The Philomathean Club. The Twentieth Century Culture Club. The Eastern Star. The Daughters of Rebekah. The Venus Lodge.
“Ha-ha!” and “Ho-ho!” roared their menfolk. “What do you girls do at these meetings of yours? Swap cooking receipts and dress patterns?”
“Oh, yes. And we talk.”
“I bet you do. Say, you don’t have to tell any man that. Talk! Time about ten of you women folks start gabblin’ together I bet you get the whole Territory settled—politics, Injuns, land fights, and all.”
“Just about.”
Yancey had come home from the Spanish-American War a hero. Other men from Osage had been in the Philippines. One had even died there (dysentery and ptomaine from bad tinned beef). But Yancey was the town’s Rough Rider. He had charged up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt. Osage, knowing Yancey and never having seen Roosevelt, assumed that Yancey Cravat—the Southwest Cimarron—had led the way, an ivory- and silver-mounted six-shooter in either hand, the great buffalo head lowered with such menace that the little brown men had fled to their jungles in terror.
His return had been the occasion for such a celebration as the town had never known and never would know again, they assured each other, between drinks, until the day when statehood should come to the Territory. He returned a captain, unwounded, but thin and yellow, with the livery look that confirmed the stories one had heard of putrid food, typhoid, dysentery, and mosquitoes more deadly, in this semitropical country, than bullets or cannon.
Poisoned and enfeebled though he was, his return seemed to energize the crude little town. Wherever he might be he lived in a swirl of events that drew into its eddy all that came within its radius. Hi, Yancey! Hi, Clint! He shed the khaki and the cocked hat and actually appeared again in the familiar white sombrero, Prince Albert, and high-heeled boots. Osage breathed a sigh of satisfaction. His dereliction was forgiven, the rumors about him forgotten—or allowed to subside, at least. Again the editorial columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam blazed with hyperbole.
It was hard for Sabra to take second place (or to appear to take second place) in the office of the Wigwam. She had so long ruled there alone. Her word had been law to the wavering Jesse Rickey and to the worshiping Cliff Means. And now to say, “You’d better ask Mr. Cravat.”
“He says leave it to you. He’s went out.”
Yancey did a good deal of going out. Sabra, after all, still did most of the work of the paper without having the satisfaction of dictating its policy. A linotype machine, that talented iron monster, now chattered and chittered and clanked in the composing room of the Wigwam. It was the first of its kind in the Oklahoma country. Very costly and uncannily human, Sabra never quite got over her fear of it. The long arm reached down with such leisurely assurance, snatched its handful of metal, carried it over, descended, dropped it. It opened its capacious maw to be fed bars of silvery lead which it spat forth again in the shape of neat cakes of type. Its keys were like grinning teeth. It grunted, shivered, clumped, spoke—or nearly.
“I never come near it,” Sabra once admitted, “that I don’t expect the thing to reach down with its iron arm and clap me on the shoulder and clatter, ‘Hello, Sabra!’ ”
She was proud of the linotype machine, for it had been her five years at the head of the Wigwam that had made it possible. It was she who had gone out after job printing contracts; who had educated the local merchants to the value of advertising. Certainly Yancey, prancing and prating, had never given a thought to these substantial foundations on which the entire business success of the paper rested. They now got out with ease the daily Wigwam for the Osage townspeople and the weekly for county subscribers. Passing the windows of the Wigwam office on Pawhuska Avenue you could hear the thump and rattle of the iron monster. Between them Jesse Rickey and Cliff Means ran the linotype. Often they labored far into the night on job work, and the late passerby would see the little light burning in the printing shop and hear the rattle and thump of the machine. In a pinch Sabra herself could run it. Yancey never went near it, and, strangely enough, young Cim had a horror of it, as he had of most things mechanical. After one attempt at the keyboard, during which he had hopelessly jammed the machine’s delicate insides, he was forbidden ever to go near it again. For that matter, Cim had little enough taste for the newspaper business. He pied type at the case rack. He had no news
