“Their father!” Felice Venable repeated, in withering accents.
The boy Cimarron, curiously sensitive to sounds and moods, stood before his grandmother, his head thrust forward, his handsome eyes glowing. “My father is the most famous man in Oklahoma. The Indians call him Buffalo Head.”
Felice Venable pounced on this. “If that’s what you mean by bringing them up as their father …”
The meeting degenerated into one of those family bickerings. “I do wish, Mamma, that you wouldn’t repeat everything I say and twist it by your tone into something poisonous.”
“I say! I can’t help it if the things you say sound ridiculous when they are repeated. I simply mean—”
“I don’t care what you mean. I mean to stay here in Osage until Yancey—until—” She never finished that sentence.
The Osage society notes became less simple. From bare accounts of quiltings, sewing bees, and church sociables they blossomed into flowery imitations of the metropolitan dailies’ descriptions of social events. Refreshments were termed elegant. Osage matrons turned from the sturdy baked beans, cole slaw, and veal loaf of an earlier day to express themselves in food terms culled from the pictures in the household magazines. They heard about fruit salads. They built angel-food cakes whose basis was the whites of thirteen eggs, and their husbands, at breakfast, said, “What makes these scrambled eggs so yellow?” Countrified costumes were described in terms of fashion. The wilted prairie flowers that graced weddings and parties were transformed into rare hothouse blooms by the magic touch of the Oklahoma Wigwam hand press. Sabra cannily published all the brilliant social news items that somewhat belatedly came her way via the ready-print and the paper’s scant outside news service.
“Newport. Oct. 4—One of the most brilliant weddings which Newport has seen for many years was solemnized in old Trinity Church today. The principals were Miss Georgina Harwood and Mr. Harold Blake, both members of families within the charmed circle of the 400. The bride wore a gown of ivory satin with draperies and rufflings of rarest point lace, the lace veil being caught with a tiara of pearls and diamonds. After the ceremony a magnificent collation …”
The feminine population of Osage—of the county—felt that it had seen the ivory satin, the point lace, the tiara of pearls and diamonds, as these splendors moved down the aisle of old Trinity on the person of Miss Georgina Harwood of Newport. They derived from it the vicarious satisfaction that a dieting dyspeptic gets from reading the cook book.
Sabra was, without being fully aware of it, a power that shaped the social aspect of this crude Southwestern town. The Ladies of the new Happy Hour Club, on her declining to become a member, pleading lack of time and press of work (as well she might), made her an honorary member, resolved to have her influential name on their club roster, somehow. They were paying unconscious tribute to Oklahoma’s first feminist. She still ran the paper single handed, with the aid of Jesse Rickey, the most expert printer in the Southwest (when sober), and as good as the average when drunk.
Sabra, serene in the knowledge that the attacked could do little to wreak vengeance on a woman, printed stories and statements which for boldness and downright effrontery would have earned a male editor a horsewhipping. She publicly scolded the street loafers who, in useless sombreros and six-shooters and boots and spurs, relics of a bygone day, lolled limply on Pawhuska Avenue corners, spitting tobacco juice into the gutter. Sometimes she borrowed Yancey’s vigorous and picturesque phraseology. She denounced a local politician as being too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse, and the phrase stuck, and in the end defeated him. Law, order, the sanctity of the home, prunes, prisms. Though the Gyp Hills and the Osage Hills still were as venomous with outlaws as the Plains were with rattlesnakes; though the six-shooter still was as ordinary a part of the Oklahoma male costume as boots or trousers; though outlawry still meant stealing a horse rather than killing a man; though the Territory itself had been settled and peopled, in thousands of cases, by men who had come to it, not in a spirit of adventure, but from cowardice, rapacity, or worse, Sabra Cravat and the other basically conventional women of the community were working unconsciously, yet with a quiet ferocity, toward that day when one of them would be able to say, standing in a doorway with a stiff little smile:
“Awfully nice of you to come.”
“Awfully nice of you to ask me,” the other would reply.
When that day came, Osage would no longer need to feel itself looked down upon by Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
Slowly, slowly, certain figures began to take on the proportions of personalities. No one had arisen in the Territory to fill Yancey Cravat’s romantic boots. Pat Leary was coming on as a Territory lawyer, with an office in the Bixby Block and the railroads on which he had worked as section hand now consulting him on points of Territorial law. In his early railroad days he had married an Osage girl named Crook Nose. People shook their heads over this and said that he regretted it now, and that a lawyer could never hope to get on with this marital millstone round his neck.
There still was very little actual money in the Territory. People traded this for that. Sabra often translated subscriptions to the Oklahoma Wigwam—and even advertising space—into terms of fresh vegetables, berries, wild turkey, quail, prairie chickens, dress lengths, and shoes and stockings for the children.
Sol Levy’s store, grown to respectable proportions now, provided Sabra with countless necessities in return for the advertisement which, sent through the country via the Oklahoma Wigwam, urged its readers to Trade at Sol Levy’s. Visit the Only Zoo in the Territory. This invitation, a trifle bewildering to the uninitiated, was meant to be taken literally. In the
