The Ordways by William Humphrey Page A

Ordways were stared at now fully as hard as they had been when he led the team.
    It was during this time that the man seated on the porch of a country store where they stopped had taken it upon himself to interfere on her behalf. Their approach to the store had, as always, been studied from afar, and now this man watched the hot, dusty, pinched, and gravid little woman climb the creaky steps and cross the sagging, creaky porch in her thin shapeless dress, her worn and dusty shoes, waited until she was inside, spat out into the road, and said to his companions at large, “Now ain’t that a sight to make you ashamed of being a man? Big lazy good-for-nothing taking his ease up there in the cool while that poor little woman has to walk along poking them oxen!” His tone was one almost of raillery. You might have thought he was baiting an old friend.
    If Thomas Ordway heard this, and would have liked to hush the man for his own sake, it was already too late; there was nothing he could have said. In any case, he did not speak, and this must have seemed to the man on the porch like more of the same disregard which had been so provoking to begin with. “I’m talking to you,” he said.
    As Thomas Ordway sought to locate the voice, his unseeing gaze passed without acknowledgment over his assailant.
    â€œHere I am,” said he, stepping to edge of the porch and squinting against the glare. “It’s me that’s talking to you. I’m an old man but not too old to tell you—and to prove it on you, too—that any man who would sit on that wagon seat and let his wife, in her—”
    At that point Ella returned. But before she could intervene the man gasped, uttered a strangled, horror-stricken sob, turned, and slunk along the porch and around the side of the store, a look in his eye as if he were bent on hanging himself. It was the closest call she had had. Thereafter, hot as it was, and though dizzy already with nausea, Ella Ordway wore her overcoat—which drew stares, too, but hid her condition.
    In Little Rock they heard rumors of another threatened invasion like that of U. S. General Banks from New Orleans up the Red River shortly before. They would, they also learned there, have to cross that Red River. They were told of a ferry above Clarksville. Preferring redskins to Yankees, they decided to cut across the southeast corner of Indian Territory. Travelers who had been there assured them that the Indians of that section—Choctaws and Cherokees—differed only in color from folks everywhere: lived in houses, dressed in clothes, farmed small holdings, went to church. The savages were civilized, it was the white riffraff you had to fear in the Indian Territory. And even with them the Ordways’ helplessness and their poverty seemed a guarantee of safe conduct.
    From Little Rock they went to Arkadelphia, from Arkadelphia to De Queen, where they entered the Territory, arriving in Broken Bow on the second day of October. They had been on the road for not quite six months, and had come nine hundred miles from home. Their money was gone. Now Ella bartered with storekeepers for supplies, beginning with the things they had been given, then dipping into their own meager possessions. Piece by piece she spent her mother’s silverware. Picture frames, china, the mantelpiece clock of imitation ormolu: all these were traded away. No longer could they rely on the hospitality of the countryside. The Arkansawyers had been poor, the Indians were even poorer. Their veneration of the blind was great, and when they came in their wagons to call, they solemnly extended their welcome through a translator, one of their children or grandchildren who had had government schooling. Still, they were more used to exacting petty tribute from travelers passing through their territory than helping them on their way. They took Ella’s mirror, her cameo brooch, her sewing scissors, the