“How!”
“How!”
“Want um paper.”
“All right, Short Tooth. Five dollars.”
The blanketed figure would produce a wallet whose cheeks were plump to bursting with round silver dollars, for the Osage loved the sound and feel of the bright metal disks. Down on the desk they clinked.
The huge Osage stood then, waiting. Yancey knew what was wanted, as did Sabra.
“Me want see iron man. Make um name.”
Whereupon Yancey or Sabra would conduct the visitor into the composing room. There were three linotype machines now, clanking and chattering away. Once Yancey had taken old Big Elk, Ruby’s father, back there to see how the linotype turned liquid lead into printed words. He had had Jesse Rickey, at the linotype’s keyboard, turn out old Big Elk’s name in the form of a neat metal bar, together with the paper slip of its imprint.
There was no stopping it. The story of the iron monster that could talk and write and move spread like a prairie fire through Wazhazhe. Whole families subscribed separately for the Oklahoma Wigwam—bucks, squaws, girls, boys, papooses in arms. The iron monster had for them a fascination that was a mingling of admiration, awe, and fear. It was useless to explain that they need not take out a subscription in order to own one of these coveted metal bars. It had been done once. They always would do it that way. Sabra, if she happened to be in charge, always gave the five dollars to her pet charity, after trying in vain to refuse it when proffered. Yancey took it cheerfully and treated the boys at the new Sunny South Saloon, now a thing of splendor with its mahogany bar, its brass rail, its mirror, chandeliers, and flesh-tinted oil paintings.
Up and down the dusty Oklahoma roads at terrific speed, up and down Pawhuska Avenue, went the blanketed figures in their Packard and Pierce Arrow cars. The merchants of Osage liked to see them in town. It meant money freely spent on luxuries. The Osage Indian men were broad shouldered, magnificent, the women tall, stately. Now they grew huge with sloth and overfeeding. They ate enormously and richly. They paced Pawhuska Avenue with slow measured tread; calm, complete, grandly content. The women walked bareheaded, their brilliant blankets, striped purple and orange and green and red, wrapped about their shoulders and enveloping them from neck to heels. But beneath this you saw dresses of silk, American in make and style. On their feet were slippers of pale fine kid, high-heeled, or of patent-leather, ornamented with buckles of cut steel, shining and costly. The men wore the blanket, too, but beneath it they liked a shirt of silk brocade in gorgeous colors—bright green or purple or cerise—its tail worn outside the trousers, and the trousers often as not trimmed with a pattern of beadwork at the side. On their heads they wore huge sombreros trimmed with bands of snakeskin ornamented with silver. They hired white chauffeurs to drive their big sedan cars and sat back grandly after ordering them to drive round and round and round the main business block. Jewelry shops began to display their glistening ware in Osage, not so much in the hope of winning the favor of the white oil millionaire as the red. Bracelets, watches, gaudy rings and pins and bangles and beads and combs and buckles. Diamonds. These the Indians seemed instinctively to know about, and they bought them clear and blue-white and costly.
The Levy Mercantile Company had added a fancy grocery and market department to its three-story brick store. It was situated on the street floor and enhanced with a great plate-glass window. In this window Sol displayed a mouth-watering assortment of foods. Juicy white stalks of asparagus in glass, as large around as a man’s two thumbs; great ripe olives, their purple-black cheeks glistening with oil; lobster, mushrooms, French peas, sardines, mountainous golden cheeses, tender broilers, peaches in syrup, pork roasts dressed in frills. Dozens of chickens, pounds of pork, baskets of delicacies were piled in the cars of homeward bound Osages. Often, when the food bills mounted too high, the Indian Agent at Wazhazhe threatened to let the bill go unpaid. He alone had the power to check the outpouring of Indian gold, and even he frequently was unable to cope with their mad extravagances.
“It’s disgusting,” Sabra Cravat said, again and again. “What are they good for? What earthly good are they? Ignorant savages who do nothing but eat and sleep and drive around in their ridiculous huge automobiles.”
“Keep money in circulation,” Sol Levy replied, for she often took him to task after seeing a line of Indian cars parked outside the Osage Mercantile Company’s store.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Now, now, Sabra. Not so grand, please. I don’t do like dozens of other merchants here in town. Make out bills for goods they haven’t bought and give them the money. Or charge them double on the bill that the Indian Agent sees, and return them the overcharge. They come in my store, they buy, they pay what the article is marked, and they get what they pay for. Inez Bull comes in and gets a silk step-in, or Sun Maker he buys twelve pounds of chicken and ten pounds of pork. I should tell them they can’t have it! Let the President of the United States do it. The Big White Father.”
Not only did Yancey agree with Sol, he seemed to find enormous satisfaction in the lavishness with which they spent their oil money; in the very absurdity of the things they bought.
“The joke gets better and better. We took their land away from them and exterminated the buffalo, then expected them to squat on the Reservations weaving baskets and molding pottery that nobody wanted to buy. Well, at
