“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 purified, 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 affably 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 office. 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 office. The other served as composing room and print shop. The Hefner Furniture and Undertaking Parlors provided them with furniture—a large wooden bedstead to fit 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 fine 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 office was not so simple. Yancey, for example, was inclined to write his first editorial entitled “Whither Oklahoma?” before the hand press had been put together. He was more absorbed in the effect 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 fifty times, ostensibly to direct matters from a proper vantage point of criticism, but really to bask in the dazzling effect 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 finished 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 first 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 role 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
