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 find, with a tender steak, and little green onions, and near beer, and cheese, and coffee 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, flies 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 official 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, stifling, stinking, was already crowded. Men and women filled 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 loafing near by. It might have been less or more. Bowlegs did not consider these fine 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 midafternoon 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 nearby ear or aloud, for the benefit 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 find 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 floor, 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 filed out. They repaired to a draw at the side of the road to make their finding. Two or three of the dance-hall girls, squatted on the floor, 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 floor 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
