was at this moment that it began to dawn upon me that Parker was most suspiciously flustered. The man was shaking and twitching all over.

“H’m,” said the inspector. “I must see Miss Ackroyd at once. For the moment we’ll leave this room exactly as it is. I can return here after I’ve heard what Miss Ackroyd has to tell me. I shall just take the precaution of shutting and bolting the window.”

This precaution accomplished, he led the way into the hall and we followed him. He paused a moment, as he glanced up at the little staircase, then spoke over his shoulder to the constable.

“Jones, you’d better stay here. Don’t let any one go into that room.”

Parker interposed deferentially.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir. If you were to lock the door into the main hall, nobody could gain access to this part. That staircase leads only to Mr. Ackroyd’s bedroom and bathroom. There is no communication with the other part of the house. There once was a door through, but Mr. Ackroyd had it blocked up. He liked to feel that his suite was entirely private.”

To make things clear and explain the position, I have appended a rough sketch of the right-hand wing of the house. The small staircase leads, as Parker explained, to a big bedroom (made by two being knocked into one) and an adjoining bathroom and lavatory.

61

62

The inspector took in the position at a glance. We went through into the large hall and he locked the door behind him, slipping the key into his pocket. Then he gave the constable some low-voiced instructions, and the latter prepared to depart.

“We must get busy on those shoe tracks,” explained the inspector. “But first of all, I must have a word with Miss Ackroyd. She was the last person to see her uncle alive. Does she know yet?”

Raymond shook his head.

“Well, no need to tell her for another five minutes. She can answer my questions better without being upset by knowing the truth about her uncle. Tell her there’s been a burglary, and ask her if she would mind dressing and coming down to answer a few questions.”

It was Raymond who went upstairs on this errand.

“Miss Ackroyd will be down in a minute,” he said, when he returned. “I told her just what you suggested.”

In less than five minutes Flora descended the staircase. She was wrapped in a pale pink silk kimono. She looked anxious and excited.

The inspector stepped forward.

“Good-evening, Miss Ackroyd,” he said civilly. “We’re afraid there’s been an attempt at robbery, and we want you to help us. What’s this room—the billiard room? Come in here and sit down.”

Flora sat down composedly on the wide divan which ran the length of the wall, and looked up at the inspector.

“I don’t quite understand. What has been stolen? What do you want me to tell you?”

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“It’s just this, Miss Ackroyd. Parker here says you came out of your uncle’s study at about a quarter to ten. Is that right?”

“Quite right. I had been to say good-night to him.”

“And the time is correct?”

“Well, it must have been about then. I can’t say exactly. It might have been later.”

“Was your uncle alone, or was there any one with him?”

“He was alone. Dr. Sheppard had gone.”

“Did you happen to notice whether the window was open or shut?”

Flora shook her head.

“I can’t say. The curtains were drawn.”

“Exactly. And your uncle seemed quite as usual?”

“I think so.”

“Do you mind telling us exactly what passed between you?”

Flora paused a minute, as though to collect her recollections.

“I went in and said, ‘Good-night, uncle, I’m going to bed now. I’m tired to-night.’ He gave a sort of grunt, and—I went over and kissed him, and he said something about my looking nice in the frock I had on, and then he told me to run away as he was busy. So I went.”

“Did he ask specially not to be disturbed?”

“Oh! yes, I forgot. He said: ‘Tell Parker I don’t want anything more to-night, and that he’s not to disturb me.’ I met Parker just outside the door and gave him uncle’s message.”

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“Just so,” said the inspector.

“Won’t you tell me what it is that has been stolen?”

“We’re not quite—certain,” said the inspector hesitatingly.

A wide look of alarm came into the girl’s eyes. She started up.

“What is it? You’re hiding something from me?”

Moving in his usual unobtrusive manner, Hector Blunt came between her and the inspector. She half stretched out her hand, and he took it in both of his, patting it as though she were a very small child, and she turned to him as though something in his stolid, rocklike demeanor promised comfort and safety.

“It’s bad news, Flora,” he said quietly. “Bad news for all of us. Your Uncle Roger——”

“Yes?”

“It will be a shock to you. Bound to be. Poor Roger’s dead.”

Flora drew away from him, her eyes dilating with horror.

“When?” she whispered. “When?”

“Very soon after you left him, I’m afraid,” said Blunt gravely.

Flora raised her hand to her throat, gave a little cry, and I hurried to catch her as she fell. She had fainted, and Blunt and I carried her upstairs and laid her on her bed. Then I got him to wake Mrs. Ackroyd and tell her the news. Flora soon revived, and I brought her mother to her, telling her what to do for the girl. Then I hurried downstairs again.

---

65

CHAPTER VI

THE TUNISIAN DAGGER

I met the inspector just coming from the door which led into the kitchen quarters.

“How’s the young lady, doctor?”

“Coming round nicely. Her mother’s with her.”

“That’s good. I’ve been questioning the servants. They all declare that no one has been to the back door to-night. Your description of that stranger was rather vague. Can’t you give us something more definite to go upon?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said regretfully. “It was a dark night, you see, and the fellow had his coat collar well pulled up and his hat squashed down over his eyes.”

“H’m,” said the inspector. “Looked as though he wanted to conceal his face. Sure it was no one you know?”

I replied in the negative, but not as decidedly as I might have done. I remembered my impression that the stranger’s voice was not unfamiliar to me. I explained this rather haltingly to the inspector.

“It was a rough, uneducated voice, you say?”

I agreed, but it occurred to me that the roughness had been of an almost exaggerated quality. If, as the inspector thought, the man had wished to hide his face, he might equally well have tried to disguise his voice.

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“Do you mind coming into the study with me again, doctor? There are one or two things I want to ask you.”

I acquiesced. Inspector Davis unlocked the door of the lobby, we passed through, and he locked the door again behind him.

“We don’t want to be disturbed,” he said grimly. “And we don’t want any eavesdropping either. What’s all this about blackmail?”

“Blackmail!” I exclaimed, very much startled.

“Is it an effort of Parker’s imagination? Or is there something in it?”

“If Parker heard anything about blackmail,” I said slowly, “he must have been listening outside this door with his ear glued against the keyhole.”

Davis nodded.

“Nothing more likely. You see, I’ve been instituting a few inquiries as to what Parker has been doing with himself this evening. To tell the truth, I didn’t like his manner. The man knows something. When I began to question him, he got the wind up, and plumped out some garbled story of blackmail.”

I took an instant decision.

“I’m rather glad you’ve brought the matter up,” I said. “I’ve been trying to decide whether to make a clean breast of things or not. I’d already practically decided to tell you everything, but I was going to wait for a favorable opportunity. You might as well have it now.”

And then and there I narrated the whole events of the evening as I have set them down here. The inspector listened keenly, occasionally interjecting a question.

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“Most extraordinary story I ever heard,” he said, when I had finished. “And you say that letter has completely disappeared? It looks bad—it looks very bad indeed. It gives us what we’ve been looking for—a motive for the murder.”

I nodded.

“I realize that.”

“You say that Mr. Ackroyd hinted at a suspicion he had that some member of his household was involved? Household’s rather an elastic term.”

“You don’t think that Parker himself might be the man we’re after?” I suggested.

“It looks very like it. He was obviously listening at the door when you came out. Then Miss Ackroyd came across him later bent on entering the study. Say he tried again when she was safely out of the way. He stabbed Ackroyd, locked the door on the inside, opened the window, and got out that way, and went round to a side door which he had previously left open. How’s that?”

“There’s only one thing against it,” I said slowly. “If Ackroyd went on reading that letter as soon as I left, as he intended to do, I don’t see him continuing to sit on here and turn things over in his mind for another hour. He’d have had Parker in at once, accused him then and there, and there would have been a fine old uproar. Remember, Ackroyd was a man of choleric temper.”

“Mightn’t have had time to go on with the letter just then,” suggested the inspector. “We know some one was with him at half-past nine. If that visitor turned up as soon as you left, and after he went, Miss Ackroyd came in68 to say good-night—well, he wouldn’t be able to go on with the letter until close upon ten o’clock.”

“And the telephone call?”

“Parker sent that all right—perhaps before he thought of the locked door and open window. Then he changed his mind—or got in a panic—and decided to deny all knowledge of it. That was it, depend upon it.”

“Ye-es,” I said rather doubtfully.

“Anyway, we can find out the truth about the telephone call from the exchange. If it was put through from here, I don’t see how any one else but Parker could have sent it. Depend upon it, he’s our man. But keep it dark—we don’t want to alarm him just yet, till we’ve got all the evidence. I’ll see to it he doesn’t give us the slip. To all appearances we’ll be concentrating on your mysterious stranger.”

He rose from where he had been sitting astride the chair belonging to the desk, and crossed over to the still form in the arm-chair.

“The weapon ought to give us a clew,” he remarked, looking up. “It’s something quite unique—a curio, I should think, by the look of it.”

He bent down, surveying the handle attentively, and I heard him give a grunt of satisfaction. Then, very gingerly, he pressed his hands down below the hilt and drew the blade out from the wound. Still carrying it so as not to touch the handle, he placed it in a wide china mug which adorned the mantelpiece.

“Yes,” he said, nodding at it. “Quite a work of art. There can’t be many of them about.”

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It was indeed a beautiful object. A narrow, tapering blade, and a hilt of elaborately intertwined metals of curious and careful workmanship. He touched the blade gingerly with his finger, testing its sharpness, and made an appreciative grimace.

“Lord, what an edge,” he exclaimed. “A child could drive that into a man—as easy as cutting butter. A dangerous sort of toy to have about.”

“May I examine the body properly now?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Go ahead.”

I made a thorough examination.

“Well?” said the inspector, when I had finished.

“I’ll spare you the technical language,” I said. “We’ll keep that for the inquest. The blow was delivered by a right-handed man standing behind him, and death must have been instantaneous. By the expression on the dead man’s face, I should say that the blow was quite unexpected. He probably died without knowing who his assailant was.”

“Butlers can creep about as soft-footed as cats,” said Inspector Davis. “There’s not going to be much mystery about this crime. Take a look at the hilt of that dagger.”

I took the look.

“I dare say they’re not apparent to you, but I can see them clearly enough.” He lowered his voice. “Fingerprints!”

He stood off a few steps to judge of his effect.

“Yes,” I said mildly. “I guessed that.”

I do not see why I should be supposed to be totally70 devoid of intelligence. After all, I read detective stories, and the newspapers, and am a man of quite average ability. If there had been toe marks on the dagger handle, now, that would have been quite a different thing. I would then have registered any amount of surprise and awe.

I think the inspector was annoyed with me for declining to get thrilled. He picked up the china mug and invited me to accompany him to the billiard room.

“I want to see if Mr. Raymond can tell us anything about this dagger,” he explained.

Locking the outer door behind us again, we made our way to the billiard room, where we found Geoffrey Raymond. The inspector held up his exhibit.

“Ever seen this before, Mr. Raymond?”

“Why—I believe—I’m almost sure that is a curio given to Mr. Ackroyd by Major Blunt. It comes from Morocco—no, Tunis. So the crime was committed with that? What an extraordinary thing. It seems almost impossible, and yet there could hardly be two daggers the same. May I fetch Major Blunt?”

Without waiting for an answer, he hurried off.

“Nice young fellow that,” said the inspector. “Something honest and ingenuous about him.”

I agreed. In the two years that Geoffrey Raymond has been secretary to Ackroyd, I have never seen him ruffled or out of temper. And he has been, I know, a most efficient secretary.

In a minute or two Raymond returned, accompanied by Blunt.

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“I was right,” said Raymond excitedly. “It is the Tunisian dagger.”

“Major Blunt hasn’t looked at it yet,” objected the inspector.

“Saw it the moment I came into the study,” said the quiet man.

“You recognized it then?”

Blunt nodded.

“You said nothing about it,” said the inspector suspiciously.

“Wrong moment,” said Blunt. “Lot of harm done by blurting out things at the wrong time.”

He returned the inspector’s stare placidly enough.

The latter grunted at last and turned away. He brought the dagger over to Blunt.

“You’re quite sure about it, sir. You identify it positively?”

“Absolutely. No doubt whatever.”

“Where was this—er—curio usually kept? Can you tell me that, sir?”

It was the secretary who answered.

“In the silver table in the drawing-room.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

The others looked at me.

“Yes, doctor?” said the inspector encouragingly.

“It’s nothing.”

“Yes, doctor?” said the inspector again, still more encouragingly.

“It’s so trivial,” I explained apologetically. “Only that when I arrived last night for dinner I heard the lid of the silver table being shut down in the drawing-room.”

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I saw profound skepticism and a trace of suspicion on the inspector’s countenance.

“How did you know it was the silver table lid?”

I was forced to explain in detail—a long, tedious explanation which I would infinitely rather not have had to make.

The inspector heard me to the end.

“Was the dagger in its place when you were looking over the contents?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t say I remember noticing it—but, of course, it may have been there all the time.”

“We’d better get hold of the housekeeper,” remarked the inspector, and pulled the bell.

A few minutes later Miss Russell, summoned by Parker, entered the room.

“I don’t think I went near the silver table,” she said, when the inspector had posed his question. “I was looking to see that all the flowers were fresh. Oh! yes, I remember now. The silver table was open—which it had no business to be, and I shut the lid down as I passed.”

She looked at him aggressively.

“I see,” said the inspector. “Can you tell me if this dagger was in its place then?”

Miss Russell looked at the weapon composedly.

“I can’t say, I’m sure,” she replied. “I didn’t stop to look. I knew the family would be down any minute, and I wanted to get away.”

“Thank you,” said the inspector.

There was just a trace of hesitation in his manner, as73 though he would have liked to question her further, but Miss Russell clearly accepted the words as a dismissal, and glided from the room.

“Rather a Tartar, I should fancy, eh?” said the inspector, looking after her. “Let me see. This silver table is in front of one of the windows, I think you said, doctor?”

Raymond answered for me.

“Yes, the left-hand window.”

“And the window was open?”

“They were both ajar.”

“Well, I don’t think we need go into the question much further. Somebody—I’ll just say somebody—could get that dagger any time he liked, and exactly when he got it doesn’t matter in the least. I’ll be coming up in the morning with the chief constable, Mr. Raymond. Until then, I’ll keep the key of that door. I want Colonel Melrose to see everything exactly as it is. I happen to know that he’s dining out the other side of the county, and, I believe, staying the night….”

We watched the inspector take up the jar.

“I shall have to pack this carefully,” he observed. “It’s going to be an important piece of evidence in more ways than one.”

A few minutes later as I came out of the billiard room with Raymond, the latter gave a low chuckle of amusement.

I felt the pressure of his hand on my arm, and followed the direction of his eyes. Inspector Davis seemed to be inviting Parker’s opinion of a small pocket diary.

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“A little obvious,” murmured my companion. “So Parker is the suspect, is he? Shall we oblige Inspector Davis with a set of our fingerprints also?”

He took two cards from the card tray, wiped them with his silk handkerchief, then handed one to me and took the other himself. Then, with a grin, he handed them to the police inspector.

“Souvenirs,” he said. “No. 1, Dr. Sheppard; No. 2, my humble self. One from Major Blunt will be forthcoming in the morning.”

Youth is very buoyant. Even the brutal murder of his friend and employer could not dim Geoffrey Raymond’s spirits for long. Perhaps that is as it should be. I do not know. I have lost the quality of resilience long since myself.

It was very late when I got back, and I hoped that Caroline would have gone to bed. I might have known better.

She had hot cocoa waiting for me, and whilst I drank it, she extracted the whole history of the evening from me. I said nothing of the blackmailing business, but contented myself with giving her the facts of the murder.

“The police suspect Parker,” I said, as I rose to my feet and prepared to ascend to bed. “There seems a fairly clear case against him.”

“Parker!” said my sister. “Fiddlesticks! That inspector must be a perfect fool. Parker indeed! Don’t tell me.”

With which obscure pronouncement we went up to bed.

---

75

CHAPTER VII

I LEARN MY NEIGHBOR’S PROFESSION

On the following morning I hurried unforgivably over my round. My excuse can be that I had no very serious cases to attend. On my return Caroline came into the hall to greet me.

“Flora Ackroyd is here,” she announced in an excited whisper.

“What?”

I concealed my surprise as best I could.

“She’s very anxious to see you. She’s been here half an hour.”

Caroline led the way into our small sitting-room, and I followed.

Flora was sitting on the sofa by the window. She was in black and she sat nervously twisting her hands together. I was shocked by the sight of her face. All the color had faded away from it. But when she spoke her manner was as composed and resolute as possible.

“Dr. Sheppard, I have come to ask you to help me.”

“Of course he’ll help you, my dear,” said Caroline.

I don’t think Flora really wished Caroline to be present at the interview. She would, I am sure, have infinitely preferred to speak to me privately. But she also wanted to waste no time, so she made the best of it.

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“I want you to come to The Larches with me.”

“The Larches?” I queried, surprised.

“To see that funny little man?” exclaimed Caroline.

“Yes. You know who he is, don’t you?”

“We fancied,” I said, “that he might be a retired hairdresser.”

Flora’s blue eyes opened very wide.

“Why, he’s Hercule Poirot! You know who I mean—the private detective. They say he’s done the most wonderful things—just like detectives do in books. A year ago he retired and came to live down here. Uncle knew who he was, but he promised not to tell any one, because M. Poirot wanted to live quietly without being bothered by people.”

“So that’s who he is,” I said slowly.

“You’ve heard of him, of course?”

“I’m rather an old fogey, as Caroline tells me,” I said, “but I have just heard of him.”

“Extraordinary!” commented Caroline.

I don’t know what she was referring to—possibly her own failure to discover the truth.

“You want to go and see him?” I asked slowly. “Now why?”

“To get him to investigate this murder, of course,” said Caroline sharply. “Don’t be so stupid, James.”

I was not really being stupid. Caroline does not always understand what I am driving at.

“You haven’t got confidence in Inspector Davis?” I went on.

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“Of course she hasn’t,” said Caroline. “I haven’t either.”

Any one would have thought it was Caroline’s uncle who had been murdered.

“And how do you know he would take up the case?” I asked. “Remember he has retired from active work.”

“That’s just it,” said Flora simply. “I’ve got to persuade him.”

“You are sure you are doing wisely?” I asked gravely.

“Of course she is,” said Caroline. “I’ll go with her myself if she likes.”

“I’d rather the doctor came with me if you don’t mind, Miss Sheppard,” said Flora.

She knows the value of being direct on certain occasions. Any hints would certainly have been wasted on Caroline.

“You see,” she explained, following directness with tact, “Dr. Sheppard being the doctor, and having found the body, he would be able to give all the details to M. Poirot.”

“Yes,” said Caroline grudgingly, “I see that.”

I took a turn or two up and down the room.

“Flora,” I said gravely, “be guided by me. I advise you not to drag this detective into the case.”

Flora sprang to her feet. The color rushed into her cheeks.

“I know why you say that,” she cried. “But it’s exactly for that reason I’m so anxious to go. You’re afraid! But I’m not. I know Ralph better than you do.”

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“Ralph,” said Caroline. “What has Ralph got to do with it?”

Neither of us heeded her.

“Ralph may be weak,” continued Flora. “He may have done foolish things in the past—wicked things even—but he wouldn’t murder any one.”

“No, no,” I exclaimed. “I never thought it of him.”

“Then why did you go to the Three Boars last night?” demanded Flora, “on your way home—after uncle’s body was found?”

I was momentarily silenced. I had hoped that that visit of mine would remain unnoticed.

“How did you know about that?” I countered.

“I went there this morning,” said Flora. “I heard from the servants that Ralph was staying there——”

I interrupted her.

“You had no idea that he was in King’s Abbot?”

“No. I was astounded. I couldn’t understand it. I went there and asked for him. They told me, what I suppose they told you last night, that he went out at about nine o’clock yesterday evening—and—and never came back.”

Her eyes met mine defiantly, and as though answering something in my look, she burst out:—

“Well, why shouldn’t he? He might have gone—anywhere. He may even have gone back to London.”

“Leaving his luggage behind?” I asked gently.

Flora stamped her foot.

“I don’t care. There must be a simple explanation.”

“And that’s why you want to go to Hercule Poirot?79 Isn’t it better to leave things as they are? The police don’t suspect Ralph in the least, remember. They’re working on quite another tack.”

“But that’s just it,” cried the girl. “They do suspect him. A man from Cranchester turned up this morning—Inspector Raglan, a horrid, weaselly little man. I found he had been to the Three Boars this morning before me. They told me all about his having been there, and the questions he had asked. He must think Ralph did it.”

“That’s a change of mind from last night, if so,” I said slowly. “He doesn’t believe in Davis’s theory that it was Parker then?”

“Parker indeed,” said my sister, and snorted.

Flora came forward and laid her hand on my arm.

“Oh! Dr. Sheppard, let us go at once to this M. Poirot. He will find out the truth.”

“My dear Flora,” I said gently, laying my hand on hers. “Are you quite sure it is the truth we want?”

She looked at me, nodding her head gravely.

“You’re not sure,” she said. “I am. I know Ralph better than you do.”

“Of course he didn’t do it,” said Caroline, who had been keeping silent with great difficulty. “Ralph may be extravagant, but he’s a dear boy, and has the nicest manners.”

I wanted to tell Caroline that large numbers of murderers have had nice manners, but the presence of Flora restrained me. Since the girl was determined, I was forced to give in to her and we started at once, getting away before my sister was able to fire off any more pronouncements80 beginning with her favorite words, “Of course.”

An old woman with an immense Breton cap opened the door of The Larches to us. M. Poirot was at home, it seemed.

We were ushered into a little sitting-room arranged with formal precision, and there, after the lapse of a minute or so, my friend of yesterday came to us.

“Monsieur le docteur,” he said, smiling. “Mademoiselle.”

He bowed to Flora.

“Perhaps,” I began, “you have heard of the tragedy which occurred last night.”

His face grew grave.

“But certainly I have heard. It is horrible. I offer mademoiselle all my sympathy. In what way can I serve you?”

“Miss Ackroyd,” I said, “wants you to—to——”

“To find the murderer,” said Flora in a clear voice.

“I see,” said the little man. “But the police will do that, will they not?”

“They might make a mistake,” said Flora. “They are on their way to make a mistake now, I think. Please, M. Poirot, won’t you help us? If—if it is a question of money——”

Poirot held up his hand.

“Not that, I beg of you, mademoiselle. Not that I do not care for money.” His eyes showed a momentary twinkle. “Money, it means much to me and always has done. No, if I go into this, you must understand one81 thing clearly. I shall go through with it to the end. The good dog, he does not leave the scent, remember! You may wish that, after all, you had left it to the local police.”

“I want the truth,” said Flora, looking him straight in the eyes.

“All the truth?”

“All the truth.”

“Then I accept,” said the little man quietly. “And I hope you will not regret those words. Now, tell me all the circumstances.”

“Dr. Sheppard had better tell you,” said Flora. “He knows more than I do.”

Thus enjoined, I plunged into a careful narrative, embodying all the facts I have previously set down. Poirot listened carefully, inserting a question here and there, but for the most part sitting in silence, his eyes on the ceiling.

I brought my story to a close with the departure of the inspector and myself from Fernly Park the previous night.

“And now,” said Flora, as I finished, “tell him all about Ralph.”

I hesitated, but her imperious glance drove me on.

“You went to this inn—this Three Boars—last night on your way home?” asked Poirot, as I brought my tale to a close. “Now exactly why was that?”

I paused a moment to choose my words carefully.

“I thought some one ought to inform the young man of his uncle’s death. It occurred to me after I had left82 Fernly that possibly no one but myself and Mr. Ackroyd were aware that he was staying in the village.”

Poirot nodded.

“Quite so. That was your only motive in going there, eh?”

“That was my only motive,” I said stiffly.

“It was not to—shall we say—reassure yourself about ce jeune homme?”

“Reassure myself?”

“I think, M. le docteur, that you know very well what I mean, though you pretend not to do so. I suggest that it would have been a relief to you if you had found that Captain Paton had been at home all the evening.”

“Not at all,” I said sharply.

The little detective shook his head at me gravely.

“You have not the trust in me of Miss Flora,” he said. “But no matter. What we have to look at is this—Captain Paton is missing, under circumstances which call for an explanation. I will not hide from you that the matter looks grave. Still, it may admit of a perfectly simple explanation.”

“That’s just what I keep saying,” cried Flora eagerly.

Poirot touched no more upon that theme. Instead he suggested an immediate visit to the local police. He thought it better for Flora to return home, and for me to be the one to accompany him there and introduce him to the officer in charge of the case.

We carried out this plan forthwith. We found Inspector Davis outside the police station looking very glum indeed. With him was Colonel Melrose, the Chief Constable,83 and another man whom, from Flora’s description of “weaselly,” I had no difficulty in recognizing as Inspector Raglan from Cranchester.

I know Melrose fairly well, and I introduced Poirot to him and explained the situation. The chief constable was clearly vexed, and Inspector Raglan looked as black as thunder. Davis, however, seemed slightly exhilarated by the sight of his superior officer’s annoyance.

“The case is going to be plain as a pikestaff,” said Raglan. “Not the least need for amateurs to come butting in. You’d think any fool would have seen the way things were last night, and then we shouldn’t have lost twelve hours.”

He directed a vengeful glance at poor Davis, who received it with perfect stolidity.

“Mr. Ackroyd’s family must, of course, do what they see fit,” said Colonel Melrose. “But we cannot have the official investigation hampered in any way. I know M. Poirot’s great reputation, of course,” he added courteously.

“The police can’t advertise themselves, worse luck,” said Raglan.

It was Poirot who saved the situation.

“It is true that I have retired from the world,” he said. “I never intended to take up a case again. Above all things, I have a horror of publicity. I must beg, that in the case of my being able to contribute something to the solution of the mystery, my name may not be mentioned.”

Inspector Raglan’s face lightened a little.

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“I’ve heard of some very remarkable successes of yours,” observed the colonel, thawing.

“I have had much experience,” said Poirot quietly. “But most of my successes have been obtained by the aid of the police. I admire enormously your English police. If Inspector Raglan permits me to assist him, I shall be both honored and flattered.”

The inspector’s countenance became still more gracious.

Colonel Melrose drew me aside.

“From all I hear, this little fellow’s done some really remarkable things,” he murmured. “We’re naturally anxious not to have to call in Scotland Yard. Raglan seems very sure of himself, but I’m not quite certain that I agree with him. You see, I—er—know the parties concerned better than he does. This fellow doesn’t seem out after kudos, does he? Would work in with us unobtrusively, eh?”

“To the greater glory of Inspector Raglan,” I said solemnly.

“Well, well,” said Colonel Melrose breezily in a louder voice, “we must put you wise to the latest developments, M. Poirot.”

“I thank you,” said Poirot. “My friend, Dr. Sheppard, said something of the butler being suspected?”

“That’s all bunkum,” said Raglan instantly. “These high-class servants get in such a funk that they act suspiciously for nothing at all.”

“The fingerprints?” I hinted.

“Nothing like Parker’s.” He gave a faint smile, and85 added: “And yours and Mr. Raymond’s don’t fit either, doctor.”

“What about those of Captain Ralph Paton?” asked Poirot quietly.

I felt a secret admiration for the way he took the bull by the horns. I saw a look of respect creep into the inspector’s eye.

“I see you don’t let the grass grow under your feet, Mr. Poirot. It will be a pleasure to work with you, I’m sure. We’re going to take that young gentleman’s fingerprints as soon as we can lay hands upon him.”

“I can’t help thinking you’re mistaken, inspector,” said Colonel Melrose warmly. “I’ve known Ralph Paton from a boy upward. He’d never stoop to murder.”

“Maybe not,” said the inspector tonelessly.

“What have you got against him?” I asked.

“Went out just on nine o’clock last night. Was seen in neighborhood of Fernly Park somewhere about nine-thirty. Not been seen since. Believed to be in serious money difficulties. I’ve got a pair of his shoes here—shoes with rubber studs in them. He had two pairs, almost exactly alike. I’m going up now to compare them with those footmarks. The constable is up there seeing that no one tampers with them.”

“We’ll go at once,” said Colonel Melrose. “You and M. Poirot will accompany us, will you not?”

We assented, and all drove up in the colonel’s car. The inspector was anxious to get at once to the footmarks, and asked to be put down at the lodge. About half-way up the drive, on the right, a path branched off86 which led round to the terrace and the window of Ackroyd’s study.

“Would you like to go with the inspector, M. Poirot?” asked the chief constable, “or would you prefer to examine the study?”

Poirot chose the latter alternative. Parker opened the door to us. His manner was smug and deferential, and he seemed to have recovered from his panic of the night before.

Colonel Melrose took a key from his pocket, and unlocking the door which led into the lobby, he ushered us through into the study.

“Except for the removal of the body, M. Poirot, this room is exactly as it was last night.”

“And the body was found—where?”

As precisely as possible, I described Ackroyd’s position. The arm-chair still stood in front of the fire.

Poirot went and sat down in it.

“The blue letter you speak of, where was it when you left the room?”

“Mr. Ackroyd had laid it down on this little table at his right hand.”

Poirot nodded.

“Except for that, everything was in its place?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Colonel Melrose, would you be so extremely obliging as to sit down in this chair a minute. I thank you. Now, M. le docteur, will you kindly indicate to me the exact position of the dagger?”

I did so, whilst the little man stood in the doorway.

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“The hilt of the dagger was plainly visible from the door then. Both you and Parker could see it at once?”

“Yes.”

Poirot went next to the window.

“The electric light was on, of course, when you discovered the body?” he asked over his shoulder.

I assented, and joined him where he was studying the marks on the window-sill.

“The rubber studs are the same pattern as those in Captain Paton’s shoes,” he said quietly.

Then he came back once more to the middle of the room. His eye traveled round, searching everything in the room with a quick, trained glance.

“Are you a man of good observation, Dr. Sheppard?” he asked at last.

“I think so,” I said, surprised.

“There was a fire in the grate, I see. When you broke the door down and found Mr. Ackroyd dead, how was the fire? Was it low?”

I gave a vexed laugh.

“I—I really can’t say. I didn’t notice. Perhaps Mr. Raymond or Major Blunt——”

The little man opposite me shook his head with a faint smile.

“One must always proceed with method. I made an error of judgment in asking you that question. To each man his own knowledge. You could tell me the details of the patient’s appearance—nothing there would escape you. If I wanted information about the papers on that desk, Mr. Raymond would have noticed anything88 there was to see. To find out about the fire, I must ask the man whose business it is to observe such things. You permit——”

He moved swiftly to the fireplace and rang the bell.

After a lapse of a minute or two Parker appeared.

“The bell rang, sir,” he said hesitatingly.

“Come in, Parker,” said Colonel Melrose. “This gentleman wants to ask you something.”

Parker transferred a respectful attention to Poirot.

“Parker,” said the little man, “when you broke down the door with Dr. Sheppard last night, and found your master dead, what was the state of the fire?”

Parker replied without a pause.

“It had burned very low, sir. It was almost out.”

“Ah!” said Poirot. The exclamation sounded almost triumphant. He went on:—

“Look round you, my good Parker. Is this room exactly as it was then?”

The butler’s eye swept round. It came to rest on the windows.

“The curtains were drawn, sir, and the electric light was on.”

Poirot nodded approval.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, sir, this chair was drawn out a little more.”

He indicated a big grandfather chair to the left of the door between it and the window. I append a plan of the room with the chair in question marked with an X.

“Just show me,” said Poirot.

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The butler drew the chair in question out a good two feet from the wall, turning it so that the seat faced the door.

“Voilà ce qui est curieux,” murmured Poirot. “No one would want to sit in a chair in such a position, I fancy. Now who pushed it back into place again, I wonder? Did you, my friend?”

“No, sir,” said Parker. “I was too upset with seeing the master and all.”

Poirot looked across at me.

“Did you, doctor?”

I shook my head.

“It was back in position when I arrived with the police, sir,” put in Parker. “I’m sure of that.”

“Curious,” said Poirot again.

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“Raymond or Blunt must have pushed it back,” I suggested. “Surely it isn’t important?”

“It is completely unimportant,” said Poirot. “That is why it is so interesting,” he added softly.

“Excuse me a minute,” said Colonel Melrose. He left the room with Parker.

“Do you think Parker is speaking the truth?” I asked.

“About the chair, yes. Otherwise I do not know. You will find, M. le docteur, if you have much to do with cases of this kind, that they all resemble each other in one thing.”

“What is that?” I asked curiously.

“Every one concerned in them has something to hide.”

“Have I?” I asked, smiling.

Poirot looked at me attentively.

“I think you have,” he said quietly.

“But——”

“Have you told me everything known to you about this young man Paton?” He smiled as I grew red. “Oh! do not fear. I will not press you. I shall learn it in good time.”

“I wish you’d tell me something of your methods,” I said hastily, to cover my confusion. “The point about the fire, for instance?”

“Oh! that was very simple. You leave Mr. Ackroyd at—ten minutes to nine, was it not?”

“Yes, exactly, I should say.”

“The window is then closed and bolted and the door unlocked. At a quarter past ten when the body is discovered, the door is locked and the window is open.91 Who opened it? Clearly only Mr. Ackroyd himself could have done so, and for one of two reasons. Either because the room became unbearably hot (but since the fire was nearly out and there was a sharp drop in temperature last night, that cannot be the reason), or because he admitted some one that way. And if he admitted some one that way, it must have been some one well known to him, since he had previously shown himself uneasy on the subject of that same window.”

“It sounds very simple,” I said.

“Everything is simple, if you arrange the facts methodically. We are concerned now with the personality of the person who was with him at nine-thirty last night. Everything goes to show that that was the individual admitted by the window, and though Mr. Ackroyd was seen alive later by Miss Flora, we cannot approach a solution of the mystery until we know who that visitor was. The window may have been left open after his departure and so afforded entrance to the murderer, or the same person may have returned a second time. Ah! here is the colonel who returns.”

Colonel Melrose entered with an animated manner.

“That telephone call has been traced at last,” he said. “It did not come from here. It was put through to Dr. Sheppard at 10.15 last night from a public call office at King’s Abbot station. And at 10.23 the night mail leaves for Liverpool.”

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92

CHAPTER VIII

INSPECTOR RAGLAN IS CONFIDENT

We looked at each other.

“You’ll have inquiries made at the station, of course?” I said.

“Naturally, but I’m not over sanguine as to the result. You know what that station is like.”

I did. King’s Abbot is a mere village, but its station happens to be an important junction. Most of the big expresses stop there, and trains are shunted, re-sorted, and made up. It has two or three public telephone boxes. At that time of night three local trains come in close upon each other, to catch the connection with the express for the north which comes in at 10.19 and leaves at 10.23. The whole place is in a bustle, and the chances of one particular person being noticed telephoning or getting into the express are very small indeed.

“But why telephone at all?” demanded Melrose. “That is what I find so extraordinary. There seems no rhyme or reason in the thing.”

Poirot carefully straightened a china ornament on one of the bookcases.

“Be sure there was a reason,” he said over his shoulder.

“But what reason could it be?”

“When we know that, we shall know everything. This case is very curious and very interesting.”

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There was something almost indescribable in the way he said those last words. I felt that he was looking at the case from some peculiar angle of his own, and what he saw I could not tell.

He went to the window and stood there, looking out.

“You say it was nine o’clock, Dr. Sheppard, when you met this stranger outside the gate?”

He asked the question without turning round.

“Yes,” I replied. “I heard the church clock chime the hour.”

“How long would it take him to reach the house—to reach this window, for instance?”

“Five minutes at the outside. Two or three minutes only if he took the path at the right of the drive and came straight here.”

“But to do that he would have to know the way. How can I explain myself?—it would mean that he had been here before—that he knew his surroundings.”

“That is true,” replied Colonel Melrose.

“We could find out, doubtless, if Mr. Ackroyd had received any strangers during the past week?”

“Young Raymond could tell us that,” I said.

“Or Parker,” suggested Colonel Melrose.

“Ou tous les deux,” suggested Poirot, smiling.

Colonel Melrose went in search of Raymond, and I rang the bell once more for Parker.

Colonel Melrose returned almost immediately, accompanied by the young secretary, whom he introduced to Poirot. Geoffrey Raymond was fresh and debonair as94 ever. He seemed surprised and delighted to make Poirot’s acquaintance.

“No idea you’d been living among us incognito, M. Poirot,” he said. “It will be a great privilege to watch you at work——Hallo, what’s this?”

Poirot had been standing just to the left of the door. Now he moved aside suddenly, and I saw that while my back was turned he must have swiftly drawn out the arm-chair till it stood in the position Parker had indicated.

“Want me to sit in the chair whilst you take a blood test?” asked Raymond good-humoredly. “What’s the idea?”

“M. Raymond, this chair was pulled out—so—last night when Mr. Ackroyd was found killed. Some one moved it back again into place. Did you do so?”

The secretary’s reply came without a second’s hesitation.

“No, indeed I didn’t. I don’t even remember that it was in that position, but it must have been if you say so. Anyway, somebody else must have moved it back to its proper place. Have they destroyed a clew in doing so? Too bad!”

“It is of no consequence,” said the detective. “Of no consequence whatever. What I really want to ask you is this, M. Raymond: Did any stranger come to see Mr. Ackroyd during this past week?”

The secretary reflected for a minute or two, knitting his brows, and during the pause Parker appeared in answer to the bell.

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“No,” said Raymond at last. “I can’t remember any one. Can you, Parker?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Any stranger coming to see Mr. Ackroyd this week?”

The butler reflected for a minute or two.

“There was the young man who came on Wednesday, sir,” he said at last. “From Curtis and Troute, I understood he was.”

Raymond moved this aside with an impatient hand.

“Oh! yes, I remember, but that is not the kind of stranger this gentleman means.” He turned to Poirot. “Mr. Ackroyd had some idea of purchasing a dictaphone,” he explained. “It would have enabled us to get through a lot more work in a limited time. The firm in question sent down their representative, but nothing came of it. Mr. Ackroyd did not make up his mind to purchase.”

Poirot turned to the butler.

“Can you describe this young man to me, my good Parker?”

“He was fair-haired, sir, and short. Very neatly dressed in a blue serge suit. A very presentable young man, sir, for his station in life.”

Poirot turned to me.

“The man you met outside the gate, doctor, was tall, was he not?”

“Yes,” I said. “Somewhere about six feet, I should say.”

“There is nothing in that, then,” declared the Belgian. “I thank you, Parker.”

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The butler spoke to Raymond.

“Mr. Hammond has just arrived, sir,” he said. “He is anxious to know if he can be of any service, and he would be glad to have a word with you.”

“I’ll come at once,” said the young man. He hurried out. Poirot looked inquiringly at the chief constable.

“The family solicitor, M. Poirot,” said the latter.

“It is a busy time for this young M. Raymond,” murmured M. Poirot. “He has the air efficient, that one.”

“I believe Mr. Ackroyd considered him a most able secretary.”

“He has been here—how long?”

“Just on two years, I fancy.”

“His duties he fulfills punctiliously. Of that I am sure. In what manner does he amuse himself? Does he go in for le sport?”

“Private secretaries haven’t much time for that sort of thing,” said Colonel Melrose, smiling. “Raymond plays golf, I believe. And tennis in the summer time.”

“He does not attend the courses—I should say the running of the horses?”

“Race meetings? No, I don’t think he’s interested in racing.”

Poirot nodded and seemed to lose interest. He glanced slowly round the study.

“I have seen, I think, all that there is to be seen here.”

I, too, looked round.

“If those walls could speak,” I murmured.

Poirot shook his head.

“A tongue is not enough,” he said. “They would have97 to have also eyes and ears. But do not be too sure that these dead things”—he touched the top of the bookcase as he spoke—“are always dumb. To me they speak sometimes—chairs, tables—they have their message!”

He turned away towards the door.

“What message?” I cried. “What have they said to you to-day?”

He looked over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow quizzically.

“An opened window,” he said. “A locked door. A chair that apparently moved itself. To all three I say, ‘Why?’ and I find no answer.”

He shook his head, puffed out his chest, and stood blinking at us. He looked ridiculously full of his own importance. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he was really any good as a detective. Had his big reputation been built up on a series of lucky chances?

I think the same thought must have occurred to Colonel Melrose, for he frowned.

“Anything more you want to see, M. Poirot?” he inquired brusquely.

“You would perhaps be so kind as to show me the silver table from which the weapon was taken? After that, I will trespass on your kindness no longer.”

We went to the drawing-room, but on the way the constable waylaid the colonel, and after a muttered conversation the latter excused himself and left us together. I showed Poirot the silver table, and after raising the lid once or twice and letting it fall, he pushed open the window and stepped out on the terrace. I followed him.

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Inspector Raglan had just turned the corner of the house, and was coming towards us. His face looked grim and satisfied.

“So there you are, M. Poirot,” he said. “Well, this isn’t going to be much of a case. I’m sorry, too. A nice enough young fellow gone wrong.”

Poirot’s face fell, and he spoke very mildly.

“I’m afraid I shall not be able to be of much aid to you, then?”

“Next time, perhaps,” said the inspector soothingly. “Though we don’t have murders every day in this quiet little corner of the world.”

Poirot’s gaze took on an admiring quality.

“You have been of a marvelous promptness,” he observed. “How exactly did you go to work, if I may ask?”

“Certainly,” said the inspector. “To begin with—method. That’s what I always say—method!”

“Ah!” cried the other. “That, too, is my watchword. Method, order, and the little gray cells.”

“The cells?” said the inspector, staring.

“The little gray cells of the brain,” explained the Belgian.

“Oh, of course; well, we all use them, I suppose.”

“In a greater or lesser degree,” murmured Poirot. “And there are, too, differences in quality. Then there is the psychology of a crime. One must study that.”

“Ah!” said the inspector, “you’ve been bitten with all this psychoanalysis stuff? Now, I’m a plain man——”

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“Mrs. Raglan would not agree, I am sure, to that,” said Poirot, making him a little bow.

Inspector Raglan, a little taken aback, bowed.

“You don’t understand,” he said, grinning broadly. “Lord, what a lot of difference language makes. I’m telling you how I set to work. First of all, method. Mr. Ackroyd was last seen alive at a quarter to ten by his niece, Miss Flora Ackroyd. That’s fact number one, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“Well, it is. At half-past ten, the doctor here says that Mr. Ackroyd has been dead at least half an hour. You stick to that, doctor?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Half an hour or longer.”

“Very good. That gives us exactly a quarter of an hour in which the crime must have been committed. I make a list of every one in the house, and work through it, setting down opposite their names where they were and what they were doing between the hour of 9.45 and 10 p.m.”

He handed a sheet of paper to Poirot. I read it over his shoulder. It ran as follows, written in a neat script:—

Major Blunt.—In billiard room with Mr. Raymond. (Latter confirms.)

Mr. Raymond.—Billiard room. (See above.)

Mrs. Ackroyd.—9.45 watching billiard match. Went up to bed 9.55. (Raymond and Blunt watched her up staircase.)

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Miss Ackroyd.—Went straight from her uncle’s room upstairs. (Confirmed by Parker, also housemaid, Elsie Dale.)

Servants:—

Parker.—Went straight to butler’s pantry. (Confirmed by housekeeper, Miss Russell, who came down to speak to him about something at 9.47, and remained at least ten minutes.)

Miss Russell.—As above. Spoke to housemaid, Elsie Dale, upstairs at 9.45.

Ursula Bourne (parlormaid).—In her own room until 9.55. Then in Servants’ Hall.

Mrs. Cooper (cook).—In Servants’ Hall.

Gladys Jones (second housemaid).—In Servants’ Hall.

Elsie Dale.—Upstairs in bedroom. Seen there by Miss Russell and Miss Flora Ackroyd.

Mary Thripp (kitchenmaid).—Servants’ Hall.

“The cook has been here seven years, the parlormaid eighteen months, and Parker just over a year. The others are new. Except for something fishy about Parker, they all seem quite all right.”

“A very complete list,” said Poirot, handing it back to him. “I am quite sure that Parker did not do the murder,” he added gravely.

“So is my sister,” I struck in. “And she’s usually right.” Nobody paid any attention to my interpolation.

“That disposes pretty effectually of the household,” continued the inspector. “Now we come to a very grave point. The woman at the lodge—Mary Black—was101 pulling the curtains last night when she saw Ralph Paton turn in at the gate and go up towards the house.”

“She is sure of that?” I asked sharply.

“Quite sure. She knows him well by sight. He went past very quickly and turned off by the path to the right, which is a short cut to the terrace.”

“And what time was that?” asked Poirot, who had sat with an immovable face.

“Exactly twenty-five minutes past nine,” said the inspector gravely.

There was a silence. Then the inspector spoke again.

“It’s all clear enough. It fits in without a flaw. At twenty-five minutes past nine, Captain Paton is seen passing the lodge; at nine-thirty or thereabouts, Mr. Geoffrey Raymond hears some one in here asking for money and Mr. Ackroyd refusing. What happens next? Captain Paton leaves the same way—through the window. He walks along the terrace, angry and baffled. He comes to the open drawing-room window. Say it’s now a quarter to ten. Miss Flora Ackroyd is saying good-night to her uncle. Major Blunt, Mr. Raymond, and Mrs. Ackroyd are in the billiard room. The drawing-room is empty. He steals in, takes the dagger from the silver table, and returns to the study window. He slips off his shoes, climbs in, and—well, I don’t need to go into details. Then he slips out again and goes off. Hadn’t the nerve to go back to the inn. He makes for the station, rings up from there——”

“Why?” said Poirot softly.

I jumped at the interruption. The little man was102 leaning forward. His eyes shone with a queer green light.

For a moment Inspector Raglan was taken aback by the question.

“It’s difficult to say exactly why he did that,” he said at last. “But murderers do funny things. You’d know that if you were in the police force. The cleverest of them make stupid mistakes sometimes. But come along and I’ll show you those footprints.”

We followed him round the corner of the terrace to the study window. At a word from Raglan a police constable produced the shoes which had been obtained from the local inn.

The inspector laid them over the marks.

“They’re the same,” he said confidently. “That is to say, they’re not the same pair that actually made these prints. He went away in those. This is a pair just like them, but older—see how the studs are worn down.”

“Surely a great many people wear shoes with rubber studs in them?” asked Poirot.

“That’s so, of course,” said the inspector. “I shouldn’t put so much stress on the footmarks if it wasn’t for everything else.”

“A very foolish young man, Captain Ralph Paton,” said Poirot thoughtfully. “To leave so much evidence of his presence.”

“Ah! well,” said the inspector, “it was a dry, fine night, you know. He left no prints on the terrace or on the graveled path. But, unluckily for him, a spring103 must have welled up just lately at the end of the path from the drive. See here.”

A small graveled path joined the terrace a few feet away. In one spot, a few yards from its termination, the ground was wet and boggy. Crossing this wet place there were again the marks of footsteps, and amongst them the shoes with rubber studs.

Poirot followed the path on a little way, the inspector by his side.

“You noticed the women’s footprints?” he said suddenly.

The inspector laughed.

“Naturally. But several different women have walked this way—and men as well. It’s a regular short cut to the house, you see. It would be impossible to sort out all the footsteps. After all, it’s the ones on the window-sill that are really important.”

Poirot nodded.

“It’s no good going farther,” said the inspector, as we came in view of the drive. “It’s all graveled again here, and hard as it can be.”

Again Poirot nodded, but his eyes were fixed on a small garden house—a kind of superior summer-house. It was a little to the left of the path ahead of us, and a graveled walk ran up to it.

Poirot lingered about until the inspector had gone back towards the house. Then he looked at me.

“You must have indeed been sent from the good God to replace my friend Hastings,” he said, with a twinkle. “I observe that you do not quit my side. How say104 you, Dr. Sheppard, shall we investigate that summer-house? It interests me.”

He went up to the door and opened it. Inside, the place was almost dark. There were one or two rustic seats, a croquet set, and some folded deck-chairs.

I was startled to observe my new friend. He had dropped to his hands and knees and was crawling about the floor. Every now and then he shook his head as though not satisfied. Finally, he sat back on his heels.

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Well, perhaps it was not to be expected. But it would have meant so much——”

He broke off, stiffening all over. Then he stretched out his hand to one of the rustic chairs. He detached something from one side of it.

“What is it?” I cried. “What have you found?”

He smiled, unclosing his hand so that I should see what lay in the palm of it. A scrap of stiff white cambric.

I took it from him, looked at it curiously, and then handed it back.

“What do you make of it, eh, my friend?” he asked, eyeing me keenly.

“A scrap torn from a handkerchief,” I suggested, shrugging my shoulders.

He made another dart and picked up a small quill—a goose quill by the look of it.

“And that?” he cried triumphantly. “What do you make of that?”

I only stared.

He slipped the quill into his pocket, and looked again at the scrap of white stuff.

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“A fragment of a handkerchief?” he mused. “Perhaps you are right. But remember this—a good laundry does not starch a handkerchief.”

He nodded at me triumphantly, then he put away the scrap carefully in his pocket-book.

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106

CHAPTER IX

THE GOLDFISH POND

We walked back to the house together. There was no sign of the inspector. Poirot paused on the terrace and stood with his back to the house, slowly turning his head from side to side.

“Une belle propriété,” he said at last appreciatively. “Who inherits it?”

His words gave me almost a shock. It is an odd thing, but until that moment the question of inheritance had never come into my head. Poirot watched me keenly.

“It is a new idea to you, that,” he said at last. “You had not thought of it before—eh?”

“No,” I said truthfully. “I wish I had.”

He looked at me again curiously.

“I wonder just what you mean by that,” he said thoughtfully. “Ah! no,” as I was about to speak. “Inutile! You would not tell me your real thought.”

“Every one has something to hide,” I quoted, smiling.

“Exactly.”

“You still believe that?”

“More than ever, my friend. But it is not easy to hide things from Hercule Poirot. He has a knack of finding out.”

He descended the steps of the Dutch garden as he spoke.

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“Let us walk a little,” he said over his shoulder. “The air is pleasant to-day.”

I followed him. He led me down a path to the left enclosed in yew hedges. A walk led down the middle, bordered each side with formal flower beds, and at the end was a round paved recess with a seat and a pond of goldfish. Instead of pursuing the path to the end, Poirot took another which wound up the side of a wooded slope. In one spot the trees had been cleared away, and a seat had been put. Sitting there one had a splendid view over the countryside, and one looked right down on the paved recess and the goldfish pond.

“England is very beautiful,” said Poirot, his eyes straying over the prospect. Then he smiled. “And so are English girls,” he said in a lower tone. “Hush, my friend, and look at the pretty picture below us.”

It was then that I saw Flora. She was moving along the path we had just left and she was humming a little snatch of song. Her step was more dancing than walking, and in spite of her black dress, there was nothing but joy in her whole attitude. She gave a sudden pirouette on her toes, and her black draperies swung out. At the same time she flung her head back and laughed outright.

As she did so a man stepped out from the trees. It was Hector Blunt.

The girl started. Her expression changed a little.

“How you startled me—I didn’t see you.”

Blunt said nothing, but stood looking at her for a minute or two in silence.

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“What I like about you,” said Flora, with a touch of malice, “is your cheery conversation.”

I fancy that at that Blunt reddened under his tan. His voice, when he spoke, sounded different—it had a curious sort of humility in it.

“Never was much of a fellow for talking. Not even when I was young.”

“That was a very long time ago, I suppose,” said Flora gravely.

I caught the undercurrent of laughter in her voice, but I don’t think Blunt did.

“Yes,” he said simply, “it was.”

“How does it feel to be Methuselah?” asked Flora.

This time the laughter was more apparent, but Blunt was following out an idea of his own.

“Remember the Johnny who sold his soul to the devil? In return for being made young again? There’s an opera about it.”

“Faust, you mean?”

“That’s the beggar. Rum story. Some of us would do it if we could.”

“Any one would think you were creaking at the joints to hear you talk,” cried Flora, half vexed, half amused.

Blunt said nothing for a minute or two. Then he looked away from Flora into the middle distance and observed to an adjacent tree trunk that it was about time he got back to Africa.

“Are you going on another expedition—shooting things?”

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“Expect so. Usually do, you know—shoot things, I mean.”

“You shot that head in the hall, didn’t you?”

Blunt nodded. Then he jerked out, going rather red, as he did so:—

“Care for some decent skins any time? If so, I could get ’em for you.”

“Oh! please do,” cried Flora. “Will you really? You won’t forget?”

“I shan’t forget,” said Hector Blunt.

He added, in a sudden burst of communicativeness:—

“Time I went. I’m no good in this sort of life. Haven’t got the manners for it. I’m a rough fellow, no use in society. Never remember the things one’s expected to say. Yes, time I went.”

“But you’re not going at once,” cried Flora. “Not—not while we’re in all this trouble. Oh! please. If you go——”

She turned away a little.

“You want me to stay?” asked Blunt.

He spoke deliberately but quite simply.

“We all——”

“I meant you personally,” said Blunt, with directness.

Flora turned slowly back again and met his eyes.

“I want you to stay,” she said, “if—if that makes any difference.”

“It makes all the difference,” said Blunt.

There was a moment’s silence. They sat down on the stone seat by the goldfish pond. It seemed as though neither of them knew quite what to say next.

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“It—it’s such a lovely morning,” said Flora at last. “You know, I can’t help feeling happy, in spite—in spite of everything. That’s awful, I suppose?”

“Quite natural,” said Blunt. “Never saw your uncle until two years ago, did you? Can’t be expected to grieve very much. Much better to have no humbug about it.”

“There’s something awfully consoling about you,” said Flora. “You make things so simple.”

“Things are simple as a rule,” said the big game hunter.

“Not always,” said Flora.

Her voice had lowered itself, and I saw Blunt turn and look at her, bringing his eyes back from (apparently) the coast of Africa to do so. He evidently put his own construction on her change of tone, for he said, after a minute or two, in rather an abrupt manner:—

“I say, you know, you mustn’t worry. About that young chap, I mean. Inspector’s an ass. Everybody knows—utterly absurd to think he could have done it. Man from outside. Burglar chap. That’s the only possible solution.”

Flora turned to look at him.

“You really think so?”

“Don’t you?” said Blunt quickly.

“I—oh, yes, of course.”

Another silence, and then Flora burst out:—

“I’m—I’ll tell you why I felt so happy this morning. However heartless you think me, I’d rather tell you. It’s because the lawyer has been—Mr. Hammond. He told us about the will. Uncle Roger has left me twenty thousand111 pounds. Think of it—twenty thousand beautiful pounds.”

Blunt looked surprised.

“Does it mean so much to you?”

“Mean much to me? Why, it’s everything. Freedom—life—no more scheming and scraping and lying——”

“Lying?” said Blunt, sharply interrupting.

Flora seemed taken aback for a minute.

“You know what I mean,” she said uncertainly. “Pretending to be thankful for all the nasty castoff things rich relations give you. Last year’s coats and skirts and hats.”

“Don’t know much about ladies’ clothes; should have said you were always very well turned out.”

“It’s cost me something, though,” said Flora in a low voice. “Don’t let’s talk of horrid things. I’m so happy. I’m free. Free to do what I like. Free not to——”

She stopped suddenly.

“Not to what?” asked Blunt quickly.

“I forget now. Nothing important.”

Blunt had a stick in his hand, and he thrust it into the pond, poking at something.

“What are you doing, Major Blunt?”

“There’s something bright down there. Wondered what it was—looks like a gold brooch. Now I’ve stirred up the mud and it’s gone.”

“Perhaps it’s a crown,” suggested Flora. “Like the one Mélisande saw in the water.”

“Mélisande,” said Blunt reflectively—“she’s in an opera, isn’t she?”

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“Yes, you seem to know a lot about operas.”

“People take me sometimes,” said Blunt sadly. “Funny idea of pleasure—worse racket than the natives make with their tom-toms.”

Flora laughed.

“I remember Mélisande,” continued Blunt, “married an old chap old enough to be her father.”

He threw a small piece of flint into the goldfish pond. Then, with a change of manner, he turned to Flora.

“Miss Ackroyd, can I do anything? About Paton, I mean. I know how dreadfully anxious you must be.”

“Thank you,” said Flora in a cold voice. “There is really nothing to be done. Ralph will be all right. I’ve got hold of the most wonderful detective in the world, and he’s going to find out all about it.”

For some time I had felt uneasy as to our position. We were not exactly eavesdropping, since the two in the garden below had only to lift their heads to see us. Nevertheless, I should have drawn attention to our presence before now, had not my companion put a warning pressure on my arm. Clearly he wished me to remain silent.

But now he rose briskly to his feet, clearing his throat.

“I demand pardon,” he cried. “I cannot allow mademoiselle thus extravagantly to compliment me, and not draw attention to my presence. They say the listener hears no good of himself, but that is not the case this time. To spare my blushes, I must join you and apologize.”

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He hurried down the path with me close behind him, and joined the others by the pond.

“This is M. Hercule Poirot,” said Flora. “I expect you’ve heard of him.”

Poirot bowed.

“I know Major Blunt by reputation,” he said politely. “I am glad to have encountered you, monsieur. I am in need of some information that you can give me.”

Blunt looked at him inquiringly.

“When did you last see M. Ackroyd alive?”

“At dinner.”

“And you neither saw nor heard anything of him after that?”

“Didn’t see him. Heard his voice.”

“How was that?”

“I strolled out on the terrace——”

“Pardon me, what time was this?”

“About half-past nine. I was walking up and down smoking in front of the drawing-room window. I heard Ackroyd talking in his study——”

Poirot stooped and removed a microscopic weed.

“Surely you couldn’t hear voices in the study from that part of the terrace,” he murmured.

He was not looking at Blunt, but I was, and to my intense surprise, I saw the latter flush.

“Went as far as the corner,” he explained unwillingly.

“Ah! indeed?” said Poirot.

In the mildest manner he conveyed an impression that more was wanted.

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“Thought I saw—a woman disappearing into the bushes. Just a gleam of white, you know. Must have been mistaken. It was while I was standing at the corner of the terrace that I heard Ackroyd’s voice speaking to that secretary of his.”

“Speaking to Mr. Geoffrey Raymond?”

“Yes—that’s what I supposed at the time. Seems I was wrong.”

“Mr. Ackroyd didn’t address him by name?”

“Oh, no.”

“Then, if I may ask, why did you think——?”

Blunt explained laboriously.

“Took it for granted that it would be Raymond, because he had said just before I came out that he was taking some papers to Ackroyd. Never thought of it being anybody else.”

“Can you remember what the words you heard were?”

“Afraid I can’t. Something quite ordinary and unimportant. Only caught a scrap of it. I was thinking of something else at the time.”

“It is of no importance,” murmured Poirot. “Did you move a chair back against the wall when you went into the study after the body was discovered?”

“Chair? No—why should I?”

Poirot shrugged his shoulders but did not answer. He turned to Flora.

“There is one thing I should like to know from you, mademoiselle. When you were examining the things in the silver table with Dr. Sheppard, was the dagger in its place, or was it not?”

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Flora’s chin shot up.

“Inspector Raglan has been asking me that,” she said resentfully. “I’ve told him, and I’ll tell you. I’m perfectly certain the dagger was not there. He thinks it was and that Ralph sneaked it later in the evening. And—and he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m saying it to—to shield Ralph.”

“And aren’t you?” I asked gravely.

Flora stamped her foot.

“You, too, Dr. Sheppard! Oh! it’s too bad.”

Poirot tactfully made a diversion.

“It is true what I heard you say, Major Blunt. There is something that glitters in this pond. Let us see if I can reach it.”

He knelt down by the pond, baring his arm to the elbow, and lowered it in very slowly, so as not to disturb the bottom of the pond. But in spite of all his precautions the mud eddied and swirled, and he was forced to draw his arm out again empty-handed.

He gazed ruefully at the mud upon his arm. I offered him my handkerchief, which he accepted with fervent protestations of thanks. Blunt looked at his watch.

“Nearly lunch time,” he said. “We’d better be getting back to the house.”

“You will lunch with us, M. Poirot?” asked Flora. “I should like you to meet my mother. She is—very fond of Ralph.”

The little man bowed.

“I shall be delighted, mademoiselle.”

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“And you will stay, too, won’t you, Dr. Sheppard?”

I hesitated.

“Oh, do!”

I wanted to, so I accepted the invitation without further ceremony.

We set out towards the house, Flora and Blunt walking ahead.

“What hair,” said Poirot to me in a low tone, nodding towards Flora. “The real gold! They will make a pretty couple. She and the dark, handsome Captain Paton. Will they not?”

I looked at him inquiringly, but he began to fuss about a few microscopic drops of water on his coat sleeve. The man reminded me in some ways of a cat. His green eyes and his finicking habits.

“And all for nothing, too,” I said sympathetically. “I wonder what it was in the pond?”

“Would you like to see?” asked Poirot.

I stared at him. He nodded.

“My good friend,” he said gently and reproachfully, “Hercule Poirot does not run the risk of disarranging his costume without being sure of attaining his object. To do so would be ridiculous and absurd. I am never ridiculous.”

“But you brought your hand out empty,” I objected.

“There are times when it is necessary to have discretion. Do you tell your patients everything—everything, doctor? I think not. Nor do you tell your excellent sister everything either, is it not so? Before showing117 my empty hand, I dropped what it contained into my other hand. You shall see what that was.”

He held out his left hand, palm open. On it lay a little circlet of gold. A woman’s wedding ring.

I took it from him.

“Look inside,” commanded Poirot.

I did so. Inside was an inscription in fine writing:—

From R., March 13th.

I looked at Poirot, but he was busy inspecting his appearance in a tiny pocket glass. He paid particular attention to his mustaches, and none at all to me. I saw that he did not intend to be communicative.

---

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CHAPTER X

THE PARLORMAID

We found Mrs. Ackroyd in the hall. With her was a small dried-up little man, with an aggressive chin and sharp gray eyes, and “lawyer” written all over him.

“Mr. Hammond is staying to lunch with us,” said Mrs. Ackroyd. “You know Major Blunt, Mr. Hammond? And dear Dr. Sheppard—also a close friend of poor Roger’s. And, let me see——”

She paused, surveying Hercule Poirot in some perplexity.

“This is M. Poirot, mother,” said Flora. “I told you about him this morning.”

“Oh! yes,” said Mrs. Ackroyd vaguely. “Of course, my dear, of course. He is to find Ralph, is he not?”

“He is to find out who killed uncle,” said Flora.

“Oh! my dear,” cried her mother. “Please! My poor nerves. I am a wreck this morning, a positive wreck. Such a dreadful thing to happen. I can’t help feeling that it must have been an accident of some kind. Roger was so fond of handling queer curios. His hand must have slipped, or something.”

This theory was received in polite silence. I saw Poirot edge up to the lawyer, and speak to him in a confidential undertone. They moved aside into the embrasure of the window. I joined them—then hesitated.

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“Perhaps I’m intruding,” I said.

“Not at all,” cried Poirot heartily. “You and I, M. le docteur, we investigate this affair side by side. Without you I should be lost. I desire a little information from the good Mr. Hammond.”

“You are acting on behalf of Captain Ralph Paton, I understand,” said the lawyer cautiously.

Poirot shook his head.

“Not so. I am acting in the interests of justice. Miss Ackroyd has asked me to investigate the death of her uncle.”

Mr. Hammond seemed slightly taken aback.

“I cannot seriously believe that Captain Paton can be concerned in this crime,” he said, “however strong the circumstantial evidence against him may be. The mere fact that he was hard pressed for money——”

“Was he hard pressed for money?” interpolated Poirot quickly.

The lawyer shrugged his shoulders.

“It was a chronic condition with Ralph Paton,” he said dryly. “Money went through his hands like water. He was always applying to his stepfather.”

“Had he done so of late? During the last year, for instance?”

“I cannot say. Mr. Ackroyd did not mention the fact to me.”

“I comprehend. Mr. Hammond, I take it that you are acquainted with the provisions of Mr. Ackroyd’s will?”

“Certainly. That is my principal business here to-day.”

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“Then, seeing that I am acting for Miss Ackroyd, you will not object to telling me the terms of that will?”

“They are quite simple. Shorn of legal phraseology, and after paying certain legacies and bequests——”

“Such as——?” interrupted Poirot.

Mr. Hammond seemed a little surprised.

“A thousand pounds to his housekeeper, Miss Russell; fifty pounds to the cook, Emma Cooper; five hundred pounds to his secretary, Mr. Geoffrey Raymond. Then to various hospitals——”

Poirot held up his hand.

“Ah! the charitable bequests, they interest me not.”

“Quite so. The income on ten thousand pounds’ worth of shares to be paid to Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd during her lifetime. Miss Flora Ackroyd inherits twenty thousand pounds outright. The residue—including this property, and the shares in Ackroyd and Son—to his adopted son, Ralph Paton.”

“Mr. Ackroyd possessed a large fortune?”

“A very large fortune. Captain Paton will be an exceedingly wealthy young man.”

There was a silence. Poirot and the lawyer looked at each other.

“Mr. Hammond,” came Mrs. Ackroyd’s voice plaintively from the fireplace.

The lawyer answered the summons. Poirot took my arm and drew me right into the window.

“Regard the irises,” he remarked in rather a loud voice. “Magnificent, are they not? A straight and pleasing effect.”

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At the same time I felt the pressure of his hand on my arm, and he added in a low tone:—

“Do you really wish to aid me? To take part in this investigation?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said eagerly. “There’s nothing I should like better. You don’t know what a dull old fogey’s life I lead. Never anything out of the ordinary.”

“Good, we will be colleagues then. In a minute or two I fancy Major Blunt will join us. He is not happy with the good mamma. Now there are some things I want to know—but I do not wish to seem to want to know them. You comprehend? So it will be your part to ask the questions.”

“What questions do you want me to ask?” I asked apprehensively.

“I want you to introduce the name of Mrs. Ferrars.”

“Yes?”

“Speak of her in a natural fashion. Ask him if he was down here when her husband died. You understand the kind of thing I mean. And while he replies, watch his face without seeming to watch it. C’est compris?”

There was no time for more, for at that minute, as Poirot had prophesied, Blunt left the others in his abrupt fashion and came over to us.

I suggested strolling on the terrace, and he acquiesced. Poirot stayed behind.

I stopped to examine a late rose.

“How things change in the course of a day or so,” I observed. “I was up here last Wednesday, I remember, walking up and down this same terrace. Ackroyd was122 with me—full of spirits. And now—three days later—Ackroyd’s dead, poor fellow, Mrs. Ferrars’s dead—you knew her, didn’t you? But of course you did.”

Blunt nodded his head.

“Had you seen her since you’d been down this time?”

“Went with Ackroyd to call. Last Tuesday, think it was. Fascinating woman—but something queer about her. Deep—one would never know what she was up to.”

I looked into his steady gray eyes. Nothing there surely. I went on:—

“I suppose you’d met her before.”

“Last time I was here—she and her husband had just come here to live.” He paused a minute and then added: “Rum thing, she had changed a lot between then and now.”

“How—changed?” I asked.

“Looked ten years older.”

“Were you down here when her husband died?” I asked, trying to make the question sound as casual as possible.

“No. From all I heard it would be a good riddance. Uncharitable, perhaps, but the truth.”

I agreed.

“Ashley Ferrars was by no means a pattern husband,” I said cautiously.

“Blackguard, I thought,” said Blunt.

“No,” I said, “only a man with more money than was good for him.”

“Oh! money! All the troubles in the world can be put down to money—or the lack of it.”

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“Which has been your particular trouble?” I asked.

“I’ve enough for what I want. I’m one of the lucky ones.”

“Indeed.”

“I’m not too flush just now, as a matter of fact. Came into a legacy a year ago, and like a fool let myself be persuaded into putting it into some wild-cat scheme.”

I sympathized, and narrated my own similar trouble.

Then the gong pealed out, and we all went in to lunch. Poirot drew me back a little.

“Eh! bien?”

“He’s all right,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Nothing—disturbing?”

“He had a legacy just a year ago,” I said. “But why not? Why shouldn’t he? I’ll swear the man is perfectly square and aboveboard.”

“Without doubt, without doubt,” said Poirot soothingly. “Do not upset yourself.”

He spoke as though to a fractious child.

We all trooped into the dining-room. It seemed incredible that less than twenty-four hours had passed since I last sat at that table.

Afterwards, Mrs. Ackroyd took me aside and sat down with me on a sofa.

“I can’t help feeling a little hurt,” she murmured, producing a handkerchief of the kind obviously not meant to be cried into. “Hurt, I mean, by Roger’s lack of confidence in me. That twenty thousand pounds ought to have been left to me—not to Flora. A mother could be124 trusted to safeguard the interests of her child. A lack of trust, I call it.”

“You forget, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said, “Flora was Ackroyd’s own niece, a blood relation. It would have been different had you been his sister instead of his sister-in-law.”

“As poor Cecil’s widow, I think my feelings ought to have been considered,” said the lady, touching her eye-lashes gingerly with the handkerchief. “But Roger was always most peculiar—not to say mean—about money matters. It has been a most difficult position for both Flora and myself. He did not even give the poor child an allowance. He would pay her bills, you know, and even that with a good deal of reluctance and asking what she wanted all those fal-lals for—so like a man—but—now I’ve forgotten what it was I was going to say! Oh, yes, not a penny we could call our own, you know. Flora resented it—yes, I must say she resented it—very strongly. Though devoted to her uncle, of course. But any girl would have resented it. Yes, I must say Roger had very strange ideas about money. He wouldn’t even buy new face towels, though I told him the old ones were in holes. And then,” proceeded Mrs. Ackroyd, with a sudden leap highly characteristic of her conversation, “to leave all that money—a thousand pounds—fancy, a thousand pounds!—to that woman.”

“What woman?”

“That Russell woman. Something very queer about her, and so I’ve always said. But Roger wouldn’t hear a word against her. Said she was a woman of great force of125 character, and that he admired and respected her. He was always going on about her rectitude and independence and moral worth. I think there’s something fishy about her. She was certainly doing her best to marry Roger. But I soon put a stop to that. She’s always hated me. Naturally. I saw through her.”

I began to wonder if there was any chance of stemming Mrs. Ackroyd’s eloquence, and getting away.

Mr. Hammond provided the necessary diversion by coming up to say good-by. I seized my chance and rose also.

“About the inquest,” I said. “Where would you prefer it to be held. Here, or at the Three Boars?”

Mrs. Ackroyd stared at me with a dropped jaw.

“The inquest?” she asked, the picture of consternation. “But surely there won’t have to be an inquest?”

Mr. Hammond gave a dry little cough and murmured, “Inevitable. Under the circumstances,” in two short little barks.

“But surely Dr. Sheppard can arrange——”

“There are limits to my powers of arrangement,” I said dryly.

“If his death was an accident——”

“He was murdered, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said brutally.

She gave a little cry.

“No theory of accident will hold water for a minute.”

Mrs. Ackroyd looked at me in distress. I had no patience with what I thought was her silly fear of unpleasantness.

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“If there’s an inquest, I—I shan’t have to answer questions and all that, shall I?” she asked.

“I don’t know what will be necessary,” I answered. “I imagine Mr. Raymond will take the brunt of it off you. He knows all the circumstances, and can give formal evidence of identification.”

The lawyer assented with a little bow.

“I really don’t think there is anything to dread, Mrs. Ackroyd,” he said. “You will be spared all unpleasantness. Now, as to the question of money, have you all you need for the present? I mean,” he added, as she looked at him inquiringly, “ready money. Cash, you know. If not, I can arrange to let you have whatever you require.”

“That ought to be all right,” said Raymond, who was standing by. “Mr. Ackroyd cashed a cheque for a hundred pounds yesterday.”

“A hundred pounds?”

“Yes. For wages and other expenses due to-day. At the moment it is still intact.”

“Where is this money? In his desk?”

“No, he always kept his cash in his bedroom. In an old collar-box, to be accurate. Funny idea, wasn’t it?”

“I think,” said the lawyer, “we ought to make sure the money is there before I leave.”

“Certainly,” agreed the secretary. “I’ll take you up now…. Oh! I forgot. The door’s locked.”

Inquiry from Parker elicited the information that Inspector Raglan was in the housekeeper’s room asking a few supplementary questions. A few minutes later the inspector joined the party in the hall, bringing the key with127 him. He unlocked the door and we passed into the lobby and up the small staircase. At the top of the stairs the door into Ackroyd’s bedroom stood open. Inside the room it was dark, the curtains were drawn, and the bed was turned down just as it had been last night. The inspector drew the curtains, letting in the sunlight, and Geoffrey Raymond went to the top drawer of a rosewood bureau.

“He kept his money like that, in an unlocked drawer. Just fancy,” commented the inspector.

The secretary flushed a little.

“Mr. Ackroyd had perfect faith in the honesty of all the servants,” he said hotly.

“Oh! quite so,” said the inspector hastily.

Raymond opened the drawer, took out a round leather collar-box from the back of it, and opening it, drew out a thick wallet.

“Here is the money,” he said, taking out a fat roll of notes. “You will find the hundred intact, I know, for Mr. Ackroyd put it in the collar-box in my presence last night when he was dressing for dinner, and of course it has not been touched since.”

Mr. Hammond took the roll from him and counted it. He looked up sharply.

“A hundred pounds, you said. But there is only sixty here.”

Raymond stared at him.

“Impossible,” he cried, springing forward. Taking the notes from the other’s hand, he counted them aloud.

Mr. Hammond had been right. The total amounted to sixty pounds.

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“But—I can’t understand it,” cried the secretary, bewildered.

Poirot asked a question.

“You saw Mr. Ackroyd put this money away last night when he was dressing for dinner? You are sure he had not paid away any of it already?”

“I’m sure he hadn’t. He even said, ‘I don’t want to take a hundred pounds down to dinner with me. Too bulgy.’”

“Then the affair is very simple,” remarked Poirot. “Either he paid out that forty pounds sometime last evening, or else it has been stolen.”

“That’s the matter in a nutshell,” agreed the inspector. He turned to Mrs. Ackroyd. “Which of the servants would come in here yesterday evening?”

“I suppose the housemaid would turn down the bed.”

“Who is she? What do you know about her?”

“She’s not been here very long,” said Mrs. Ackroyd. “But she’s a nice ordinary country girl.”

“I think we ought to clear this matter up,” said the inspector. “If Mr. Ackroyd paid that money away himself, it may have a bearing on the mystery of the crime. The other servants all right, as far as you know?”

“Oh, I think so.”

“Not missed anything before?”

“No.”

“None of them leaving, or anything like that?”

“The parlormaid is leaving.”

“When?”

“She gave notice yesterday, I believe.”

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“To you?”

“Oh, no. I have nothing to do with the servants. Miss Russell attends to the household matters.”

The inspector remained lost in thought for a minute or two. Then he nodded his head and remarked, “I think I’d better have a word with Miss Russell, and I’ll see the girl Dale as well.”

Poirot and I accompanied him to the housekeeper’s room. Miss Russell received us with her usual sang-froid.

Elsie Dale had been at Fernly five months. A nice girl, quick at her duties, and most respectable. Good references. The last girl in the world to take anything not belonging to her.

What about the parlormaid?

“She, too, was a most superior girl. Very quiet and ladylike. An excellent worker.”

“Then why is she leaving?” asked the inspector.

Miss Russell pursed up her lips.

“It was none of my doing. I understand Mr. Ackroyd found fault with her yesterday afternoon. It was her duty to do the study, and she disarranged some of the papers on his desk, I believe. He was very annoyed about it, and she gave notice. At least, that is what I understood from her, but perhaps you’d like to see her yourselves?”

The inspector assented. I had already noticed the girl when she was waiting on us at lunch. A tall girl, with a lot of brown hair rolled tightly away at the back of her neck, and very steady gray eyes. She came in answer to130 the housekeeper’s summons, and stood very straight with those same gray eyes fixed on us.

“You are Ursula Bourne?” asked the inspector.

“Yes, sir.”

“I understand you are leaving?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why is that?”

“I disarranged some papers on Mr. Ackroyd’s desk. He was very angry about it, and I said I had better leave. He told me to go as soon as possible.”

“Were you in Mr. Ackroyd’s bedroom at all last night? Tidying up or anything?”

“No, sir. That is Elsie’s work. I never went near that part of the house.”

“I must tell you, my girl, that a large sum of money is missing from Mr. Ackroyd’s room.”

At last I saw her roused. A wave of color swept over her face.

“I know nothing about any money. If you think I took it, and that that is why Mr. Ackroyd dismissed me, you are wrong.”

“I’m not accusing you of taking it, my girl,” said the inspector. “Don’t flare up so.”

The girl looked at him coldly.

“You can search my things if you like,” she said disdainfully. “But you won’t find anything.”

Poirot suddenly interposed.

“It was yesterday afternoon that Mr. Ackroyd dismissed you—or you dismissed yourself, was it not?” he asked.

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The girl nodded.

“How long did the interview last?”

“The interview?”

“Yes, the interview between you and Mr. Ackroyd in the study?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Twenty minutes? Half an hour?”

“Something like that.”

“Not longer?”

“Not longer than half an hour, certainly.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle.”

I looked curiously at him. He was rearranging a few objects on the table, setting them straight with precise fingers. His eyes were shining.

“That’ll do,” said the inspector.

Ursula Bourne disappeared. The inspector turned to Miss Russell.

“How long has she been here? Have you got a copy of the reference you had with her?”

Without answering the first question, Miss Russell moved to an adjacent bureau, opened one of the drawers, and took out a handful of letters clipped together with a patent fastener. She selected one and handed it to the inspector.

“H’m,” said he. “Reads all right. Mrs. Richard Folliott, Marby Grange, Marby. Who’s this woman?”

“Quite good county people,” said Miss Russell.

“Well,” said the inspector, handing it back, “let’s have a look at the other one, Elsie Dale.”

Elsie Dale was a big fair girl, with a pleasant but132 slightly stupid face. She answered our questions readily enough, and showed much distress and concern at the loss of the money.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her,” observed the inspector, after he had dismissed her.

“What about Parker?”

Miss Russell pursed her lips together and made no reply.

“I’ve a feeling there’s something wrong about that man,” the inspector continued thoughtfully. “The trouble is that I don’t quite see when he got his opportunity. He’d be busy with his duties immediately after dinner, and he’s got a pretty good alibi all through the evening. I know, for I’ve been devoting particular attention to it. Well, thank you very much, Miss Russell. We’ll leave things as they are for the present. It’s highly probable Mr. Ackroyd paid that money away himself.”

The housekeeper bade us a dry good-afternoon, and we took our leave.

I left the house with Poirot.

“I wonder,” I said, breaking the silence, “what the papers the girl disarranged could have been for Ackroyd to have got into such a state about them? I wonder if there is any clew there to the mystery.”

“The secretary said there were no papers of particular importance on the desk,” said Poirot quietly.

“Yes, but——” I paused.

“It strikes you as odd that Ackroyd should have flown into a rage about so trivial a matter?”

“Yes, it does rather.”

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“But was it a trivial matter?”

“Of course,” I admitted, “we don’t know what those papers may have been. But Raymond certainly said——”

“Leave M. Raymond out of it for a minute. What did you think of that girl?”

“Which girl? The parlormaid?”

“Yes, the parlormaid. Ursula Bourne.”

“She seemed a nice girl,” I said hesitatingly.

Poirot repeated my words, but whereas I had laid a slight stress on the fourth word, he put it on the second.

“She seemed a nice girl—yes.”

Then, after a minute’s silence, he took something from his pocket and handed it to me.

“See, my friend, I will show you something. Look there.”

The paper he had handed me was that compiled by the inspector and given by him to Poirot that morning. Following the pointing finger, I saw a small cross marked in pencil opposite the name Ursula Bourne.

“You may not have noticed it at the time, my good friend, but there was one person on this list whose alibi had no kind of confirmation. Ursula Bourne.”

“You don’t think——”

“Dr. Sheppard, I dare to think anything. Ursula Bourne may have killed Mr. Ackroyd, but I confess I can see no motive for her doing so. Can you?”

He looked at me very hard—so hard that I felt uncomfortable.

“Can you?” he repeated.

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“No motive whatsoever,” I said firmly.

His gaze relaxed. He frowned and murmured to himself:—

“Since the blackmailer was a man, it follows that she cannot be the blackmailer, then——”

I coughed.

“As far as that goes——” I began doubtfully.

He spun round on me.

“What? What are you going to say?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Only that, strictly speaking, Mrs. Ferrars in her letter mentioned a person—she didn’t actually specify a man. But we took it for granted, Ackroyd and I, that it was a man.”

Poirot did not seem to be listening to me. He was muttering to himself again.

“But then it is possible after all—yes, certainly it is possible—but then—ah! I must rearrange my ideas. Method, order; never have I needed them more. Everything must fit in—in its appointed place—otherwise I am on the wrong tack.”

He broke off, and whirled round upon me again.

“Where is Marby?”

“It’s on the other side of Cranchester.”

“How far away?”

“Oh!—fourteen miles, perhaps.”

“Would it be possible for you to go there? To-morrow, say?”

“To-morrow? Let me see, that’s Sunday. Yes, I could arrange it. What do you want me to do there?”

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“See this Mrs. Folliott. Find out all you can about Ursula Bourne.”

“Very well. But—I don’t much care for the job.”

“It is not the time to make difficulties. A man’s life may hang on this.”

“Poor Ralph,” I said with a sigh. “You believe him to be innocent, though?”

Poirot looked at me very gravely.

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Of course.”

“Then you shall have it. My friend, everything points to the assumption that he is guilty.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

Poirot nodded.

“Yes, that stupid inspector—for he is stupid—has everything pointing his way. I seek for the truth—and the truth leads me every time to Ralph Paton. Motive, opportunity, means. But I will leave no stone unturned. I promised Mademoiselle Flora. And she was very sure, that little one. But very sure indeed.”

---

136

CHAPTER XI

POIROT PAYS A CALL

I was slightly nervous when I rang the bell at Marby Grange the following afternoon. I wondered very much what Poirot expected to find out. He had entrusted the job to me. Why? Was it because, as in the case of questioning Major Blunt, he wished to remain in the background? The wish, intelligible in the first case, seemed to me quite meaningless here.

My meditations were interrupted by the advent of a smart parlormaid.

Yes, Mrs. Folliott was at home. I was ushered into a big drawing-room, and looked round me curiously as I waited for the mistress of the house. A large bare room, some good bits of old china, and some beautiful etchings, shabby covers and curtains. A lady’s room in every sense of the term.

I turned from the inspection of a Bartolozzi on the wall as Mrs. Folliott came into the room. She was a tall woman, with untidy brown hair, and a very winning smile.

“Dr. Sheppard,” she said hesitatingly.

“That is my name,” I replied. “I must apologize for calling upon you like this, but I wanted some information about a parlormaid previously employed by you, Ursula Bourne.”

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With the utterance of the name the smile vanished from her face, and all the cordiality froze out of her manner. She looked uncomfortable and ill at ease.

“Ursula Bourne?” she said hesitatingly.

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps you don’t remember the name?”

“Oh, yes, of course. I—I remember perfectly.”

“She left you just over a year ago, I understand?”

“Yes. Yes, she did. That is quite right.”

“And you were satisfied with her whilst she was with you? How long was she with you, by the way?”

“Oh! a year or two—I can’t remember exactly how long. She—she is very capable. I’m sure you will find her quite satisfactory. I didn’t know she was leaving Fernly. I hadn’t the least idea of it.”

“Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked.

“Anything about her?”

“Yes, where she comes from, who her people are—that sort of thing?”

Mrs. Folliott’s face wore more than ever its frozen look.

“I don’t know at all.”

“Who was she with before she came to you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

There was a spark of anger now underlying her nervousness. She flung up her head in a gesture that was vaguely familiar.

“Is it really necessary to ask all these questions?”

“Not at all,” I said, with an air of surprise and a138 tinge of apology in my manner. “I had no idea you would mind answering them. I am very sorry.”

Her anger left her and she became confused again.

“Oh! I don’t mind answering them. I assure you I don’t. Why should I? It—it just seemed a little odd, you know. That’s all. A little odd.”

One advantage of being a medical practitioner is that you can usually tell when people are lying to you. I should have known from Mrs. Folliott’s manner, if from nothing else, that she did mind answering my questions—minded intensely. She was thoroughly uncomfortable and upset, and there was plainly some mystery in the background. I judged her to be a woman quite unused to deception of any kind, and consequently rendered acutely uneasy when forced to practice it. A child could have seen through her.

But it was also clear that she had no intention of telling me anything further. Whatever the mystery centering around Ursula Bourne might be, I was not going to learn it through Mrs. Folliott.

Defeated, I apologized once more for disturbing her, took my hat and departed.

I went to see a couple of patients and arrived home about six o’clock. Caroline was sitting beside the wreck of tea things. She had that look of suppressed exultation on her face which I know only too well. It is a sure sign with her, of either the getting or the giving of information. I wondered which it had been.

“I’ve had a very interesting afternoon,” began Caroline as I dropped into my own particular easy chair, and139 stretched out my feet to the inviting blaze in the fireplace.

“Have you?” I asked. “Miss Ganett drop in to tea?”

Miss Ganett is one of the chief of our newsmongers.

“Guess again,” said Caroline with intense complacency.

I guessed several times, working slowly through all the members of Caroline’s Intelligence Corps. My sister received each guess with a triumphant shake of the head. In the end she volunteered the information herself.

“M. Poirot!” she said. “Now what do you think of that?”

I thought a good many things of it, but I was careful not to say them to Caroline.

“Why did he come?” I asked.

“To see me, of course. He said that knowing my brother so well, he hoped he might be permitted to make the acquaintance of his charming sister—your charming sister, I’ve got mixed up, but you know what I mean.”

“What did he talk about?” I asked.

“He told me a lot about himself and his cases. You know that Prince Paul of Mauretania—the one who’s just married a dancer?”

“Yes?”

“I saw a most intriguing paragraph about her in Society Snippets the other day, hinting that she was really a Russian Grand Duchess—one of the Czar’s daughters who managed to escape from the Bolsheviks. Well, it seems that M. Poirot solved a baffling murder mystery that threatened to involve them both. Prince Paul was beside himself with gratitude.”

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“Did he give him an emerald tie pin the size of a plover’s egg?” I inquired sarcastically.

“He didn’t mention it. Why?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I thought it was always done. It is in detective fiction anyway. The super detective always has his rooms littered with rubies and pearls and emeralds from grateful Royal clients.”

“It’s very interesting to hear about these things from the inside,” said my sister complacently.

It would be—to Caroline. I could not but admire the ingenuity of M. Hercule Poirot, who had selected unerringly the case of all others that would most appeal to an elderly maiden lady living in a small village.

“Did he tell you if the dancer was really a Grand Duchess?” I inquired.

“He was not at liberty to speak,” said Caroline importantly.

I wondered how far Poirot had strained the truth in talking to Caroline—probably not at all. He had conveyed his innuendoes by means of his eyebrows and his shoulders.

“And after all this,” I remarked, “I suppose you were ready to eat out of his hand.”

“Don’t be coarse, James. I don’t know where you get these vulgar expressions from.”

“Probably from my only link with the outside world—my patients. Unfortunately my practice does not lie amongst Royal princes and interesting Russian émigrés.”

Caroline pushed her spectacles up and looked at me.

“You seem very grumpy, James. It must be your liver. A blue pill, I think, to-night.”

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To see me in my own home, you would never imagine that I was a doctor of medicine. Caroline does the home prescribing both for herself and me.

“Damn my liver,” I said irritably. “Did you talk about the murder at all?”

“Well, naturally, James. What else is there to talk about locally? I was able to set M. Poirot right upon several points. He was very grateful to me. He said I had the makings of a born detective in me—and a wonderful psychological insight into human nature.”

Caroline was exactly like a cat that is full to overflowing with rich cream. She was positively purring.

“He talked a lot about the little gray cells of the brain, and of their functions. His own, he says, are of the first quality.”

“He would say so,” I remarked bitterly. “Modesty is certainly not his middle name.”

“I wish you would not be so horribly American, James. He thought it very important that Ralph should be found as soon as possible, and induced to come forward and give an account of himself. He says that his disappearance will produce a very unfortunate impression at the inquest.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I agreed with him,” said Caroline importantly. “And I was able to tell him the way people were already talking about it.”

“Caroline,” I said sharply, “did you tell M. Poirot what you overheard in the wood that day?”

“I did,” said Caroline complacently.

I got up and began to walk about.

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“You realize what you’re doing, I hope,” I jerked out. “You’re putting a halter round Ralph Paton’s neck as surely as you’re sitting in that chair.”

“Not at all,” said Caroline, quite unruffled. “I was surprised you hadn’t told him.”

“I took very good care not to,” I said. “I’m fond of that boy.”

“So am I. That’s why I say you’re talking nonsense. I don’t believe Ralph did it, and so the truth can’t hurt him, and we ought to give M. Poirot all the help we can. Why, think, very likely Ralph was out with that identical girl on the night of the murder, and if so, he’s got a perfect alibi.”

“If he’s got a perfect alibi,” I retorted, “why doesn’t he come forward and say so?”

“Might get the girl into trouble,” said Caroline sapiently. “But if M. Poirot gets hold of her, and puts it to her as her duty, she’ll come forward of her own accord and clear Ralph.”

“You seem to have invented a romantic fairy story of your own,” I said. “You read too many trashy novels, Caroline. I’ve always told you so.”

I dropped into my chair again.

“Did Poirot ask you any more questions?” I inquired.

“Only about the patients you had that morning.”

“The patients?” I demanded, unbelievingly.

“Yes, your surgery patients. How many and who they were?”

“Do you mean to say you were able to tell him that?” I demanded.

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Caroline is really amazing.

“Why not?” asked my sister triumphantly. “I can see the path up to the surgery door perfectly from this window. And I’ve got an excellent memory, James. Much better than yours, let me tell you.”

“I’m sure you have,” I murmured mechanically.

My sister went on, checking the names on her fingers.

“There was old Mrs. Bennett, and that boy from the farm with the bad finger, Dolly Grice to have a needle out of her finger; that American steward off the liner. Let me see—that’s four. Yes, and old George Evans with his ulcer. And lastly——”

She paused significantly.

“Well?”

Caroline brought out her climax triumphantly. She hissed in the most approved style—aided by the fortunate number of s’s at her disposal.

“Miss Russell!”

She sat back in her chair and looked at me meaningly, and when Caroline looks at you meaningly, it is impossible to miss it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, quite untruthfully. “Why shouldn’t Miss Russell consult me about her bad knee?”

“Bad knee,” said Caroline. “Fiddlesticks! No more bad knee than you and I. She was after something else.”

“What?” I asked.

Caroline had to admit that she didn’t know.

“But depend upon it, that was what he was trying to144 get at, M. Poirot, I mean. There’s something fishy about that woman, and he knows it.”

“Precisely the remark Mrs. Ackroyd made to me yesterday,” I said. “That there was something fishy about Miss Russell.”

“Ah!” said Caroline darkly, “Mrs. Ackroyd! There’s another!”

“Another what?”

Caroline refused to explain her remarks. She merely nodded her head several times, rolled up her knitting, and went upstairs to don the high mauve silk blouse and the gold locket which she calls dressing for dinner.

I stayed there staring into the fire and thinking over Caroline’s words. Had Poirot really come to gain information about Miss Russell, or was it only Caroline’s tortuous mind that interpreted everything according to her own ideas?

There had certainly been nothing in Miss Russell’s manner that morning to arouse suspicion. At least——

I remembered her persistent conversation on the subject of drug-taking and from that she had led the conversation to poisons and poisoning. But there was nothing in that. Ackroyd had not been poisoned. Still, it was odd….

I heard Caroline’s voice, rather acid in note, calling from the top of the stairs.

“James, you will be late for dinner.”

I put some coal on the fire and went upstairs obediently.

It is well at any price to have peace in the home.

---

145

CHAPTER XII

ROUND THE TABLE

A joint inquest was held on Monday.

I do not propose to give the proceedings in detail. To do so would only be to go over the same ground again and again. By arrangement with the police, very little was allowed to come out. I gave evidence as to the cause of Ackroyd’s death and the probable time. The absence of Ralph Paton was commented on by the coroner, but not unduly stressed.

Afterwards, Poirot and I had a few words with Inspector Raglan. The inspector was very grave.

“It looks bad, Mr. Poirot,” he said. “I’m trying to judge the thing fair and square. I’m a local man, and I’ve seen Captain Paton many times in Cranchester. I’m not wanting him to be the guilty one—but it’s bad whichever way you look at it. If he’s innocent, why doesn’t he come forward? We’ve got evidence against him, but it’s just possible that that evidence could be explained away. Then why doesn’t he give an explanation?”

A lot more lay behind the inspector’s words than I knew at the time. Ralph’s description had been wired to every port and railway station in England. The police everywhere were on the alert. His rooms in town were watched, and any houses he had been known to be in146 the habit of frequenting. With such a cordon it seemed impossible that Ralph should be able to evade detection. He had no luggage, and, as far as any one knew, no money.

“I can’t find any one who saw him at the station that night,” continued the inspector. “And yet he’s well known down here, and you’d think somebody would have noticed him. There’s no news from Liverpool either.”

“You think he went to Liverpool?” queried Poirot.

“Well, it’s on the cards. That telephone message from the station, just three minutes before the Liverpool express left—there ought to be something in that.”

“Unless it was deliberately intended to throw you off the scent. That might just possibly be the point of the telephone message.”

“That’s an idea,” said the inspector eagerly. “Do you really think that’s the explanation of the telephone call?”

“My friend,” said Poirot gravely, “I do not know. But I will tell you this: I believe that when we find the explanation of that telephone call we shall find the explanation of the murder.”

“You said something like that before, I remember,” I observed, looking at him curiously.

Poirot nodded.

“I always come back to it,” he said seriously.

“It seems to me utterly irrelevant,” I declared.

“I wouldn’t say that,” demurred the inspector. “But I must confess I think Mr. Poirot here harps on it a little too much. We’ve better clews than that. The fingerprints on the dagger, for instance.”

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Poirot became suddenly very foreign in manner, as he often did when excited over anything.

“M. l’Inspecteur,” he said, “beware of the blind—the blind—comment dire?—the little street that has no end to it.”

Inspector Raglan stared, but I was quicker.

“You mean a blind alley?” I said.

“That is it—the blind street that leads nowhere. So it may be with those fingerprints—they may lead you nowhere.”

“I don’t see how that can well be,” said the police officer. “I suppose you’re hinting that they’re faked? I’ve read of such things being done, though I can’t say I’ve ever come across it in my experience. But fake or true—they’re bound to lead somewhere.”

Poirot merely shrugged his shoulders, flinging out his arms wide.

The inspector then showed us various enlarged photographs of the fingerprints, and proceeded to become technical on the subject of loops and whorls.

“Come now,” he said at last, annoyed by Poirot’s detached manner, “you’ve got to admit that those prints were made by some one who was in the house that night?”

“Bien entendu,” said Poirot, nodding his head.

“Well, I’ve taken the prints of every member of the household, every one, mind you, from the old lady down to the kitchenmaid.”

I don’t think Mrs. Ackroyd would enjoy being referred to as the old lady. She must spend a considerable amount on cosmetics.

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“Every one’s,” repeated the inspector fussily.

“Including mine,” I said dryly.

“Very well. None of them correspond. That leaves us two alternatives. Ralph Paton, or the mysterious stranger the doctor here tells us about. When we get hold of those two——”

“Much valuable time may have been lost,” broke in Poirot.

“I don’t quite get you, Mr. Poirot?”

“You have taken the prints of every one in the house, you say,” murmured Poirot. “Is that the exact truth you are telling me there, M. l’Inspecteur?”

“Certainly.”

“Without overlooking any one?”

“Without overlooking any one.”

“The quick or the dead?”

For a moment the inspector looked bewildered at what he took to be a religious observation. Then he reacted slowly.

“You mean——”

“The dead, M. l’Inspecteur.”

The inspector still took a minute or two to understand.

“I am suggesting,” said Poirot placidly, “that the fingerprints on the dagger handle are those of Mr. Ackroyd himself. It is an easy matter to verify. His body is still available.”

“But why? What would be the point of it? You’re surely not suggesting suicide, Mr. Poirot?”

“Ah! no. My theory is that the murderer wore gloves149 or wrapped something round his hand. After the blow was struck, he picked up the victim’s hand and closed it round the dagger handle.”

“But why?”

Poirot shrugged his shoulders again.

“To make a confusing case even more confusing.”

“Well,” said the inspector, “I’ll look into it. What gave you the idea in the first place?”

“When you were so kind as to show me the dagger and draw attention to the fingerprints. I know very little of loops and whorls—see, I confess my ignorance frankly. But it did occur to me that the position of the prints was somewhat awkward. Not so would I have held a dagger in order to strike. Naturally, with the right hand brought up over the shoulder backwards, it would have been difficult to put it in exactly the right position.”

Inspector Raglan stared at the little man. Poirot, with an air of great unconcern, flecked a speck of dust from his coat sleeve.

“Well,” said the inspector, “it’s an idea. I’ll look into it all right, but don’t you be disappointed if nothing comes of it.”

He endeavored to make his tone kindly and patronizing. Poirot watched him go off. Then he turned to me with twinkling eyes.

“Another time,” he observed, “I must be more careful of his amour propre. And now that we are left to our own devices, what do you think, my good friend, of a little reunion of the family?”

The “little reunion,” as Poirot called it, took place150 about half an hour later. We sat round the table in the dining-room at Fernly—Poirot at the head of the table, like the chairman of some ghastly board meeting. The servants were not present, so we were six in all. Mrs. Ackroyd, Flora, Major Blunt, young Raymond, Poirot, and myself.

When every one was assembled, Poirot rose and bowed.

“Messieurs, mesdames, I have called you together for a certain purpose.” He paused. “To begin with, I want to make a very special plea to mademoiselle.”

“To me?” said Flora.

“Mademoiselle, you are engaged to Captain Ralph Paton. If any one is in his confidence, you are. I beg you, most earnestly, if you know of his whereabouts, to persuade him to come forward. One little minute”—as Flora raised her head to speak—“say nothing till you have well reflected. Mademoiselle, his position grows daily more dangerous. If he had come forward at once, no matter how damning the facts, he might have had a chance of explaining them away. But this silence—this flight—what can it mean? Surely only one thing, knowledge of guilt. Mademoiselle, if you really believe in his innocence, persuade him to come forward before it is too late.”

Flora’s face had gone very white.

“Too late!” she repeated, very low.

Poirot leant forward, looking at her.

“See now, mademoiselle,” he said very gently, “it is Papa Poirot who asks you this. The old Papa Poirot who has much knowledge and much experience. I would not151 seek to entrap you, mademoiselle. Will you not trust me—and tell me where Ralph Paton is hiding?”

The girl rose, and stood facing him.

“M. Poirot,” she said in a clear voice, “I swear to you—swear solemnly—that I have no idea where Ralph is, and that I have neither seen him nor heard from him either on the day of—of the murder, or since.”

She sat down again. Poirot gazed at her in silence for a minute or two, then he brought his hand down on the table with a sharp rap.

“Bien! That is that,” he said. His face hardened. “Now I appeal to these others who sit round this table, Mrs. Ackroyd, Major Blunt, Dr. Sheppard, Mr. Raymond. You are all friends and intimates of the missing man. If you know where Ralph Paton is hiding, speak out.”

There was a long silence. Poirot looked to each in turn.

“I beg of you,” he said in a low voice, “speak out.”

But still there was silence, broken at last by Mrs. Ackroyd.

“I must say,” she observed in a plaintive voice, “that Ralph’s absence is most peculiar—most peculiar indeed. Not to come forward at such a time. It looks, you know, as though there were something behind it. I can’t help thinking, Flora dear, that it was a very fortunate thing your engagement was never formally announced.”

“Mother!” cried Flora angrily.

“Providence,” declared Mrs. Ackroyd. “I have a devout152 belief in Providence—a divinity that shapes our ends, as Shakespeare’s beautiful line runs.”

“Surely you don’t make the Almighty directly responsible for thick ankles, Mrs. Ackroyd, do you?” asked Geoffrey Raymond, his irresponsible laugh ringing out.

His idea was, I think, to loosen the tension, but Mrs. Ackroyd threw him a glance of reproach and took out her handkerchief.

“Flora has been saved a terrible amount of notoriety and unpleasantness. Not for a moment that I think dear Ralph had anything to do with poor Roger’s death. I don’t think so. But then I have a trusting heart—I always have had, ever since a child. I am loath to believe the worst of any one. But, of course, one must remember that Ralph was in several air raids as a young boy. The results are apparent long after, sometimes, they say. People are not responsible for their actions in the least. They lose control, you know, without being able to help it.”

“Mother,” cried Flora, “you don’t think Ralph did it?”

“Come, Mrs. Ackroyd,” said Blunt.

“I don’t know what to think,” said Mrs. Ackroyd tearfully. “It’s all very upsetting. What would happen to the estate, I wonder, if Ralph were found guilty?”

Raymond pushed his chair away from the table violently. Major Blunt remained very quiet, looking thoughtfully at her. “Like shell-shock, you know,” said Mrs. Ackroyd obstinately, “and I dare say Roger kept him very short of money—with the best intentions, of course. I can see you are all against me, but I do think153 it is very odd that Ralph has not come forward, and I must say I am thankful Flora’s engagement was never announced formally.”

“It will be to-morrow,” said Flora in a clear voice.

“Flora!” cried her mother, aghast.

Flora had turned to the secretary.

“Will you send the announcement to the Morning Post and the Times, please, Mr. Raymond.”

“If you are sure that it is wise, Miss Ackroyd,” he replied gravely.

She turned impulsively to Blunt.

“You understand,” she said. “What else can I do? As things are, I must stand by Ralph. Don’t you see that I must?”

She looked very searchingly at him, and after a long pause he nodded abruptly.

Mrs. Ackroyd burst out into shrill protests. Flora remained unmoved. Then Raymond spoke.

“I appreciate your motives, Miss Ackroyd. But don’t you think you’re being rather precipitate? Wait a day or two.”

“To-morrow,” said Flora, in a clear voice. “It’s no good, mother, going on like this. Whatever else I am, I’m not disloyal to my friends.”

“M. Poirot,” Mrs. Ackroyd appealed tearfully, “can’t you say anything at all?”

“Nothing to be said,” interpolated Blunt. “She’s doing the right thing. I’ll stand by her through thick and thin.”

Flora held out her hand to him.

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“Thank you, Major Blunt,” she said.

“Mademoiselle,” said Poirot, “will you let an old man congratulate you on your courage and your loyalty? And will you not misunderstand me if I ask you—ask you most solemnly—to postpone the announcement you speak of for at least two days more?”

Flora hesitated.

“I ask it in Ralph Paton’s interests as much as in yours, mademoiselle. You frown. You do not see how that can be. But I assure you that it is so. Pas de blagues. You put the case into my hands—you must not hamper me now.”

Flora paused a few minutes before replying.

“I do not like it,” she said at last, “but I will do what you say.”

She sat down again at the table.

“And now, messieurs et mesdames,” said Poirot rapidly, “I will continue with what I was about to say. Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it. I am much aged, my powers may not be what they were.” Here he clearly expected a contradiction. “In all probability this is the last case I shall ever investigate. But Hercule Poirot does not end with a failure. Messieurs et mesdames, I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know—in spite of you all.”

He brought out the last words provocatively, hurling them in our face as it were. I think we all flinched back a little, excepting Geoffrey Raymond, who remained good humored and imperturbable as usual.

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“How do you mean—in spite of us all?” he asked, with slightly raised eyebrows.

“But—just that, monsieur. Every one of you in this room is concealing something from me.” He raised his hand as a faint murmur of protest arose. “Yes, yes, I know what I am saying. It may be something unimportant—trivial—which is supposed to have no bearing on the case, but there it is. Each one of you has something to hide. Come, now, am I right?”

His glance, challenging and accusing, swept round the table. And every pair of eyes dropped before his. Yes, mine as well.

“I am answered,” said Poirot, with a curious laugh. He got up from his seat. “I appeal to you all. Tell me the truth—the whole truth.” There was a silence. “Will no one speak?”

He gave the same short laugh again.

“C’est dommage,” he said, and went out.

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156

CHAPTER XIII

THE GOOSE QUILL

That evening, at Poirot’s request, I went over to his house after dinner. Caroline saw me depart with visible reluctance. I think she would have liked to have accompanied me.

Poirot greeted me hospitably. He had placed a bottle of Irish whisky (which I detest) on a small table, with a soda water siphon and a glass. He himself was engaged in brewing hot chocolate. It was a favorite beverage of his, I discovered later.

He inquired politely after my sister, whom he declared to be a most interesting woman.

“I’m afraid you’ve been giving her a swelled head,” I said dryly. “What about Sunday afternoon?”

He laughed and twinkled.

“I always like to employ the expert,” he remarked obscurely, but he refused to explain the remark.

“You got all the local gossip anyway,” I remarked. “True, and untrue.”

“And a great deal of valuable information,” he added quietly.

“Such as——?”

He shook his head.

“Why not have told me the truth?” he countered.157 “In a place like this, all Ralph Paton’s doings were bound to be known. If your sister had not happened to pass through the wood that day somebody else would have done so.”

“I suppose they would,” I said grumpily. “What about this interest of yours in my patients?”

Again he twinkled.

“Only one of them, doctor. Only one of them.”

“The last?” I hazarded.

“I find Miss Russell a study of the most interesting,” he said evasively.

“Do you agree with my sister and Mrs. Ackroyd that there is something fishy about her?” I asked.

“Eh? What do you say—fishy?”

I explained to the best of my ability.

“And they say that, do they?”

“Didn’t my sister convey as much to you yesterday afternoon?”

“C’est possible.”

“For no reason whatever,” I declared.

“Les femmes,” generalized Poirot. “They are marvelous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.”

He swelled his chest out importantly, looking so ridiculous, that I found it difficult not to burst out laughing.158 Then he took a small sip of his chocolate, and carefully wiped his mustache.

“I wish you’d tell me,” I burst out, “what you really think of it all?”

He put down his cup.

“You wish that?”

“I do.”

“You have seen what I have seen. Should not our ideas be the same?”

“I’m afraid you’re laughing at me,” I said stiffly. “Of course, I’ve no experience of matters of this kind.”

Poirot smiled at me indulgently.

“You are like the little child who wants to know the way the engine works. You wish to see the affair, not as the family doctor sees it, but with the eye of a detective who knows and cares for no one—to whom they are all strangers and all equally liable to suspicion.”

“You put it very well,” I said.

“So I give you then, a little lecture. The first thing is to get a clear history of what happened that evening—always bearing in mind that the person who speaks may be lying.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Rather a suspicious attitude.”

“But necessary—I assure you, necessary. Now first—Dr. Sheppard leaves the house at ten minutes to nine. How do I know that?”

“Because I told you so.”

“But you might not be speaking the truth—or the watch you went by might be wrong. But Parker also says159 that you left the house at ten minutes to nine. So we accept that statement and pass on. At nine o’clock you run into a man—and here we come to what we will call the Romance of the Mysterious Stranger—just outside the Park gates. How do I know that that is so?”

“I told you so,” I began again, but Poirot interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.

“Ah! but it is that you are a little stupid to-night, my friend. You know that it is so—but how am I to know? Eh bien, I am able to tell you that the Mysterious Stranger was not a hallucination on your part, because the maid of a Miss Ganett met him a few minutes before you did, and of her too he inquired the way to Fernly Park. We accept his presence, therefore, and we can be fairly sure of two things about him—that he was a stranger to the neighborhood, and that whatever his object in going to Fernly, there was no great secrecy about it, since he twice asked the way there.”

“Yes,” I said, “I see that.”

“Now I have made it my business to find out more about this man. He had a drink at the Three Boars, I learn, and the barmaid there says that he spoke with an American accent and mentioned having just come over from the States. Did it strike you that he had an American accent?”

“Yes, I think he had,” I said, after a minute or two, during which I cast my mind back; “but a very slight one.”

“Précisément. There is also this which, you will remember, I picked up in the summer-house?”

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He held out to me the little quill. I looked at it curiously. Then a memory of something I had read stirred in me.

Poirot, who had been watching my face, nodded.

“Yes, heroin ‘snow.’ Drug-takers carry it like this, and sniff it up the nose.”

“Diamorphine hydrochloride,” I murmured mechanically.

“This method of taking the drug is very common on the other side. Another proof, if we wanted one, that the man came from Canada or the States.”

“What first attracted your attention to that summer-house?” I asked curiously.

“My friend the inspector took it for granted that any one using that path did so as a short cut to the house, but as soon as I saw the summer-house, I realized that the same path would be taken by any one using the summer-house as a rendezvous. Now it seems fairly certain that the stranger came neither to the front nor to the back door. Then did some one from the house go out and meet him? If so, what could be a more convenient place than that little summer-house? I searched it with the hope that I might find some clew inside. I found two, the scrap of cambric and the quill.”

“And the scrap of cambric?” I asked curiously. “What about that?”

Poirot raised his eyebrows.

“You do not use your little gray cells,” he remarked dryly. “The scrap of starched cambric should be obvious.”

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“Not very obvious to me.” I changed the subject. “Anyway,” I said, “this man went to the summer-house to meet somebody. Who was that somebody?”

“Exactly the question,” said Poirot. “You will remember that Mrs. Ackroyd and her daughter came over from Canada to live here?”

“Is that what you meant to-day when you accused them of hiding the truth?”

“Perhaps. Now another point. What did you think of the parlormaid’s story?”

“What story?”

“The story of her dismissal. Does it take half an hour to dismiss a servant? Was the story of those important papers a likely one? And remember, though she says she was in her bedroom from nine-thirty until ten o’clock, there is no one to confirm her statement.”

“You bewilder me,” I said.

“To me it grows clearer. But tell me now your own ideas and theories.”

I drew a piece of paper from my pocket.

“I just scribbled down a few suggestions,” I said apologetically.

“But excellent—you have method. Let us hear them.”

I read out in a somewhat embarrassed voice.

“To begin with, one must look at the thing logically——”

“Just what my poor Hastings used to say,” interrupted Poirot, “but alas! he never did so.”

“Point No. 1.—Mr. Ackroyd was heard talking to some one at half-past nine.

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“Point No. 2.—At some time during the evening Ralph Paton must have come in through the window, as evidenced by the prints of his shoes.

“Point No. 3.—Mr. Ackroyd was nervous that evening, and would only have admitted some one he knew.

“Point No. 4.—The person with Mr. Ackroyd at nine-thirty was asking for money. We know Ralph Paton was in a scrape.

“These four points go to show that the person with Mr. Ackroyd at nine-thirty was Ralph Paton. But we know that Mr. Ackroyd was alive at a quarter to ten, therefore it was not Ralph who killed him. Ralph left the window open. Afterwards the murderer came in that way.”

“And who was the murderer?” inquired Poirot.

“The American stranger. He may have been in league with Parker, and possibly in Parker we have the man who blackmailed Mrs. Ferrars. If so, Parker may have heard enough to realize the game was up, have told his accomplice so, and the latter did the crime with the dagger which Parker gave him.”

“It is a theory that,” admitted Poirot. “Decidedly you have cells of a kind. But it leaves a good deal unaccounted for.”

“Such as——?”

“The telephone call, the pushed-out chair——”

“Do you really think the latter important?” I interrupted.

“Perhaps not,” admitted my friend. “It may have been pulled out by accident, and Raymond or Blunt may have shoved it into place unconsciously under the stress163 of emotion. Then there is the missing forty pounds.”

“Given by Ackroyd to Ralph,” I suggested. “He may have reconsidered his first refusal.”

“That still leaves one thing unexplained?”

“What?”

“Why was Blunt so certain in his own mind that it was Raymond with Mr. Ackroyd at nine-thirty?”

“He explained that,” I said.

“You think so? I will not press the point. Tell me instead, what were Ralph Paton’s reasons for disappearing?”

“That’s rather more difficult,” I said slowly. “I shall have to speak as a medical man. Ralph’s nerves must have gone phut! If he suddenly found out that his uncle had been murdered within a few minutes of his leaving him—after, perhaps, a rather stormy interview—well, he might get the wind up and clear right out. Men have been known to do that—act guiltily when they’re perfectly innocent.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Poirot. “But we must not lose sight of one thing.”

“I know what you’re going to say,” I remarked: “motive. Ralph Paton inherits a great fortune by his uncle’s death.”

“That is one motive,” agreed Poirot.

“One?”

“Mais oui. Do you realize that there are three separate motives staring us in the face. Somebody certainly stole the blue envelope and its contents. That is one motive. Blackmail! Ralph Paton may have been the164 man who blackmailed Mrs. Ferrars. Remember, as far as Hammond knew, Ralph Paton had not applied to his uncle for help of late. That looks as though he were being supplied with money elsewhere. Then there is the fact that he was in some—how do you say—scrape?—which he feared might get to his uncle’s ears. And finally there is the one you have just mentioned.”

“Dear me,” I said, rather taken aback. “The case does seem black against him.”

“Does it?” said Poirot. “That is where we disagree, you and I. Three motives—it is almost too much. I am inclined to believe that, after all, Ralph Paton is innocent.”

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165

CHAPTER XIV

MRS. ACKROYD

After the evening talk I have just chronicled, the affair seemed to me to enter on a different phase. The whole thing can be divided into two parts, each clear and distinct from the other. Part I. ranges from Ackroyd’s death on the Friday evening to the following Monday night. It is the straight-forward narrative of what occurred, as presented to Hercule Poirot. I was at Poirot’s elbow the whole time. I saw what he saw. I tried my best to read his mind. As I know now, I failed in this latter task. Though Poirot showed me all his discoveries—as, for instance, the gold wedding-ring—he held back the vital and yet logical impressions that he formed. As I came to know later, this secrecy was characteristic of him. He would throw out hints and suggestions, but beyond that he would not go.

As I say, up till the Monday evening, my narrative might have been that of Poirot himself. I played Watson to his Sherlock. But after Monday our ways diverged. Poirot was busy on his own account. I got to hear of what he was doing, because, in King’s Abbot, you get to hear of everything, but he did not take me into his confidence beforehand. And I, too, had my own preoccupations.

166

On looking back, the thing that strikes me most is the piecemeal character of this period. Every one had a hand in the elucidation of the mystery. It was rather like a jig-saw puzzle to which every one contributed their own little piece of knowledge or discovery. But their task ended there. To Poirot alone belongs the renown of fitting those pieces into their correct place.

Some of the incidents seemed at the time irrelevant and unmeaning. There was, for instance, the question of the black boots. But that comes later…. To take things strictly in chronological order, I must begin with the summons from Mrs. Ackroyd.

She sent for me early on Tuesday morning, and since the summons sounded an urgent one, I hastened there, expecting to find her in extremis.

The lady was in bed. So much did she concede to the etiquette of the situation. She gave me her bony hand, and indicated a chair drawn up to the bedside.

“Well, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said, “and what’s the matter with you?”

I spoke with that kind of spurious geniality which seems to be expected of general practitioners.

“I’m prostrated,” said Mrs. Ackroyd in a faint voice. “Absolutely prostrated. It’s the shock of poor Roger’s death. They say these things often aren’t felt at the time, you know. It’s the reaction afterwards.”

It is a pity that a doctor is precluded by his profession from being able sometimes to say what he really thinks.

I would have given anything to be able to answer “Bunkum!”

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Instead, I suggested a tonic. Mrs. Ackroyd accepted the tonic. One move in the game seemed now to be concluded. Not for a moment did I imagine that I had been sent for because of the shock occasioned by Ackroyd’s death. But Mrs. Ackroyd is totally incapable of pursuing a straight-forward course on any subject. She always approaches her object by tortuous means. I wondered very much why it was she had sent for me.

“And then that scene—yesterday,” continued my patient.

She paused as though expecting me to take up a cue.

“What scene?”

“Doctor, how can you? Have you forgotten? That dreadful little Frenchman—or Belgian—or whatever he is. Bullying us all like he did. It has quite upset me. Coming on top of Roger’s death.”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said.

“I don’t know what he meant—shouting at us like he did. I should hope I know my duty too well to dream of concealing anything. I have given the police every assistance in my power.”

Mrs. Ackroyd paused, and I said, “Quite so.” I was beginning to have a glimmering of what all the trouble was about.

“No one can say that I have failed in my duty,” continued Mrs. Ackroyd. “I am sure Inspector Raglan is perfectly satisfied. Why should this little upstart of a foreigner make a fuss? A most ridiculous-looking creature he is too—just like a comic Frenchman in a revue. I can’t think why Flora insisted on bringing him into the168 case. She never said a word to me about it. Just went off and did it on her own. Flora is too independent. I am a woman of the world and her mother. She should have come to me for advice first.”

I listened to all this in silence.

“What does he think? That’s what I want to know. Does he actually imagine I’m hiding something? He—he—positively accused me yesterday.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“It is surely of no consequence, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said. “Since you are not concealing anything, any remarks he may have made do not apply to you.”

Mrs. Ackroyd went off at a tangent, after her usual fashion.

“Servants are so tiresome,” she said. “They gossip, and talk amongst themselves. And then it gets round—and all the time there’s probably nothing in it at all.”

“Have the servants been talking?” I asked. “What about?”

Mrs. Ackroyd cast a very shrewd glance at me. It quite threw me off my balance.

“I was sure you’d know, doctor, if any one did. You were with M. Poirot all the time, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Then of course you know. It was that girl, Ursula Bourne, wasn’t it? Naturally—she’s leaving. She would want to make all the trouble she could. Spiteful, that’s what they are. They’re all alike. Now, you being there, doctor, you must know exactly what she did say? I’m most anxious that no wrong impression should get about.169 After all, you don’t repeat every little detail to the police, do you? There are family matters sometimes—nothing to do with the question of the murder. But if the girl was spiteful, she may have made out all sorts of things.”

I was shrewd enough to see that a very real anxiety lay behind these outpourings. Poirot had been justified in his premises. Of the six people round the table yesterday, Mrs. Ackroyd at least had had something to hide. It was for me to discover what that something might be.

“If I were you, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said brusquely, “I should make a clean breast of things.”

She gave a little scream.

“Oh! doctor, how can you be so abrupt. It sounds as though—as though——And I can explain everything so simply.”

“Then why not do so,” I suggested.

Mrs. Ackroyd took out a frilled handkerchief, and became tearful.

“I thought, doctor, that you might put it to M. Poirot—explain it, you know—because it’s so difficult for a foreigner to see our point of view. And you don’t know—nobody could know—what I’ve had to contend with. A martyrdom—a long martyrdom. That’s what my life has been. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead—but there it is. Not the smallest bill, but it had all to be gone over—just as though Roger had had a few miserly hundreds a year instead of being (as Mr. Hammond told me yesterday) one of the wealthiest men in these parts.”

Mrs. Ackroyd paused to dab her eyes with the frilled handkerchief.

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“Yes,” I said encouragingly. “You were talking about bills?”

“Those dreadful bills. And some I didn’t like to show Roger at all. They were things a man wouldn’t understand. He would have said the things weren’t necessary. And of course they mounted up, you know, and they kept coming in——”

She looked at me appealingly, as though asking me to condole with her on this striking peculiarity.

“It’s a habit they have,” I agreed.

“And the tone altered—became quite abusive. I assure you, doctor, I was becoming a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep at nights. And a dreadful fluttering round the heart. And then I got a letter from a Scotch gentleman—as a matter of fact there were two letters—both Scotch gentlemen. Mr. Bruce MacPherson was one, and the other were Colin MacDonald. Quite a coincidence.”

“Hardly that,” I said dryly. “They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.”

“Ten pounds to ten thousand on note of hand alone,” murmured Mrs. Ackroyd reminiscently. “I wrote to one of them, but it seemed there were difficulties.”

She paused.

I gathered that we were just coming to delicate ground. I have never known any one more difficult to bring to the point.

“You see,” murmured Mrs. Ackroyd, “it’s all a question of expectations, isn’t it? Testamentary expectations. And though, of course, I expected that Roger171 would provide for me, I didn’t know. I thought that if only I could glance over a copy of his will—not in any sense of vulgar prying—but just so that I could make my own arrangements.”

She glanced sideways at me. The position was now very delicate indeed. Fortunately words, ingeniously used, will serve to mask the ugliness of naked facts.

“I could only tell this to you, dear Dr. Sheppard,” said Mrs. Ackroyd rapidly. “I can trust you not to misjudge me, and to represent the matter in the right light to M. Poirot. It was on Friday afternoon——”

She came to a stop and swallowed uncertainly.

“Yes,” I repeated encouragingly. “On Friday afternoon. Well?”

“Every one was out, or so I thought. And I went into Roger’s study—I had some real reason for going there—I mean, there was nothing underhand about it. And as I saw all the papers heaped on the desk, it just came to me, like a flash: ‘I wonder if Roger keeps his will in one of the drawers of the desk.’ I’m so impulsive, always was, from a child. I do things on the spur of the moment. He’d left his keys—very careless of him—in the lock of the top drawer.”

“I see,” I said helpfully. “So you searched the desk. Did you find the will?”

Mrs. Ackroyd gave a little scream, and I realized that I had not been sufficiently diplomatic.

“How dreadful it sounds. But it wasn’t at all like that really.”

172

“Of course it wasn’t,” I said hastily. “You must forgive my unfortunate way of putting things.”

“You see, men are so peculiar. In dear Roger’s place, I should not have objected to revealing the provisions of my will. But men are so secretive. One is forced to adopt little subterfuges in self-defence.”

“And the result of the little subterfuge?” I asked.

“That’s just what I’m telling you. As I got to the bottom drawer, Bourne came in. Most awkward. Of course I shut the drawer and stood up, and I called her attention to a few specks of dust on the surface. But I didn’t like the way she looked—quite respectful in manner, but a very nasty light in her eyes. Almost contemptuous, if you know what I mean. I never have liked that girl very much. She’s a good servant, and she says Ma’am, and doesn’t object to wearing caps and aprons (which I declare to you a lot of them do nowadays), and she can say ‘Not at home’ without scruples if she has to answer the door instead of Parker, and she doesn’t have those peculiar gurgling noises inside which so many parlormaids seem to have when they wait at table——Let me see, where was I?”

“You were saying, that in spite of several valuable qualities, you never liked Bourne.”

“No more I do. She’s—odd. There’s something different about her from the others. Too well educated, that’s my opinion. You can’t tell who are ladies and who aren’t nowadays.”

“And what happened next?” I asked.

“Nothing. At least, Roger came in. And I thought173 he was out for a walk. And he said: ‘What’s all this?’ and I said, ‘Nothing. I just came in to fetch Punch.’ And I took Punch and went out with it. Bourne stayed behind. I heard her asking Roger if she could speak to him for a minute. I went straight up to my room, to lie down. I was very upset.”

There was a pause.

“You will explain to M. Poirot, won’t you? You can see for yourself what a trivial matter the whole thing was. But, of course, when he was so stern about concealing things, I thought of this at once. Bourne may have made some extraordinary story out of it, but you can explain, can’t you?”

“That is all?” I said. “You have told me everything?”

“Ye-es,” said Mrs. Ackroyd. “Oh! yes,” she added firmly.

But I had noted the momentary hesitation, and I knew that there was still something she was keeping back. It was nothing less than a flash of sheer genius that prompted me to ask the question I did.

“Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said, “was it you who left the silver table open?”

I had my answer in the blush of guilt that even rouge and powder could not conceal.

“How did you know?” she whispered.

“It was you, then?”

“Yes—I—you see—there were one or two pieces of old silver—very interesting. I had been reading up the subject and there was an illustration of quite a small piece which had fetched an immense sum at Christy’s.174 It looked to me just the same as the one in the silver table. I thought I would take it up to London with me when I went—and—and have it valued. Then if it really was a valuable piece, just think what a charming surprise it would have been for Roger?”

I refrained from comments, accepting Mrs. Ackroyd’s story on its merits. I even forbore to ask her why it was necessary to abstract what she wanted in such a surreptitious manner.

“Why did you leave the lid open?” I asked. “Did you forget?”

“I was startled,” said Mrs. Ackroyd. “I heard footsteps coming along the terrace outside. I hastened out of the room and just got up the stairs before Parker opened the front door to you.”

“That must have been Miss Russell,” I said thoughtfully. Mrs. Ackroyd had revealed to me one fact that was extremely interesting. Whether her designs upon Ackroyd’s silver had been strictly honorable I neither knew nor cared. What did interest me was the fact that Miss Russell must have entered the drawing-room by the window, and that I had not been wrong when I judged her to be out of breath with running. Where had she been? I thought of the summer-house and the scrap of cambric.

“I wonder if Miss Russell has her handkerchiefs starched!” I exclaimed on the spur of the moment.

Mrs. Ackroyd’s start recalled me to myself, and I rose.

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“You think you can explain to M. Poirot?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, certainly. Absolutely.”

I got away at last, after being forced to listen to more justifications of her conduct.

The parlormaid was in the hall, and it was she who helped me on with my overcoat. I observed her more closely than I had done heretofore. It was clear that she had been crying.

“How is it,” I asked, “that you told us that Mr. Ackroyd sent for you on Friday to his study? I hear now that it was you who asked to speak to him?”

For a minute the girl’s eyes dropped before mine.

Then she spoke.

“I meant to leave in any case,” she said uncertainly.

I said no more. She opened the front door for me. Just as I was passing out, she said suddenly in a low voice:—

“Excuse me, sir, is there any news of Captain Paton?”

I shook my head, looking at her inquiringly.

“He ought to come back,” she said. “Indeed—indeed he ought to come back.”

She was looking at me with appealing eyes.

“Does no one know where he is?” she asked.

“Do you?” I said sharply.

She shook her head.

“No, indeed. I know nothing. But any one who was a friend to him would tell him this: he ought to come back.”

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I lingered, thinking that perhaps the girl would say more. Her next question surprised me.

“When do they think the murder was done? Just before ten o’clock?”

“That is the idea,” I said. “Between a quarter to ten and the hour.”

“Not earlier? Not before a quarter to ten?”

I looked at her attentively. She was so clearly eager for a reply in the affirmative.

“That’s out of the question,” I said. “Miss Ackroyd saw her uncle alive at a quarter to ten.”

She turned away, and her whole figure seemed to droop.

“A handsome girl,” I said to myself as I drove off. “An exceedingly handsome girl.”

Caroline was at home. She had had a visit from Poirot and was very pleased and important about it.

“I am helping him with the case,” she explained.

I felt rather uneasy. Caroline is bad enough as it is. What will she be like with her detective instincts encouraged?

“Are you going round the neighborhood looking for Ralph Paton’s mysterious girl?” I inquired.

“I might do that on my own account,” said Caroline. “No, this is a special thing M. Poirot wants me to find out for him.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“He wants to know whether Ralph Paton’s boots were black or brown,” said Caroline with tremendous solemnity.

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I stared at her. I see now that I was unbelievably stupid about these boots. I failed altogether to grasp the point.

“They were brown shoes,” I said. “I saw them.”

“Not shoes, James, boots. M. Poirot wants to know whether a pair of boots Ralph had with him at the hotel were brown or black. A lot hangs on it.”

Call me dense if you like. I didn’t see.

“And how are you going to find out?” I asked.

Caroline said there would be no difficulty about that. Our Annie’s dearest friend was Miss Ganett’s maid, Clara. And Clara was walking out with the boots at the Three Boars. The whole thing was simplicity itself, and by the aid of Miss Ganett, who coöperated loyally, at once giving Clara leave of absence, the matter was rushed through at express speed.

It was when we were sitting down to lunch that Caroline remarked, with would-be unconcern:—

“About those boots of Ralph Paton’s.”

“Well,” I said, “what about them?”

“M. Poirot thought they were probably brown. He was wrong. They’re black.”

And Caroline nodded her head several times. She evidently felt that she had scored a point over Poirot.

I did not answer. I was puzzling over what the color of a pair of Ralph Paton’s boots had to do with the case.

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178

CHAPTER XV

GEOFFREY RAYMOND

I was to have a further proof that day of the success of Poirot’s tactics. That challenge of his had been a subtle touch born of his knowledge of human nature. A mixture of fear and guilt had wrung the truth from Mrs. Ackroyd. She was the first to react.

That afternoon when I returned from seeing my patients, Caroline told me that Geoffrey Raymond had just left.

“Did he want to see me?” I asked, as I hung up my coat in the hall.

Caroline was hovering by my elbow.

“It was M. Poirot he wanted to see,” she said. “He’d just come from The Larches. M. Poirot was out. Mr. Raymond thought that he might be here, or that you might know where he was.”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“I tried to make him wait,” said Caroline, “but he said he would call back at The Larches in half an hour, and went away down the village. A great pity, because M. Poirot came in practically the minute after he left.”

“Came in here?”

“No, to his own house.”

“How do you know?”

“The side window,” said Caroline briefly.

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It seemed to me that we had now exhausted the topic. Caroline thought otherwise.

“Aren’t you going across?”

“Across where?”

“To The Larches, of course.”

“My dear Caroline,” I said, “what for?”

“Mr. Raymond wanted to see him very particularly,” said Caroline. “You might hear what it’s all about.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Curiosity is not my besetting sin,” I remarked coldly. “I can exist comfortably without knowing exactly what my neighbors are doing and thinking.”

“Stuff and nonsense, James,” said my sister. “You want to know just as much as I do. You’re not so honest, that’s all. You always have to pretend.”

“Really, Caroline,” I said, and retired into my surgery.

Ten minutes later Caroline tapped at the door and entered. In her hand she held what seemed to be a pot of jam.

“I wonder, James,” she said, “if you would mind taking this pot of medlar jelly across to M. Poirot? I promised it to him. He has never tasted any home-made medlar jelly.”

“Why can’t Annie go?” I asked coldly.

“She’s doing some mending. I can’t spare her.”

Caroline and I looked at each other.

“Very well,” I said, rising. “But if I take the beastly thing, I shall just leave it at the door. You understand that?”

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My sister raised her eyebrows.

“Naturally,” she said. “Who suggested you should do anything else?”

The honors were with Caroline.

“If you do happen to see M. Poirot,” she said, as I opened the front door, “you might tell him about the boots.”

It was a most subtle parting shot. I wanted dreadfully to understand the enigma of the boots. When the old lady with the Breton cap opened the door to me, I found myself asking if M. Poirot was in, quite automatically.

Poirot sprang up to meet me, with every appearance of pleasure.

“Sit down, my good friend,” he said. “The big chair? This small one? The room is not too hot, no?”

I thought it was stifling, but refrained from saying so. The windows were closed, and a large fire burned in the grate.

“The English people, they have a mania for the fresh air,” declared Poirot. “The big air, it is all very well outside, where it belongs. Why admit it to the house? But let us not discuss such banalities. You have something for me, yes?”

“Two things,” I said. “First—this—from my sister.”

I handed over the pot of medlar jelly.

“How kind of Mademoiselle Caroline. She has remembered her promise. And the second thing?”

“Information—of a kind.”

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And I told him of my interview with Mrs. Ackroyd. He listened with interest, but not much excitement.

“It clears the ground,” he said thoughtfully. “And it has a certain value as confirming the evidence of the housekeeper. She said, you remember, that she found the silver table lid open and closed it down in passing.”

“What about her statement that she went into the drawing-room to see if the flowers were fresh?”

“Ah! we never took that very seriously, did we, my friend? It was patently an excuse, trumped up in a hurry, by a woman who felt it urgent to explain her presence—which, by the way, you would probably never have thought of questioning. I considered it possible that her agitation might arise from the fact that she had been tampering with the silver table, but I think now that we must look for another cause.”

“Yes,” I said. “Whom did she go out to meet? And why?”

“You think she went to meet some one?”

“I do.”

Poirot nodded.

“So do I,” he said thoughtfully.

There was a pause.

“By the way,” I said, “I’ve got a message for you from my sister. Ralph Paton’s boots were black, not brown.”

I was watching him closely as I gave the message, and I fancied that I saw a momentary flicker of discomposure. If so, it passed almost immediately.

“She is absolutely positive they are not brown?”

“Absolutely.”

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“Ah!” said Poirot regretfully. “That is a pity.”

And he seemed quite crestfallen.

He entered into no explanations, but at once started a new subject of conversation.

“The housekeeper, Miss Russell, who came to consult you on that Friday morning—is it indiscreet to ask what passed at the interview—apart from the medical details, I mean?”

“Not at all,” I said. “When the professional part of the conversation was over, we talked for a few minutes about poisons, and the ease or difficulty of detecting them, and about drug-taking and drug-takers.”

“With special reference to cocaine?” asked Poirot.

“How did you know?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

For answer, the little man rose and crossed the room to where newspapers were filed. He brought me a copy of the Daily Budget, dated Friday, 16th September, and showed me an article dealing with the smuggling of cocaine. It was a somewhat lurid article, written with an eye to picturesque effect.

“That is what put cocaine into her head, my friend,” he said.

I would have catechized him further, for I did not quite understand his meaning, but at that moment the door opened and Geoffrey Raymond was announced.

He came in fresh and debonair as ever, and greeted us both.

“How are you, doctor? M. Poirot, this is the second time I’ve been here this morning. I was anxious to catch you.”

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“Perhaps I’d better be off,” I suggested rather awkwardly.

“Not on my account, doctor. No, it’s just this,” he went on, seating himself at a wave of invitation from Poirot, “I’ve got a confession to make.”

“En verité?” said Poirot, with an air of polite interest.

“Oh, it’s of no consequence, really. But, as a matter of fact, my conscience has been pricking me ever since yesterday afternoon. You accused us all of keeping back something, M. Poirot. I plead guilty. I’ve had something up my sleeve.”

“And what is that, M. Raymond?”

“As I say, it’s nothing of consequence—just this. I was in debt—badly, and that legacy came in the nick of time. Five hundred pounds puts me on my feet again with a little to spare.”

He smiled at us both with that engaging frankness that made him such a likable youngster.

“You know how it is. Suspicious looking policeman—don’t like to admit you were hard up for money—think it will look bad to them. But I was a fool, really, because Blunt and I were in the billiard room from a quarter to ten onwards, so I’ve got a watertight alibi and nothing to fear. Still, when you thundered out that stuff about concealing things, I felt a nasty prick of conscience, and I thought I’d like to get it off my mind.”

He got up again and stood smiling at us.

“You are a very wise young man,” said Poirot, nodding at him with approval. “See you, when I know that184 any one is hiding things from me, I suspect that the thing hidden may be something very bad indeed. You have done well.”

“I’m glad I’m cleared from suspicion,” laughed Raymond. “I’ll be off now.”

“So that is that,” I remarked, as the door closed behind the young secretary.

“Yes,” agreed Poirot. “A mere bagatelle—but if he had not been in the billiard room—who knows? After all, many crimes have been committed for the sake of less than five hundred pounds. It all depends on what sum is sufficient to break a man. A question of the relativity, is it not so? Have you reflected, my friend, that many people in that house stood to benefit by Mr. Ackroyd’s death? Mrs. Ackroyd, Miss Flora, young Mr. Raymond, the housekeeper, Miss Russell. Only one, in fact, does not, Major Blunt.”

His tone in uttering that name was so peculiar that I looked up, puzzled.

“I don’t quite understand you?” I said.

“Two of the people I accused have given me the truth.”

“You think Major Blunt has something to conceal also?”

“As for that,” remarked Poirot nonchalantly, “there is a saying, is there not, that Englishmen conceal only one thing—their love? And Major Blunt, I should say, is not good at concealments.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “I wonder if we haven’t rather jumped to conclusions on one point.”

“What is that?”

185

“We’ve assumed that the blackmailer of Mrs. Ferrars is necessarily the murderer of Mr. Ackroyd. Mightn’t we be mistaken?”

Poirot nodded energetically.

“Very good. Very good indeed. I wondered if that idea would come to you. Of course it is possible. But we must remember one point. The letter disappeared. Still, that, as you say, may not necessarily mean that the murderer took it. When you first found the body, Parker may have abstracted the letter unnoticed by you.”

“Parker?”

“Yes, Parker. I always come back to Parker—not as the murderer—no, he did not commit the murder; but who is more suitable than he as the mysterious scoundrel who terrorized Mrs. Ferrars? He may have got his information about Mr. Ferrars’s death from one of the King’s Paddock servants. At any rate, he is more likely to have come upon it than a casual guest such as Blunt, for instance.”

“Parker might have taken the letter,” I admitted. “It wasn’t till later that I noticed it was gone.”

“How much later? After Blunt and Raymond were in the room, or before?”

“I can’t remember,” I said slowly. “I think it was before—no, afterwards. Yes, I’m almost sure it was afterwards.”

“That widens the field to three,” said Poirot thoughtfully. “But Parker is the most likely. It is in my mind to try a little experiment with Parker. How say you, my friend, will you accompany me to Fernly?”

186

I acquiesced, and we set out at once. Poirot asked to see Miss Ackroyd, and presently Flora came to us.

“Mademoiselle Flora,” said Poirot, “I have to confide in you a little secret. I am not yet satisfied of the innocence of Parker. I propose to make a little experiment with your assistance. I want to reconstruct some of his actions on that night. But we must think of something to tell him—ah! I have it. I wish to satisfy myself as to whether voices in the little lobby could have been heard outside on the terrace. Now, ring for Parker, if you will be so good.”

I did so, and presently the butler appeared, suave as ever.

“You rang, sir?”

“Yes, my good Parker. I have in mind a little experiment. I have placed Major Blunt on the terrace outside the study window. I want to see if any one there could have heard the voices of Miss Ackroyd and yourself in the lobby that night. I want to enact that little scene over again. Perhaps you would fetch the tray or whatever it was you were carrying?”

Parker vanished, and we repaired to the lobby outside the study door. Presently we heard a chink in the outer hall, and Parker appeared in the doorway carrying a tray with a siphon, a decanter of whisky, and two glasses on it.

“One moment,” cried Poirot, raising his hand and seemingly very excited. “We must have everything in order. Just as it occurred. It is a little method of mine.”

187

“A foreign custom, sir,” said Parker. “Reconstruction of the crime they call it, do they not?”

He was quite imperturbable as he stood there politely waiting on Poirot’s orders.

“Ah! he knows something, the good Parker,” cried Poirot. “He has read of these things. Now, I beg you, let us have everything of the most exact. You came from the outer hall—so. Mademoiselle was—where?”

“Here,” said Flora, taking up her stand just outside the study door.

“Quite right, sir,” said Parker.

“I had just closed the door,” continued Flora.

“Yes, miss,” agreed Parker. “Your hand was still on the handle as it is now.”

“Then allez,” said Poirot. “Play me the little comedy.”

Flora stood with her hand on the door handle, and Parker came stepping through the door from the hall, bearing the tray.

He stopped just inside the door. Flora spoke.

“Oh! Parker. Mr. Ackroyd doesn’t want to be disturbed again to-night.”

“Is that right?” she added in an undertone.

“To the best of my recollection, Miss Flora,” said Parker, “but I fancy you used the word evening instead of night.” Then, raising his voice in a somewhat theatrical fashion: “Very good, miss. Shall I lock up as usual?”

“Yes, please.”

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Parker retired through the door, Flora followed him, and started to ascend the main staircase.

“Is that enough?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Admirable,” declared the little man, rubbing his hands. “By the way, Parker, are you sure there were two glasses on the tray that evening? Who was the second one for?”

“I always bring two glasses, sir,” said Parker. “Is there anything further?”

“Nothing. I thank you.”

Parker withdrew, dignified to the last.

Poirot stood in the middle of the hall frowning. Flora came down and joined us.

“Has your experiment been successful?” she asked. “I don’t quite understand, you know——”

Poirot smiled admiringly at her.

“It is not necessary that you should,” he said. “But tell me, were there indeed two glasses on Parker’s tray that night?”

Flora wrinkled her brows a minute.

“I really can’t remember,” she said. “I think there were. Is—is that the object of your experiment?”

Poirot took her hand and patted it.

“Put it this way,” he said. “I am always interested to see if people will speak the truth.”

“And did Parker speak the truth?”

“I rather think he did,” said Poirot thoughtfully.

A few minutes later saw us retracing our steps to the village.

189

“What was the point of that question about the glasses?” I asked curiously.

Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

“One must say something,” he remarked. “That particular question did as well as any other.”

I stared at him.

“At any rate, my friend,” he said more seriously, “I know now something I wanted to know. Let us leave it at that.”

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190

CHAPTER XVI

AN EVENING AT MAH JONG

That night we had a little Mah Jong party. This kind of simple entertainment is very popular in King’s Abbot. The guests arrive in goloshes and waterproofs after dinner. They partake of coffee and later of cake, sandwiches, and tea.

On this particular night our guests were Miss Ganett, and Colonel Carter, who lives near the church. A good deal of gossip is handed round at these evenings, sometimes seriously interfering with the game in progress. We used to play bridge—chatty bridge of the worst description. We find Mah Jong much more peaceful. The irritated demand as to why on earth your partner did not lead a certain card is entirely done away with, and though we still express criticisms frankly, there is not the same acrimonious spirit.

“Very cold evening, eh, Sheppard?” said Colonel Carter, standing with his back to the fire. Caroline had taken Miss Ganett to her own room, and was there assisting her to disentangle herself from her many wraps. “Reminds me of the Afghan passes.”

“Indeed?” I said politely.

“Very mysterious business this about poor Ackroyd,” continued the colonel, accepting a cup of coffee. “A191 deuce of a lot behind it—that’s what I say. Between you and me, Sheppard, I’ve heard the word blackmail mentioned!”

The colonel gave me the look which might be tabulated “one man of the world to another.”

“A woman in it, no doubt,” he said. “Depend upon it, a woman in it.”

Caroline and Miss Ganett joined us at this minute. Miss Ganett drank coffee whilst Caroline got out the Mah Jong box and poured out the tiles upon the table.

“Washing the tiles,” said the colonel facetiously. “That’s right—washing the tiles, as we used to say in the Shanghai Club.”

It is the private opinion of both Caroline and myself that Colonel Carter has never been in the Shanghai Club in his life. More, that he has never been farther east than India, where he juggled with tins of bully beef and plum and apple jam during the Great War. But the colonel is determinedly military, and in King’s Abbot we permit people to indulge their little idiosyncrasies freely.

“Shall we begin?” said Caroline.

We sat round the table. For some five minutes there was complete silence, owing to the fact that there is tremendous secret competition amongst us as to who can build their wall quickest.

“Go on, James,” said Caroline at last. “You’re East Wind.”

I discarded a tile. A round or two proceeded, broken by the monotonous remarks of “Three Bamboos,” “Two Circles,” “Pung,” and frequently from Miss Ganett “Unpung,”192 owing to that lady’s habit of too hastily claiming tiles to which she had no right.

“I saw Flora Ackroyd this morning,” said Miss Ganett. “Pung—no—Unpung. I made a mistake.”

“Four Circles,” said Caroline. “Where did you see her?”

“She didn’t see me,” said Miss Ganett, with that tremendous significance only to be met with in small villages.

“Ah!” said Caroline interestedly. “Chow.”

“I believe,” said Miss Ganett, temporarily diverted, “that it’s the right thing nowadays to say ‘Chee’ not ‘Chow.’”

“Nonsense,” said Caroline. “I have always said ‘Chow.’”

“In the Shanghai Club,” said Colonel Carter, “they say ‘Chow.’”

Miss Ganett retired, crushed.

“What were you saying about Flora Ackroyd?” asked Caroline, after a moment or two devoted to the game. “Was she with any one?”

“Very much so,” said Miss Ganett.

The eyes of the two ladies met, and seemed to exchange information.

“Really,” said Caroline interestedly. “Is that it? Well, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

“We’re waiting for you to discard, Miss Caroline,” said the colonel. He sometimes affects the pose of the bluff male, intent on the game and indifferent to gossip. But nobody is deceived.

193

“If you ask me,” said Miss Ganett. (“Was that a Bamboo you discarded, dear? Oh! no, I see now—it was a Circle.) As I was saying, if you ask me, Flora’s been exceedingly lucky. Exceedingly lucky she’s been.”

“How’s that, Miss Ganett?” asked the colonel. “I’ll Pung that Green Dragon. How do you make out that Miss Flora’s been lucky? Very charming girl and all that, I know.”

“I mayn’t know very much about crime,” said Miss Ganett, with the air of one who knows everything there is to know, “but I can tell you one thing. The first question that’s always asked is ‘Who last saw the deceased alive?’ And the person who did is regarded with suspicion. Now, Flora Ackroyd last saw her uncle alive. It might have looked very nasty for her—very nasty indeed. It’s my opinion—and I give it for what it’s worth, that Ralph Paton is staying away on her account, to draw suspicion away from her.”

“Come, now,” I protested mildly, “you surely can’t suggest that a young girl like Flora Ackroyd is capable of stabbing her uncle in cold blood?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Ganett. “I’ve just been reading a book from the library about the underworld of Paris, and it says that some of the worst women criminals are young girls with the faces of angels.”

“That’s in France,” said Caroline instantly.

“Just so,” said the colonel. “Now, I’ll tell you a very curious thing—a story that was going round the Bazaars in India….”

The colonel’s story was one of interminable length,194 and of curiously little interest. A thing that happened in India many years ago cannot compare for a moment with an event that took place in King’s Abbot the day before yesterday.

It was Caroline who brought the colonel’s story to a close by fortunately going Mah Jong. After the slight unpleasantness always occasioned by my corrections of Caroline’s somewhat faulty arithmetic, we started a new hand.

“East Wind passes,” said Caroline. “I’ve got an idea of my own about Ralph Paton. Three Characters. But I’m keeping it to myself for the present.”

“Are you, dear?” said Miss Ganett. “Chow—I mean Pung.”

“Yes,” said Caroline firmly.

“Was it all right about the boots?” asked Miss Ganett. “Their being black, I mean?”

“Quite all right,” said Caroline.

“What was the point, do you think?” asked Miss Ganett.

Caroline pursed up her lips, and shook her head with an air of knowing all about it.

“Pung,” said Miss Ganett. “No—Unpung. I suppose that now the doctor’s in with M. Poirot he knows all the secrets?”

“Far from it,” I said.

“James is so modest,” said Caroline. “Ah! a concealed Kong.”

The colonel gave vent to a whistle. For the moment gossip was forgotten.

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“Your own wind, too,” he said. “And you’ve got two Pungs of Dragons. We must be careful. Miss Caroline’s out for a big hand.”

We played for some minutes with no irrelevant conversation.

“This M. Poirot now,” said Colonel Carter, “is he really such a great detective?”

“The greatest the world has ever known,” said Caroline solemnly. “He had to come here incognito to avoid publicity.”

“Chow,” said Miss Ganett. “Quite wonderful for our little village, I’m sure. By the way, Clara—my maid, you know—is great friends with Elsie, the housemaid at Fernly, and what do you think Elsie told her? That there’s been a lot of money stolen, and it’s her opinion—Elsie’s—I mean, that the parlormaid had something to do with it. She’s leaving at the month, and she’s crying a good deal at night. If you ask me, the girl is very likely in league with a gang. She’s always been a queer girl—she’s not friends with any of the girls round here. She goes off by herself on her days out—very unnatural, I call it, and most suspicious. I asked her once to come to our Girls’ Friendly Evenings, but she refused, and then I asked her a few questions about her home and her family—all that sort of thing, and I’m bound to say I considered her manner most impertinent. Outwardly very respectful—but she shut me up in the most barefaced way.”

Miss Ganett stopped for breath, and the colonel, who was totally uninterested in the servant question, remarked196 that in the Shanghai Club brisk play was the invariable rule.

We had a round of brisk play.

“That Miss Russell,” said Caroline. “She came here pretending to consult James on Friday morning. It’s my opinion she wanted to see where the poisons were kept. Five Characters.”

“Chow,” said Miss Ganett. “What an extraordinary idea? I wonder if you can be right.”

“Talking of poisons,” said the colonel. “Eh—what? Haven’t I discarded? Oh! Eight Bamboos.”

“Mah Jong!” said Miss Ganett.

Caroline was very much annoyed.

“One Red Dragon,” she said regretfully, “and I should have had a hand of three doubles.”

“I’ve had two Red Dragons all the time,” I mentioned.

“So exactly like you, James,” said Caroline reproachfully. “You’ve no conception of the spirit of the game.”

I myself thought I had played rather cleverly. I should have had to pay Caroline an enormous amount if she had gone Mah Jong. Miss Ganett’s Mah Jong was of the poorest variety possible, as Caroline did not fail to point out to her.

East Wind passed, and we started a new hand in silence.

“What I was going to tell you just now was this,” said Caroline.

“Yes?” said Miss Ganett encouragingly.

“My idea about Ralph Paton, I mean.”

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“Yes, dear,” said Miss Ganett, still more encouragingly. “Chow!”

“It’s a sign of weakness to Chow so early,” said Caroline severely. “You should go for a big hand.”

“I know,” said Miss Ganett. “You were saying—about Ralph Paton, you know?”

“Yes. Well, I’ve a pretty shrewd idea where he is.”

We all stopped to stare at her.

“This is very interesting, Miss Caroline,” said Colonel Carter. “All your own idea, eh?”

“Well, not exactly. I’ll tell you about it. You know that big map of the county we have in the hall?”

We all said Yes.

“As M. Poirot was going out the other day, he stopped and looked at it, and he made some remark—I can’t remember exactly what it was. Something about Cranchester being the only big town anywhere near us—which is true, of course. But after he had gone—it came to me suddenly.”

“What came to you?”

“His meaning. Of course Ralph is in Cranchester.”

It was at that moment that I knocked down the rack that held my pieces. My sister immediately reproved me for clumsiness, but half-heartedly. She was intent on her theory.

“Cranchester, Miss Caroline?” said Colonel Carter. “Surely not Cranchester! It’s so near.”

“That’s exactly it,” cried Caroline triumphantly. “It seems quite clear by now that he didn’t get away from198 here by train. He must simply have walked into Cranchester. And I believe he’s there still. No one would dream of his being so near at hand.”

I pointed out several objections to the theory, but when once Caroline has got something firmly into her head, nothing dislodges it.

“And you think M. Poirot has the same idea,” said Miss Ganett thoughtfully. “It’s a curious coincidence, but I was out for a walk this afternoon on the Cranchester road, and he passed me in a car coming from that direction.”

We all looked at each other.

“Why, dear me,” said Miss Ganett suddenly, “I’m Mah Jong all the time, and I never noticed it.”

Caroline’s attention was distracted from her own inventive exercises. She pointed out to Miss Ganett that a hand consisting of mixed suits and too many Chows was hardly worth going Mah Jong on. Miss Ganett listened imperturbably and collected her counters.

“Yes, dear, I know what you mean,” she said. “But it rather depends on what kind of a hand you have to start with, doesn’t it?”

“You’ll never get the big hands if you don’t go for them,” urged Caroline.

“Well, we must all play our own way, mustn’t we?” said Miss Ganett. She looked down at her counters. “After all, I’m up, so far.”

Caroline, who was considerably down, said nothing.

East Wind passed, and we set to once more. Annie brought in the tea things. Caroline and Miss Ganett199 were both slightly ruffled as is often the case during one of these festive evenings.

“If you would only play a leetle quicker, dear,” said Caroline, as Miss Ganett hesitated over her discard. “The Chinese put down the tiles so quickly it sounds like little birds pattering.”

For some few minutes we played like the Chinese.

“You haven’t contributed much to the sum of information, Sheppard,” said Colonel Carter genially. “You’re a sly dog. Hand in glove with the great detective, and not a hint as to the way things are going.”

“James is an extraordinary creature,” said Caroline. “He can not bring himself to part with information.”

She looked at me with some disfavor.

“I assure you,” I said, “that I don’t know anything. Poirot keeps his own counsel.”

“Wise man,” said the colonel with a chuckle. “He doesn’t give himself away. But they’re wonderful fellows, these foreign detectives. Up to all sorts of dodges, I believe.”

“Pung,” said Miss Ganett, in a tone of quiet triumph. “And Mah Jong.”

The situation became more strained. It was annoyance at Miss Ganett’s going Mah Jong for the third time running which prompted Caroline to say to me as we built a fresh wall:—

“You are too tiresome, James. You sit there like a dead head, and say nothing at all!”

“But, my dear,” I protested, “I have really nothing to say—that is, of the kind you mean.”

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“Nonsense,” said Caroline, as she sorted her hand. “You must know something interesting.”

I did not answer for a moment. I was overwhelmed and intoxicated. I had read of there being such a thing as the Perfect Winning—going Mah Jong on one’s original hand. I had never hoped to hold the hand myself.

With suppressed triumph I laid my hand face upwards on the table.

“As they say in the Shanghai Club,” I remarked, “Tin-ho—the Perfect Winning!”

The colonel’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.

“Upon my soul,” he said. “What an extraordinary thing. I never saw that happen before!”

It was then that I went on, goaded by Caroline’s gibes, and rendered reckless by my triumph.

“And as to anything interesting,” I said. “What about a gold wedding ring with a date and ‘From R.’ inside.”

I pass over the scene that followed. I was made to say exactly where this treasure was found. I was made to reveal the date.

“March 13th,” said Caroline. “Just six months ago. Ah!”

Out of the babel of excited suggestions and suppositions three theories were evolved:—

1. That of Colonel Carter: that Ralph was secretly married to Flora. The first or most simple solution.

2. That of Miss Ganett: that Roger Ackroyd had been secretly married to Mrs. Ferrars.

3. That of my sister: that Roger Ackroyd had married his housekeeper, Miss Russell.

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A fourth or super-theory was propounded by Caroline later as we went up to bed.

“Mark my words,” she said suddenly, “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Geoffrey Raymond and Flora weren’t married.”

“Surely it would be ‘From G,’ not ‘From R’ then,” I suggested.

“You never know. Some girls call men by their surnames. And you heard what Miss Ganett said this evening—about Flora’s carryings on.”

Strictly speaking, I had not heard Miss Ganett say anything of the kind, but I respected Caroline’s knowledge of innuendoes.

“How about Hector Blunt,” I hinted. “If it’s anybody——”

“Nonsense,” said Caroline. “I dare say he admires her—may even be in love with her. But depend upon it a girl isn’t going to fall in love with a man old enough to be her father when there’s a good-looking young secretary about. She may encourage Major Blunt just as a blind. Girls are very artful. But there’s one thing I do tell you, James Sheppard. Flora Ackroyd does not care a penny piece for Ralph Paton, and never has. You can take it from me.”

I took it from her meekly.

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202

CHAPTER XVII

PARKER

It occurred to me the next morning that under the exhilaration produced by Tin-ho, or the Perfect Winning, I might have been slightly indiscreet. True, Poirot had not asked me to keep the discovery of the ring to myself. On the other hand, he had said nothing about it whilst at Fernly, and as far as I knew, I was the only person aware that it had been found. I felt distinctly guilty. The fact was by now spreading through King’s Abbot like wildfire. I was expecting wholesale reproaches from Poirot any minute.

The joint funeral of Mrs. Ferrars and Roger Ackroyd was fixed for eleven o’clock. It was a melancholy and impressive ceremony. All the party from Fernly were there.

After it was over, Poirot, who had also been present, took me by the arm, and invited me to accompany him back to The Larches. He was looking very grave, and I feared that my indiscretion of the night before had got round to his ears. But it soon transpired that his thoughts were occupied by something of a totally different nature.

“See you,” he said. “We must act. With your help I propose to examine a witness. We will question him, we203 will put such fear into him that the truth is bound to come out.”

“What witness are you talking of?” I asked, very much surprised.

“Parker!” said Poirot. “I asked him to be at my house this morning at twelve o’clock. He should await us there at this very minute.”

“What do you think,” I ventured, glancing sideways at his face.

“I know this—that I am not satisfied.”

“You think that it was he who blackmailed Mrs. Ferrars?”

“Either that, or——”

“Well?” I said, after waiting a minute or two.

“My friend, I will say this to you—I hope it was he.”

The gravity of his manner, and something indefinable that tinged it, reduced me to silence.

On arrival at The Larches, we were informed that Parker was already there awaiting our return. As we entered the room, the butler rose respectfully.

“Good morning, Parker,” said Poirot pleasantly. “One instant, I pray of you.”

He removed his overcoat and gloves.

“Allow me, sir,” said Parker, and sprang forward to assist him. He deposited the articles neatly on a chair by the door. Poirot watched him with approval.

“Thank you, my good Parker,” he said. “Take a seat, will you not? What I have to say may take some time.”

204

Parker seated himself with an apologetic bend of the head.

“Now what do you think I asked you to come here for this morning—eh?”

Parker coughed.

“I understood, sir, that you wished to ask me a few questions about my late master—private like.”

“Précisément,” said Poirot, beaming. “Have you made many experiments in blackmail?”

“Sir!”

The butler sprang to his feet.

“Do not excite yourself,” said Poirot placidly. “Do not play the farce of the honest, injured man. You know all there is to know about the blackmail, is it not so?”

“Sir, I—I’ve never—never been——”

“Insulted,” suggested Poirot, “in such a way before. Then why, my excellent Parker, were you so anxious to overhear the conversation in Mr. Ackroyd’s study the other evening, after you had caught the word blackmail?”

“I wasn’t—I——”

“Who was your last master?” rapped out Poirot suddenly.

“My last master?”

“Yes, the master you were with before you came to Mr. Ackroyd.”

“A Major Ellerby, sir——”

Poirot took the words out of his mouth.

“Just so, Major Ellerby. Major Ellerby was addicted to drugs, was he not? You traveled about with him. When he was in Bermuda there was some trouble—a man205 was killed. Major Ellerby was partly responsible. It was hushed up. But you knew about it. How much did Major Ellerby pay you to keep your mouth shut?”

Parker was staring at him open-mouthed. The man had gone to pieces, his cheeks shook flabbily.

“You see, me, I have made inquiries,” said Poirot pleasantly. “It is as I say. You got a good sum then as blackmail, and Major Ellerby went on paying you until he died. Now I want to hear about your latest experiment.”

Parker still stared.

“It is useless to deny. Hercule Poirot knows. It is so, what I have said about Major Ellerby, is it not?”

As though against his will, Parker nodded reluctantly once. His face was ashen pale.

“But I never hurt a hair of Mr. Ackroyd’s head,” he moaned. “Honest to God, sir, I didn’t. I’ve been afraid of this coming all the time. And I tell you I didn’t—I didn’t kill him.”

His voice rose almost to a scream.

“I am inclined to believe you, my friend,” said Poirot. “You have not the nerve—the courage. But I must have the truth.”

“I’ll tell you anything, sir, anything you want to know. It’s true that I tried to listen that night. A word or two I heard made me curious. And Mr. Ackroyd’s wanting not to be disturbed, and shutting himself up with the doctor the way he did. It’s God’s own truth what I told the police. I heard the word blackmail, sir, and well——”

206

He paused.

“You thought there might be something in it for you?” suggested Poirot smoothly.

“Well—well, yes, I did, sir. I thought that if Mr. Ackroyd was being blackmailed, why shouldn’t I have a share of the pickings?”

A very curious expression passed over Poirot’s face. He leaned forward.

“Had you any reason to suppose before that night that Mr. Ackroyd was being blackmailed?”

“No, indeed, sir. It was a great surprise to me. Such a regular gentleman in all his habits.”

“How much did you overhear?”

“Not very much, sir. There seemed what I might call a spite against me. Of course I had to attend to my duties in the pantry. And when I did creep along once or twice to the study it was no use. The first time Dr. Sheppard came out and almost caught me in the act, and another time Mr. Raymond passed me in the big hall and went that way, so I knew it was no use; and when I went with the tray, Miss Flora headed me off.”

Poirot stared for a long time at the man, as if to test his sincerity. Parker returned his gaze earnestly.

“I hope you believe me, sir. I’ve been afraid all along the police would rake up that old business with Major Ellerby and be suspicious of me in consequence.”

“Eh bien,” said Poirot at last. “I am disposed to believe you. But there is one thing I must request of you—to show me your bank-book. You have a bank-book, I presume?”

207

“Yes, sir, as a matter of fact, I have it with me now.”

With no sign of confusion, he produced it from his pocket. Poirot took the slim, green-covered book and perused the entries.

“Ah! I perceive you have purchased £500 of National Savings Certificates this year?”

“Yes, sir. I have already over a thousand pounds saved—the result of my connection with—er—my late master, Major Ellerby. And I have had quite a little flutter on some horses this year—very successful. If you remember, sir, a rank outsider won the Jubilee. I was fortunate enough to back it—£20.”

Poirot handed him back the book.

“I will wish you good-morning. I believe that you have told me the truth. If you have not—so much the worse for you, my friend.”

When Parker had departed, Poirot picked up his overcoat once more.

“Going out again?” I asked.

“Yes, we will pay a little visit to the good M. Hammond.”

“You believe Parker’s story?”

“It is credible enough on the face of it. It seems clear that—unless he is a very good actor indeed—he genuinely believes it was Ackroyd himself who was the victim of blackmail. If so, he knows nothing at all about the Mrs. Ferrars business.”

“Then in that case—who——”

“Précisément! Who? But our visit to M. Hammond208 will accomplish one purpose. It will either clear Parker completely or else——”

“Well?”

“I fall into the bad habit of leaving my sentences unfinished this morning,” said Poirot apologetically. “You must bear with me.”

“By the way,” I said, rather sheepishly, “I’ve got a confession to make. I’m afraid I have inadvertently let out something about that ring.”

“What ring?”

“The ring you found in the goldfish pond.”

“Ah! yes,” said Poirot, smiling broadly.

“I hope you’re not annoyed? It was very careless of me.”

“But not at all, my good friend, not at all. I laid no commands upon you. You were at liberty to speak of it if you so wished. She was interested, your sister?”

“She was indeed. It created a sensation. All sorts of theories are flying about.”

“Ah! And yet it is so simple. The true explanation leapt to the eye, did it not?”

“Did it?” I said dryly.

Poirot laughed.

“The wise man does not commit himself,” he observed. “Is not that so? But here we are at Mr. Hammond’s.”

The lawyer was in his office, and we were ushered in without any delay. He rose and greeted us in his dry, precise manner.

Poirot came at once to the point.

“Monsieur, I desire from you certain information, that209 is, if you will be so good as to give it to me. You acted, I understand, for the late Mrs. Ferrars of King’s Paddock?”

I noticed the swift gleam of surprise which showed in the lawyer’s eyes, before his professional reserve came down once more like a mask over his face.

“Certainly. All her affairs passed through our hands.”

“Very good. Now, before I ask you to tell me anything, I should like you to listen to the story Dr. Sheppard will relate to you. You have no objection, have you, my friend, to repeating the conversation you had with Mr. Ackroyd last Friday night?”

“Not in the least,” I said, and straightway began the recital of that strange evening.

Hammond listened with close attention.

“That is all,” I said, when I had finished.

“Blackmail,” said the lawyer thoughtfully.

“You are surprised?” asked Poirot.

The lawyer took off his pince-nez and polished them with his handkerchief.

“No,” he replied, “I can hardly say that I am surprised. I have suspected something of the kind for some time.”

“That brings us,” said Poirot, “to the information for which I am asking. If any one can give us an idea of the actual sums paid, you are the man, monsieur.”

“I see no object in withholding the information,” said Hammond, after a moment or two. “During the past year, Mrs. Ferrars has sold out certain securities, and the money for them was paid into her account and not reinvested. As her income was a large one, and she lived210 very quietly after her husband’s death, it seems certain that these sums of money were paid away for some special purpose. I once sounded her on the subject, and she said that she was obliged to support several of her husband’s poor relations. I let the matter drop, of course. Until now, I have always imagined that the money was paid to some woman who had had a claim on Ashley Ferrars. I never dreamed that Mrs. Ferrars herself was involved.”

“And the amount?” asked Poirot.

“In all, I should say the various sums totaled at least twenty thousand pounds.”

“Twenty thousand pounds!” I exclaimed. “In one year!”

“Mrs. Ferrars was a very wealthy woman,” said Poirot dryly. “And the penalty for murder is not a pleasant one.”

“Is there anything else that I can tell you?” inquired Mr. Hammond.

“I thank you, no,” said Poirot, rising. “All my excuses for having deranged you.”

“Not at all, not at all.”

“The word derange,” I remarked, when we were outside again, “is applicable to mental disorder only.”

“Ah!” cried Poirot, “never will my English be quite perfect. A curious language. I should then have said disarranged, n’est-ce pas?”

“Disturbed is the word you had in mind.”

“I thank you, my friend. The word exact, you are zealous for it. Eh bien, what about our friend Parker211 now? With twenty thousand pounds in hand, would he have continued being a butler? Je ne pense pas. It is, of course, possible that he banked the money under another name, but I am disposed to believe he spoke the truth to us. If he is a scoundrel, he is a scoundrel on a mean scale. He has not the big ideas. That leaves us as a possibility, Raymond, or—well—Major Blunt.”

“Surely not Raymond,” I objected. “Since we know that he was desperately hard up for a matter of five hundred pounds.”

“That is what he says, yes.”

“And as to Hector Blunt——”

“I will tell you something as to the good Major Blunt,” interrupted Poirot. “It is my business to make inquiries. I make them. Eh bien—that legacy of which he speaks, I have discovered that the amount of it was close upon twenty thousand pounds. What do you think of that?”

I was so taken aback that I could hardly speak.

“It’s impossible,” I said at last. “A well-known man like Hector Blunt.”

Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

“Who knows? At least he is a man with big ideas. I confess that I hardly see him as a blackmailer, but there is another possibility that you have not even considered.”

“What is that?”

“The fire, my friend. Ackroyd himself may have destroyed that letter, blue envelope and all, after you left him.”

“I hardly think that likely,” I said slowly. “And yet—212of course, it may be so. He might have changed his mind.”

We had just arrived at my house, and on the spur of the moment I invited Poirot to come in and take pot luck.

I thought Caroline would be pleased with me, but it is hard to satisfy one’s women folk. It appears that we were eating chops for lunch—the kitchen staff being regaled on tripe and onions. And two chops set before three people are productive of embarrassment.

But Caroline is seldom daunted for long. With magnificent mendacity, she explained to Poirot that although James laughed at her for doing so, she adhered strictly to a vegetarian diet. She descanted ecstatically on the delights of nut cutlets (which I am quite sure she has never tasted) and ate a Welsh rarebit with gusto and frequent cutting remarks as to the dangers of “flesh” foods.

Afterwards, when we were sitting in front of the fire and smoking, Caroline attacked Poirot directly.

“Not found Ralph Paton yet?” she asked.

“Where should I find him, mademoiselle?”

“I thought, perhaps, you’d found him in Cranchester,” said Caroline, with intense meaning in her tone.

Poirot looked merely bewildered.

“In Cranchester? But why in Cranchester?”

I enlightened him with a touch of malice.

“One of our ample staff of private detectives happened to see you in a car on the Cranchester road yesterday,” I explained.

Poirot’s bewilderment vanished. He laughed heartily.

213

“Ah, that! A simple visit to the dentist, c’est tout. My tooth, it aches. I go there. My tooth, it is at once better. I think to return quickly. The dentist, he says No. Better to have it out. I argue. He insists. He has his way! That particular tooth, it will never ache again.”

Caroline collapsed rather like a pricked balloon.

We fell to discussing Ralph Paton.

“A weak nature,” I insisted. “But not a vicious one.”

“Ah!” said Poirot. “But weakness, where does it end?”

“Exactly,” said Caroline. “Take James here—weak as water, if I weren’t about to look after him.”

“My dear Caroline,” I said irritably, “can’t you talk without dragging in personalities?”

“You are weak, James,” said Caroline, quite unmoved. “I’m eight years older than you are—oh! I don’t mind M. Poirot knowing that——”

“I should never have guessed it, mademoiselle,” said Poirot, with a gallant little bow.

“Eight years older. But I’ve always considered it my duty to look after you. With a bad bringing up, Heaven knows what mischief you might have got into by now.”

“I might have married a beautiful adventuress,” I murmured, gazing at the ceiling, and blowing smoke rings.

“Adventuress!” said Caroline, with a snort. “If we’re talking of adventuresses——”

She left the sentence unfinished.

214

“Well?” I said, with some curiosity.

“Nothing. But I can think of some one not a hundred miles away.”

Then she turned to Poirot suddenly.

“James sticks to it that you believe some one in the house committed the murder. All I can say is, you’re wrong.”

“I should not like to be wrong,” said Poirot. “It is not—how do you say—my métier?”

“I’ve got the facts pretty clearly,” continued Caroline, taking no notice of Poirot’s remark, “from James and others. As far as I can see, of the people in the house, only two could have had the chance of doing it. Ralph Paton and Flora Ackroyd.”

“My dear Caroline——”

“Now, James, don’t interrupt me. I know what I’m talking about. Parker met her outside the door, didn’t he? He didn’t hear her uncle saying good-night to her. She could have killed him then and there.”

“Caroline.”

“I’m not saying she did, James. I’m saying she could have done. As a matter of fact, though Flora is like all these young girls nowadays, with no veneration for their betters and thinking they know best on every subject under the sun, I don’t for a minute believe she’d kill even a chicken. But there it is. Mr. Raymond and Major Blunt have alibis. Mrs. Ackroyd’s got an alibi. Even that Russell woman seems to have one—and a good job for her it is she has. Who is left? Only Ralph and215 Flora! And say what you will, I don’t believe Ralph Paton is a murderer. A boy we’ve known all our lives.”

Poirot was silent for a minute, watching the curling smoke rise from his cigarette. When at last he spoke, it was in a gentle far-away voice that produced a curious impression. It was totally unlike his usual manner.

“Let us take a man—a very ordinary man. A man with no idea of murder in his heart. There is in him somewhere a strain of weakness—deep down. It has so far never been called into play. Perhaps it never will be—and if so he will go to his grave honored and respected by every one. But let us suppose that something occurs. He is in difficulties—or perhaps not that even. He may stumble by accident on a secret—a secret involving life or death to some one. And his first impulse will be to speak out—to do his duty as an honest citizen. And then the strain of weakness tells. Here is a chance of money—a great amount of money. He wants money—he desires it—and it is so easy. He has to do nothing for it—just keep silence. That is the beginning. The desire for money grows. He must have more—and more! He is intoxicated by the gold mine which has opened at his feet. He becomes greedy. And in his greed he overreaches himself. One can press a man as far as one likes—but with a woman one must not press too far. For a woman has at heart a great desire to speak the truth. How many husbands who have deceived their wives go comfortably to their graves, carrying their secret with them! How many wives who have deceived their216 husbands wreck their lives by throwing the fact in those same husbands’ teeth! They have been pressed too far. In a reckless moment (which they will afterwards regret, bien entendu) they fling safety to the winds and turn at bay, proclaiming the truth with great momentary satisfaction to themselves. So it was, I think, in this case. The strain was too great. And so there came your proverb, the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs. But that is not the end. Exposure faced the man of whom we are speaking. And he is not the same man he was—say, a year ago. His moral fiber is blunted. He is desperate. He is fighting a losing battle, and he is prepared to take any means that come to his hand, for exposure means ruin to him. And so—the dagger strikes!”

He was silent for a moment. It was as though he had laid a spell upon the room. I cannot try to describe the impression his words produced. There was something in the merciless analysis, and the ruthless power of vision which struck fear into both of us.

“Afterwards,” he went on softly, “the danger removed, he will be himself again, normal, kindly. But if the need again arises, then once more he will strike.”

Caroline roused herself at last.

“You are speaking of Ralph Paton,” she said. “You may be right, you may not, but you have no business to condemn a man unheard.”

The telephone bell rang sharply. I went out into the hall, and took off the receiver.

“What?” I said. “Yes. Dr. Sheppard speaking.”

217

I listened for a minute or two, then replied briefly. Replacing the receiver, I went back into the drawing-room.

“Poirot,” I said, “they have detained a man at Liverpool. His name is Charles Kent, and he is believed to be the stranger who visited Fernly that night. They want me to go to Liverpool at once and identify him.”

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218

CHAPTER XVIII

CHARLES KENT

Half an hour later saw Poirot, myself, and Inspector Raglan in the train on the way to Liverpool. The inspector was clearly very excited.

“We may get a line on the blackmailing part of the business, if on nothing else,” he declared jubilantly. “He’s a rough customer, this fellow, by what I heard over the phone. Takes dope, too. We ought to find it easy to get what we want out of him. If there was the shadow of a motive, nothing’s more likely than that he killed Mr. Ackroyd. But in that case, why is young Paton keeping out of the way? The whole thing’s a muddle—that’s what it is. By the way, M. Poirot, you were quite right about those fingerprints. They were Mr. Ackroyd’s own. I had rather the same idea myself, but I dismissed it as hardly feasible.”

I smiled to myself. Inspector Raglan was so very plainly saving his face.

“As regards this man,” said Poirot, “he is not yet arrested, eh?”

“No, detained under suspicion.”

“And what account does he give of himself?”

“Precious little,” said the inspector, with a grin. “He’s a wary bird, I gather. A lot of abuse, but very little more.”

219

On arrival at Liverpool I was surprised to find that Poirot was welcomed with acclamation. Superintendent Hayes, who met us, had worked with Poirot over some case long ago, and had evidently an exaggerated opinion of his powers.

“Now we’ve got M. Poirot here we shan’t be long,” he said cheerfully. “I thought you’d retired, moosior?”

“So I had, my good Hayes, so I had. But how tedious is retirement! You cannot imagine to yourself the monotony with which day comes after day.”

“Very likely. So you’ve come to have a look at our own particular find? Is this Dr. Sheppard? Think you’ll be able to identify him, sir?”

“I’m not very sure,” I said doubtfully.

“How did you get hold of him?” inquired Poirot.

“Description was circulated, as you know. In the press and privately. Not much to go on, I admit. This fellow has an American accent all right, and he doesn’t deny that he was near King’s Abbot that night. Just asks what the hell it is to do with us, and that he’ll see us in —— before he answers any questions.”

“Is it permitted that I, too, see him?” asked Poirot.

The superintendent closed one eye knowingly.

“Very glad to have you, sir. You’ve got permission to do anything you please. Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard was asking after you the other day. Said he’d heard you were connected unofficially with this case. Where’s Captain Paton hiding, sir, can you tell me that?”

“I doubt if it would be wise at the present juncture,”220 said Poirot primly, and I bit my lips to prevent a smile.

The little man really did it very well.

After some further parley, we were taken to interview the prisoner.

He was a young fellow, I should say not more than twenty-two or three. Tall, thin, with slightly shaking hands, and the evidences of considerable physical strength somewhat run to seed. His hair was dark, but his eyes were blue and shifty, seldom meeting a glance squarely. I had all along cherished the illusion that there was something familiar about the figure I had met that night, but if this were indeed he, I was completely mistaken. He did not remind me in the least of any one I knew.

“Now then, Kent,” said the superintendent, “stand up. Here are some visitors come to see you. Recognize any of them.”

Kent glared at us sullenly, but did not reply. I saw his glance waver over the three of us, and come back to rest on me.

“Well, sir,” said the superintendent to me, “what do you say?”

“The height’s the same,” I said, “and as far as general appearance goes it might well be the man in question. Beyond that, I couldn’t go.”

“What the hell’s the meaning of all this?” asked Kent. “What have you got against me? Come on, out with it! What am I supposed to have done?”

I nodded my head.

“It’s the man,” I said. “I recognize the voice.”

221

“Recognize my voice, do you? Where do you think you heard it before?”

“On Friday evening last, outside the gates of Fernly Park. You asked me the way there.”

“I did, did I?”

“Do you admit it?” asked the inspector.

“I don’t admit anything. Not till I know what you’ve got on me.”

“Have you not read the papers in the last few days?” asked Poirot, speaking for the first time.

The man’s eyes narrowed.

“So that’s it, is it? I saw an old gent had been croaked at Fernly. Trying to make out I did the job, are you?”

“You were there that night,” said Poirot quietly.

“How do you know, mister?”

“By this.” Poirot took something from his pocket and held it out.

It was the goose quill we had found in the summer-house.

At the sight of it the man’s face changed. He half held out his hand.

“Snow,” said Poirot thoughtfully. “No, my friend, it is empty. It lay where you dropped it in the summer-house that night.”

Charles Kent looked at him uncertainly.

“You seem to know a hell of a lot about everything, you little foreign cock duck. Perhaps you remember this: the papers say that the old gent was croaked between a quarter to ten and ten o’clock?”

222

“That is so,” agreed Poirot.

“Yes, but is it really so? That’s what I’m getting at.”

“This gentleman will tell you,” said Poirot.

He indicated Inspector Raglan. The latter hesitated, glanced at Superintendent Hayes, then at Poirot, and finally, as though receiving sanction, he said:—

“That’s right. Between a quarter to ten and ten o’clock.”

“Then you’ve nothing to keep me here for,” said Kent. “I was away from Fernly Park by twenty-five minutes past nine. You can ask at the Dog and Whistle. That’s a saloon about a mile out of Fernly on the road to Cranchester. I kicked up a bit of a row there, I remember. As near as nothing to quarter to ten, it was. How about that?”

Inspector Raglan wrote down something in his notebook.

“Well?” demanded Kent.

“Inquiries will be made,” said the inspector. “If you’ve spoken the truth, you won’t have anything to complain about. What were you doing at Fernly Park anyway?”

“Went there to meet some one.”

“Who?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You’d better keep a civil tongue in your head, my man,” the superintendent warned him.

“To hell with a civil tongue. I went there on my own business, and that’s all there is to it. If I was clear away before the murder was done, that’s all that concerns the cops.”

223

“Your name, it is Charles Kent,” said Poirot. “Where were you born?”

The man stared at him, then he grinned.

“I’m a full-blown Britisher all right,” he said.

“Yes,” said Poirot meditatively, “I think you are. I fancy you were born in Kent.”

The man stared.

“Why’s that? Because of my name? What’s that to do with it? Is a man whose name is Kent bound to be born in that particular county?”

“Under certain circumstances, I can imagine he might be,” said Poirot very deliberately. “Under certain circumstances, you comprehend.”

There was so much meaning in his voice as to surprise the two police officers. As for Charles Kent, he flushed a brick red, and for a moment I thought he was going to spring at Poirot. He thought better of it, however, and turned away with a kind of laugh.

Poirot nodded as though satisfied, and made his way out through the door. He was joined presently by the two officers.

“We’ll verify that statement,” remarked Raglan. “I don’t think he’s lying, though. But he’s got to come clear with a statement as to what he was doing at Fernly. It looks to me as though we’d got our blackmailer all right. On the other hand, granted his story’s correct, he couldn’t have had anything to do with the actual murder. He’d got ten pounds on him when he was arrested—rather a large sum. I fancy that forty pounds went to him—the numbers of the notes didn’t correspond, but of course224 he’d have changed them first thing. Mr. Ackroyd must have given him the money, and he made off with it as fast as possible. What was that about Kent being his birthplace? What’s that got to do with it?”

“Nothing whatever,” said Poirot mildly. “A little idea of mine, that was all. Me, I am famous for my little ideas.”

“Are you really?” said Raglan, studying him with a puzzled expression.

The superintendent went into a roar of laughter.

“Many’s the time I’ve heard Inspector Japp say that. M. Poirot and his little ideas! Too fanciful for me, he’d say, but always something in them.”

“You mock yourself at me,” said Poirot, smiling; “but never mind. The old ones they laugh last sometimes, when the young, clever ones do not laugh at all.”

And nodding his head at them in a sage manner, he walked out into the street.

He and I lunched together at an hotel. I know now that the whole thing lay clearly unravelled before him. He had got the last thread he needed to lead him to the truth.

But at the time I had no suspicion of the fact. I overestimated his general self-confidence, and I took it for granted that the things which puzzled me must be equally puzzling to him.

My chief puzzle was what the man Charles Kent could have been doing at Fernly. Again and again I put the question to myself and could get no satisfactory reply.

225

At last I ventured a tentative query to Poirot. His reply was immediate.

“Mon ami, I do not think; I know.”

“Really?” I said incredulously.

“Yes, indeed. I suppose now that to you it would not make sense if I said that he went to Fernly that night because he was born in Kent?”

I stared at him.

“It certainly doesn’t seem to make sense to me,” I said dryly.

“Ah!” said Poirot pityingly. “Well, no matter. I have still my little idea.”

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226

CHAPTER XIX

FLORA ACKROYD

As I was returning from my round the following morning, I was hailed by Inspector Raglan. I pulled up, and the inspector mounted on the step.

“Good-morning, Dr. Sheppard,” he said. “Well, that alibi is all right enough.”

“Charles Kent’s?”

“Charles Kent’s. The barmaid at the Dog and Whistle, Sally Jones, she remembers him perfectly. Picked out his photograph from among five others. It was just a quarter to ten when he came into the bar, and the Dog and Whistle is well over a mile from Fernly Park. The girl mentions that he had a lot of money on him—she saw him take a handful of notes out of his pocket. Rather surprised her, it did, seeing the class of fellow he was, with a pair of boots clean dropping off him. That’s where that forty pounds went right enough.”

“The man still refuses to give an account of his visit to Fernly?”

“Obstinate as a mule he is. I had a chat with Hayes at Liverpool over the wire this morning.”

“Hercule Poirot says he knows the reason the man went there that night,” I observed.

“Does he?” cried the inspector eagerly.

227

“Yes,” I said maliciously. “He says he went there because he was born in Kent.”

I felt a distinct pleasure in passing on my own discomfiture.

Raglan stared at me for a moment or two uncomprehendingly. Then a grin overspread his weaselly countenance and he tapped his forehead significantly.

“Bit gone here,” he said. “I’ve thought so for some time. Poor old chap, so that’s why he had to give up and come down here. In the family, very likely. He’s got a nephew who’s quite off his crumpet.”

“Poirot has?” I said, very surprised.

“Yes. Hasn’t he ever mentioned him to you? Quite docile, I believe, and all that, but mad as a hatter, poor lad.”

“Who told you that?”

Again a grin showed itself on Inspector Raglan’s face.

“Your sister, Miss Sheppard, she told me all about it.”

Really, Caroline is amazing. She never rests until she knows the last details of everybody’s family secrets. Unfortunately, I have never been able to instill into her the decency of keeping them to herself.

“Jump in, inspector,” I said, opening the door of the car. “We’ll go up to The Larches together, and acquaint our Belgian friend with the latest news.”

“Might as well, I suppose. After all, even if he is a bit balmy, it was a useful tip he gave me about those fingerprints. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about the man Kent, but who knows—there may be something useful behind it.”

228

Poirot received us with his usual smiling courtesy.

He listened to the information we had brought him, nodding his head now and then.

“Seems quite O.K., doesn’t it?” said the inspector rather gloomily. “A chap can’t be murdering some one in one place when he’s drinking in the bar in another place a mile away.”

“Are you going to release him?”

“Don’t see what else we can do. We can’t very well hold him for obtaining money on false pretences. Can’t prove a ruddy thing.”

The inspector tossed a match into the grate in a disgruntled fashion. Poirot retrieved it and put it neatly in a little receptacle designed for the purpose. His action was purely mechanical. I could see that his thoughts were on something very different.

“If I were you,” he said at last, “I should not release the man Charles Kent yet.”

“What do you mean?”

Raglan stared at him.

“What I say. I should not release him yet.”

“You don’t think he can have had anything to do with the murder, do you?”

“I think probably not—but one cannot be certain yet.”

“But haven’t I just told you——”

Poirot raised a hand protestingly.

“Mais oui, mais oui. I heard. I am not deaf—nor stupid, thank the good God! But see you, you approach the matter from the wrong—the wrong—premises, is not that the word?”

229

The inspector stared at him heavily.

“I don’t see how you make that out. Look here, we know Mr. Ackroyd was alive at a quarter to ten. You admit that, don’t you?”

Poirot looked at him for a moment, then shook his head with a quick smile.

“I admit nothing that is not—proved!”

“Well, we’ve got proof enough of that. We’ve got Miss Flora Ackroyd’s evidence.”

“That she said good-night to her uncle? But me—I do not always believe what a young lady tells me—no, not even when she is charming and beautiful.”

“But hang it all, man, Parker saw her coming out of the door.”

“No.” Poirot’s voice rang out with sudden sharpness. “That is just what he did not see. I satisfied myself of that by a little experiment the other day—you remember, doctor? Parker saw her outside the door, with her hand on the handle. He did not see her come out of the room.”

“But—where else could she have been?”

“Perhaps on the stairs.”

“The stairs?”

“That is my little idea—yes.”

“But those stairs only lead to Mr. Ackroyd’s bedroom.”

“Precisely.”

And still the inspector stared.

“You think she’d been up to her uncle’s bedroom? Well, why not? Why should she lie about it?”

230

“Ah! that is just the question. It depends on what she was doing there, does it not?”

“You mean—the money? Hang it all, you don’t suggest that it was Miss Ackroyd who took that forty pounds?”

“I suggest nothing,” said Poirot. “But I will remind you of this. Life was not very easy for that mother and daughter. There were bills—there was constant trouble over small sums of money. Roger Ackroyd was a peculiar man over money matters. The girl might be at her wit’s end for a comparatively small sum. Figure to yourself then what happens. She has taken the money, she descends the little staircase. When she is half-way down she hears the chink of glass from the hall. She has not a doubt of what it is—Parker coming to the study. At all costs she must not be found on the stairs—Parker will not forget it, he will think it odd. If the money is missed, Parker is sure to remember having seen her come down those stairs. She has just time to rush down to the study door—with her hand on the handle to show that she has just come out, when Parker appears in the doorway. She says the first thing that comes into her head, a repetition of Roger Ackroyd’s orders earlier in the evening, and then goes upstairs to her own room.”

“Yes, but later,” persisted the inspector, “she must have realized the vital importance of speaking the truth? Why, the whole case hinges on it!”

“Afterwards,” said Poirot dryly, “it was a little difficult for Mademoiselle Flora. She is told simply that the police are here and that there has been a robbery. Naturally231 she jumps to the conclusion that the theft of the money has been discovered. Her one idea is to stick to her story. When she learns that her uncle is dead she is panic-stricken. Young women do not faint nowadays, monsieur, without considerable provocation. Eh bien! there it is. She is bound to stick to her story, or else confess everything. And a young and pretty girl does not like to admit that she is a thief—especially before those whose esteem she is anxious to retain.”

Raglan brought his fist down with a thump on the table.

“I’ll not believe it,” he said. “It’s—it’s not credible. And you—you’ve known this all along?”

“The possibility has been in my mind from the first,” admitted Poirot. “I was always convinced that Mademoiselle Flora was hiding something from us. To satisfy myself, I made the little experiment I told you of. Dr. Sheppard accompanied me.”

“A test for Parker, you said it was,” I remarked bitterly.

“Mon ami,” said Poirot apologetically, “as I told you at the time, one must say something.”

The inspector rose.

“There’s only one thing for it,” he declared. “We must tackle the young lady right away. You’ll come up to Fernly with me, M. Poirot?”

“Certainly. Dr. Sheppard will drive us up in his car.”

I acquiesced willingly.

On inquiry for Miss Ackroyd, we were shown into the232 billiard room. Flora and Major Hector Blunt were sitting on the long window seat.

“Good-morning, Miss Ackroyd,” said the inspector. “Can we have a word or two alone with you?”

Blunt got up at once and moved to the door.

“What is it?” asked Flora nervously. “Don’t go, Major Blunt. He can stay, can’t he?” she asked, turning to the inspector.

“That’s as you like,” said the inspector dryly. “There’s a question or two it’s my duty to put to you, miss, but I’d prefer to do so privately, and I dare say you’d prefer it also.”

Flora looked keenly at him. I saw her face grow whiter. Then she turned and spoke to Blunt.

“I want you to stay—please—yes, I mean it. Whatever the inspector has to say to me, I’d rather you heard it.”

Raglan shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, if you will have it so, that’s all there is to it. Now, Miss Ackroyd, M. Poirot here has made a certain suggestion to me. He suggests that you weren’t in the study at all last Friday night, that you never saw Mr. Ackroyd to say good-night to him, that instead of being in the study you were on the stairs leading down from your uncle’s bedroom when you heard Parker coming across the hall.”

Flora’s gaze shifted to Poirot. He nodded back at her.

“Mademoiselle, the other day, when we sat round the table, I implored you to be frank with me. What one does not tell to Papa Poirot he finds out. It was233 that, was it not? See, I will make it easy for you. You took the money, did you not?”

“The money,” said Blunt sharply.

There was a silence which lasted for at least a minute.

Then Flora drew herself up and spoke.

“M. Poirot is right. I took that money. I stole. I am a thief—yes, a common, vulgar little thief. Now you know! I am glad it has come out. It’s been a nightmare, these last few days!” She sat down suddenly and buried her face in her hands. She spoke huskily through her fingers. “You don’t know what my life has been since I came here. Wanting things, scheming for them, lying, cheating, running up bills, promising to pay—oh! I hate myself when I think of it all! That’s what brought us together, Ralph and I. We were both weak! I understood him, and I was sorry—because I’m the same underneath. We’re not strong enough to stand alone, either of us. We’re weak, miserable, despicable things.”

She looked at Blunt and suddenly stamped her foot.

“Why do you look at me like that—as though you couldn’t believe? I may be a thief—but at any rate I’m real now. I’m not lying any more. I’m not pretending to be the kind of girl you like, young and innocent and simple. I don’t care if you never want to see me again. I hate myself, despise myself—but you’ve got to believe one thing, if speaking the truth would have made things better for Ralph, I would have spoken out. But I’ve seen all along that it wouldn’t be better for Ralph—it makes the case against him blacker than ever. I was not doing him any harm by sticking to my lie.”

234

“Ralph,” said Blunt. “I see—always Ralph.”

“You don’t understand,” said Flora hopelessly. “You never will.”

She turned to the inspector.

“I admit everything; I was at my wit’s end for money. I never saw my uncle that evening after he left the dinner-table. As to the money, you can take what steps you please. Nothing could be worse than it is now!”

Suddenly she broke down again, hid her face in her hands, and rushed from the room.

“Well,” said the inspector in a flat tone, “so that’s that.”

He seemed rather at a loss what to do next.

Blunt came forward.

“Inspector Raglan,” he said quietly, “that money was given to me by Mr. Ackroyd for a special purpose. Miss Ackroyd never touched it. When she says she did, she is lying with the idea of shielding Captain Paton. The truth is as I said, and I am prepared to go into the witness box and swear to it.”

He made a kind of jerky bow, then turning abruptly, he left the room.

Poirot was after him in a flash. He caught the other up in the hall.

“Monsieur—a moment, I beg of you, if you will be so good.”

“Well, sir?”

Blunt was obviously impatient. He stood frowning down on Poirot.

“It is this,” said Poirot rapidly: “I am not deceived by235 your little fantasy. No, indeed. It was truly Miss Flora who took the money. All the same it is well imagined what you say—it pleases me. It is very good what you have done there. You are a man quick to think and to act.”

“I’m not in the least anxious for your opinion, thank you,” said Blunt coldly.

He made once more as though to pass on, but Poirot, not at all offended, laid a detaining hand on his arm.

“Ah! but you are to listen to me. I have more to say. The other day I spoke of concealments. Very well, all along have I seen what you are concealing. Mademoiselle Flora, you love her with all your heart. From the first moment you saw her, is it not so? Oh! let us not mind saying these things—why must one in England think it necessary to mention love as though it were some disgraceful secret? You love Mademoiselle Flora. You seek to conceal that fact from all the world. That is very good—that is as it should be. But take the advice of Hercule Poirot—do not conceal it from mademoiselle herself.”

Blunt had shown several signs of restlessness whilst Poirot was speaking, but the closing words seemed to rivet his attention.

“What d’you mean by that?” he said sharply.

“You think that she loves the Capitaine Ralph Paton—but I, Hercule Poirot, tell you that that is not so. Mademoiselle Flora accepted Captain Paton to please her uncle, and because she saw in the marriage a way of escape from her life here which was becoming frankly insupportable236 to her. She liked him, and there was much sympathy and understanding between them. But love—no! It is not Captain Paton Mademoiselle Flora loves.”

“What the devil do you mean?” asked Blunt.

I saw the dark flush under his tan.

“You have been blind, monsieur. Blind! She is loyal, the little one. Ralph Paton is under a cloud, she is bound in honor to stick by him.”

I felt it was time I put in a word to help on the good work.

“My sister told me the other night,” I said encouragingly, “that Flora had never cared a penny piece for Ralph Paton, and never would. My sister is always right about these things.”

Blunt ignored my well-meant efforts. He spoke to Poirot.

“D’you really think——” he began, and stopped.

He is one of those inarticulate men who find it hard to put things into words.

Poirot knows no such disability.

“If you doubt me, ask her yourself, monsieur. But perhaps you no longer care to—the affair of the money——”

Blunt gave a sound like an angry laugh.

“Think I’d hold that against her? Roger was always a queer chap about money. She got in a mess and didn’t dare tell him. Poor kid. Poor lonely kid.”

Poirot looked thoughtfully at the side door.

“Mademoiselle Flora went into the garden, I think,” he murmured.

237

“I’ve been every kind of a fool,” said Blunt abruptly. “Rum conversation we’ve been having. Like one of those Danish plays. But you’re a sound fellow, M. Poirot. Thank you.”

He took Poirot’s hand and gave it a grip which caused the other to wince in anguish. Then he strode to the side door and passed out into the garden.

“Not every kind of a fool,” murmured Poirot, tenderly nursing the injured member. “Only one kind—the fool in love.”

---

238

CHAPTER XX

MISS RUSSELL

Inspector Raglan had received a bad jolt. He was not deceived by Blunt’s valiant lie any more than we had been. Our way back to the village was punctuated by his complaints.

“This alters everything, this does. I don’t know whether you’ve realized it, Monsieur Poirot?”

“I think so, yes, I think so,” said Poirot. “You see, me, I have been familiar with the idea for some time.”

Inspector Raglan, who had only had the idea presented to him a short half-hour ago, looked at Poirot unhappily, and went on with his discoveries.

“Those alibis now. Worthless! Absolutely worthless. Got to start again. Find out what every one was doing from nine-thirty onwards. Nine-thirty—that’s the time we’ve got to hang on to. You were quite right about the man Kent—we don’t release him yet awhile. Let me see now—nine-forty-five at the Dog and Whistle. He might have got there in a quarter of an hour if he ran. It’s just possible that it was his voice Mr. Raymond heard talking to Mr. Ackroyd—asking for money which Mr. Ackroyd refused. But one thing’s clear—it wasn’t he who sent the telephone message. The station is half a mile in the other direction—over a mile and a half from239 the Dog and Whistle, and he was at the Dog and Whistle until about ten minutes past ten. Dang that telephone call! We always come up against it.”

“We do indeed,” agreed Poirot. “It is curious.”

“It’s just possible that if Captain Paton climbed into his uncle’s room and found him there murdered, he may have sent it. Got the wind up, thought he’d be accused, and cleared out. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Why should he have telephoned?”

“May have had doubts if the old man was really dead. Thought he’d get the doctor up there as soon as possible, but didn’t want to give himself away. Yes, I say now, how’s that for a theory? Something in that, I should say.”

The inspector swelled his chest out importantly. He was so plainly delighted with himself that any words of ours would have been quite superfluous.

We arrived back at my house at this minute, and I hurried in to my surgery patients, who had all been waiting a considerable time, leaving Poirot to walk to the police station with the inspector.

Having dismissed the last patient, I strolled into the little room at the back of the house which I call my workshop—I am rather proud of the home-made wireless set I turned out. Caroline hates my workroom. I keep my tools there, and Annie is not allowed to wreak havoc with a dustpan and brush. I was just adjusting the interior of an alarm clock which had been denounced as wholly unreliable by the household, when the door opened and Caroline put her head in.

240

“Oh! there you are, James,” she said, with deep disapproval. “M. Poirot wants to see you.”

“Well,” I said, rather irritably, for her sudden entrance had startled me and I had let go of a piece of delicate mechanism, “if he wants to see me, he can come in here.”

“In here?” said Caroline.

“That’s what I said—in here.”

Caroline gave a sniff of disapproval and retired. She returned in a moment or two, ushering in Poirot, and then retired again, shutting the door with a bang.

“Aha! my friend,” said Poirot, coming forward and rubbing his hands. “You have not got rid of me so easily, you see!”

“Finished with the inspector?” I asked.

“For the moment, yes. And you, you have seen all the patients?”

“Yes.”

Poirot sat down and looked at me, tilting his egg-shaped head on one side, with the air of one who savors a very delicious joke.

“You are in error,” he said at last. “You have still one patient to see.”

“Not you?” I exclaimed in surprise.

“Ah, not me, bien entendu. Me, I have the health magnificent. No, to tell you the truth, it is a little complot of mine. There is some one I wish to see, you understand—and at the same time it is not necessary that the whole village should intrigue itself about the matter—which is what would happen if the lady were seen to241 come to my house—for it is a lady. But to you she has already come as a patient before.”

“Miss Russell!” I exclaimed.

“Précisément. I wish much to speak with her, so I send her the little note and make the appointment in your surgery. You are not annoyed with me?”

“On the contrary,” I said. “That is, presuming I am allowed to be present at the interview?”

“But naturally! In your own surgery!”

“You know,” I said, throwing down the pincers I was holding, “it’s extraordinarily intriguing, the whole thing. Every new development that arises is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope—the thing changes entirely in aspect. Now, why are you so anxious to see Miss Russell?”

Poirot raised his eyebrows.

“Surely it is obvious?” he murmured.

“There you go again,” I grumbled. “According to you everything is obvious. But you leave me walking about in a fog.”

Poirot shook his head genially at me.

“You mock yourself at me. Take the matter of Mademoiselle Flora. The inspector was surprised—but you—you were not.”

“I never dreamed of her being the thief,” I expostulated.

“That—perhaps no. But I was watching your face and you were not—like Inspector Raglan—startled and incredulous.”

I thought for a minute or two.

242

“Perhaps you are right,” I said at last. “All along I’ve felt that Flora was keeping back something—so the truth, when it came, was subconsciously expected. It upset Inspector Raglan very much indeed, poor man.”

“Ah! pour ça, oui! The poor man must rearrange all his ideas. I profited by his state of mental chaos to induce him to grant me a little favor.”

“What was that?”

Poirot took a sheet of notepaper from his pocket. Some words were written on it, and he read them aloud.

“The police have, for some days, been seeking for Captain Ralph Paton, the nephew of Mr. Ackroyd of Fernly Park, whose death occurred under such tragic circumstances last Friday. Captain Paton has been found at Liverpool, where he was on the point of embarking for America.”

He folded up the piece of paper again.

“That, my friend, will be in the newspapers to-morrow morning.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded.

“But—but it isn’t true! He’s not at Liverpool!”

Poirot beamed on me.

“You have the intelligence so quick! No, he has not been found at Liverpool. Inspector Raglan was very loath to let me send this paragraph to the press, especially as I could not take him into my confidence. But I assured him most solemnly that very interesting results would follow its appearance in print, so he gave in, after stipulating that he was, on no account, to bear the responsibility.”

243

I stared at Poirot. He smiled back at me.

“It beats me,” I said at last, “what you expect to get out of that.”

“You should employ your little gray cells,” said Poirot gravely.

He rose and came across to the bench.

“It is that you have really the love of the machinery,” he said, after inspecting the débris of my labors.

Every man has his hobby. I immediately drew Poirot’s attention to my home-made wireless. Finding him sympathetic, I showed him one or two little inventions of my own—trifling things, but useful in the house.

“Decidedly,” said Poirot, “you should be an inventor by trade, not a doctor. But I hear the bell—that is your patient. Let us go into the surgery.”

Once before I had been struck by the remnants of beauty in the housekeeper’s face. This morning I was struck anew. Very simply dressed in black, tall, upright and independent as ever, with her big dark eyes and an unwonted flush of color in her usually pale cheeks, I realized that as a girl she must have been startlingly handsome.

“Good-morning, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “Will you be seated? Dr. Sheppard is so kind as to permit me the use of his surgery for a little conversation I am anxious to have with you.”

Miss Russell sat down with her usual composure. If she felt any inward agitation, it did not display itself in any outward manifestation.

244

“It seems a queer way of doing things, if you’ll allow me to say so,” she remarked.

“Miss Russell—I have news to give you.”

“Indeed!”

“Charles Kent has been arrested at Liverpool.”

Not a muscle of her face moved. She merely opened her eyes a trifle wider, and asked, with a tinge of defiance:

“Well, what of it?”

But at that moment it came to me—the resemblance that had haunted me all along, something familiar in the defiance of Charles Kent’s manner. The two voices, one rough and coarse, the other painfully ladylike—were strangely the same in timbre. It was of Miss Russell that I had been reminded that night outside the gates of Fernly Park.

I looked at Poirot, full of my discovery, and he gave me an imperceptible nod.

In answer to Miss Russell’s question, he threw out his hands in a thoroughly French gesture.

“I thought you might be interested, that is all,” he said mildly.

“Well, I’m not particularly,” said Miss Russell. “Who is this Charles Kent anyway?”

“He is a man, mademoiselle, who was at Fernly on the night of the murder.”

“Really?”

“Fortunately for him, he has an alibi. At a quarter to ten he was at a public-house a mile from here.”

“Lucky for him,” commented Miss Russell.

245

“But we still do not know what he was doing at Fernly—who it was he went to meet, for instance.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you at all,” said the housekeeper politely. “Nothing came to my ears. If that is all——”

She made a tentative movement as though to rise. Poirot stopped her.

“It is not quite all,” he said smoothly. “This morning fresh developments have arisen. It seems now that Mr. Ackroyd was murdered, not at a quarter to ten, but before. Between ten minutes to nine, when Dr. Sheppard left, and a quarter to ten.”

I saw the color drain from the housekeeper’s face, leaving it dead white. She leaned forward, her figure swaying.

“But Miss Ackroyd said—Miss Ackroyd said——”

“Miss Ackroyd has admitted that she was lying. She was never in the study at all that evening.”

“Then——?”

“Then it would seem that in this Charles Kent we have the man we are looking for. He came to Fernly, can give no account of what he was doing there——”

“I can tell you what he was doing there. He never touched a hair of old Ackroyd’s head—he never went near the study. He didn’t do it, I tell you.”

She was leaning forward. That iron self-control was broken through at last. Terror and desperation were in her face.

“M. Poirot! M. Poirot! Oh, do believe me.”

246

Poirot got up and came to her. He patted her reassuringly on the shoulder.

“But yes—but yes, I will believe. I had to make you speak, you know.”

For an instant suspicion flared up in her.

“Is what you said true?”

“That Charles Kent is suspected of the crime? Yes, that is true. You alone can save him, by telling the reason for his being at Fernly.”

“He came to see me.” She spoke in a low, hurried voice. “I went out to meet him——”

“In the summer-house, yes, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Mademoiselle, it is the business of Hercule Poirot to know things. I know that you went out earlier in the evening, that you left a message in the summer-house to say what time you would be there.”

“Yes, I did. I had heard from him—saying he was coming. I dared not let him come to the house. I wrote to the address he gave me and said I would meet him in the summer-house, and described it to him so that he would be able to find it. Then I was afraid he might not wait there patiently, and I ran out and left a piece of paper to say I would be there about ten minutes past nine. I didn’t want the servants to see me, so I slipped out through the drawing-room window. As I came back, I met Dr. Sheppard, and I fancied that he would think it queer. I was out of breath, for I had been running. I had no idea that he was expected to dinner that night.”

She paused.

247

“Go on,” said Poirot. “You went out to meet him at ten minutes past nine. What did you say to each other?”

“It’s difficult. You see——”

“Mademoiselle,” said Poirot, interrupting her, “in this matter I must have the whole truth. What you tell us need never go beyond these four walls. Dr. Sheppard will be discreet, and so shall I. See, I will help you. This Charles Kent, he is your son, is he not?”

She nodded. The color had flamed into her cheeks.

“No one has ever known. It was long ago—long ago—down in Kent. I was not married….”

“So you took the name of the county as a surname for him. I understand.”

“I got work. I managed to pay for his board and lodging. I never told him that I was his mother. But he turned out badly, he drank, then took to drugs. I managed to pay his passage out to Canada. I didn’t hear of him for a year or two. Then, somehow or other, he found out that I was his mother. He wrote asking me for money. Finally, I heard from him back in this country again. He was coming to see me at Fernly, he said. I dared not let him come to the house. I have always been considered so—so very respectable. If any one got an inkling—it would have been all up with my post as housekeeper. So I wrote to him in the way I have just told you.”

“And in the morning you came to see Dr. Sheppard?”

“Yes. I wondered if something could be done. He was not a bad boy—before he took to drugs.”

248

“I see,” said Poirot. “Now let us go on with the story. He came that night to the summer-house?”

“Yes, he was waiting for me when I got there. He was very rough and abusive. I had brought with me all the money I had, and I gave it to him. We talked a little, and then he went away.”

“What time was that?”

“It must have been between twenty and twenty-five minutes past nine. It was not yet half-past when I got back to the house.”

“Which way did he go?”

“Straight out the same way he came, by the path that joined the drive just inside the lodge gates.”

Poirot nodded.

“And you, what did you do?”

“I went back to the house. Major Blunt was walking up and down the terrace smoking, so I made a detour to get round to the side door. It was then just on half-past nine, as I tell you.”

Poirot nodded again. He made a note or two in a microscopic pocket-book.

“I think that is all,” he said thoughtfully.

“Ought I——” she hesitated. “Ought I to tell all this to Inspector Raglan?”

“It may come to that. But let us not be in a hurry. Let us proceed slowly, with due order and method. Charles Kent is not yet formally charged with murder. Circumstances may arise which will render your story unnecessary.”

Miss Russell rose.

249

“Thank you very much, M. Poirot,” she said. “You have been very kind—very kind indeed. You—you do believe me, don’t you? That Charles had nothing to do with this wicked murder!”

“There seems no doubt that the man who was talking to Mr. Ackroyd in the library at nine-thirty could not possibly have been your son. Be of good courage, mademoiselle. All will yet be well.”

Miss Russell departed. Poirot and I were left together.

“So that’s that,” I said. “Every time we come back to Ralph Paton. How did you manage to spot Miss Russell as the person Charles Kent came to meet? Did you notice the resemblance?”

“I had connected her with the unknown man long before we actually came face to face with him. As soon as we found that quill. The quill suggested dope, and I remembered your account of Miss Russell’s visit to you. Then I found the article on cocaine in that morning’s paper. It all seemed very clear. She had heard from some one that morning—some one addicted to drugs, she read the article in the paper, and she came to you to ask a few tentative questions. She mentioned cocaine, since the article in question was on cocaine. Then, when you seemed too interested, she switched hurriedly to the subject of detective stories and untraceable poisons. I suspected a son or a brother, or some other undesirable male relation. Ah! but I must go. It is the time of the lunch.”

“Stay and lunch with us,” I suggested.

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Poirot shook his head. A faint twinkle came into his eye.

“Not again to-day. I should not like to force Mademoiselle Caroline to adopt a vegetarian diet two days in succession.”

It occurred to me that there was not much which escaped Hercule Poirot.

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251

CHAPTER XXI

THE PARAGRAPH IN THE PAPER

Caroline, of course, had not failed to see Miss Russell come to the surgery door. I had anticipated this, and had ready an elaborate account of the lady’s bad knee. But Caroline was not in a cross-questioning mood. Her point of view was that she knew what Miss Russell had really come for and that I didn’t.

“Pumping you, James,” said Caroline. “Pumping you in the most shameless manner, I’ve not a doubt. It’s no good interrupting. I dare say you hadn’t the least idea she was doing it even. Men are so simple. She knows that you are in M. Poirot’s confidence, and she wants to find out things. Do you know what I think, James?”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine. You think so many extraordinary things.”

“It’s no good being sarcastic. I think Miss Russell knows more about Mr. Ackroyd’s death than she is prepared to admit.”

Caroline leaned back triumphantly in her chair.

“Do you really think so?” I said absently.

“You are very dull to-day, James. No animation about you. It’s that liver of yours.”

Our conversation then dealt with purely personal matters.

252

The paragraph inspired by Poirot duly appeared in our daily paper the next morning. I was in the dark as to its purpose, but its effect on Caroline was immense.

She began by stating, most untruly, that she had said as much all along. I raised my eyebrows, but did not argue. Caroline, however, must have felt a prick of conscience, for she went on:—

“I mayn’t have actually mentioned Liverpool, but I knew he’d try to get away to America. That’s what Crippen did.”

“Without much success,” I reminded her.

“Poor boy, and so they’ve caught him. I consider, James, that it’s your duty to see that he isn’t hung.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Why, you’re a medical man, aren’t you? You’ve known him from a boy upwards. Not mentally responsible. That’s the line to take, clearly. I read only the other day that they’re very happy in Broadmoor—it’s quite like a high-class club.”

But Caroline’s words had reminded me of something.

“I never knew that Poirot had an imbecile nephew?” I said curiously.

“Didn’t you? Oh, he told me all about it. Poor lad. It’s a great grief to all the family. They’ve kept him at home so far, but it’s getting to such a pitch that they’re afraid he’ll have to go into some kind of institution.”

“I suppose you know pretty well everything there is to know about Poirot’s family by this time,” I said, exasperated.

“Pretty well,” said Caroline complacently. “It’s a253 great relief to people to be able to tell all their troubles to some one.”

“It might be,” I said, “if they were ever allowed to do so spontaneously. Whether they enjoy having confidences screwed out of them by force is another matter.”

Caroline merely looked at me with the air of a Christian martyr enjoying martyrdom.

“You are so self-contained, James,” she said. “You hate speaking out, or parting with any information yourself, and you think everybody else must be just like you. I should hope that I never screw confidences out of anybody. For instance, if M. Poirot comes in this afternoon, as he said he might do, I shall not dream of asking him who it was arrived at his house early this morning.”

“Early this morning?” I queried.

“Very early,” said Caroline. “Before the milk came. I just happened to be looking out of the window—the blind was flapping. It was a man. He came in a closed car, and he was all muffled up. I couldn’t get a glimpse of his face. But I will tell you my idea, and you’ll see that I’m right.”

“What’s your idea?”

Caroline dropped her voice mysteriously.

“A Home Office expert,” she breathed.

“A Home Office expert,” I said, amazed. “My dear Caroline!”

“Mark my words, James, you’ll see that I’m right. That Russell woman was here that morning after your poisons. Roger Ackroyd might easily have been poisoned in his food that night.”

254

I laughed out loud.

“Nonsense,” I cried. “He was stabbed in the neck. You know that as well as I do.”

“After death, James,” said Caroline; “to make a false clew.”

“My good woman,” I said, “I examined the body, and I know what I’m talking about. That wound wasn’t inflicted after death—it was the cause of death, and you need make no mistake about it.”

Caroline merely continued to look omniscient, which so annoyed me that I went on:—

“Perhaps you will tell me, Caroline, if I have a medical degree or if I have not?”

“You have the medical degree, I dare say, James—at least, I mean I know you have. But you’ve no imagination whatever.”

“Having endowed you with a treble portion, there was none left over for me,” I said dryly.

I was amused to notice Caroline’s maneuvers that afternoon when Poirot duly arrived. My sister, without asking a direct question, skirted the subject of the mysterious guest in every way imaginable. By the twinkle in Poirot’s eyes, I saw that he realized her object. He remained blandly impervious, and blocked her bowling so successfully that she herself was at a loss how to proceed.

Having, I suspect, quietly enjoyed the little game, he rose to his feet and suggested a walk.

“It is that I need to reduce the figure a little,” he explained.255 “You will come with me, doctor? And perhaps later Miss Caroline will give us some tea.”

“Delighted,” said Caroline. “Won’t your—er—guest come in also?”

“You are too kind,” said Poirot. “But no, my friend reposes himself. Soon you must make his acquaintance.”

“Quite an old friend of yours, so somebody told me,” said Caroline, making one last valiant effort.

“Did they?” murmured Poirot. “Well, we must start.”

Our tramp took us in the direction of Fernly. I had guessed beforehand that it might do so. I was beginning to understand Poirot’s methods. Every little irrelevancy had a bearing upon the whole.

“I have a commission for you, my friend,” he said at last. “To-night, at my house, I desire to have a little conference. You will attend, will you not?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Good. I need also all those in the house—that is to say: Mrs. Ackroyd, Mademoiselle Flora, Major Blunt, M. Raymond. I want you to be my ambassador. This little reunion is fixed for nine o’clock. You will ask them—yes?”

“With pleasure; but why not ask them yourself?”

“Because they will then put the questions: Why? What for? They will demand what my idea is. And, as you know, my friend, I much dislike to have to explain my little ideas until the time comes.”

I smiled a little.

“My friend Hastings, he of whom I told you, used to say of me that I was the human oyster. But he was unjust.256 Of facts, I keep nothing to myself. But to every one his own interpretation of them.”

“When do you want me to do this?”

“Now, if you will. We are close to the house.”

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“No, me, I will promenade myself in the grounds. I will rejoin you by the lodge gates in a quarter of an hour’s time.”

I nodded, and set off on my task. The only member of the family at home proved to be Mrs. Ackroyd, who was sipping an early cup of tea. She received me very graciously.

“So grateful to you, doctor,” she murmured, “for clearing up that little matter with M. Poirot. But life is one trouble after another. You have heard about Flora, of course?”

“What exactly?” I asked cautiously.

“This new engagement. Flora and Hector Blunt. Of course not such a good match as Ralph would have been. But after all, happiness comes first. What dear Flora needs is an older man—some one steady and reliable, and then Hector is really a very distinguished man in his way. You saw the news of Ralph’s arrest in the paper this morning?”

“Yes,” I said, “I did.”

“Horrible.” Mrs. Ackroyd closed her eyes and shuddered. “Geoffrey Raymond was in a terrible way. Rang up Liverpool. But they wouldn’t tell him anything at the police station there. In fact, they said they hadn’t arrested Ralph at all. Mr. Raymond insists that it’s all257 a mistake—a—what do they call it?—canard of the newspaper’s. I’ve forbidden it to be mentioned before the servants. Such a terrible disgrace. Fancy if Flora had actually been married to him.”

Mrs. Ackroyd shut her eyes in anguish. I began to wonder how soon I should be able to deliver Poirot’s invitation.

Before I had time to speak, Mrs. Ackroyd was off again.

“You were here yesterday, weren’t you, with that dreadful Inspector Raglan? Brute of a man—he terrified Flora into saying she took that money from poor Roger’s room. And the matter was so simple, really. The dear child wanted to borrow a few pounds, didn’t like to disturb her uncle since he’d given strict orders against it, but knowing where he kept his notes she went there and took what she needed.”

“Is that Flora’s account of the matter?” I asked.

“My dear doctor, you know what girls are nowadays. So easily acted on by suggestion. You, of course, know all about hypnosis and that sort of thing. The inspector shouts at her, says the word ‘steal’ over and over again, until the poor child gets an inhibition—or is it a complex?—I always mix up those two words—and actually thinks herself that she has stolen the money. I saw at once how it was. But I can’t be too thankful for the whole misunderstanding in one way—it seems to have brought those two together—Hector and Flora, I mean. And I assure you that I have been very much worried about Flora in the past: why, at one time I actually258 thought there was going to be some kind of understanding between her and young Raymond. Just think of it!” Mrs. Ackroyd’s voice rose in shrill horror. “A private secretary—with practically no means of his own.”

“It would have been a severe blow to you,” I said. “Now, Mrs. Ackroyd, I’ve got a message for you from M. Hercule Poirot.”

“For me?”

Mrs. Ackroyd looked quite alarmed.

I hastened to reassure her, and I explained what Poirot wanted.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Ackroyd rather doubtfully, “I suppose we must come if M. Poirot says so. But what is it all about? I like to know beforehand.”

I assured the lady truthfully that I myself did not know any more than she did.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Ackroyd at last, rather grudgingly, “I will tell the others, and we will be there at nine o’clock.”

Thereupon I took my leave, and joined Poirot at the agreed meeting-place.

“I’ve been longer than a quarter of an hour, I’m afraid,” I remarked. “But once that good lady starts talking it’s a matter of the utmost difficulty to get a word in edgeways.”

“It is of no matter,” said Poirot. “Me, I have been well amused. This park is magnificent.”

We set off homewards. When we arrived, to our great surprise Caroline, who had evidently been watching for us, herself opened the door.

259

She put her fingers to her lips. Her face was full of importance and excitement.

“Ursula Bourne,” she said, “the parlormaid from Fernly. She’s here! I’ve put her in the dining-room. She’s in a terrible way, poor thing. Says she must see M. Poirot at once. I’ve done all I could. Taken her a cup of hot tea. It really goes to one’s heart to see any one in such a state.”

“In the dining-room?” asked Poirot.

“This way,” I said, and flung open the door.

Ursula Bourne was sitting by the table. Her arms were spread out in front of her, and she had evidently just lifted her head from where it had been buried. Her eyes were red with weeping.

“Ursula Bourne,” I murmured.

But Poirot went past me with outstretched hands.

“No,” he said, “that is not quite right, I think. It is not Ursula Bourne, is it, my child—but Ursula Paton? Mrs. Ralph Paton.”

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260

CHAPTER XXII

URSULA’S STORY

For a moment or two the girl looked mutely at Poirot. Then, her reserve breaking down completely, she nodded her head once, and burst into an outburst of sobs.

Caroline pushed past me, and putting her arm round the girl, patted her on the shoulder.

“There, there, my dear,” she said soothingly, “it will be all right. You’ll see—everything will be all right.”

Buried under curiosity and scandal-mongering there is a lot of kindness in Caroline. For the moment, even the interest of Poirot’s revelation was lost in the sight of the girl’s distress.

Presently Ursula sat up and wiped her eyes.

“This is very weak and silly of me,” she said.

“No, no, my child,” said Poirot kindly. “We can all realize the strain of this last week.”

“It must have been a terrible ordeal,” I said.

“And then to find that you knew,” continued Ursula. “How did you know? Was it Ralph who told you?”

Poirot shook his head.

“You know what brought me to you to-night,” went on the girl. “This——”

She held out a crumpled piece of newspaper, and I recognized the paragraph that Poirot had had inserted.

261

“It says that Ralph has been arrested. So everything is useless. I need not pretend any longer.”

“Newspaper paragraphs are not always true, mademoiselle,” murmured Poirot, having the grace to look ashamed of himself. “All the same, I think you will do well to make a clean breast of things. The truth is what we need now.”

The girl hesitated, looking at him doubtfully.

“You do not trust me,” said Poirot gently. “Yet all the same you came here to find me, did you not? Why was that?”

“Because I don’t believe that Ralph did it,” said the girl in a very low voice. “And I think that you are clever, and will find out the truth. And also——”

“Yes?”

“I think you are kind.”

Poirot nodded his head several times.

“It is very good that—yes, it is very good. Listen, I do in verity believe that this husband of yours is innocent—but the affair marches badly. If I am to save him, I must know all there is to know—even if it should seem to make the case against him blacker than before.”

“How well you understand,” said Ursula.

“So you will tell me the whole story, will you not? From the beginning.”

“You’re not going to send me away, I hope,” said Caroline, settling herself comfortably in an arm-chair. “What I want to know,” she continued, “is why this child was masquerading as a parlormaid?”

“Masquerading?” I queried.

262

“That’s what I said. Why did you do it, child? For a wager?”

“For a living,” said Ursula dryly.

And encouraged, she began the story which I reproduce here in my own words.

Ursula Bourne, it seemed, was one of a family of seven—impoverished Irish gentlefolk. On the death of her father, most of the girls were cast out into the world to earn their own living. Ursula’s eldest sister was married to Captain Folliott. It was she whom I had seen that Sunday, and the cause of her embarrassment was clear enough now. Determined to earn her living and not attracted to the idea of being a nursery governess—the one profession open to an untrained girl, Ursula preferred the job of parlormaid. She scorned to label herself a “lady parlormaid.” She would be the real thing, her reference being supplied by her sister. At Fernly, despite an aloofness which, as has been seen, caused some comment, she was a success at her job—quick, competent, and thorough.

“I enjoyed the work,” she explained. “And I had plenty of time to myself.”

And then came her meeting with Ralph Paton, and the love affair which culminated in a secret marriage. Ralph had persuaded her into that, somewhat against her will. He had declared that his stepfather would not hear of his marrying a penniless girl. Better to be married secretly, and break the news to him at some later and more favorable minute.

And so the deed was done, and Ursula Bourne became263 Ursula Paton. Ralph had declared that he meant to pay off his debts, find a job, and then, when he was in a position to support her, and independent of his adopted father, they would break the news to him.

But to people like Ralph Paton, turning over a new leaf is easier in theory than in practice. He hoped that his stepfather, whilst still in ignorance of the marriage, might be persuaded to pay his debts and put him on his feet again. But the revelation of the amount of Ralph’s liabilities merely enraged Roger Ackroyd, and he refused to do anything at all. Some months passed, and then Ralph was bidden once more to Fernly. Roger Ackroyd did not beat about the bush. It was the desire of his heart that Ralph should marry Flora, and he put the matter plainly before the young man.

And here it was that the innate weakness of Ralph Paton showed itself. As always, he grasped at the easy, the immediate solution. As far as I could make out, neither Flora nor Ralph made any pretence of love. It was, on both sides, a business arrangement. Roger Ackroyd dictated his wishes—they agreed to them. Flora accepted a chance of liberty, money, and an enlarged horizon, Ralph, of course, was playing a different game. But he was in a very awkward hole financially. He seized at the chance. His debts would be paid. He could start again with a clean sheet. His was not a nature to envisage the future, but I gather that he saw vaguely the engagement with Flora being broken off after a decent interval had elapsed. Both Flora and he stipulated that it should be kept a secret for the present. He was anxious to conceal it from264 Ursula. He felt instinctively that her nature, strong and resolute, with an inherent distaste for duplicity, was not one to welcome such a course.

Then came the crucial moment when Roger Ackroyd, always high-handed, decided to announce the engagement. He said no word of his intention to Ralph—only to Flora, and Flora, apathetic, raised no objection. On Ursula, the news fell like a bombshell. Summoned by her, Ralph came hurriedly down from town. They met in the wood, where part of their conversation was overheard by my sister. Ralph implored her to keep silent for a little while longer, Ursula was equally determined to have done with concealments. She would tell Mr. Ackroyd the truth without any further delay. Husband and wife parted acrimoniously.

Ursula, steadfast in her purpose, sought an interview with Roger Ackroyd that very afternoon, and revealed the truth to him. Their interview was a stormy one—it might have been even more stormy had not Roger Ackroyd been already obsessed with his own troubles. It was bad enough, however. Ackroyd was not the kind of man to forgive the deceit that had been practiced upon him. His rancor was mainly directed to Ralph, but Ursula came in for her share, since he regarded her as a girl who had deliberately tried to “entrap” the adopted son of a very wealthy man. Unforgivable things were said on both sides.

That same evening Ursula met Ralph by appointment in the small summer-house, stealing out from the house by the side door in order to do so. Their interview was265 made up of reproaches on both sides. Ralph charged Ursula with having irretrievably ruined his prospects by her ill-timed revelation. Ursula reproached Ralph with his duplicity.

They parted at last. A little over half an hour later came the discovery of Roger Ackroyd’s body. Since that night Ursula had neither seen nor heard from Ralph.

As the story unfolded itself, I realized more and more what a damning series of facts it was. Alive, Ackroyd could hardly have failed to alter his will—I knew him well enough to realize that to do so would be his first thought. His death came in the nick of time for Ralph and Ursula Paton. Small wonder the girl had held her tongue, and played her part so consistently.

My meditations were interrupted. It was Poirot’s voice speaking, and I knew from the gravity of his tone that he, too, was fully alive to the implications of the position.

“Mademoiselle, I must ask you one question, and you must answer it truthfully, for on it everything may hang: What time was it when you parted from Captain Ralph Paton in the summer-house? Now, take a little minute so that your answer may be very exact.”

The girl gave a half laugh, bitter enough in all conscience.

“Do you think I haven’t gone over that again and again in my own mind? It was just half-past nine when I went out to meet him. Major Blunt was walking up and down the terrace, so I had to go round through the bushes to avoid him. It must have been about twenty-seven minutes266 to ten when I reached the summer-house. Ralph was waiting for me. I was with him ten minutes—not longer, for it was just a quarter to ten when I got back to the house.”

I saw now the insistence of her question the other day. If only Ackroyd could have been proved to have been killed before a quarter to ten, and not after.

I saw the reflection of that thought in Poirot’s next question.

“Who left the summer-house first?”

“I did.”

“Leaving Ralph Paton in the summer-house?”

“Yes—but you don’t think——”

“Mademoiselle, it is of no importance what I think. What did you do when you got back to the house?”

“I went up to my room.”

“And stayed there until when?”

“Until about ten o’clock.”

“Is there any one who can prove that?”

“Prove? That I was in my room, you mean? Oh! no. But surely—oh! I see, they might think—they might think——”

I saw the dawning horror in her eyes.

Poirot finished the sentence for her.

“That it was you who entered by the window and stabbed Mr. Ackroyd as he sat in his chair? Yes, they might think just that.”

“Nobody but a fool would think any such thing,” said Caroline indignantly.

She patted Ursula on the shoulder.

267

The girl had her face hidden in her hands.

“Horrible,” she was murmuring. “Horrible.”

Caroline gave her a friendly shake.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” she said. “M. Poirot doesn’t think that really. As for that husband of yours, I don’t think much of him, and I tell you so candidly. Running away and leaving you to face the music.”

But Ursula shook her head energetically.

“Oh, no,” she cried. “It wasn’t like that at all. Ralph would not run away on his own account. I see now. If he heard of his stepfather’s murder, he might think himself that I had done it.”

“He wouldn’t think any such thing,” said Caroline.

“I was so cruel to him that night—so hard and bitter. I wouldn’t listen to what he was trying to say—wouldn’t believe that he really cared. I just stood there telling him what I thought of him, and saying the coldest, cruelest things that came into my mind—trying my best to hurt him.”

“Do him no harm,” said Caroline. “Never worry about what you say to a man. They’re so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it’s unflattering.”

Ursula went on, nervously twisting and untwisting her hands.

“When the murder was discovered and he didn’t come forward, I was terribly upset. Just for a moment I wondered—but then I knew he couldn’t—he couldn’t…. But I wished he would come forward and say openly that he’d had nothing to do with it. I knew that he was very fond of Dr. Sheppard, and I fancied that perhaps Dr. Sheppard might know where he was hiding.”

268

She turned to me.

“That’s why I said what I did to you that day. I thought, if you knew where he was, you might pass on the message to him.”

“I?” I exclaimed.

“Why should James know where he was?” demanded Caroline sharply.

“It was very unlikely, I know,” admitted Ursula, “but Ralph had often spoken of Dr. Sheppard, and I knew that he would be likely to consider him as his best friend in King’s Abbot.”

“My dear child,” I said, “I have not the least idea where Ralph Paton is at the present moment.”

“That is true enough,” said Poirot.

“But——” Ursula held out the newspaper cutting in a puzzled fashion.

“Ah! that,” said Poirot, slightly embarrassed; “a bagatelle, mademoiselle. A rien du tout. Not for a moment do I believe that Ralph Paton has been arrested.”

“But then——” began the girl slowly.

Poirot went on quickly:—

“There is one thing I should like to know—did Captain Paton wear shoes or boots that night?”

Ursula shook her head.

“I can’t remember.”

“A pity! But how should you? Now, madame,” he smiled at her, his head on one side, his forefinger wagging eloquently, “no questions. And do not torment yourself. Be of good courage, and place your faith in Hercule Poirot.”

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269

CHAPTER XXIII

POIROT’S LITTLE REUNION

“And now,” said Caroline, rising, “that child is coming upstairs to lie down. Don’t you worry, my dear. M. Poirot will do everything he can for you—be sure of that.”

“I ought to go back to Fernly,” said Ursula uncertainly.

But Caroline silenced her protests with a firm hand.

“Nonsense. You’re in my hands for the time being. You’ll stay here for the present, anyway—eh, M. Poirot?”

“It will be the best plan,” agreed the little Belgian. “This evening I shall want mademoiselle—I beg her pardon, madame—to attend my little reunion. Nine o’clock at my house. It is most necessary that she should be there.”

Caroline nodded, and went with Ursula out of the room. The door shut behind them. Poirot dropped down into a chair again.

“So far, so good,” he said. “Things are straightening themselves out.”

“They’re getting to look blacker and blacker against Ralph Paton,” I observed gloomily.

Poirot nodded.

270

“Yes, that is so. But it was to be expected, was it not?”

I looked at him, slightly puzzled by the remark. He was leaning back in the chair, his eyes half closed, the tips of his fingers just touching each other. Suddenly he sighed and shook his head.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It is that there are moments when a great longing for my friend Hastings comes over me. That is the friend of whom I spoke to you—the one who resides now in the Argentine. Always, when I have had a big case, he has been by my side. And he has helped me—yes, often he has helped me. For he had a knack, that one, of stumbling over the truth unawares—without noticing it himself, bien entendu. At times he has said something particularly foolish, and behold that foolish remark has revealed the truth to me! And then, too, it was his practice to keep a written record of the cases that proved interesting.”

I gave a slight embarrassed cough.

“As far as that goes,” I began, and then stopped.

Poirot sat upright in his chair. His eyes sparkled.

“But yes? What is it that you would say?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I’ve read some of Captain Hastings’s narratives, and I thought, why not try my hand at something of the same kind? Seemed a pity not to—unique opportunity—probably the only time I’ll be mixed up with anything of this kind.”

I felt myself getting hotter and hotter, and more and271 more incoherent, as I floundered through the above speech.

Poirot sprang from his chair. I had a moment’s terror that he was going to embrace me French fashion, but mercifully he refrained.

“But this is magnificent—you have then written down your impressions of the case as you went along?”

I nodded.

“Epatant!” cried Poirot. “Let me see them—this instant.”

I was not quite prepared for such a sudden demand. I racked my brains to remember certain details.

“I hope you won’t mind,” I stammered. “I may have been a little—er—personal now and then.”

“Oh! I comprehend perfectly; you have referred to me as comic—as, perhaps, ridiculous now and then? It matters not at all. Hastings, he also was not always polite. Me, I have the mind above such trivialities.”

Still somewhat doubtful, I rummaged in the drawers of my desk and produced an untidy pile of manuscript which I handed over to him. With an eye on possible publication in the future, I had divided the work into chapters, and the night before I had brought it up to date with an account of Miss Russell’s visit. Poirot had therefore twenty chapters.

I left him with them.

I was obliged to go out to a case at some distance away, and it was past eight o’clock when I got back, to be greeted with a plate of hot dinner on a tray, and the announcement that Poirot and my sister had supped together272 at half-past seven, and that the former had then gone to my workshop to finish his reading of the manuscript.

“I hope, James,” said my sister, “that you’ve been careful in what you say about me in it?”

My jaw dropped. I had not been careful at all.

“Not that it matters very much,” said Caroline, reading my expression correctly. “M. Poirot will know what to think. He understands me much better than you do.”

I went into the workshop. Poirot was sitting by the window. The manuscript lay neatly piled on a chair beside him. He laid his hand on it and spoke.

“Eh bien,” he said, “I congratulate you—on your modesty!”

“Oh!” I said, rather taken aback.

“And on your reticence,” he added.

I said “Oh!” again.

“Not so did Hastings write,” continued my friend. “On every page, many, many times was the word ‘I.’ What he thought—what he did. But you—you have kept your personality in the background; only once or twice does it obtrude—in scenes of home life, shall we say?”

I blushed a little before the twinkle in his eye.

“What do you really think of the stuff?” I asked nervously.

“You want my candid opinion?”

“Yes.”

Poirot laid his jesting manner aside.

“A very meticulous and accurate account,” he said kindly. “You have recorded all the facts faithfully and273 exactly—though you have shown yourself becomingly reticent as to your own share in them.”

“And it has helped you?”

“Yes. I may say that it has helped me considerably. Come, we must go over to my house and set the stage for my little performance.”

Caroline was in the hall. I think she hoped that she might be invited to accompany us. Poirot dealt with the situation tactfully.

“I should much like to have had you present, mademoiselle,” he said regretfully, “but at this juncture it would not be wise. See you, all these people to-night are suspects. Amongst them, I shall find the person who killed Mr. Ackroyd.”

“You really believe that?” I said incredulously.

“I see that you do not,” said Poirot dryly. “Not yet do you appreciate Hercule Poirot at his true worth.”

At that minute Ursula came down the staircase.

“You are ready, my child?” said Poirot. “That is good. We will go to my house together. Mademoiselle Caroline, believe me, I do everything possible to render you service. Good-evening.”

We went out, leaving Caroline, rather like a dog who has been refused a walk, standing on the front door step gazing after us.

The sitting-room at The Larches had been got ready. On the table were various sirops and glasses. Also a plate of biscuits. Several chairs had been brought in from the other room.

Poirot ran to and fro rearranging things. Pulling out274 a chair here, altering the position of a lamp there, occasionally stooping to straighten one of the mats that covered the floor. He was specially fussy over the lighting. The lamps were arranged in such a way as to throw a clear light on the side of the room where the chairs were grouped, at the same time leaving the other end of the room, where I presumed Poirot himself would sit, in a dim twilight.

Ursula and I watched him. Presently a bell was heard.

“They arrive,” said Poirot. “Good, all is in readiness.”

The door opened and the party from Fernly filed in. Poirot went forward and greeted Mrs. Ackroyd and Flora.

“It is most good of you to come,” he said. “And Major Blunt and Mr. Raymond.”

The secretary was debonair as ever.

“What’s the great idea?” he said, laughing. “Some scientific machine? Do we have bands round our wrists which register guilty heart-beats? There is such an invention, isn’t there?”

“I have read of it, yes,” admitted Poirot. “But me, I am old-fashioned. I use the old methods. I work only with the little gray cells. Now let us begin—but first I have an announcement to make to you all.”

He took Ursula’s hand and drew her forward.

“This lady is Mrs. Ralph Paton. She was married to Captain Paton last March.”

A little shriek burst from Mrs. Ackroyd.

“Ralph! Married! Last March! Oh! but it’s absurd. How could he be?”

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She stared at Ursula as though she had never seen her before.

“Married to Bourne?” she said. “Really, M. Poirot, I don’t believe you.”

Ursula flushed and began to speak, but Flora forestalled her.

Going quickly to the other girl’s side, she passed her hand through her arm.

“You must not mind our being surprised,” she said. “You see, we had no idea of such a thing. You and Ralph have kept your secret very well. I am—very glad about it.”

“You are very kind, Miss Ackroyd,” said Ursula in a low voice, “and you have every right to be exceedingly angry. Ralph behaved very badly—especially to you.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” said Flora, giving her arm a consoling little pat. “Ralph was in a corner and took the only way out. I should probably have done the same in his place. I do think he might have trusted me with the secret, though. I wouldn’t have let him down.”

Poirot rapped gently on a table and cleared his throat significantly.

“The board meeting’s going to begin,” said Flora. “M. Poirot hints that we mustn’t talk. But just tell me one thing. Where is Ralph? You must know if any one does.”

“But I don’t,” cried Ursula, almost in a wail. “That’s just it, I don’t.”

“Isn’t he detained at Liverpool?” asked Raymond. “It said so in the paper.”

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“He is not at Liverpool,” said Poirot shortly.

“In fact,” I remarked, “no one knows where he is.”

“Excepting Hercule Poirot, eh?” said Raymond.

Poirot replied seriously to the other’s banter.

“Me, I know everything. Remember that.”

Geoffrey Raymond lifted his eyebrows.

“Everything?” He whistled. “Whew! that’s a tall order.”

“Do you mean to say you can really guess where Ralph Paton is hiding?” I asked incredulously.

“You call it guessing. I call it knowing, my friend.”

“In Cranchester?” I hazarded.

“No,” replied Poirot gravely, “not in Cranchester.”

He said no more, but at a gesture from him the assembled party took their seats. As they did so, the door opened once more and two other people came in and sat down near the door. They were Parker and the housekeeper.

“The number is complete,” said Poirot. “Every one is here.”

There was a ring of satisfaction in his tone. And with the sound of it I saw a ripple of something like uneasiness pass over all those faces grouped at the other end of the room. There was a suggestion in all this as of a trap—a trap that had closed.

Poirot read from a list in an important manner.

“Mrs. Ackroyd, Miss Flora Ackroyd, Major Blunt, Mr. Geoffrey Raymond, Mrs. Ralph Paton, John Parker, Elizabeth Russell.”

He laid the paper down on the table.

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“What’s the meaning of all this?” began Raymond.

“The list I have just read,” said Poirot, “is a list of suspected persons. Every one of you present had the opportunity to kill Mr. Ackroyd——”

With a cry Mrs. Ackroyd sprang up, her throat working.

“I don’t like it,” she wailed. “I don’t like it. I would much prefer to go home.”

“You cannot go home, madame,” said Poirot sternly, “until you have heard what I have to say.”

He paused a moment, then cleared his throat.

“I will start at the beginning. When Miss Ackroyd asked me to investigate the case, I went up to Fernly Park with the good Dr. Sheppard. I walked with him along the terrace, where I was shown the footprints on the window-sill. From there Inspector Raglan took me along the path which leads to the drive. My eye was caught by a little summer-house, and I searched it thoroughly. I found two things—a scrap of starched cambric and an empty goose quill. The scrap of cambric immediately suggested to me a maid’s apron. When Inspector Raglan showed me his list of the people in the house, I noticed at once that one of the maids—Ursula Bourne, the parlormaid—had no real alibi. According to her own story, she was in her bedroom from nine-thirty until ten. But supposing that instead she was in the summer-house? If so, she must have gone there to meet some one. Now we know from Dr. Sheppard that some one from outside did come to the house that night—the stranger whom he met just by the gate. At a first glance278 it would seem that our problem was solved, and that the stranger went to the summer-house to meet Ursula Bourne. It was fairly certain that he did go to the summer-house because of the goose quill. That suggested at once to my mind a taker of drugs—and one who had acquired the habit on the other side of the Atlantic where sniffing ‘snow’ is more common than in this country. The man whom Dr. Sheppard met had an American accent, which fitted in with that supposition.

“But I was held up by one point. The times did not fit. Ursula Bourne could certainly not have gone to the summer-house before nine-thirty, whereas the man must have got there by a few minutes past nine. I could, of course, assume that he waited there for half an hour. The only alternative supposition was that there had been two separate meetings in the summer-house that night. Eh bien, as soon as I went into that alternative I found several significant facts. I discovered that Miss Russell, the housekeeper, had visited Dr. Sheppard that morning, and had displayed a good deal of interest in cures for victims of the drug habit. Taking that in conjunction with the goose quill, I assumed that the man in question came to Fernly to meet the housekeeper, and not Ursula Bourne. Who, then, did Ursula Bourne come to the rendezvous to meet? I was not long in doubt. First I found a ring—a wedding ring—with ‘From R.’ and a date inside it. Then I learnt that Ralph Paton had been seen coming up the path which led to the summer-house at twenty-five minutes past nine, and I also heard of a certain conversation which had taken place in279 the wood near the village that very afternoon—a conversation between Ralph Paton and some unknown girl. So I had my facts succeeding each other in a neat and orderly manner. A secret marriage, an engagement announced on the day of the tragedy, the stormy interview in the wood, and the meeting arranged for the summer-house that night.

“Incidentally this proved to me one thing, that both Ralph Paton and Ursula Bourne (or Paton) had the strongest motives for wishing Mr. Ackroyd out of the way. And it also made one other point unexpectedly clear. It could not have been Ralph Paton who was with Mr. Ackroyd in the study at nine-thirty.

“So we come to another and most interesting aspect of the crime. Who was it in the room with Mr. Ackroyd at nine-thirty? Not Ralph Paton, who was in the summer-house with his wife. Not Charles Kent, who had already left. Who, then? I posed my cleverest—my most audacious question: Was any one with him?”

Poirot leaned forward and shot the last words triumphantly at us, drawing back afterwards with the air of one who has made a decided hit.

Raymond, however, did not seem impressed, and lodged a mild protest.

“I don’t know if you’re trying to make me out a liar, M. Poirot, but the matter does not rest on my evidence alone—except perhaps as to the exact words used. Remember, Major Blunt also heard Mr. Ackroyd talking to some one. He was on the terrace outside, and couldn’t280 catch the words clearly, but he distinctly heard the voices.”

Poirot nodded.

“I have not forgotten,” he said quietly. “But Major Blunt was under the impression that it was you to whom Mr. Ackroyd was speaking.”

For a moment Raymond seemed taken aback. Then he recovered himself.

“Blunt knows now that he was mistaken,” he said.

“Exactly,” agreed the other man.

“Yet there must have been some reason for his thinking so,” mused Poirot. “Oh! no,” he held up his hand in protest, “I know the reason you will give—but it is not enough. We must seek elsewhere. I will put it this way. From the beginning of the case I have been struck by one thing—the nature of those words which Mr. Raymond overheard. It has been amazing to me that no one has commented on them—has seen anything odd about them.”

He paused a minute, and then quoted softly:—

“… The calls on my purse have been so frequent of late that I fear it is impossible for me to accede to your request. Does nothing strike you as odd about that?”

“I don’t think so,” said Raymond. “He has frequently dictated letters to me, using almost exactly those same words.”

“Exactly,” cried Poirot. “That is what I seek to arrive at. Would any man use such a phrase in talking to another? Impossible that that should be part of a real conversation. Now, if he had been dictating a letter——”

281

“You mean he was reading a letter aloud,” said Raymond slowly. “Even so, he must have been reading to some one.”

“But why? We have no evidence that there was any one else in the room. No other voice but Mr. Ackroyd’s was heard, remember.”

“Surely a man wouldn’t read letters of that type aloud to himself—not unless he was—well—going balmy.”

“You have all forgotten one thing,” said Poirot softly: “the stranger who called at the house the preceding Wednesday.”

They all stared at him.

“But yes,” said Poirot, nodding encouragingly, “on Wednesday. The young man was not of himself important. But the firm he represented interested me very much.”

“The Dictaphone Company,” gasped Raymond. “I see it now. A dictaphone. That’s what you think?”

Poirot nodded.

“Mr. Ackroyd had promised to invest in a dictaphone, you remember. Me, I had the curiosity to inquire of the company in question. Their reply is that Mr. Ackroyd did purchase a dictaphone from their representative. Why he concealed the matter from you, I do not know.”

“He must have meant to surprise me with it,” murmured Raymond. “He had quite a childish love of surprising people. Meant to keep it up his sleeve for a day or so. Probably was playing with it like a new toy. Yes, it fits in. You’re quite right—no one would use quite those words in casual conversation.”

282

“It explains, too,” said Poirot, “why Major Blunt thought it was you who were in the study. Such scraps as came to him were fragments of dictation, and so his subconscious mind deduced that you were with him. His conscious mind was occupied with something quite different—the white figure he had caught a glimpse of. He fancied it was Miss Ackroyd. Really, of course, it was Ursula Bourne’s white apron he saw as she was stealing down to the summer-house.”

Raymond had recovered from his first surprise.

“All the same,” he remarked, “this discovery of yours, brilliant though it is (I’m quite sure I should never have thought of it), leaves the essential position unchanged. Mr. Ackroyd was alive at nine-thirty, since he was speaking into the dictaphone. It seems clear that the man Charles Kent was really off the premises by then. As to Ralph Paton——?”

He hesitated, glancing at Ursula.

Her color flared up, but she answered steadily enough.

“Ralph and I parted just before a quarter to ten. He never went near the house, I am sure of that. He had no intention of doing so. The last thing on earth he wanted was to face his stepfather. He would have funked it badly.”

“It isn’t that I doubt your story for a moment,” explained Raymond. “I’ve always been quite sure Captain Paton was innocent. But one has to think of a court of law—and the questions that would be asked. He is in a most unfortunate position, but if he were to come forward——”

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Poirot interrupted.

“That is your advice, yes? That he should come forward?”

“Certainly. If you know where he is——”

“I perceive that you do not believe that I do know. And yet I have told you just now that I know everything. The truth of the telephone call, of the footprints on the window-sill, of the hiding-place of Ralph Paton——”

“Where is he?” said Blunt sharply.

“Not very far away,” said Poirot, smiling.

“In Cranchester?” I asked.

Poirot turned towards me.

“Always you ask me that. The idea of Cranchester it is with you an idée fixe. No, he is not in Cranchester. He is—there!”

He pointed a dramatic forefinger. Every one’s head turned.

Ralph Paton was standing in the doorway.

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284

CHAPTER XXIV

RALPH PATON’S STORY

It was a very uncomfortable minute for me. I hardly took in what happened next, but there were exclamations and cries of surprise! When I was sufficiently master of myself to be able to realize what was going on, Ralph Paton was standing by his wife, her hand in his, and he was smiling across the room at me.

Poirot, too, was smiling, and at the same time shaking an eloquent finger at me.

“Have I not told you at least thirty-six times that it is useless to conceal things from Hercule Poirot?” he demanded. “That in such a case he finds out?”

He turned to the others.

“One day, you remember, we held a little séance about a table—just the six of us. I accused the other five persons present of concealing something from me. Four of them gave up their secret. Dr. Sheppard did not give up his. But all along I have had my suspicions. Dr. Sheppard went to the Three Boars that night hoping to find Ralph. He did not find him there; but supposing, I said to myself, that he met him in the street on his way home? Dr. Sheppard was a friend of Captain Paton’s, and he had come straight from the scene of the crime. He must know that things looked very black against him. Perhaps he knew more than the general public did——”

285

“I did,” I said ruefully. “I suppose I might as well make a clean breast of things now. I went to see Ralph that afternoon. At first he refused to take me into his confidence, but later he told me about his marriage, and the hole he was in. As soon as the murder was discovered, I realized that once the facts were known, suspicion could not fail to attach to Ralph—or, if not to him, to the girl he loved. That night I put the facts plainly before him. The thought of having possibly to give evidence which might incriminate his wife made him resolve at all costs to—to——”

I hesitated, and Ralph filled up the gap.

“To do a bunk,” he said graphically. “You see, Ursula left me to go back to the house. I thought it possible that she might have attempted to have another interview with my stepfather. He had already been very rude to her that afternoon. It occurred to me that he might have so insulted her—in such an unforgivable manner—that without knowing what she was doing——”

He stopped. Ursula released her hand from his, and stepped back.

“You thought that, Ralph! You actually thought that I might have done it?”

“Let us get back to the culpable conduct of Dr. Sheppard,” said Poirot dryly. “Dr. Sheppard consented to do what he could to help him. He was successful in hiding Captain Paton from the police.”

“Where?” asked Raymond. “In his own house?”

“Ah, no, indeed,” said Poirot. “You should ask yourself the question that I did. If the good doctor is concealing286 the young man, what place would he choose? It must necessarily be somewhere near at hand. I think of Cranchester. A hotel? No. Lodgings? Even more emphatically, no. Where, then? Ah! I have it. A nursing home. A home for the mentally unfit. I test my theory. I invent a nephew with mental trouble. I consult Mademoiselle Sheppard as to suitable homes. She gives me the names of two near Cranchester to which her brother has sent patients. I make inquiries. Yes, at one of them a patient was brought there by the doctor himself early on Saturday morning. That patient, though known by another name, I had no difficulty in identifying as Captain Paton. After certain necessary formalities, I was allowed to bring him away. He arrived at my house in the early hours of yesterday morning.”

I looked at him ruefully.

“Caroline’s Home Office expert,” I murmured. “And to think I never guessed!”

“You see now why I drew attention to the reticence of your manuscript,” murmured Poirot. “It was strictly truthful as far as it went—but it did not go very far, eh, my friend?”

I was too abashed to argue.

“Dr. Sheppard has been very loyal,” said Ralph. “He has stood by me through thick and thin. He did what he thought was the best. I see now, from what M. Poirot has told me, that it was not really the best. I should have come forward and faced the music. You see, in the home, we never saw a newspaper. I knew nothing of what was going on.”

287

“Dr. Sheppard has been a model of discretion,” said Poirot dryly. “But me, I discover all the little secrets. It is my business.”

“Now we can have your story of what happened that night,” said Raymond impatiently.

“You know it already,” said Ralph. “There’s very little for me to add. I left the summer-house about nine-forty-five, and tramped about the lanes, trying to make up my mind as to what to do next—what line to take. I’m bound to admit that I’ve not the shadow of an alibi, but I give you my solemn word that I never went to the study, that I never saw my stepfather alive—or dead. Whatever the world thinks, I’d like all of you to believe me.”

“No alibi,” murmured Raymond. “That’s bad. I believe you, of course, but—it’s a bad business.”

“It makes things very simple, though,” said Poirot, in a cheerful voice. “Very simple indeed.”

We all stared at him.

“You see what I mean? No? Just this—to save Captain Paton the real criminal must confess.”

He beamed round at us all.

“But yes—I mean what I say. See now, I did not invite Inspector Raglan to be present. That was for a reason. I did not want to tell him all that I knew—at least I did not want to tell him to-night.”

He leaned forward, and suddenly his voice and his whole personality changed. He suddenly became dangerous.

“I who speak to you—I know the murderer of Mr.288 Ackroyd is in this room now. It is to the murderer I speak. To-morrow the truth goes to Inspector Raglan. You understand?”

There was a tense silence. Into the midst of it came the old Breton woman with a telegram on a salver. Poirot tore it open.

Blunt’s voice rose abrupt and resonant.

“The murderer is amongst us, you say? You know—which?”

Poirot had read the message. He crumpled it up in his hand.

“I know—now.”

He tapped the crumpled ball of paper.

“What is that?” said Raymond sharply.

“A wireless message—from a steamer now on her way to the United States.”

There was a dead silence. Poirot rose to his feet bowing.

“Messieurs et Mesdames, this reunion of mine is at an end. Remember—the truth goes to Inspector Raglan in the morning.”

---

289

CHAPTER XXV

THE WHOLE TRUTH

A slight gesture from Poirot enjoined me to stay behind the rest. I obeyed, going over to the fire and thoughtfully stirring the big logs on it with the toe of my boot.

I was puzzled. For the first time I was absolutely at sea as to Poirot’s meaning. For a moment I was inclined to think that the scene I had just witnessed was a gigantic piece of bombast—that he had been what he called “playing the comedy” with a view to making himself interesting and important. But, in spite of myself, I was forced to believe in an underlying reality. There had been real menace in his words—a certain indisputable sincerity. But I still believed him to be on entirely the wrong tack.

When the door shut behind the last of the party he came over to the fire.

“Well, my friend,” he said quietly, “and what do you think of it all?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said frankly. “What was the point? Why not go straight to Inspector Raglan with the truth instead of giving the guilty person this elaborate warning?”

Poirot sat down and drew out his case of tiny Russian290 cigarettes. He smoked for a minute or two in silence. Then:—

“Use your little gray cells,” he said. “There is always a reason behind my actions.”

I hesitated for a moment, and then I said slowly:

“The first one that occurs to me is that you yourself do not know who the guilty person is, but that you are sure that he is to be found amongst the people here to-night. Therefore your words were intended to force a confession from the unknown murderer?”

Poirot nodded approvingly.

“A clever idea, but not the truth.”

“I thought, perhaps, that by making him believe you knew, you might force him out into the open—not necessarily by confession. He might try to silence you as he formerly silenced Mr. Ackroyd—before you could act to-morrow morning.”

“A trap with myself as the bait! Merci, mon ami, but I am not sufficiently heroic for that.”

“Then I fail to understand you. Surely you are running the risk of letting the murderer escape by thus putting him on his guard?”

Poirot shook his head.

“He cannot escape,” he said gravely. “There is only one way out—and that way does not lead to freedom.”

“You really believe that one of those people here to-night committed the murder?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes, my friend.”

“Which one?”

There was a silence for some minutes. Then Poirot291 tossed the stump of his cigarette into the grate and began to speak in a quiet, reflective tone.

“I will take you the way that I have traveled myself. Step by step you shall accompany me, and see for yourself that all the facts point indisputably to one person. Now, to begin with, there were two facts and one little discrepancy in time which especially attracted my attention. The first fact was the telephone call. If Ralph Paton were indeed the murderer, the telephone call became meaningless and absurd. Therefore, I said to myself, Ralph Paton is not the murderer.

“I satisfied myself that the call could not have been sent by any one in the house, yet I was convinced that it was amongst those present on the fatal evening that I had to look for my criminal. Therefore I concluded that the telephone call must have been sent by an accomplice. I was not quite pleased with that deduction, but I let it stand for the minute.

“I next examined the motive for the call. That was difficult. I could only get at it by judging its result. Which was—that the murder was discovered that night instead of—in all probability—the following morning. You agree with that?”

“Ye-es,” I admitted. “Yes. As you say, Mr. Ackroyd, having given orders that he was not to be disturbed, nobody would have been likely to go to the study that night.”

“Très bien. The affair marches, does it not? But matters were still obscure. What was the advantage of having the crime discovered that night in preference to292 the following morning? The only idea I could get hold of was that the murderer, knowing the crime was to be discovered at a certain time, could make sure of being present when the door was broken in—or at any rate immediately afterwards. And now we come to the second fact—the chair pulled out from the wall. Inspector Raglan dismissed that as of no importance. I, on the contrary, have always regarded it as of supreme importance.

“In your manuscript you have drawn a neat little plan of the study. If you had it with you this minute you would see that—the chair being drawn out in the position indicated by Parker—it would stand in a direct line between the door and the window.”

“The window!” I said quickly.

“You, too, have my first idea. I imagined that the chair was drawn out so that something connected with the window should not be seen by any one entering through the door. But I soon abandoned that supposition, for though the chair was a grandfather with a high back, it obscured very little of the window—only the part between the sash and the ground. No, mon ami—but remember that just in front of the window there stood a table with books and magazines upon it. Now that table was completely hidden by the drawn-out chair—and immediately I had my first shadowy suspicion of the truth.

“Supposing that there had been something on that table not intended to be seen? Something placed there by the murderer? As yet I had no inkling of what that something might be. But I knew certain very interesting293 facts about it. For instance, it was something that the murderer had not been able to take away with him at the time that he committed the crime. At the same time it was vital that it should be removed as soon as possible after the crime had been discovered. And so—the telephone message, and the opportunity for the murderer to be on the spot when the body was discovered.

“Now four people were on the scene before the police arrived. Yourself, Parker, Major Blunt, and Mr. Raymond. Parker I eliminated at once, since at whatever time the crime was discovered, he was the one person certain to be on the spot. Also it was he who told me of the pulled-out chair. Parker, then, was cleared (of the murder, that is. I still thought it possible that he had been blackmailing Mrs. Ferrars). Raymond and Blunt, however, remained under suspicion since, if the crime had been discovered in the early hours of the morning, it was quite possible that they might have arrived on the scene too late to prevent the object on the round table being discovered.

“Now what was that object? You heard my arguments to-night in reference to the scrap of conversation overheard? As soon as I learned that a representative of a dictaphone company had called, the idea of a dictaphone took root in my mind. You heard what I said in this room not half an hour ago? They all agreed with my theory—but one vital fact seems to have escaped them. Granted that a dictaphone was being used by Mr. Ackroyd that night—why was no dictaphone found?”

“I never thought of that,” I said.

294

“We know that a dictaphone was supplied to Mr. Ackroyd. But no dictaphone has been found amongst his effects. So, if something was taken from that table—why should not that something be the dictaphone? But there were certain difficulties in the way. The attention of every one was, of course, focused on the murdered man. I think any one could have gone to the table unnoticed by the other people in the room. But a dictaphone has a certain bulk—it cannot be slipped casually into a pocket. There must have been a receptacle of some kind capable of holding it.

“You see where I am arriving? The figure of the murderer is taking shape. A person who was on the scene straightway, but who might not have been if the crime had been discovered the following morning. A person carrying a receptacle into which the dictaphone might be fitted——”

I interrupted.

“But why remove the dictaphone? What was the point?”

“You are like Mr. Raymond. You take it for granted that what was heard at nine-thirty was Mr. Ackroyd’s voice speaking into a dictaphone. But consider this useful invention for a little minute. You dictate into it, do you not? And at some later time a secretary or a typist turns it on, and the voice speaks again.”

“You mean——” I gasped.

Poirot nodded.

“Yes, I mean that. At nine-thirty Mr. Ackroyd was295 already dead. It was the dictaphone speaking—not the man.”

“And the murderer switched it on. Then he must have been in the room at that minute?”

“Possibly. But we must not exclude the likelihood of some mechanical device having been applied—something after the nature of a time lock, or even of a simple alarm clock. But in that case we must add two qualifications to our imaginary portrait of the murderer. It must be some one who knew of Mr. Ackroyd’s purchase of the dictaphone and also some one with the necessary mechanical knowledge.

“I had got thus far in my own mind when we came to the footprints on the window ledge. Here there were three conclusions open to me. (1) They might really have been made by Ralph Paton. He had been at Fernly that night, and might have climbed into the study and found his uncle dead there. That was one hypothesis. (2) There was the possibility that the footmarks might have been made by somebody else who happened to have the same kind of studs in his shoes. But the inmates of the house had shoes soled with crepe rubber, and I declined to believe in the coincidence of some one from outside having the same kind of shoes as Ralph Paton wore. Charles Kent, as we know from the barmaid of the Dog and Whistle, had on a pair of boots ‘clean dropping off him.’ (3) Those prints were made by some one deliberately trying to throw suspicion on Ralph Paton. To test this last conclusion, it was necessary to ascertain certain facts. One pair of Ralph’s shoes had been296 obtained from the Three Boars by the police. Neither Ralph nor any one else could have worn them that evening, since they were downstairs being cleaned. According to the police theory, Ralph was wearing another pair of the same kind, and I found out that it was true that he had two pairs. Now for my theory to be proved correct it was necessary for the murderer to have worn Ralph’s shoes that evening—in which case Ralph must have been wearing yet a third pair of footwear of some kind. I could hardly suppose that he would bring three pairs of shoes all alike—the third pair of footwear were more likely to be boots. I got your sister to make inquiries on this point—laying some stress on the color, in order—I admit it frankly—to obscure the real reason for my asking.

“You know the result of her investigations. Ralph Paton had had a pair of boots with him. The first question I asked him when he came to my house yesterday morning was what he was wearing on his feet on the fatal night. He replied at once that he had worn boots—he was still wearing them, in fact—having nothing else to put on.

“So we get a step further in our description of the murderer—a person who had the opportunity to take these shoes of Ralph Paton’s from the Three Boars that day.”

He paused, and then said, with a slightly raised voice:—

“There is one further point. The murderer must have been a person who had the opportunity to purloin that297 dagger from the silver table. You might argue that any one in the house might have done so, but I will recall to you that Miss Ackroyd was very positive that the dagger was not there when she examined the silver table.”

He paused again.

“Let us recapitulate—now that all is clear. A person who was at the Three Boars earlier that day, a person who knew Ackroyd well enough to know that he had purchased a dictaphone, a person who was of a mechanical turn of mind, who had the opportunity to take the dagger from the silver table before Miss Flora arrived, who had with him a receptacle suitable for hiding the dictaphone—such as a black bag, and who had the study to himself for a few minutes after the crime was discovered while Parker was telephoning for the police. In fact—Dr. Sheppard!”

---

298

CHAPTER XXVI

AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

There was a dead silence for a minute and a half.

Then I laughed.

“You’re mad,” I said.

“No,” said Poirot placidly. “I am not mad. It was the little discrepancy in time that first drew my attention to you—right at the beginning.”

“Discrepancy in time?” I queried, puzzled.

“But yes. You will remember that every one agreed—you yourself included—that it took five minutes to walk from the lodge to the house—less if you took the short cut to the terrace. But you left the house at ten minutes to nine—both by your own statement and that of Parker, and yet it was nine o’clock as you passed through the lodge gates. It was a chilly night—not an evening a man would be inclined to dawdle; why had you taken ten minutes to do a five-minutes’ walk? All along I realized that we had only your statement for it that the study window was ever fastened. Ackroyd asked you if you had done so—he never looked to see. Supposing, then, that the study window was unfastened? Would there be time in that ten minutes for you to run round the outside of the house, change your shoes, climb in through the window, kill Ackroyd, and get to the gate by nine299 o’clock? I decided against that theory since in all probability a man as nervous as Ackroyd was that night would hear you climbing in, and then there would have been a struggle. But supposing that you killed Ackroyd before you left—as you were standing beside his chair? Then you go out of the front door, run round to the summer-house, take Ralph Paton’s shoes out of the bag you brought up with you that night, slip them on, walk through the mud in them, and leave prints on the window ledge, you climb in, lock the study door on the inside, run back to the summer-house, change back into your own shoes, and race down to the gate. (I went through similar actions the other day, when you were with Mrs. Ackroyd—it took ten minutes exactly.) Then home—and an alibi—since you had timed the dictaphone for half-past nine.”

“My dear Poirot,” I said in a voice that sounded strange and forced to my own ears, “you’ve been brooding over this case too long. What on earth had I to gain by murdering Ackroyd?”

“Safety. It was you who blackmailed Mrs. Ferrars. Who could have had a better knowledge of what killed Mr. Ferrars than the doctor who was attending him? When you spoke to me that first day in the garden, you mentioned a legacy received about a year ago. I have been unable to discover any trace of a legacy. You had to invent some way of accounting for Mrs. Ferrars’s twenty thousand pounds. It has not done you much good. You lost most of it in speculation—then you put the screw on too hard, and Mrs. Ferrars took a way out300 that you had not expected. If Ackroyd had learnt the truth he would have had no mercy on you—you were ruined for ever.”

“And the telephone call?” I asked, trying to rally. “You have a plausible explanation of that also, I suppose?”

“I will confess to you that it was my greatest stumbling block when I found that a call had actually been put through to you from King’s Abbot station. I at first believed that you had simply invented the story. It was a very clever touch, that. You must have some excuse for arriving at Fernly, finding the body, and so getting the chance to remove the dictaphone on which your alibi depended. I had a very vague notion of how it was worked when I came to see your sister that first day and inquired as to what patients you had seen on Friday morning. I had no thought of Miss Russell in my mind at that time. Her visit was a lucky coincidence, since it distracted your mind from the real object of my questions. I found what I was looking for. Among your patients that morning was the steward of an American liner. Who more suitable than he to be leaving for Liverpool by the train that evening? And afterwards he would be on the high seas, well out of the way. I noted that the Orion sailed on Saturday, and having obtained the name of the steward I sent him a wireless message asking a certain question. This is his reply you saw me receive just now.”

He held out the message to me. It ran as follows—

301

“Quite correct. Dr. Sheppard asked me to leave a note at a patient’s house. I was to ring him up from the station with the reply. Reply was ‘No answer.’”

** ***

“It was a clever idea,” said Poirot. “The call was genuine. Your sister saw you take it. But there was only one man’s word as to what was actually said—your own!”

I yawned.

“All this,” I said, “is very interesting—but hardly in the sphere of practical politics.”

“You think not? Remember what I said—the truth goes to Inspector Raglan in the morning. But, for the sake of your good sister, I am willing to give you the chance of another way out. There might be, for instance, an overdose of a sleeping draught. You comprehend me? But Captain Ralph Paton must be cleared—ça va sans dire. I should suggest that you finish that very interesting manuscript of yours—but abandoning your former reticence.”

“You seem to be very prolific of suggestions,” I remarked. “Are you sure you’ve quite finished.”

“Now that you remind me of the fact, it is true that there is one thing more. It would be most unwise on your part to attempt to silence me as you silenced M. Ackroyd. That kind of business does not succeed against Hercule Poirot, you understand.”

“My dear Poirot,” I said, smiling a little, “whatever else I may be, I am not a fool.”

I rose to my feet.

302

“Well, well,” I said, with a slight yawn, “I must be off home. Thank you for a most interesting and instructive evening.”

Poirot also rose and bowed with his accustomed politeness as I passed out of the room.

---

303

CHAPTER XXVII

APOLOGIA

Five a.m. I am very tired—but I have finished my task. My arm aches from writing.

A strange end to my manuscript. I meant it to be published some day as the history of one of Poirot’s failures! Odd, how things pan out.

All along I’ve had a premonition of disaster, from the moment I saw Ralph Paton and Mrs. Ferrars with their heads together. I thought then that she was confiding in him; as it happened I was quite wrong there, but the idea persisted even after I went into the study with Ackroyd that night, until he told me the truth.

Poor old Ackroyd. I’m always glad that I gave him a chance. I urged him to read that letter before it was too late. Or let me be honest—didn’t I subconsciously realize that with a pig-headed chap like him, it was my best chance of getting him not to read it? His nervousness that night was interesting psychologically. He knew danger was close at hand. And yet he never suspected me.

The dagger was an afterthought. I’d brought up a very handy little weapon of my own, but when I saw the dagger lying in the silver table, it occurred to me at once how much better it would be to use a weapon that couldn’t be traced to me.

304

I suppose I must have meant to murder him all along. As soon as I heard of Mrs. Ferrars’s death, I felt convinced that she would have told him everything before she died. When I met him and he seemed so agitated, I thought that perhaps he knew the truth, but that he couldn’t bring himself to believe it, and was going to give me the chance of refuting it.

So I went home and took my precautions. If the trouble were after all only something to do with Ralph—well, no harm would have been done. The dictaphone he had given me two days before to adjust. Something had gone a little wrong with it, and I persuaded him to let me have a go at it, instead of sending it back. I did what I wanted to it, and took it up with me in my bag that evening.

I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following:—

“The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.”

All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?

When I looked round the room from the door, I was quite satisfied. Nothing had been left undone. The dictaphone was on the table by the window, timed to go off305 at nine-thirty (the mechanism of that little device was rather clever—based on the principle of an alarm clock), and the arm-chair was pulled out so as to hide it from the door.

I must admit that it gave me rather a shock to run into Parker just outside the door. I have faithfully recorded that fact.

Then later, when the body was discovered, and I had sent Parker to telephone for the police, what a judicious use of words: “I did what little had to be done!” It was quite little—just to shove the dictaphone into my bag and push back the chair against the wall in its proper place. I never dreamed that Parker would have noticed that chair. Logically, he ought to have been so agog over the body as to be blind to everything else. But I hadn’t reckoned with the trained-servant complex.

I wish I could have known beforehand that Flora was going to say she’d seen her uncle alive at a quarter to ten. That puzzled me more than I can say. In fact, all through the case there have been things that puzzled me hopelessly. Every one seems to have taken a hand.

My greatest fear all through has been Caroline. I have fancied she might guess. Curious the way she spoke that day of my “strain of weakness.”

Well, she will never know the truth. There is, as Poirot said, one way out….

I can trust him. He and Inspector Raglan will manage it between them. I should not like Caroline to know. She is fond of me, and then, too, she is proud….306 My death will be a grief to her, but grief passes….

When I have finished writing, I shall enclose this whole manuscript in an envelope and address it to Poirot.

And then—what shall it be? Veronal? There would be a kind of poetic justice. Not that I take any responsibility for Mrs. Ferrars’s death. It was the direct consequence of her own actions. I feel no pity for her.

I have no pity for myself either.

So let it be veronal.

But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.

THE END

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Transcriber’s Notes:

• Blank pages have been removed.
• Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
• In the line “On this particular night our guests were Miss Ganett, and Colonel Carter who lives near the church.” it is unclear who “who lives” refers to, so a comma was added as the simplest change.

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