Local townsmen who once had feared and admired him began to patronize him or to laugh at him, tolerantly. Many of them were rich now, counting their riches not in thousands but in millions. They had owned a piece of Oklahoma dirt, or a piece of a piece of dirt—and suddenly, through no act of theirs, it was worth its weight in diamonds. Pat Leary, the pugnacious little Irish lawyer who had once been a section hand in the early days of the building of the Santa Fe road, was now so rich through his vast oil holdings that his Indian wife, Crook Nose, was considered a quaint and picturesque note by the wives of Eastern operators who came down on oil business.
After the first shrill excitement of it Sabra Cravat relinquished the hope of making sudden millions as other luckier ones had done. Her land had yielded no oil; she owned no oil leases. It was a curious fact that Sabra still queened it in Osage and had actually become a power in the state. The paper was read, respected, and feared throughout the Southwest. It was said with pride by Osage’s civic minded that no oil was rich enough to stain the pages of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Though few realized it, and though Sabra herself never admitted it, it was Yancey who had made this true. He neglected it for years together, but he always turned up in a crisis, whether political, economic, or social, to hurl his barbed editorials at the heads of the offenders, to sting with the poison of his ridicule. He championed the Indians, he denounced the oil kings, he laughed at the money grabbers, he exposed the land thieves. He was afraid of nothing. He would absent himself for six months. The Wigwam would run along smoothly, placidly. He would return, torch in hand, again set fire to the paper until the town, the county, the state were ablaze. The Osages came to him with their legal problems, and he advised them soundly and took a minimum fee. He seemed always to sense an important happening from afar and to emerge, growling like an old lion, from his hidden jungle lair, broken, mangy, but fighting, the fine eyes still alight, the magnificent head still as menacing as that of a buffalo charging. He had, on one occasion, come back just in time to learn of Dixie Lee’s death.
Dixie had struck oil and had retired, a rich woman. She had closed her house and gone to Oklahoma City, and there she bought a house in a decent neighborhood and adopted a baby girl. She had gone to Kansas City for it, and though she had engaged a capable and somewhat bewildered nurse on that trip, Dixie herself carried the child home in her arms, its head close against the expansive satin bosom.
No one knew what means she had used to pull the wool over the eyes of the Kansas City authorities. She never could have done it in Oklahoma. She had had the child almost a year when the women of Osage got wind of it. They say she took it out herself in its perambulator daily, and perhaps someone recognized her on the street, though she looked like any plump and respectable matron now, in her rich, quiet dress and her pince nez, a little gray showing in the black, abundant hair.
Sabra Cravat heard of it. Mrs. Wyatt. Mrs. Doc Nisbett. Mrs. Pack.
They took the child away from her by law. Six months later Dixie Lee died; the sentimental said of a broken heart. It was Yancey Cravat who wrote her obituary:
“Dixie Lee, for years one of the most prominent citizens of Osage and a pioneer in the early days of Oklahoma, having made the Run in ’89, one of the few women who had the courage to enter that historic and terrible race, is dead.
“She was murdered by the good women of Osage. …”
The story was a nine-days’ wonder, even in that melodramatic state. Sabra read it, white faced. The circulation of the Wigwam took another bound upward.
“Some day,” said Osage, over its afternoon paper, “somebody is going to come along and shoot old Cimarron.”
“I should think his wife would save them the trouble,” someone suggested.
If Yancey’s sporadic contributions increased the paper’s circulation it was Sabra’s steady drive that maintained it. It was a gigantic task to keep up with the changes that were sweeping over Osage and all of Oklahoma. Yet the columns of the Wigwam recorded these changes in its news columns, in its editorial pages, in its personal and local items and its advertisements, as faithfully as on that day of its first issue when Yancey had told them who killed Pegler. Perhaps it was because Sabra, even during Yancey’s many absences, felt that the paper must be prepared any day to meet his scathing eye.
Strange items began to appear daily in the paper’s columns—strange to the eye not interested in oil; but there was no such eye in Oklahoma, nor, for that matter, in the whole Southwest. Cryptic though these items might be to dwellers in other parts of the United States, they were of more absorbing interest to Oklahomans than front-page stories of war, romance, intrigue, royalty, crime.
“Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company swabbed 42 barrels in its No. 3 Lizzie in the northwest corner of the southwest of the northwest of 11–8–6 after having plugged back to 4,268 feet, and shooting with 52 quarts.
“The wildcat test of McComb two miles north of Kewoka which is No. 1 Sutton in the southwest corner of the southeast of the northeast of 35–2–9 was given a shot of 105 quarts in the sand from 1,867 feet and hole bridged. As it stands it is estimated
