The collection was taken up, in two five-gallon sombreros, the contents of which, as they passed from one hairy sunburned paw to the next, were watched with eagle eyes by Southwest Davis and Ike Bixler, and, in fact, by the entire gathering. The sombreros were then solemnly and with some hesitation brought to the roulette table pulpit for Yancey’s inspection.
“Mr. Grat Gotch, being used to lightning calculations in the matter of coins, will kindly count the proceeds of the collection.”
Arkansas Grat, red-faced and perspiring, elbowed his way to the pulpit and made his swift and accurate count. He muttered the result to Yancey. Yancey announced it publicly. “Fellow citizens, the sum of the first collection for the new church organ for the Osage church, whose denomination shall be nameless, is the gratifying total of one hundred and thirty-three dollars and fifty-five cents.—Heh, wait a minute, Grat! Fifty-five—did you say fifty-five cents?”
“That’s right, Yancey.”
Yancey’s eye swept his flock. “Some miserable tightfisted skinflint of a—But maybe it was a Ponca or an Osage, by mistake.”
“How about a Cherokee, Yancey!” came a taunting voice from somewhere in the rear.
“No, not a Cherokee, Sid. Recognized your voice by the squeak. A Cherokee—as you’d know if you knew anything at all—you and Yountis and the rest of your outfit—is too smart to put anything in the contribution box of a race that has robbed him of his birthright.” He did not pause for the titter that went round. He now took from the rear pocket of the flowing Prince Albert the small and worn little Bible. “Friends! We’ve come to the sermon. What I have to say is going to take fifteen minutes. The first five minutes are going to be devoted to a confession by me to you, and I didn’t expect to make it when I accepted the job of conducting this church meeting. Walt Whitman—say, boys, there’s a poet with red blood in him, and the feel of the land, and a love of his fellow beings!—Walt Whitman has a line that has stuck in my memory. It is: ‘I say the real and permanent grandeur of these states must be their religion.’ That’s what Walt says. And that’s the text I intended to use for the subject of my sermon, though I know that the Bible should furnish it. And now, at the eleventh hour, I’ve changed my mind. It’s from the Good Book, after all. I’ll announce my text, and then I’ll make my confession, and following that, any time left will be devoted to the sermon. Any lady or gent wishing to leave the tent will kindly do so now, before the confession, and with my full consent, or remain in his or her seat until the conclusion of the service, on pain of being publicly held up to scorn by me in the first issue of my newspaper, the Oklahoma Wigwam, due off the press next Thursday. Anyone wishing to leave the tent kindly rise now and pass as quietly as may be to the rear. Please make way for all departing—uh—worshipers.”
An earthquake might have moved a worshiper from his place in that hushed and expectant gathering: certainly no lesser cataclysm of nature. Yancey waited, Bible in hand, a sweet and brilliant smile on his face. He waited quietly, holding the eyes of the throng in that stifling tent. A kind of power seemed to flow from him to them, drawing them, fixing them, enthralling them. Yet in his eyes, and in the great head raised now as it so rarely was, there was that which sent a warning pang of fear through Sabra. She, too, felt his magnetic draw, but mingled with it was a dreadful terror—a stab of premonition. The little pitted places in the skin of forehead and cheeks were somehow more noticeable. Twice she had seen his eyes look like that.
Yancey waited yet another moment. Then he drew a long breath. “My text is from Proverbs. ‘There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets.’ Friends, there is a lion in the streets of Osage, our fair city, soon to be Queen of the Great Southwest. A lion is in the streets. And I have been a liar and a coward and an avaricious knave. For I pretended not to have knowledge which I have; and I went about asking for information of this lion—though I would change the word ‘lion’ to ‘jackal’ or ‘dirty skunk’ if I did not feel it to be sacrilege to take liberties with Holy Writ—when already I had proof positive of his guilt—proof in writing, for which I paid, and about which I said nothing. And the reason for this deceit of mine I am ashamed to confess to you, but I shall confess it. I intended to announce to you all today that I had this knowledge, and I meant to announce to you from this pulpit—” he glanced down at the roulette table—“from this platform—that I would publish this knowledge in the columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam on Thursday, hoping thereby to gain profit and fame because of the circulation which this would gain for my paper, starting it off with a bang!” At the word “bang,” uttered with much vehemence, the congregation of Osage’s First Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, etc., church jumped noticeably and nervously. “Friends and fellow citizens, I repent of my greed and of my desire for self-advancement at the expense of this community. I no longer intend to withhold, for my own profit, the name of the jackal in a lion’s skin who, by threats of sudden death, has held this town abjectly terrorized. I stand here to announce to you that the name of that skunk, that skulking fiend and soulless murderer who shot down Jack Pegler when his back was turned—that coward and poltroon—” he
