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Show Copyright by Edna FerberA ."WNU Service. ta THE STORY Tancey Cravat, Just returned frm the newly opened Indian territory, relates hia experiences to a larrfe gathering of the Ven-able Ven-able family. Yancey is married to Sabra Venable; is a criminal lawyer and editor of the Wichita Wigwam. When the Run started, Yancey ha,d raced his pony against the thoroughbred mount of a girl. The girl's horse was injured and when Yancey stopped to shoot it she grabbed his pony and got the land Yancey warred. Yancey announces he Is going back to the Oklahoma country with Sabra and their four-year-old son, Cimarron. They make the Journey in two covered wagons. They arrive at Osage, where Yancey Intends to start a newspaper. Yancey is determined to find out who killed Editor Peg-ler Peg-ler of the New Day. Preparations for the publication of the Oklahoma Okla-homa Wigwam are completed. CHAPTER III Continued "Tancey, this case of type's badly 0. pled." Jesse Rickey, journeyman printer and periodic drunkard, was responsible re-sponsible for this misfortune, having dropped a case, face down, in the dust of the road while assisting Yancey in the moving. "It'll have to be sorted before you can get out a paper." "Oh, Rlckey'U tend to that. I've j- got a lot of Important work to do. Editorials to write, news to get, lot of real estate transfers and I'm going to find out who killed Pegler and print it In the first issue if it takes the last drop of blood in me. I'll show them, ' first crack, that the Oklahoma Wig wam prints all the news, all the time, knowing no law but the Law of God and the government of these United States! Say, that's a pretty good slogan. Top of the page, just above, the editoiial column." In the end it was she who sorted the case of pied type. The five years of Yancey's newspaper ownership in Wichita had familiarized her, almost unconsciously, with many of the mechanical me-chanical uspects of a newspaper printing print-ing shop. The hand press was finally set up, and the little Job press, and the case rack containing the type. The rollers were in place, and their little stock of paper. Curiously enough, though neither Yancey nor Sabra was conscious con-scious of It, It was she who had directed di-rected most of this manual work and had indeed actually performed much of It, with Isaiah and Jesse Rickey to help her. Yancey would lose himself In the placing of his law library, his books of reference, and his favorite volumes, for which he contended there was not enough shelf room In the house proper. He had brought along boxes of books stowed away in the covered wagons. If the combined book wealth contained in all the houses, offices, and shops of the entire Oklahoma Okla-homa country so newly settled could it have been gathered in one spot it prob- ably would have been found to number less than this preposterous library of V the paradoxical Yancey Cravat. Glib and showy though he was with his book knowledge Yancey still had in these volumes of his the absorption jof the true book lover. Lost to all else he would call happily hap-pily In to Sabra as she bent over the L case rack, her cheek streaked with '"', Ink: "Sabe! Oh, Sabe listen to this." He would clear his throat. " 'Son of Nestor, delight of my heart, mark the flushing of bronze through the echoing balls, and the flashing of gold and of amber and of silver and of Ivory. Such like, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, for the world of things that are here ; wonder comes over me as I look thereon.' there-on.' . . . G d, Subra, it's as fine as the Old Testament. Finer!" "'The world of things that are here,' " echoed Sabra, not bitterly, but with grave common sense. ''Perhaps If you'd pay more attention to those, and less to your nonsense in books about gold and silver aud ivory, we might get settled." But he was ready with a honeyed reply culled from the same book so dear to his heart and hisgrandiloquent tongue. "'Be not wroth with me hereat, goddess and queen.' " The goddess and queen pushed her hair back from her forehead with a sooty hand, leaving si ill another emudge of printer's Ink upon that worried wor-ried surface. Jesse Rickey, the printer (known, laturally, to his familiars as "Gin" Rickey, owing to his periods of Intemperance) Intem-perance) and black Isaiah were, next t Sabra, most responsible for the astounding as-tounding fact that the Cravat family finally was settled in the house and office. The front door, which was the office entrance, faced the wide wallo of the main street. In the midst of clay and refuse, in a sort of hed-kennel, lived little Isaiah; rather, he slept tiler, like a faithful dog, for all day long he was about the house j. ' and the printing office, tireless, willing, Invaluable. He belonged to Sabra, body and soul, as completely as though the Civil war had never been. A little servant of twelve, born to labor, he became as dear to Sabra, as accustomed, accus-tomed, as oue of her own children, Respite tier southern training aud his black skin. He dried the dishes, a towel tied round his neck ; he laid the table; he was playmate and nursemaid nurse-maid for Cim: he ran errands, a swift and splay-footed Mercury; he was a born reporter, and, in the course of his day's scurrying about the town on this errand or that brought into Sabra's kitchen more items of news and gossip gos-sip (which were later transferred to the newspaper office) than a whole staff of trained newspaper men could have done. He was so little, so black, so lithe, so harmless looking, that his presence was, more often than not, completely overlooked. The saloon loungers, cowboys, rangers, and homesteaders home-steaders in and about the town alternately alter-nately spoiled and plagued him. Sabra, in time, taught him to read, write, and figure. He was quick to .learn, industrious, lovable. He thought he actually belonged to her. He cleared the unsightly back yard of its litter of tin cans and refuse. Together To-gether he and Sabra ev.en tried to plant a little garden in this barren, sanguine clay. More than anything else, Sabra missed the trees and flowers. flow-ers. In the whole town of almost ten thousand inhabitants there were, two trees: stunted jack oaks.. Sometimes she dreamed of lilies of the valley the translucent, almost liquid green of their stems and leaves, the perfumed per-fumed purity of their white bells. All this, however, came later. These first few days were filled to overflowing over-flowing with the labor of making the house habitable and the office and plant fit for Yancey's professional pursuits. pur-suits. Already his talents as a silver-tongue silver-tongue were being sought in defense of murderers, horse thieves, land grabbers, grab-bers, and more civil offenders in all the surrounding towns and counties. Even a horse thief, that blackest of criminals in this country, was said to have a bare chance for his life if Yancey Cravat could be induced to plead for him and provided always, of course, that the posse had not dealt with the offender first. Yancey, from the time he rose in the morning until he went to bed late at night, was always a little over-stimulated by the whisky he drank. This, together with a natural fearlessness, an enormous vitality, and a devouring Interest in everybody and everything in this fantastic Oklahoma country, gained him friends and enemies in almost al-most equal proportion. In the ten days following their arrival ar-rival in Osage, his one interest seemed to be the tracing of the Pegler murder mur-der for he scoffed at the idea that his predecessor's death was due to any other cause. Sabra argued with him, almost hysterically, but in vain. "You didn't do anything about helping them catch the Kid, out there on the prairie, when they were looking for him, and you knew where he was or just about and he had killed a man. too, and robbed a bank, and I don't know what all." "That was different. The Kid's different," dif-ferent," Yancey answered, unreasonably unreason-ably and infuriatingly. "Different! How different? What's this Pegler to you ! They'll kill you, too tney'll shoot you down and then what shall I do? Cim Cim and I here, alone Yancey, darling I love you so if anything should happen to you " She waxed incoherent. "Listen, honey. Hush your crying and listen. Try to understand. The Kid's a terror. He's a bad one. But it isn't his fault. The government at Washington made him an outlaw. The Kid's father rode the range before there were fences or railroads in Kansas, Kan-sas, and when this part of the country was running wild with longhorn cattle cat-tle that had descended straight from the animals that the Spaniards had brought over four centuries ago. The railroads began coming in. The settlers set-tlers came with It, from the Gulf coast, up across Texas, through the Indian territory to the end of steel at Abilene, Kan. The Kid was brought up to all that. Freighters, bull whackers, mule skinners, hunters, and cowboys that's all he knew. Into Dodge City, with perhaps nine months' pay jingling in his pocket. I'll bet neither the Kid nor his father before him ever saw a nickel or a dime. They wouldn't have bothered with such chicken feed. Silver dollars were the smallest coin they knew. They worked for it, too. I've seen seventy-five seventy-five thousand cattle at a time waiting shipment to the Fast, with lads like the Kid in charge. The Kid's grandfather grand-father was a buffalo hunter. The range was the only life they wanted. Along conies the government. What happens? They take the range away from the cattle men and cowboys the free range that never belonged to them really, but that they had come to think of as theirs through right of use. Squatters come in, Sooners, too, and Nesters, and then the whole rush of the Opening. The range is cut up into town sites, and the town into lots, before be-fore their very eyes. Why, it must have sickened them killed them almost al-most to see it. "Wilderness one day ; town sites the next. And the cowboys and rangers having no more chance than chips in a flood. Can't you see it? Shanties where the horizon used to be ; gro cery stores on the old buffalo trails. They went plnmb locoed, I tell you. They couldn't fight progress, but they could get revenge on the people who had taken their would awaj from them and cut It Into little strips and. dirtied it. "The Kid's bad, yes. They don't come worse than he. Aud they'll get him, eventually. But the man who fahered him needn't be ashamed of him. There's no yellow in the Kid." For one dreadful sickening second something closed with iron fingers around Sabra Cravat's heart and squeezed It, and it ceased to beat. White faced, her dark eyes searched her husband's fa-e. Wichita whispers. Kansas slander. But that face was all exaltation, like the face of an evangelist, evan-gelist, and as pure. His eyes were glowing. The iron fingers relaxed. "But Pegler. The men who killed Pegler. Why are they so much worse " "Skunks. Dirty jackals hired by white-livered politicians." "But why? Why?" "Because Pegler had the same idea I have that here's a chance to start clean, right from scratch. Live and let live. Clean politics instead of the skulduggery all around; a new way of living and of thinking, because we've had a chance to see how rotten and narrow and bigoted the other way has been. Here everything's fresh. It's all to do, and we can do It. There's never been a chance like it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of 'the other pioneers to profit by. New England, and California, and the settlers of the Middle West it got away from them, and they fell into the rut. Ugly poll-tics, poll-tics, ugly towns, ugly buildings, ugly minds." He was off again, Sabra, all impatience, stopped him. "But Pegler. What's that got to do with Pegler?" She hated the name. She hated the dead man who was stalking their new life and threatening threaten-ing to destroy it "I saw that one copy of his paper. He called it the New Day poor devil. And in It he named names, and he outlined out-lined a policy and a belief something like well along the lines I've tried to explain to you. He accused the government of robbing the Indians. He acccused the settlers of cheating them." "Oh, my heavens, Yancey! Indians! You and your miserable dirty Indians I You're always going on about them as if they mattered ! The sooner they're all dead the better. What good are they? Filthy, thieving, lazy things. They won't work. You've said so yourself. They just squat there, rotting." rot-ting." "I've tried to explain to you," Yancey Yan-cey began, gently, "White men can't do those things to a helpless" "And so they killed him!" Sabra cried, Irrelevantly. "And they'll kill you, too. Oh, Yancey please please I don't want to be a pioneer woman. I thought I did, but I don't. I can't make things different. I liked them as they were. Comfortable and safe. Let them alone. I don't want to live in a model empire. Darling! Darling! Let's just make it a town like Wichita Wich-ita .. . with trees . . . and people being sociable . . . not killing kill-ing each other all the time church on Sunday . : . a school for Cim. ..." The face she adored was a mask. The ocean-gray eyes were slate-gray now, with the look she had seen and dreaded cold, determined, relentless. "All right. Go back there. Go back 'to your trees and your churches and your sidewalks and your Sunday roast beef and your smug, dead-alive family. But not me! Me. I'm staying here. And when I find the man who killed Pegler I'll face him with it, and I'll publish his name, and if he's alive by then I'll bring him to justice and I'll see him strung up on a tree. If I don't it'll be because I'm not alive myself." "Ob, G d!" whimpered Sabra, and sank, a limp bundle of misery, into his arms. But those arms were, suddenly, sud-denly, no haven, no shelter. He put her from him, gently, but with iron firmness, and walked out of the house, through the newspaper office, down the broad and sinister red road. CHAPTER IV Yancey put his question wherever he came upon a little group of three or four lounging on saloon or store porch or street corner. "How did Pegler Peg-ler come to die?" The effect of the question always was the same. One minute they were standing sociably, gossiping, rolling cigarettes; citizens at ease in their shirt sleeves. Yancey would stroll up with his light, graceful grace-ful step, his white sombrero with the two bullet holes In Its crown, his Prince Albert, his fine high-heeled hoots. He would ask his question. As though by magic the group dispersed, faded, vanished. Yancey strolled out into the glaring sunshine of Pawhuska avenue. Indians. In-dians. Mexicans, cowboys, solid citizens citi-zens lounged in whatever of shade could be found in the hot. dry, dustj street. Op the corner stood Pete Pitchlyn talking to the Spaniard, ! Estevan Miro. They were the gossips of the town, these two. This lTancey knew. News not only of the town, but of the Territory not alone of the Territory but of the whole brilliant burning Southwest, from Texas through New Mexico into Arizona, sieved through this pair. Miro not only knew; he sold his knowledge. The Spaniard was very quiet, and his movements appeared slow because of their feline grace. Eternally he rolled cigarettes in the cowboy fashion, with exquisite deftness. Pete Pitchlyn, famous Indian scout of a bygone day, had grown potbellied pot-bellied and flabby, now that the Indians In-dians were rotting on their reservations reserva-tions and there was no more work for him to do. He was a vast fellow, his height of six feet three now balanced by his bulk. Late in his hazardous career as a scout on the plains Pitchlyn Pitch-lyn had been shot in the left heel by a poisoned Indian arrow. It was thought he would surely die. This failing, it was then thought he would lose that leg. But a combination of unlimited whisky, constitution made up of chilled steel, and a determination determina-tion that those varmints should never kill hin, somehow caused him not only to live but to keep the poison-ravaged leg clinging to his carcase. Stubbornly Stubborn-ly he had refused to have it ampu- "Well, Boy, What Do You Know?" tated, and by a miracle It had failed to send its poison through the rest of that iron frame. But the leg had withered and shrunk until now It was fully twelve inches shorter than the sound limb. He refused to use crutches or the clumsy mechanical devices de-vices of the day, and got about with astonishing speed and agility. When he stood on the sound leg he was, with his magnificent breadth of shoulders, a giant of six feet three. But occasionally occa-sionally the sound leg tired, and he would rest it by slumping for a moment mo-ment on the other. He then became a runt of five feet high. These two specimens of the Southwest South-west It was that Yancey now approached, ap-proached, his step a saunter, his manner man-ner carefree, even bland. Almost imperceptibly im-perceptibly the two seemed to stiffen, as though bracing themselves for action. ac-tion. In the old scout It evidenced itself In his sudden emergence from lounging cripple to statuesque giant. In the Spaniard you sensed, rather than saw, only a curiously rippling motion of the muscles beneath the smooth tawny skin, like a snake that glides before it really moves to go. They stood, the three, wary, silent. Yancey balanced gayly from shining boot toe to high heel and hack again. Yancey put the eternal question of the inquiring reporter. "Well, boys, what do you know?" The two were braced for a query less airy. Their faces relaxed in an expression resembling disappointment. It was as when gunfire fails to explode. ex-plode. The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders, a protean gesture intended on this occasion to convey to the beholder be-holder the utter Innocence and un-eventfulness un-eventfulness of the daily existence led by Estevan Miro. Pete Pitchlyn's eyes, in that ravaged face, were coals in an ash heap. It was not for him to be seen talking on the street corner cor-ner with the man who was asking a fatal question fatal not only to the asker but to the one who should be foolhardy enough to answer it. He knew Yancey, admired him, wished him well. Yet there was little he dared say now before the reptilian Miro. Yancey continued, conversationally conversa-tionally : "I understand there's an element rarin' around town bragging that they're going to make Osage the terror ter-ror of tlie Southwest, like Abilene and Dodge City in the old days; and the Cimarron. I'm interviewing citizens of note," continued Yancey, blandly, "on whether they think this town ought to bo run on that principle or on a Socratic one that the more modern mod-ern element has in mind." He lifted Ids great head and turned his rare :.rnze full on the little Spaniard. His ;ray eyes, quizzical, mocking, met the Mack eyes, and the darker ones shifted. shift-ed. "Are you at ail familiar with the works of Socrates 'Socrates . . . whom well inspir'd the oracla pro nounced wisest of men'?" Again Estevan Miro shrugged. This time the gesture was exquisitely complicated com-plicated In its meaning, even for a low-class Spaniard. Slight embarrassment embarrass-ment was in it, some bewilderment, and a grain the merest fleck of something as nearly approaching contempt con-tempt as was possible in him for a man whom he feared. "Yancey," said Pete Pitchlyn, deliberately, de-liberately, "stick to your lawy'in'." "Why?" "Anybody's got the gift of gab like you have is wastin' their time doin' anything else." "Oh, I wouldn't say that," Yancey replied, all modesty. "Running a newspaper news-paper keeps me in touch with folks. I like it. Besides, the law isn't very remunerative in these parts. Running a newspaper's my way of earning a living. Of course," he continued brightly, as an afterthought, 'there have been times when running a newspaper news-paper has saved the editor tht, trouble of ever again having to earn a living." The faces of the two were blank as a sponged slate. Suddenly "Come on, boys. Who killed Pegler?" Pete Pitchlyn vanished. Yancey, and the Spaniard were left alone on the sunny street corner. The fac of Miro now became strangely pinched. The eyes were inky slits. He wsa summoning all his little bravado, piHl-lng piHl-lng It out of his inmost depths. "I know something. I have that to tell you," he said in Spanish, his lips barely moving. Yancey replied In the same tongue, "Out with it." The Spaniard did not speak. The slits looked at Yancey. Yancey knew that already he must have been well paid by some one to show such temerity when his very vitals were gripped with fear. "Yon know something, some-thing, h'm? Well,. Miro,' mas vale saber que haber." With which bit of philosophy he showed Miro what westerner can do in the way of a shrug; and sauntered off. Miro leaped after him in one noiseless noise-less bound, like a cat. He seemed now to-be more afraid of not revealing that which he had been paid to say than of saying it He spoke rapidly, In Spanish. Span-ish. "I say only that which was told to me. The words are not mine. They say, 'Are you a friend of Yancey Cravat?' Cra-vat?' I say, 'Yes.' They say then, 'Tell your friend Yancey Cravat that wisdom Is better than wealth. If he does not keep his d n mouth shut he will die." The words are not mine." "Thanks," replied Yancey, thoughtfully, thought-fully, speaking in English now. Then with one fine white hand he reached out swiftly and gave Miro's scarlet neckerchief a quick strong Jerk and twist. The gesture was at once an insult and a threat. "Tell them " Suddenly Yancey stopped. He opened his mo'uth, and there issued from It a sound so dreadful, so unearthly as to freeze the blood of any within hearing. It was a sound between the gobble of an angry turkey cock and the howl of a .coyote. Throughout the Southwest it was known that this terrible sound, famed as the gobble, was Cherokee in origin and a death cry among the Territory Ter-ritory Indians. It was known, too, that when an Indian gobbled it meant sudden destruction to any or all in his path. The Spaniard's face went a curious dough gray. With a whimper he ran, a streak of purple and scarlet and brown, round the corner of the nearest near-est shack, and vanished. Unfortunately, Y'ancey could not resist re-sist the temptation of dilating to Sabra on this dramatic triumph. The story was, furthermore, told in the presence of Cim and Isaiah, and illustrated illus-trated before Sabra could prevent it with a magnificent rendering of the blood-curdling gobble. They were seated at noonday dinner. Sabra's fork, halfway to her mouth, fell clattering clat-tering on her plate. Her face blanched Her appetite was gone. (TO EE CONTINUED.) |