“… but here in this land, Sabra, my girl, the women, they’ve been the real hewers of wood and drawers of water. You’ll want to remember that.”
Sabra remembered it now, well enough.
Slowly the crowd began to disperse. The men had their business; the women their housework. Wives linked their arms through those of husbands, and the gesture was one of perhaps not entirely unconscious cruelty, accompanied as it was by a darting glance at Sabra.
“Rough Rider uniform, sack of gold, golden voice, and melting eye,” that glance seemed to say. “You’re welcome to all the happiness you can get from those. Security, permanence, home, husband—I wouldn’t change places with you.”
“Come on, Yancey!” shouted Strap Buckner. “Over to the Sunny Southwest and have a drink. We got a terrible lot of drinking to do, ain’t we, boys? Come on, you old longhorn. We got to drink to you because you’re back and because you’re going away.”
“And to the war!” yelled Bixler.
“And the Rough Riders!”
“And Alaska!”
Their boots clattered across the board floor of the newspaper office. They swept the towering figure in its khaki uniform with them. He turned, waved his hat at her. “Back in a minute, honey.” They were gone.
Sabra turned to the children, Cim and Donna, flushed, both, with the unwonted excitement; out of hand. Her face set itself with that look of quiet resolve. “Half the morning’s gone. But I want you to go along to school, anyway. Now, none of that! It’s no use your staying around here. The paper must be got out. Jesse’ll be no good to me the rest of the day. It’s easy to see that. I’ll write a note to your teachers. … Run along now. I must go to court.”
She actually had made up her mind that she would see the day through as she had started it. The Dixie Lee case, seething for weeks, was coming to a crisis this morning—this very minute. She would be late if she did not hasten. She would not let the work of months go for nothing because this man—this stranger had seen fit to stride into her life for a day.
She pinned on her hat, saw that her handbag contained pencil and paper, hurried into the back room that was printing shop, composing room, press room combined, she had been right about Jesse Rickey. That consistently irresponsible one was even now leaning a familiar elbow on the polished surface of the Sunny Southwest bar as he helped toast the returned wanderer or the departing hero or the war in the semi-tropics, or the snows of Alaska “—or God knows what!” concluded Sabra, in her mind.
Cliff Means, the ink-smeared printer’s devil who, at fifteen, served as Jesse Rickey’s sole assistant in the mechanical end of the Wigwam office, looked up from his case rack as Sabra entered.
“It’s all right, Mis’ Cravat. I got the head all set up like you said. ‘Vice Gets Death Blow. Reign of Scarlet Woman Ends. Judge Issues Ban.’ Even if Jesse don’t—even if he ain’t—why, you and me can set up the story this afternoon so we can start the press goin’ for Thursday. We ain’t been late with the paper yet, have we?”
“Out on time every Thursday for five years,” Sabra said, almost defiantly.
Suddenly, sharp and clear, Yancey’s voice calling her from the office porch, from the front office, from the print-shop doorway; urgent, perturbed. “Sabra! Sabra! Sabra!”
He strode into the back shop. She faced him. Instinctively she knew. “What’s this about Dixie Lee?” His news-trained eye leaped to the form. He read the setup head, upside down, expertly. “When’s this case come up?”
“Now.”
“Who’s defending her?”
“Nobody in town would touch the case. They say she got a lawyer from Denver. He didn’t show up. He knew better than to take her money.”
“Prosecuting?”
“Pat Leary.”
Without a word he turned. She caught him at the door, gripped his arm. “Where are you going?”
“Court.”
“What for? What for?” But she knew. She actually interposed her body between him and the street door then, as though physically to prevent him from going. Her face was white. Her eyes stared enormous.
“You can’t take the case of that woman.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t. Because I’ve been fighting her. Because the Wigwam has come out against all that she stands for.”
“Why, Sabra, honey, where are you thinking of sending her?”
“Away. Away from Osage.”
“But where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Things have changed since you went away. Went away and left me.”
“Nothing’s changed. It’s all the same. Dixie’s been stoned in the market place for two thousand years and more. Driving her out is not going to do it. You’ve got to drive the devil out of—”
“Yancey Cravat, are you preaching to me? You who left your wife and children to starve, for all you cared! And now you come back and you take this creature’s part against every respectable woman in Osage—against me!”
“I know it. I can’t help it, Sabra.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” cried Sabra—the Sabra Cravat who had been evolved in the past five years. “I think you’re crazy! They’ve all said so. And now I know they are right.”
“Maybe so.”
“If you dare to think of disgracing me by defending her. And your children. I’ve fought her for months in the paper. A miserable creature like that! Your own wife—a laughing stock—for a—a—”
“The Territory’s rotten. But, by God, every citizen’s still got the legal right to fight for existence!” He put her gently aside.
She went mad. She became a wildcat. She tried to hold him. She beat herself against him. It was like an infuriated sparrow hurling itself upon a mastodon. “If you dare! Why did you come back? I hate you. What’s she
