“Declaration of Independence!” he exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Tell her one of my ancestors wrote the Ten Commandments. Fella name of Moses.”
Yancey, roaring with laughter, used this in the Wigwam, and it naturally helped as much as anything to defeat the already defeated candidate.
Sometimes the slim, white-faced proprietor, with his friend Yancey Cravat, stood in the doorway of the store, watching the town go by. They said little. It was as though they were outsiders, looking on at a strange pageant.
“What the hell are you doing here in this town, anyway, Sol?” Yancey would say, as though musing aloud.
“And you?” Sol would retort. “A civilized barbarian.”
The town went by—Indians, cowboys up from Texas, plainsmen, ranchers. They still squatted at the curb, as in the early days. They chewed tobacco and spat. The big sombrero persisted, and even the boots and spurs.
“Howdy, Yancey! Howdy, Sol! H’are you, Cim!”
There was talk of paving Pawhuska Avenue, but this did not come for years. The town actually boasted a waterworks. The Wigwam office still stood on Pawhuska, but it now occupied the entire house. Two years after Yancey’s return they had decided to build a home on Kihekah Street, where there actually were trees now almost ten years old.
Sabra had built the house as she wanted it, though at first there had been a spirited argument about this. Yancey’s idea had been, of course, ridiculous, fantastic. He said he wanted the house built in native style.
“Native! What in the world! A wickiup?”
“Well, a house in the old Southwest Indian style—almost pueblo, I mean. Or Spanish, sort of, made of Oklahoma red clay—plaster, maybe. Not brick. And low, with a patio where you can be out of doors and yet away from the sun. And where you can have privacy.”
Sabra made short work of that idea. Or perhaps Yancey did not persist. He withdrew his plan as suddenly as he had presented it; shrugged his great shoulders as though the house no longer interested him.
Osage built its new houses with an attached front porch gaping socially out into the street. It sat on the front porch in its shirtsleeves and kitchen apron. It called from porch to porch, “How’s your tomato plants doing? I see the Packses got out-of-town company visiting.” It didn’t in the least want privacy.
Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas, and scrollwork. There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with bubonic plague. There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms on the second floor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace. In the parlor were brown brocade-and-velvet settee and stuffed chairs. In the sitting room was a lamp with a leaded glass shade in the shape of a strange and bloated flower—a Burbankian monstrosity, half water lily, half petunia.
“As long as we’re building and furnishing,” Sabra said, “it might as well be the best.” She had gone about planning the house, and furnishing it, with her customary energy and capability. With it all she found time to do her work on the Wigwam—for without her the paper would have been run to the ground in six months. Osage had long since ceased to consider it queer that she, a woman, and the wife of one of its most prominent citizens, should go to work every morning like a man.
By ten every morning she had attended to her household, seen it started for the day, had planned the meals, ordered them on her way downtown, and was at her desk in the Wigwam office, sorting mail, reading exchanges, taking ads, covering news, writing heads, pasting up. Yancey’s contributions were brilliant but spasmodic. The necessary departmental items—real estate transfers, routine court news, out-of-town district and county gleanings—bored him, though he knew well that they were necessary to the success of the paper. He left these to Sabra, among many other things.
Sabra, in common with the other well-to-do housewives of the community, employed an Indian girl as a house servant. There was no other kind of help available. After her hideous experience with Arita Red Feather she had been careful to get Indian girls older, more settled, though this was difficult. She preferred Osage girls. These married young, often before they had finished their studies at the Indian school.
Ruby Big Elk had been with Sabra now for three years. A curious, big, silent girl of about twenty-two—almost handsome—one of six children—a large family for an Osage. Sabra was somewhat taken aback, after the girl had been with her for some months, to learn that she already had been twice married.
“What became of your husbands, Ruby?”
“Died.”
She had a manner that bordered on the insolent. Sabra put it down to Indian dignity. When she walked she scuffed her feet ever so little, and this, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to add insolence to her bearing. “Oh, do lift your feet, Ruby! Don’t scuffle when you walk.” The girl made no reply. Went on scuffling. Sabra discovered that she was lame; the left leg was slightly shorter than the right. She did not limp—or, rather, hid the tendency to limp by the irritating sliding sound. Her walk was straight, leisurely, measured. Sabra was terribly embarrassed; apologized to the Indian girl. The girl only looked at her and
