“Oil, my children! More oil than anybody ever thought there was in any one spot in the world. And where! Where! On the Osage Indian Reservation. It came in an hour ago, like the ocean. It makes every other field look like the Sahara. There never was such a joke! It’s cosmic—it’s terrible. How the gods must be roaring. ‘Laughter unquenchable among the blessed gods!’ ”
“Yancey dear, we’re used to oil out here. It’s an old story. Come now. Come home and have a hot bath and clean clothes.” In her mind’s eye she saw those fine white linen shirts of his all neatly stacked in the drawer as he had left them.
For answer he reached out with one great arm and swept a pile of exchanges, copy paper, galley proofs, and clippings off the desk, while with the other hand he seized the typewriter by its steel bar and plumped it to the floor with a force that wrung a protesting whine and zing from its startled insides. He had always scorned to use a typewriter. The black swathes of his herculean pencil bit deeper into the paper’s surface than any typewriter’s metal teeth.
“Hot bath! Hot hell, honey! Do you realize what this means? Do you understand that two thousand Osage Indians, squatting in their rags in front of their miserable shanties, are now the richest nation in the world? In the world, I tell you. They were given that land—the barest, meanest desert land in the whole of the Oklahoma country. And the government of these United States said, ‘There, you red dogs, take that and live on it. And if you can’t live on it, then die on it.’ God A’mighty, I could die myself with laughing. Millions and millions of dollars. They’re spattering, I tell you, all over the Osage Reservation. There’s no stopping that flow. Every buck and squaw on the Osage Reservation is a millionaire. They own that land, and, by God, I’m going to see that no one takes it away from them!”
“Oh, Yancey, be careful.”
He was driving his pencil across the paper. “Send this out A.P. They tried to keep it dark when the flow came, but I’ll show them. Sabra, kill your editorial lead, whatever it was. I’ll write it. Make this your news lead, too. Listen. ‘The gaudiest star-spangled cosmic joke that ever was played on a double-dealing government burst into fireworks today when, with a roar that could be heard for miles around, thousands of barrels of oil shot into the air on the miserable desert land known as the Osage Indian Reservation and occupied by those duped and wretched—!”
“We can’t use that, I tell you.”
“Why not?”
“This isn’t the Cimarron. It’s the state of Oklahoma. That’s treason—that’s anarchy—”
“It’s the truth. It’s history. I can prove it. They’ll be down on those Osages like a pack of wolves. At least I’ll let them know they’re expected. I’ll run the story, by God, as I want it run, and they can shoot me for it.”
“And I say you won’t. You can’t come in here like that. I’m editor of this paper.”
He turned quietly and looked at her, the great head jutting out, the eyes like cold steel. “Who is?”
“I am.”
Without a word he grasped her wrist and led her out, across the old porch, down the steps and into the street. There, on Pawhuska Avenue, in the full glare of noonday, he pointed to the weatherworn sign that he himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, had hung there almost twenty years before. She had had it painted and repainted. She had had it repaired. She had never replaced it with another.
The Oklahoma Wigwam
Yancey Cravat Prop. and Editor.
“When you take that down, Sabra honey, and paint your own name up in my place, you’ll be the editor of this newspaper. Until you do that, I am.”
As they stood there, she in her neat blue serge, he in his crumpled and shabby attire, she knew that she never would do it.
XXI
Young Cim came home from Colorado for the summer vacation, was caught up in the oil flood, and never went back. With his geological knowledge, slight as it was, and his familiarity with the region, he was shuttled back and forth from one end of the state to the other. Curiously enough Cim, like his father, was more an onlooker than a participant in this fantastic spectacle. The quality of business acumen seemed to be lacking in both these men; or perhaps a certain mad fastidiousness in them kept them from taking part in the feverish fight. A hint of oil in this corner, a trace of oil in that, and the thousands were upon it, pushing, scrambling, nose to the ground, down on all-fours like pigs in a trough. A hundred times Yancey could have bought an oil lease share for a song. Head lolling on his breast, lids lowered over the lightning eyes, he shrugged indifferent shoulders.
“I don’t want the filthy muck,” he said. “It stinks. Let the Indians have it. It’s theirs. And the Big Boys from the East—let them sweat and scheme for it. They know where Oklahoma is now, all right.”
His comings and goings had ceased to cause Sabra the keen agony of earlier days. She knew now that their existence, so long as Yancey lived, would always be made up of just such unexplained absences and melodramatic homecomings. She had made up her mind to accept the inevitable.
She did not mind that Yancey spent much time on the old fields. He knew the men he called the Big Boys from the East, and they often sought him out for his company, which they found amusing, and for a certain regional wisdom that they considered valuable. He despised them and spent more of his time with the pumpers and roustabouts, drillers and tool dressers and shooters—a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-fighting crew. In his white sombrero and his
