“… all the vicious influences, your Honor, with which our glorious Territory is infested, can be laid at this woman’s leprous door. … A refuge for the evil, for the diseased, for the criminal … waxed fat and sleek in her foul trade, on the money that should have been spent to help build up, to ennoble this fair Southwest land of ours … scavenger … vilest of humans … disgrace to the fair name of woman. …” Names, then, that writhed from his tongue like snakes.
A curious embarrassment seized the crowd. There were many in the packed room who had known the easy hospitality of Dixie’s ménage; who had eaten at her board, who had been broken in Grat Gotch’s gambling place and had borrowed money from Dixie to save themselves from rough frontier revenge. She had plied her trade and taken the town’s money and given it out again with the other merchants of the town. The banker could testify to that; the mayor; this committee; that committee. Put Dixie Lee’s name down for a thousand. Part of the order of that disorderly, haphazard town.
Names. Names. Names. The dull red of resentment deepened the natural red of their sunburned faces. The jurors shifted in their places. A low mutter, ominous, like a growl, sounded its distant thunder. Blunt. Sharp. Ruthless. Younger than Yancey, less experienced, he still should have known better. These men of the inadequate jury, these men in the courtroom crowd, had come of a frontier background, had lived in the frontier atmosphere. In their rough youth, and now, women were scarce, with the scarcity that the hard life predicated. And because they were scarce they were precious. No woman so plain, so hard, so undesirable that she did not take on, by the very fact of her sex, a value far beyond her deserts. The attitude of a whole nation had been touched by this sentimental fact which was, after all, largely geographic. For a full century the countries of Europe, bewildered by it, unable to account for it, had laughed at this adolescent reverence of the American man for the American woman.
Here was Pat Leary, jumping excitedly about, mouthing execrations, when he himself, working on the railroads ten years before, had married an Indian girl out of the scarcity of girls in the Oklahoma country. Out of the corner of his eye, as he harangued, he saw the great lolling figure of Yancey Cravat. The huge head was sunk on the breast; the eyelids were lowered. Beaten, Pat Leary thought. Defeated, and he knows it. Cravat, the windbag, the wife deserter. He finished in a burst of oratory so ruthless, so brutal that he had the satisfaction of seeing the painful, unaccustomed red surge thickly over Dixie Lee’s pale face from her brow down to where the ladylike white turnover of her high collar met the line of her throat.
The pompous little Irishman seated himself, chest out, head high, eye roving the crowd and the bench, lips open with self-satisfaction. A few more cases like this and maybe they’d see there was material for a Territory governor right here in Osage.
The crowd shifted, murmured, gabbled. Yancey still sat sunk in his chair as though lost in thought. The gabble rose, soared. “He’s given it up,” thought Sabra, exulting. “He sees how it is.”
The eyes of the crowd so close packed in that suffocating little courtroom were concentrated on the inert figure lolling so limply in its chair. Perhaps they were going to be cheated of their show after all.
Slowly the big head lifted, the powerful shoulders straightened, he rose, he seemed to rise endlessly, he walked to Judge Sipes’s crude desk with his light, graceful stride. The lids were still cast down over the lightning eyes. He stood a moment, that singularly sweet and winning smile wreathing his lips. He began to speak. The vibrant voice, after Leary’s shouts, was so low pitched that the crowd held its breath in order to hear.
“Your Honor. Gentlemen of the Jury. I am the first to bow to achievement. Recognition where recognition is due—this, gentlemen, has ever been my way. May I, then, before I begin my poor plea in defense of this lady, my client, most respectfully call your attention to that which, in my humble opinion, has never before been achieved, much less duplicated, in the whole of the Southwest. Turn your eye to the figure which has so recently and so deservedly held your attention. Gaze once more upon him. Regard him well. You will not look upon his like again. For, gentlemen, in my opinion this gifted person, Mr. Patrick Leary, is the only man in the Oklahoma Territory—in the Indian Territory—in the whole of the brilliant and glorious Southwest—nay, I may even go so far as to say the only man in this magnificent country, the United States of America!—of whom it actually can be said that he is able to strut sitting down.”
The puffed little figure in the chair collapsed, then bounded to its feet, red faced, gesticulating. “Your Honor! I object!”
But the rest was lost in the gigantic roar of the delighted crowd.
“Go it, Yancey!”
“That’s the stuff, Cimarron!”
Here was what they had come for. Doggone, there was nobody like him, damn if they was!
Even today, though more than a quarter of a century has gone by, there still are people in Oklahoma who have kept a copy, typed neatly now from records made by hand, of the speech made that day by Yancey Cravat in defense of the town woman, Dixie Lee. “Yancey Cravat’s Plea for a Fallen Woman,” it is called; and never was speech more sentimental, windy, false, and utterly moving. The slang words “hokum” and “bunk” were not then in use, but even had they been they never would have been applied, by that appreciative crowd, at least, to the flowery and impassioned oratory of the Southwest Silver Tongue, Yancey Cravat.
Cheap,
