“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 find out who killed Pegler and print it in the first 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, first 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 five 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 find one she hit upon the idea of using a muffin tin until a proper receptacle could be found. It never was found, and the muffin 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 finally 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 off 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, offices, 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 first 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 (ineffectual enough in this lawless land) were shocked to find 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 fingers stained, her head close to Jesse Rickey’s bleary-eyed one as she sorted type or filled the muffin 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 flashing of bronze through the echoing halls, and the flashing of gold and of amber and of silver and of ivory. Suchlike, 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 fine 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 finally was settled in house and office. The front door, which was the office 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
