“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not. She’s like Mamma in many ways, only she’s got intelligence and drive. She doesn’t get along with the girls here—Maurine Turket and Gazelle Slaughter and Jewel Riggs and Czarina McKee, and those. She’s different. They go switching up and down Pawhuska Avenue. They’ll marry one of these tobacco-chewing loafers and settle down like vegetables. Well, she won’t. I’ll see to that.”
“Going to marry her off to an Eastern potentate—at fifteen?”
“You wait. You’ll see. She knows what she wants. She’ll get it, too.”
“Sure it isn’t you who know what you want her to want?”
But Sabra had sent her off to Miss Dignum’s on a diet of prunes and prisms that even her high-and-mighty old grandmother Felice Venable approved.
Cim, walking the prairies beyond Osage with that peculiar light step of his, his eyes cast down; prowling the draws and sprawling upon the clay banks of the rivers that ran so red through the Red Man’s Territory, said that he wanted to be a geologist. He spoke of the Colorado School of Mines. He worked in the Wigwam office and hated it. He could pi a case of type more quickly and completely than a drunken tramp printer. The familiar “shrdlu etaoin” was likely to appear in any column in which he had a hand. Even Jesse Rickey, his mournful mustaches more drooping than ever, protested to Yancey.
“She can’t make a newspaper man out of that kid,” he said. “Not in a million years. Newspaper men are born, not made. Cim, he just naturally hates news, let alone a newspaper office. He was born without a nose for news, like a fellow that’s born without an arm, or something. You can’t grow it if you haven’t got it.”
“I know it,” said Yancey, wearily. “He’ll find a way out.”
For the first time a rival newspaper flourished in the town of Osage. The town was scarcely large enough to support two daily papers, but Yancey’s political attitude so often was at variance with the feeling of the Territory politicians that the new daily, slipshod and dishonest though it was, and owned body and soul by Territorial interests, achieved a degree of popularity.
Sabra, unable to dictate the policy of the Wigwam with Yancey at its head, had to content herself with the management of its mechanical workings and with its increasingly important social and club columns. Osage swarmed with meetings, committees, lodges, Knights of This and Sisters of That. The Philomathean and the Twentieth Century clubs began to go in for Civic Betterment, and no Osage merchant or professional man was safe from cajoling and unattractive females in shirtwaists and skirts and eyeglasses demanding his name signed to this or that petition (with a contribution. Whatever you feel that you can give, Mr. Hefner. Of course, as a leading business man …).
They planted shrubs about the cinder-strewn environs of the Santa Fe and the Katy depots. They agitated for the immediate paving of Pawhuska Avenue (it wasn’t done). The Ladies of the Eastern Star. The Venus Lodge. Sisters of Rebekah. Daughters of the Southwest. They came into the Wigwam office with notices to be printed about lodge suppers and church sociables. Strangely enough, they were likely to stay longer and to chat more freely if Yancey and not Sabra were there to receive them. Sabra was polite but businesslike to her own sex encountered in office hours. But Yancey made himself utterly charming. He could no more help it than he could help breathing. It was almost functional with him. He made the stout, commonplace, middle-aged women feel that they were royal—and seductive. He flattered them with his fine eyes; he bowed them to the door; their eyeglasses quivered. He was likely, on their departure, to crumple their carefully worded notice and throw it on the floor. Sabra, though she made short work of the visiting Venuses and Rebekahs, ran their notice and, if necessary, carefully rewrote it.
“God A’mighty!” he would groan at noonday dinner. “The office was full of Wenuses this morning. Like a swarm of overstuffed locusts.”
Sabra was at the head of many of these Betterment movements. Also if there could be said to be anything so formal as society in Osage, Sabra Cravat was the leader of it. She was the first to electrify the ladies of the Twentieth Century Culture Club by serving them Waldorf salad—that abominable mixture of apple cubes, chopped nuts, whipped cream, and mayonnaise. The club fell upon it with little cries and murmurs. Thereafter it was served at club meetings until Osage husbands, returning home to supper after a day’s work, and being offered this salvage from the feast, would push it aside with masculine contempt for its contents and roar, “I can’t eat this stuff. Fix me some bacon and eggs.”
From this culinary and social triumph Sabra proceeded to pineapple and marshmallow salad, the recipe for which had been sent her by Donna in the East. Its indirect effects were fatal.
When it again became her turn to act as hostess to the members of the club she made her preparations for the afternoon meeting, held at the grisly hour of half-past two. Refreshments were invariably served at four. With all arrangements made, she was confronted by Ruby Big Elk with the astounding statement that this was a great Indian Festival day (September, and the corn dances were on) and that she must go to the Reservation in time for the Mescal Ceremony.
“You can’t go,” said Sabra, flatly. Midday dinner was over. Yancey had returned to the office. Cim was lounging in the hammock on the porch. For answer Ruby turned and walked with her stately, irritating step into her own room just off the kitchen and closed the door.
“Well,” shouted Sabra in the tones of Felice Venable herself, “if you do go you
