Still, the sight of this lovely face, and of the other feminine faces looking out from at least fairly modish and decent straw bonnets and toques, gave Sabra a glow of reassurance. Immediately this was quenched at the late, showy, and dramatic entrance, just before Yancey took his place, of a group of women of whom Sabra had actually been unaware. As a matter of fact, the leader of this spectacular group, whose appearance caused a buzz and stir throughout the tent, had arrived in Osage only the day before, accompanied by a bevy of six young ladies. The group had stepped off the passenger coach of the Katy at the town of Wahoo arrayed in such cinder-strewn splendor as to cause the depot loafers to reel. The Katy had not yet been brought as far as Osage. It terminated at Wahoo, twenty-two miles away. The vision, in her purple grosgrain silk, with a parasol to match, and two purple plumes in her hat, with her six gayly bedecked companions had mounted a buckboard amid much shrill clamor and many giggles and a striking display of ankle. In this crude vehicle, their silks outspread, their astounding parasols unfurled, they had bumped their way over the prairie to the town. Osage, since that first mad day of its beginning, had had its quota of shady ladies, but these had been raddled creatures, driftwood from this or that deserted mining camp or abandoned town site, middle aged, unsavory, and doubtless slightly subnormal mentally.
These were different. The leader, a handsome black-haired woman of not more than twenty-two or -three, had taken for herself and her companions such rooms as they could get in the town. Osage gazed on the parasols, bedazzled. Within an hour it was known that the woman claimed the name of Dixie Lee. That she was a descendant of decayed Southern aristocracy. That her blooming companions boasted such fancy nomenclature as Cherry de St. Maurice, Carmen Brown, Belle Mansero, and the like. That the woman, shrewd as a man and sharp as a knife, had driven a bargain whereby she was to come into possession, at a stiff price, of the building known as the Elite Rooming House and Café, situated at the far end of Pawhuska Avenue, near the gambling tent; and that she contemplated building a house of her own, planned for her own peculiar needs, if business warranted. Finally, she brought the news, gained God knows how or where, that the Katy was to be extended to Osage and perhaps beyond it. Thus harlotry, heretofore a sordid enough slut in a wrapper and curling pins, came to Osage in silks and plumes, with a brain behind it and a promise of prosperity in its gaudy train.
Dixie Lee, shrewd saleswoman, had been quick to learn of Sunday’s meeting, and quicker still to see the advantage of this opportunity for a public advertisement of her business. So now, at Osage’s first church meeting, in marched the six, with Dixie Lee at their head making a seventh. They rustled in silks. The air of the close-packed tent became as suffocating with scent as a Persian garden at sunset. Necks were craned; whispers became a buzz; seats were miraculously found for these representatives of a recognized social order, as for visiting royalty. The dazzling tent top, seeming to focus rather than disseminate the glare of the Oklahoma sun, cast its revealing spotlight upon painted cheeks and beaded lashes. The nude and lolling lady of the cherries in Grat Gotch’s newly acquired art treasure stared down at them, open-mouthed, with the look of one who is surprised and vanquished by an enemy from her own camp. The hardworking worthy wives of Osage, in their cheviots and their faded bonnets and cotton gloves, suddenly seemed sallow, scrawny, and almost spectacularly unalluring.
All this Sabra beheld in a single glance, as did the entire congregation. Only the Indians, standing or squatting in a row at the back, like an Egyptian frieze against the white of the tent, remained unagitated, remote. Yancey, having lifted Cim into the chair next his mother, looked up at the entrance of this splendid procession.
“God Almighty!” he said. His tone was as irreverent as the words were sacred. A dull flush suffused his face, a thing so rare in him as to startle Sabra more than the words he had uttered or the tone in which he had said them.
“What is it? Yancey! What’s wrong?”
“That’s the girl.”
“What girl?”
“That one—Dixie Lee—she’s the girl in the black tights and the skullcap … in the Run … on the thoroughbred …” he was whispering.
“Oh, no!” cried Sabra, aloud. It was wrung from her. Those near by stared.
So this was the church meeting toward which she had looked with such hope, such happy assurance. Harlots, pictures of nude women, Indians, heat, glare, her house probably blazing at this moment, Isaiah weltering in his own gore, Lon Yountis’s sinister face sneering in the tent entrance. And now this woman, unscrupulous, evil, who had stolen Yancey’s quarter section from him by a trick.
Yancey made his way through the close-packed crowd, leaped to the top of the roulette table which was to be his platform, flung his broad-brimmed white sombrero dexterously to the outjutting base of a suspended oil lamp, where it spun and then clung, cocked rakishly; and, lifting the great lolling head, swept the expectant congregation with his mysterious, his magnetic eyes.
Probably never in the history of the Christian religion had the Word of God been preached by so romantic and dashing a figure. His long black locks curled on his shoulders; the fine eyes glowed; the Prince Albert swayed with his graceful movements; his six-shooters, one on each side, bulged reassuringly in their holsters.
His thrilling voice sounded through the tent, stilling its buzz and movement.
“Friends and
