“Why don’t they do some good with it?” Sabra demanded.
“What good’s Wyatt doing? Or Nisbett, or old Buckner, or Ike Hawes, or their wives! Blowing it on houses and travel and diamonds and high-priced cars.”
“The Osages could help the other tribes—poor Indian tribes that haven’t struck oil.”
“Maybe they will—when Bixby gives away his millions to down-and-out hotel keepers who are as poor as he was when he ran the Bixby House, back in the old days.”
“Filthy savages!”
“No, honey. Just blanket Indians—horse Indians—Plains Indians, with about twenty-five millions of dollars a year gushing up out of the earth and splattering all around them. The wonder to me is that they don’t die laughing and spoil their own good time.”
Sometimes Sabra encountered old Big Elk and his vast squaw and Ruby Big Elk, together with others of the family—a large one for an Osage—driving through Pawhuska Avenue. With their assembled head rights the family was enormously rich—one of the wealthiest on the Wazhazhe Reservation. When the Big Elks drove through the town it was a parade. No one car could have contained the family, though they would have scorned such economy even if it had been possible.
They made a brilliant Indian frieze in the modern manner. Old Big Elk and his wife, somewhat conservatively, lolled in a glittering Lincoln driven by a white chauffeur. Through the generous glass windows you saw the two fat bronze faces, the massive bodies, the brilliant colors of their blankets and chains and beads. One of the Big Elk boys drove a snow-white Pierce Arrow roadster that tore and shrieked like an avenging demon up and down the dusty road between Osage and Wazhazhe. Ruby herself, and a sister-in-law or so, and a brother, might follow in one of the Packards, while still another brother or sister preferred a Cadillac. If they walked at all it was to ascend with stately step the entrance to the Indian Agent’s Office. The boys wore American dress, with perhaps an occasional Indian incongruity—beaded pants, a five-gallon hat with an eagle feather in it, sometimes moccasins. Ruby and her sisters and her sister-in-law wore the fine and gaudy blanket over their American dresses, they were hatless, and their long bountiful hair was done Indian fashion. The dress of old Big Elk and his wife was a gorgeous mixture of Indian and American, with the Indian triumphantly predominating. About the whole party, as in the case of any of the Osage oil families, there was an air of quiet insolence, of deep rich triumph.
Sabra always greeted them politely enough. “How do you do, Ruby,” she would say. “What a beautiful dress.” Ruby would say nothing. She would look at Sabra’s neat business dress of dark blue or gray, at Sabra’s plain little hat and sensible oxford ties. “Give my regards to your father and mother,” Sabra would continue, blandly, but inwardly furious to find herself feeling uncomfortable and awkward beneath this expressionless Indian gaze. She fancied that in it there was something menacing, something triumphant. She wondered if Ruby, the oft-married, had married yet again. Once she asked young Cim about her, making her tone casual. “Do you ever see that girl who used to work here—Ruby, wasn’t that it? Ruby Big Elk?”
Cim’s tone was even more casual than hers. “Oh, yes. We were working out Wazhazhe way, you know, on the Choteau field. That’s near by.”
“They’re terribly rich, aren’t they?”
“Oh, rotten. A fleet of cars and a regular flock of houses.”
“It’s a wonder that some miserable white squaw man hasn’t married that big greasy Ruby for her head right. Mrs. Conn Sanders told me that one of the Big Elk boys was actually playing golf out at the Westchester Apawamis Club last Saturday. It’s disgusting. He must know there’s a rule against Indians. Mrs. Sanders reported him to the house committee.”
“There’s a rule, all right. But you ought to see the gallery when Standing Bear whams it out so straight and so far that he makes the pro look like a ping-pong player.”
“How is he in a tomahawk contest?”
“Oh, Mother, you talk like Grandma when she used to visit here.”
“The Marcys and the Venables didn’t hobnob with dirty savages in blankets.”
“Standing Bear doesn’t wear his blanket when he plays golf,” retorted Cim, coolly. “And he took a shower after he’d made the course in seven below par.”
Donna came home from a bridge party one afternoon a week later, the creamy Venable pallor showing the Marcy tinge of ocherous rage. She burst in upon Sabra, home from the office.
“Do you know that Cim spends his time at the Big Elks’ when we think he’s out in the oil fields?”
Sabra met this as calmly as might be. “He’s working near there. He told me he had seen them.”
“Seen them! That miserable Gazelle Slaughter said that he’s out there all the time. All the time, I tell you, and that he and Ruby drive around in her car, and he eats with them, he stays there, he—”
“I’ll speak to your father. Cim’s coming home Saturday. Gazelle is angry at Cim, you know that, because he won’t notice her and she likes him.”
She turned her clear appraising gaze upon this strange daughter of hers. She thought, suddenly, that Donna was like a cobra, with that sleek black head, that cold and slanting eye, that long creamy throat in which a pulse sometimes could be seen to beat and swell a little—the only sign of emotion in this baffling creature.
“I’ll tell you what, Donna. If you’d pay a little less attention to your brother’s social lapses and a little more to your own vulgar conduct, perhaps it would be better.”
Donna bestowed her rare and brilliant smile upon her forthright mother. “Now, now, darling! I suppose I say, ‘What do you mean?’ And you
