An injured look softened Bill’s battered features. He pouted like a child. “No, ma’am. I run the dance hall, see? And I was standing in the middle of the floor, working, and I had the gun right in my hand. Anybody could see. I wasn’t carrying no concealed weapon.”
The jury filed back. Not guilty. The rat-faced girl’s shyster lawyer said something in her ear. She spoke in a dreadful raucous voice, simpering.
“I sure thank you, gents.”
The dance-hall girls cheered feebly.
Out of that fetid air into the late afternoon blaze. “The dance halls open about nine,” Sabra said. “We’ll wait for that. In the meantime I’ll show you their rooms. Their rooms—” she looked about for the fresh-cheeked Harvard boy. “Why, where—”
“There’s some kind of excitement,” said the New York editor. “People have been running and shouting. Over there in that field we visited a while ago. Here comes our young friend now. Perhaps he’ll tell us.”
The Harvard boy’s color was higher still. He was breathing fast. He had been running. His eyes shone behind the bone-rimmed spectacles.
“Well, folks, we’ll never have a narrower squeak than that.”
“What?”
“They put fifty quarts in the Gypsy pool but before she got down the oil came up—”
“Quarts of what?” interrupted an editorial voice.
“Oh—excuse me—quarts of nitroglycerin.”
“My God!”
“It’s in a can, you know. A thing like a can. It never had a chance to explode down there. It just shot up with the gas and oil. If it had hit the ground everything for miles around would have been shot to hell and all of us killed. But he caught it. They say he just ran back like an outfielder and gauged it with his eye while it was up in the air, and ran to where it would fall, and caught it in his two arms, like a baby, right on his chest. It didn’t explode. But he’s dying. Chest all caved in. They’ve sent for the ambulance.”
“Who? Who’s he?”
“I don’t know his real name. He’s an old bum that’s been around the field, doing odd jobs and drinking. They say he used to be quite a fellow in Oklahoma in his day. Picturesque pioneer or something. Some call him old Yance and I’ve heard others call him Sim or Simeon or—”
Sabra began to run across the road.
“Mrs. Cravat! You mustn’t—where are you going?”
She ran on, across the oil-soaked field and the dirt, in her little buckled high-heeled slippers. She did not even know that she was running. The crowd was dense around some central object. They formed a wall—roustabouts, drillers, tool dressers, shooters, pumpers. They were gazing down at something on the ground.
“Let me by! Let me by!” They fell back before this white-faced woman with the white hair.
He lay on the ground, a queer, crumpled, broken figure. She flung herself on the oil-soaked earth beside him and lifted the magnificent head gently, so that it lay cushioned by her arm. A little purplish bubble rose to his lips, and she wiped it away with her fine white handkerchief, and another rose to take its place.
“Yancey! Yancey!”
He opened his eyes—those ocean-gray eyes with the long curling lashes like a beautiful girl’s. She had thought of them often and often, in an agony of pain. Glazed now, unseeing.
Then, dying, they cleared. His lips moved. He knew her. Even then, dying, he must speak in measured verse.
“ ‘Wife and mother—you stainless woman—hide me—hide me in your love!’ ”
She had never heard a line of it. She did not know that this was Peer Gynt, humbled before Solveig. The once magnetic eyes glazed, stared; were eyes no longer.
She closed them, gently. She forgave him everything. Quite simply, all unknowing, she murmured through her tears the very words of Solveig.
“Sleep, my boy, my dearest boy.”
Colophon
Cimarron
was published in by
Edna Ferber.
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