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Show IBdI C I ffl M M GD 1WE1 THE STORY Tancftjr Cravat, Just returned from tha newly opened Indian territory, re la. tea hla expert nces to a large KatlierlriK of the Ven-alle Ven-alle family. Yancey la married to Sabra Vennble; la a criminal lawyer and editor of the Wichita Wigwam. When the Itun mar ted, Yancey hud raced hla pony atralnHt the thoroughbred mount of a girl. The girl's horse was Injurod and when Yancey mopped to Mhoot It she Krahbed his puny and got the land Yancey wanted. Yancey announces he Is going back to the Old alio m a country with Sabra and their four-year-old eon, Cimarron. They make the Journey . In two covered wagons. They arrive at O.vago, whore Yancuy Intends to start a newspaper. CHAPTER III Continued 5 "III, Yancey ! Howdy, ma'am." Past tlie Hed Dog saloon. A group In chairs tilted up against the wall or standing about In high-heeled boots and sombreros greeted Yancey now with a familiarity that astonished Sabra. "Howdy, Clin I Hello, Yancey Yan-cey I" "He called you Clm !" He Ignored tier surprised remark. Narrowly be was watching them as he passed. "Boys are up to something. If they try to get funny while you're here with me " Sabra, glancing at the group from beneath her shielding hat brim, did see that they were behaving much like a lot of snickering schoolboys who are preparing to let fly a bombardment bom-bardment of snowballs, an air of Secret mischief afoot. "Why are they what do you think makes them " Sabra began, a trifle nervously. "I can't say for sure. Rut I suspect sus-pect they're the boys that did Pegler dirt." "Peglert Who Is oh, Isn't that the man the editor the one who was . found dead shot dead on the banks of the Yancey! Do you mean they did It!" "I don't say they did It exactly. They know more than Is comfortable, even for these parts. I was Inquiring around last night, and everybody shut op like a clam. I'm going to find out who killed Pegler and print It In the first number of the Oklahoma Wigwam." Wig-wam." "Oh, Yancey! Yancey, I'm frightened!" fright-ened!" She clung tighter to bis arm. The grinning mirthless faces of the men on the saloon porch seemed to her like the fanged and snarling muz-rles muz-rles of wolves In a pack. "Nothing to be frightened of, honey. They know me. I'm no Fegler they can scare. They don't like my white hat, that's the truth of It. Dared me last night down at the Sunny Southwest South-west saloon to wear it this morning. Just to try me out. They won't have the guts to come out In the open " The sentence never was finished. Sabra heard a curious buzzing sound past her ear. Something sang zing! Yancey's white sombrero went spinning spin-ning Into the dust of the road. Sabra's mouth opened as though she were screaming, but the sounds she would have made emerged, feebly, as a croak. "Stay where you are," Yancey ordered, or-dered, his voice low and even. "The dirty dogs." She stood transfixed. She could not have run "If she had wanted to. Yancey strolled leisurely over to where the white hat lay in the dust. He stooped carelessly, his back to the crowd on the saloon porch, picked up the hat, surveyed It, and reached toward his pocket for his handkerchief. Atthat movement there was a rush and a scramble on the porch. Tilted chairs leaped forward, for-ward, heels clattered, a door slammed. Of the group only three men remained. One of these leaned insolently against a porch post, a second stood warily behind him, and a third was edging prudently toward the closed door. There was nothing to Indicate who had fired the shot that had sent Yancey's Yan-cey's hat spinning. Yancey, now half turned toward them, had taken his fine white handkerchief hand-kerchief from his pocket, had shaken out Its ample folds with a gesture of elegant leisure and, hat in hand, was flicking the dust from his headgear. This done he surveyed the hat critically, crit-ically, seemed to find it little the worse for its experience unless, perhaps, one excepts the two neat round holes that were drilled, back and front, through the peak of its crown. He now placed It on his head again with a gesture almost al-most languid, tossed the fine handkerchief handker-chief Into the road, and with almost the same gesture, or with another so lightning quick that Sabra's eye never followed It, bis hand went to hjs hip. There was the crack of a shot. The man who was edging toward the door clapped his hand to his ear and brought his hand away and looked at it, and it was darkly smeared. Yancey still stood In the road, his hand at his thigh, one slim foot, in its fine high-heeled Texas star boot, advanced ad-vanced carelessly. His great head was lowered menacingly. His eyes, steel gray beneath the brim of the white sombrero, looked as Sabra had never seen them look. They were terrible ter-rible eyes, merciless, cold, hypnotic. "A three-cornered piece, you'll find It, Lon. The Cravat sheep brand." "Can't you take a Joke, Yancey?" wnined one of the three, his eyes on Yancey's gun hand. ir,;e h 1!" snarled the man who had leea nicked. His hand was , clapped over his ear. "God help you, Cravat." "He always has," replied Yancey, piously. "If your missus wasn't with you " began the man whom Yancey had called Lon. Perhaps the rough Joke would have ended grimly enough. Dut here, suddenly, Sabra herself took a hand In the proceedings. Her fright had vanished. These were no longer men, evil, sinister, to be feared, but mean little boys to be put In their place. She now advanced on them in the majesty of her plumes and her silk, her fine eyes flashing, her gloved forefinger admonishing them as if they were indeed naughty children. She was every inch the very essence of that Iron woman, Felice Venable, "Don't you 'missus' me! You're a lot of miserable, good-for-nothing loafers, loaf-ers, that's what you are ! Shooting at people in the streets. You leave my husband alone. I declare, I've a notion no-tion to " For one ridiculous dreadful moment It looked as though she meant to slap the leathery bearded cheek of the bad man known ns Lon Yountis. Certainly Certain-ly she raised her little hand in Its neat There Was the Crack of a Shot black kid. The eyes of the three were popping. Lon Yountis ducked his head exactly like an urchin who Is about to be smacked by the schoolmarm. Then, with a yelp of pure terror he fled Into' the saloon, followed by the other two. Sabra stood a moment. It really looked as though she might make after them. But she thought better of It and sailed down the steps In triumph to behold a crushed, a despairing Yancey. "Oh, my G d, Sabra! What have you done to me !" "What's the matter?" "This time tomorrow It'll be all over the whole Southwest, from Mexico to Arkansas, that Yancey Cravat hid behind be-hind a woman's petticoats." "But you didn't. They can't say so. You shot him very nicely in the ear, darling." Thus had a scant eighteen hours In the Oklahoma country twisted her normal viewpoint so askew that she did not even notice the grotesquerle of what she had Just said. "They're telling It now, in there. A woman's got no call to Interfere when men are having a little dispute." "Dispute! Why, Yancey Cravat! He shot your hat right off your head !" "What of It! Little friendly shooting." shoot-ing." The enormity of this example of masculine clannlshness left her temporarily tem-porarily speechless with indignation. "Let's be getting on," Yancey continued, con-tinued, calmly. "If we're going to look at Doc Nisbett's house we'd better look at it. There are only two or three to be had in the whole town, and his is the pick of thera. It's central" (Central ! she thought, looking about her) "and according to what he said last night there's a room in the front big enough for getting out the paper. It'll have to be newspaper and law office In one. T;n there are four rooms In the back to live In. Plenty." EJna FerLer Copyright by Edna Ferber. WN'U Service. ". "Oh, plenty," echoed Sabra, thinking of the nine or ten visiting Venables always comfortably tucked away In the various hlgh-ceilinged bedrooms In the Wichita house. They resumed their walk. Sabra wondered If she had imagined the shooting outside the Ked Dog saloon. Doc NIsbett (veterinarian) shirt sleeved, shrewd, with generations of New England ancestry behind him, was seated In a chair tipped up against the front of his coveted property. In the rush for Territory town sites at the time of the Opening he had managed man-aged to lay his gnarled hands on five choice pieces. On these he erected dwellings, tilted his chair up against each In turn, and took his pick df latecomers late-comers frantic for some sort of shelter they could call a home. The dwelling Itself looked like one of Cim's childish drawings of a house. The roof was an Inverted V; there was a front door, a side door, and a spindling little porch. It was a box, a shelter merely, as angular and unlovely un-lovely as tire man who owned it. Taking her cue from Yancey "Lovely," murmured Sabra, agonized. "Do very nicely. Perfectly comfortable. comfort-able. I see. I see. I see." "There you are I" They stood on the porch, the tour completed. Yancey Yan-cey slapped his hands together gayly, as though by so doing he had summoned sum-moned a genie who had tossed up the house before their very eyes. In the discussion of monthly rental he had been a child In the hands of this lean and grasping New Englander. "There you are! That's all settled." He struck an attitude. "Survey our empire, em-pire, and behold our home!'" "Hen, hold on a minute," rasped Doc Nisbett. "How about water?" "Sabra, honey, you settle these little matters between you you and the Doc will you? I've got to run down the street and see Jesse Rickey about putting put-ting up the press and setting up the type racks and helping me haul the form tables, and then we've got the furniture to buy for the house. Meet you down the street at Hefner's Furniture Furni-ture store. Ten minutes." He was off, with a flirt of his coat tails. She would have called, "Yancey! "Yan-cey! Don't leave me!" but for a prldeful reluctance to show fear before be-fore this dourvisaged man with the tight lips and the gimlet eyes. "Well, now," repeated Doc Nisbett, nasally, "about water." i "Water?" "How much you going to need? Renting this house depends on how much water you think you going to need. How many barrels." Sabra had always taken water for granted, like air and sunshine. It was one of the elements. It was simply there. But since leaving Wichita there was always talk of water. Yancey, Yan-cey, on the prairie Journey, made it the basis of their camping site. "Oh, barrels," she now repeated, trying try-ing to appear intensely practical. "Well, let me see. There's cooking, cook-ing, of course, and all the cleaning around the house, and drinking, and bathing. I always give Clm his bath In the evening if I can. You wouldn't believe how dirty that child gets by the end of the day. Well, I should think ten barrels a day would be enough." "Ten barrels," said Doc Nisbett, In a flat voice utterly devoid of expression, expres-sion, "a day." "I should think that would be ample," am-ple," Sabra repeated, Judiciously. Doc Nisbett now regarded Sabra with a look of active dislike. Then he did a strange thing. He walked across the little porch, shut the front door, locked it, put the key in his pocket, seated himself in the chair and tilted it up against the wall at exactly the angle at which they had come upon him. Sabra stood there. Seeing her, It would have been almost impossible to believe that anyone so bravely decked out In silk and plumes and pink roses could present a figure so bewildered, so disconsolate, so defeated. Literally, she did not know what to do. She had met and surmounted many strange experiences In these last ten days. But she had been born of generations of women to whom men had paid homage. Perhaps In all her life she had never encountered the slightest discourtesy in a man, much less this abysmal boorishness. She looked at him, her face white, shocked. She looked up, in embarrassment, embarrass-ment, at t lie glaring steel sky; she looked down at the blinding red dust, she looked helplessly in the direction that Yancey had so blithely taken. She glanced again at Doc Nisbett, propped so woodenly against the wall of his hateful house. She should, of course, have gone straight up to him and said, "Do you mean that ten barrels bar-rels are too much? I didn't know. I am new to all this. Whatever you say." Hut she was young, and Inexperienced, Inexperi-enced, and full of pride, and terribly offended. So without another word she turned and marched down the dusty street. Her head in Its plumed hat was high. On either cheek burned a scarlet patch. Her eyes, in her effort ef-fort to keep back the hot tears, were blazing, liquid, enormous. She saw nothing. From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the effect that the house had been rented by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra's. Sabra was Inconsolable, In-consolable, but Yancey did not once reproach her for her mistake. It was characteristic of him that he was most charming and considerate In crises which might have been expected to infuriate him. "Never mind, sugar. Don't take on like that. We'll find a house. And, anyway, we're here. That's the main thing. He stretched his mighty arms, shook himself like a great shaggy lion. In all this welter of red clay and Indians and shirt sleeves and tobacco juice and drought he seemed to find a beauty and an exhilaration that eluded Sabra quite. But then Sabra, after those first two days, had ceased to search for a reason for anything. She met and accepted the most grotesque, the most fantastic happenings. When she looked back on the things she had done and the things she had said in the first few hours of her Oklahoma experience it was as though she were tolerantly regarding the naivetes of 'a child. Ten barrels of water a day 1 She knew now that water, In this burning land, was a precious thing. Life here was an anachronism, a great crude joke. It was hard to realize that while the rest of the United States, in this year of 18S9, was living a conventionally civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, plumb-ing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws, millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been set back according to the frontier standards stand-ards of half a century earlier. Literally Lit-erally she was pioneering In a wilderness wilder-ness surrounded but untouched by civilization. Yancey had reverted. Always even In his staidest Wichita Incarnation Incarna-tion a somewhat incredibly romantic figure, he now was remarkable even In this town of fantastic humans gathered gath-ered from every corner of the brilliantly bril-liantly picturesque Southwest. His towering form, his curling locks, his massive head, his vibrant voice, his dashing dress, his florid speech, his magnetic personality drew attention wherever he went. On the day following follow-ing their arrival Yancey had taken from his trunk a pair of silver-mounted Ivory-handled six-shooters and a belt and holster studded with silver. She had never before seen them. His white sombrero he had banded with a rattlesnake skin of gold and silver, with glass eyes, a treasure also produced pro-duced from the secret trunk, as well as a pair of gold-mounted spurs which further enhanced the Texas star boots. Thus bedecked for his legal and editorial pursuits he was by far the best dressed and most spectacular male in all the cycloramic Oklahoma country. Sabra learned many astounding things in these first few days, and among the most terrifying were the things she learned about the husband to whom she had been happily married for more than five years. She learned, for example, that this Yancey Cravat was famed as the deadliest shot In all the deadly shooting Southwest. He had the gift of being able to point his six-shooters without sighting, as one would point with a finger. He was one of the few who could draw and fire two six-shooters at once with equal speed and accuracy. His hands would go to his hips with a lightning gesture that yet was so smooth, so economical that the onlooker's eye scarcely followed it. He could hit his mark as he walked, as he ran, as he rode his horse. SaHra was vaguely uneasy. Wichita had not been exactly effete, and Dodge City, Kan., was notoriously no-toriously a gun-play town. But here no man walked without his six-shooters strapped to his body. On the very day of her harrowing encounter with Doc Nisbett, Sabra, her composure regained, re-gained, had gone with Yancey to see still another house owner about the possible renting of his treasure. The man was found In his crude one-room shack which he used as a combination combina-tion dwelling and land office. He glanced up at them from the rough pine table at which be was writing. "Howdy, Yancey !" "Howdy, Cass!" Yancey, all grace, performed an introduction. in-troduction. This lean, leather-skinned house owner wiped his palms on his pants' seat In courtly fashion and, thus purified, extended a hospitable hand to Sabra. Yancey revealed to him their plight. "Well, now, say, that's plumb terr'ble, that is. Might be I can help you out you and your good lady here. But say, Yancey, Just let me step out, will you, to the corner, and mail this here letter. The bag's goin' any minute min-ute now." He licked and stamped the envelope, rose, and took from the table beside him his broad leather belt with its pair of holstered slx-shnoters, evidently evident-ly temporarily laid aside for comfort while writing. This he now strapped quickly about his waist with the same unconcern that another man would use in slipping into his coat. He merely was donning conventional street attire for the well-dressed man of the locality. He picked up his sheaf of envelopes and stepped out In three minutes he was back, and affably ready to talk terms with them. It was, perhaps, this simple and sinister act, more than anything she had hitherto witnessed, that impressed Sabra with the utter lawlessness of this new land to which her husband had brought her. . This house, so dearly held by the man called Cass, turned out to be a four-room dwelling inadequate to their ' needs, and they were in despair at the thought of being obliged to wait until a house could be built. Thei Yancey had a brilliant Idea. He fou'id a two-room two-room cabin made of ro'ugR boards. This was hauled to the site of th I main house, plastered, and -added to itprovided them with a six-room combination dwelling, newspaper plant, and law office. There was all the splendor of sitting room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen to live In. One room of the small attached cabin was a combination law and newspaper office. The other served as composing room and print shop. The Hefner Furniture and Undertaking Parlon provided them with furniture a largt wooden bedstead to fit Sabra's mat tress and spring; a small bed for Clmi tables, chairs the plainest of everything. every-thing. In two days Sabra was a housewife house-wife established in her routine as though she had been at It for years. Setting up the newspaper plant and law office was not so simple. Yancey, for example, was Inclined to write his first editorial entitled "Whither Oklahoma?" Okla-homa?" before the hand press had been put together. He was more ob-sorbed ob-sorbed In the effect of the sign tacked up over the front of the shop than he was in the proper mechanical arrangement arrange-ment of the necessary appliances Inside. In-side. THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM, read the sign In block letters two feet high, so that the little cabin Itself was almost obscured. Then, beneath, In letters scarcely less impressive: YANCEY CRAVAT, PROP. AND EDITOR. ED-ITOR. ATTORNEY AT LAW. NOTARY. NO-TARY. The placing of this sign tooK the better part of a day, during which time all other work was suspended. While the operation was In progress Yancey crossed the road fifty times, ostensibly to direct matters from a proper vantage point of criticism, but BV qJb OKLAHOMA ii3fi r (jm-Mm SAL IhI The Placing of This Sign Took the Better Part of a Day. really to bask in the dazzling effect of the bold fat black letters. As always in the course of such proceedings on the part of the laboring male there was much hoarse shouting, gesticulation, gesticula-tion, and general rumpus. It was Sabra's first realization that the male of the species might be fallible. falli-ble. A product of southern training, even though a daily witness, during her girlhood, to the dominance of her matriarchal mother" over her weak and war-shattered father, she had been bred to the tradition that the male was always right, always to be deferred de-ferred to. Yancey, still her passionate lover, had always treated her, tenderly, ten-derly, as a charming little fool, and this role she had meekly even gratefully grate-fully accepted. But now suspicion began to rear Its ugly head. These last three weeks bad shown her that the male was often mistaken, as a sex, and that Yancey was almost always wrong as an Individual. But these frightening discoveries she would no yet admit even to herself. (TO BE CONTINUED. 1 |