Cimarron · Chapter 2 (2/3)

“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth. He was the kind of man who says, “Aha.”

“On the other side was an old fellow with a long gray beard⁠—a plainsman, he was⁠—a six-shooter in his belt, one wooden leg, and a flask of whisky. He took a pull out of that every minute or two. He was mounted on an Indian pony like mine. Every now and then he’d throw back his head and let out a yell that would curdle your blood, even in that chorus of fiends. As we waited we fell to talking, the three of us, though you couldn’t hear much in that uproar. The girl said she had trained her thoroughbred for the race. He was from Kentucky, and so was she. She was bound to get her husband and sixty acres, she said. She had to have it. She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask her. We were all too keyed up, anyway, to make sense. Oh, I forgot. She had on a getup that took the attention of anyone that saw her, even in that crazy mob. The better to cut the wind, she had shortened sail and wore a short skirt, black tights, and a skullcap.”

Here there was quite a bombardment of sound as silver spoons and knives and forks were dropped from shocked and nerveless feminine Venable fingers.

“It turned out that the three of us, there in the front line, were headed down the old freighters’ trail toward the creek land. I said, ‘I’ll be the first in the Run to reach Little Bear.’ That was the name of the creek on the section. The girl pulled her cap down tight over her ears. ‘Follow me,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Then the old fellow with the wooden leg and the whiskers yelled out, ‘Whoop‑ee! I’ll tell ’em along the Little Bear you’re both a-comin’.’

“There we were, the girl on my left, the old plainsman on my right. Eleven forty-five. Along the Border were the soldiers, their guns in one hand, their watches in the other. Those last five minutes seemed years long; and funny, they’d quieted till there wasn’t a sound. Listening. The last minute was an eternity. Twelve o’clock. There went up a roar that drowned the crack of the soldiers’ musketry as they fired in the air as the signal of noon and the start of the Run. You could see the puffs of smoke from their guns, but you couldn’t hear a sound. The thousands surged over the Line. It was like water going over a broken dam. The rush had started, and it was devil take the hindmost. We swept across the prairie in a cloud of black and red dust that covered our faces and hands in a minute, so that we looked like black demons from hell. Off we went, down the old freight trail that was two wheel ruts, a foot wide each, worn into the prairie soil. The old man on his pony kept in one rut, the girl on her thoroughbred in the other, and I on my Whitefoot on the raised place in the middle. That first half mile was almost a neck-and-neck race. The old fellow was yelling and waving one arm and hanging on somehow. He was beating his pony with the flask on his flanks. Then he began to drop behind. Next thing I heard a terrible scream and a great shouting behind me. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. The old plainsman’s pony had stumbled and fallen. His bottle smashed into bits, his six-shooter flew in another direction, and he lay sprawling full length in the rut of the trail. The next instant he was hidden in a welter of pounding hoofs and flying dirt and cinders and wagon wheels.”

A dramatic pause. Black Isaiah was hanging from his perch like a monkey on a branch. His asparagus shoofly was limp. The faces around the table were balloons pulled by a single string. They swung this way and that with Yancey Cravat’s pace as he strode the room, his Prince Albert coat tails billowing. This way⁠—the faces turned toward the sideboard. That way⁠—they turned toward the windows. Yancey held the little moment of silence like a jewel in the circlet of faces. Sabra Cravat’s voice, high and sharp with suspense, cut the stillness.

“What happened? What happened to the old man?”

Yancey’s pliant hands flew up in a gesture of inevitability. “Oh, he was trampled to death in the mad mob that charged over him. Crazy. They couldn’t stop for a one-legged old whiskers with a quart flask.”

Out of the well-bred murmur of horror that now arose about the Venable board there emerged the voice of Felice Venable, sharp-edged with disapproval. “And the girl. The girl with the black⁠—” Unable to say it. Southern.

“The girl and I⁠—funny, I never did learn her name⁠—were in the lead because we had stuck to the old trail, rutted though it was, rather than strike out across the prairie that by this time was beyond the burned area and was covered with a heavy growth of blue stem grass almost six feet high in places. A horse could only be forced through that at slow pace. That jungle of grass kept many a racer from winning his section that day.

“The girl followed close behind me. That thoroughbred she rode was built for speed, not distance. A race horse, blooded. I could hear him blowing. He was trained to short bursts. My Indian pony was just getting his second wind as her horse slackened into a trot. We had come nearly sixteen miles. I was well in the lead by that time, with the girl following. She was crouched low over his neck, like a jockey, and I could hear her talking to him, low and sweet and eager, as if he were a human being. We were far in the lead now. We had left the others behind, hundreds going this way, hundreds that, scattering for miles over the prairie. Then I saw that the prairie ahead was afire. The tall grass was blazing. Only the narrow trail down which we were galloping was open. On either side of it was a wall of flame. Some skunk of a Sooner, sneaking in ahead of the Run, had set the blaze to keep the Boomers off, saving the land for himself. The dry grass burned like oiled paper. I turned around. The girl was there, her racer stumbling, breaking and going on, his head lolling now. I saw her motion with her hand. She was coming. I whipped off my hat and clapped it over Whitefoot’s eyes, gave him the spurs, crouched down low and tight, shut my own eyes, and down the trail we went into the furnace. Hot! It was hell! The crackling and snapping on either side was like a fusillade. I could smell the singed hair on the flanks of the mustang. My own hair was singeing. I could feel the flames licking my legs and back. Another hundred yards and neither the horse nor I could have come through it. But we broke out into the open choking and blinded and half suffocated. I looked down the lane of flame. The girl hung on her horse’s neck. Her skullcap was pulled down over her eyes. She was coming through game. I knew that my land⁠—the piece that I had come through hell for⁠—was not more than a mile ahead. I knew that hanging around here would probably get me a shot through the head, for the Sooner that started that fire must be lurking somewhere in the high grass ready to kill anybody that tried to lay claim to his land. I began to wonder, too, if that girl wasn’t headed for the same section that I was bound for. I made up my mind that, woman or no woman, this was a race and devil take the hindmost. My poor little pony was coughing and sneezing and trembling. Her racer must have been ready to drop. I wheeled and went on. I kept thinking how, when I came to Little Bear Creek, I’d bathe my little mustang’s nose and face and his poor heaving flanks, and how I mustn’t let him drink too much, once he got his muzzle in the water.

“Just before I reached the land I was riding for I had to leave the trail and cut across the prairie. I could see a clump of elms ahead. I knew the creek was near by. But just before I got to it I came to one of those deep gullies you find in the plains country. Drought does it⁠—a crack in the dry earth to begin with, widening with every rain until it becomes a small canyon. Almost ten feet across this one was, and deep. No way around it that I could see, and no time to look for one. I put Whitefoot to the leap and, by God, he took it, landing on the other side with hardly an inch to spare. I heard a wild scream behind me. I turned. The girl on her spent racer had tried to make the gulch. He had actually taken it⁠—a thoroughbred and a gentleman, that animal⁠—but he came down on his knees just on the farther edge, rolled, and slid down the gully side into the ditch. The girl had flung herself free. My claim was fifty yards away. So was the girl, with her dying horse. She lay there on the prairie. As I raced toward her⁠—my own poor little mount was nearly gone by this time⁠—she scrambled to her knees. I can see her face now, black with cinders and soot and dirt, her hair all over her shoulders, her cheek bleeding where she had struck a stone in her fall, her black tights torn, her little short skirt sagging. She sort of sat up and looked around her. Then she staggered to her feet before I reached her and stood there swaying, and pushing her hair out of her eyes like someone who’d been asleep. She pointed down the gully. The black of her face was streaked with tears.

“ ‘Shoot him!’ she said. ‘I can’t. His two forelegs are broken. I heard them crack. Shoot him! For God’s sake!’

“So I off my horse and down to the gully’s edge. There the animal lay, his eyes all whites, his poor legs doubled under him, his flanks black and sticky with sweat and dirt. He was done for, all right. I took out my six-shooter and aimed right between his eyes. He kicked once, sort of leaped⁠—or tried to, and then lay still. I stood there a minute, to see if he had to have another. He was so game that, some way, I didn’t want to give him more than he needed.

“Then something made me turn around. The girl had mounted my mustang. She was off toward the creek section. Before I had moved ten paces she had reached the very piece I had marked in my mind for my own. She leaped from the horse, ripped off her skirt, tied it to her riding whip that she still held tight in her hand, dug the whip butt into the soil of the prairie⁠—planted her flag⁠—and the land was hers by right of claim.”

Yancey Cravat stopped talking. There was a moment of stricken silence. Sabra Cravat staring, staring at her husband with great round eyes. Lewis Venable, limp, yellow, tremulous. Felice Venable, upright and quivering. It was she who spoke first. And when she did she was every inch the thrifty descendant of French forbears; nothing of the Southern belle about her.

“Yancey Cravat, do you mean that you let her have your quarter section on the creek that you had gone to the Indian Territory for! That you had been gone a month for! That you had left your wife and child for! That⁠—”

“Now, Mamma!” You saw that all the Venable in Sabra was summoned to keep the tears from her eyes, and that thus denied they had crowded themselves into her trembling voice. “Now, Mamma!”

“Don’t you ‘now Mamma’ me! What of the land that you were to have had! It was bad enough to think of your going to that wilderness, but to⁠—” She paused. Her voice took on a new and more sinister note. “I don’t believe a word of it.” She whirled on Yancey, her black eyes blazing. “Why did you let that trollop in the black tights have that land?”

Yancey regarded this question with considerable judicial calm, but Felice, knowing him, might have been warned by the way his great head was lowered like that of a charging bull buffalo.

“If it had been a man I could have shot him. A good many had to, to keep the land they’d run fairly for. But you can’t shoot a woman.”

“Why not?” demanded the erstwhile Southern belle, sharply.

The Venables, as one man, gave a little jump. A nervous sound, that was half gasp and half shocked titter, went round the Venable board. A startled “Felice!” was wrung from Lewis Venable. “Why, Mamma!” said Sabra.

Yancey Cravat, enormously vital, felt rising within him the tide of irritability which this vitiated family always stirred in him. Something now about their shocked and staring faces, their lolling and graceful forms, roused in him an unreasoning rebellion. He suddenly hated them. He wanted to be free of them. He wanted to be free of them⁠—of Wichita⁠—of convention⁠—of smooth custom⁠—of⁠—no, not of her. He now smiled his brilliant sweet smile which alone should have warned Felice Venable. But that intrepid matriarch was not one to let a tale go unpointed.

“I’m mighty pleased, for one, that it turned out as it did. Do you suppose I’d have allowed a daughter of mine⁠—a Venable⁠—to go traipsing down into the wilderness to live among drunken one-legged plainsmen, and toothless scrags in calico, and trollops in tights! Never! It’s over now, and a mighty good thing, too. Perhaps now, Yancey, you’ll stop this ramping up and down and be content to run that newspaper of yours and conduct your law practice⁠—such as it is⁠—with no more talk of this Indian Territory. A daughter of mine in boots and calico and sunbonnet, if you please, a-pioneering among savages. Reared as she was! No, indeed.”

Yancey was strangely silent. He was surveying his fine white hands critically, interestedly, as though seeing them in admiration for the first time⁠—another sign that should have warned the brash Felice. When he spoke it was with utter gentleness.

“I’m no farmer. I’m no rancher. I didn’t want a section of farm land, anyway. The town’s where I belong, and I should have made for the town sites. There were towns of ten thousand and over sprung up in a night during the Run. Wagallala⁠—Sperry⁠—Wawhuska⁠—Osage. It’s the last frontier in America, that new country. There isn’t a newspaper in one of those towns⁠—or wasn’t, when I left. I want to go back there and help build a state out of prairie and Indians and scrub oaks and red clay. For it’ll be a state some day⁠—mark my words.”

“That wilderness a state!” sneered Cousin Dabney Venable. “With an Osage buck or a Cherokee chief for governor, I suppose.”

“Why not? What a revenge on a government that has cheated them and driven them like cattle from place to place and broken its treaties with them and robbed them of their land. Look at Georgia! Look at Mississippi! Remember the Trail of Tears!”

“Ho hum,” yawned Cousin Jouett Goforth, and rose, fumblingly. “This has all been very interesting⁠—odd, but interesting. But if you will excuse me now I shall have my little siesta. I am accustomed after dinner⁠ ⁠…”

Lewis Venable, so long silent, now too reached for his cane and prepared to rise. He was not quick enough. Felice Venable’s hand, thin, febrile, darted out and clutched his coat sleeve⁠—pressed him back so that he became at once prisoner and judge in his chair at the head of the table.

“Lewis Venable, you heard him! Are you going to sit there? He says he’s going back. How about your daughter?” She turned blazing black eyes on her son-in-law. “Do you mean you’re going back to that Indian country? Do you?”

“I’ll be back there in two weeks. And remember, it’s white man’s country now.”

Sabra stood up, the boy Cim grasped about his middle in her arms, so that he began to whimper, dangling there. Her eyes were startled, enormous. “Yancey! Yancey, you’re not leaving me again!”

“Leaving you, my beauty!” He strode over to her. “Not by a long shot. This time you’re going with me.”

“And I say she’s not!” Felice Venable rapped it out. “And neither are you, my fine fellow. You were tricked out of your land by a trollop in tights, and that ends it. You’ll stay here with your wife and child.”

He shook his great head gently. His voice was dulcet.

“I’m going back to the Oklahoma country; and Sabra and Cim with me.”

Felice whirled on her husband. “Lewis! You can sit there and see your daughter dragged off to be scalped among savages!”