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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 first time that Sabra, her eyes widening with horror, noticed that there were five 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 effort would set it free. Yancey could pull his gun and thumb the hammer with but one motion, instead of two. The infinitesimal 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 today, after the meeting. All that horrible shooting—all those people around you—Cim screaming—and then to find 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 five 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 outfit, and down she came.”
“You talk as though you admired her! That—that—” 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 first issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam actually appeared on Thursday, as scheduled. It was a masterly mixture of reticence and indiscretion. A half column, first 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 affray 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 ruffian, 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 magnificent 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 off 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 role 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 affairs. Indeed, had it not been for Sabra and Jesse Rickey that first issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam might never have appeared, for the front office of the little wooden shack that served as newspaper plant was crowded, following that eventful Sunday, with congratulatory committees, so that it seemed stuffed to suffocation 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 outfit, and the Kid sees ’em he’ll drop ’em like a row of gobblers at a turkey shootin’. Yancey, you’re the kind of stuff 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 Fe.
Girls inhabiting the Island of Himla, near Rhodes, are not allowed to marry until they have brought up a specified number of sponges, each taken from a certain depth. The people of the Island earn their living by the sponge fishery.
The thumb is stronger than all the other fingers together.
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 first issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam numbered four hundred and fifty copies, and before it was run off, 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 terrified to see the occasion treated as an event, with a crowd of cowboys and local citizens in front of the house, pistols fired, whoops and yells; and Yancey himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, handing out copies as if they had cost nothing to print. Perhaps twenty-five 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 office 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 fide 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, fished, 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 firm, 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 flanks. 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 fire water was strictly forbidden them, and to sell or give it to an Indian was a criminal offense. They lolled or squatted in the sun. They would not work. They raised a little corn which, mixed with lye, they called soffica. 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 openhanded 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 openhanded 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 fight from the first. 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 office 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 underdog; overgallant to women; emotional, quick-tempered, impulsive, dramatic, idealistic. And idealism does not flourish 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 find themselves elevated from the kitchen to the parlor, having first 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 Bazaar 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 flurry 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 fichued 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 satisfied. 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 finery 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 handwoven 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 fine 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 effete 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 find 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 magnificent 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 elite. 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 fine, Sabra. That’s fine! 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 flounced 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 office 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 five rooms. She was annoyingly proud of this, and referred to it on all possible occasions.
“The first 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 first 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 flies 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 coffee and doughnuts,” Sabra added, graciously. “And I’ll move to elect you president. I”—this not without a flick 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 infirmity 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 finger, 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.’ ”