Nearly always the wind blew. It blew throughout the night, throughout the day. The air was so dry it was something glittering, sweeping continually past. The arc lights swinging wildly in the boisterous wind, cast strange and grotesque shadows upon the unpainted shacks, and the people who were moving about. The church and the gambling houses and that long, black, restless ribbon which was the incoming Santa Fé train, were the only civilizing forces that welded men together, and helped drive away distance, homesickness, and loneliness. Each city’s idea of a celebration of any kind was noise. The ideal of noise was guns and tin pans. Every man carried one gun. The greater number carried two. Since there was no law but martial law, the population’s first desire was for territorial government. When Senator ——? of Washington, Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, arose in the Senate, stuck his hand in the lapel of his coat and said: Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, I demand for the future citizens of Oklahoma, those honest, hard-working Americans that they be given self government, and so forth, and so forth. The speech went on the wire to Oklahoma. The telegraph operator, who was likewise ticket agent, depot master, and a half a dozen other things, got it first. By way of letting the town know that good news was coming, he ran out on the platform and fired a round from his six-shooter. The proprietor of First Chance Saloon, a two-gun man from Texas, stepped out of his shack and let go both guns. He did not know the news but he felt that it must be good. And he believed in helping on a good thing. If it were good he voiced his approval. If, however, it turned out to be bad it meant that he had been voicing his disapproval. When his guns began to bark, the Feed Store Man, next door, began with his, and before another minute had elapsed the entire town was in the street firing up into the sky. It was like magic. Men leaped from shacks. Men leaped from dugouts, and saloons, everywhere. A firing squad began to march up and down the streets, firing by volley, by individuals, by twos and threes. Most of them did not know what for, but when the telegraph operator ran up the hill to deliver his message to the mayor, who, standing on the empty sugar barrel in the Government Acre, read it aloud, the crowd went mad. The celebration lasted all night. If the news happened to prove disappointing on the morrow, no one was vexed, because soon some other news of some kind would come and then they could have another celebration. Occasionally a citizen had an eye knocked out, or a half a dozen teeth, by a spent bullet. Window glass was broken nightly. No one of course minded such trifles. They were merely the by-product of frequent and joyous celebrations. Mr. Mencken is a pugilist, not an artist. He has always been in the wrong ring. It is safer to take blows, however, which make you blue instead of black.