During the course of the bountiful meal with which the Venable table was spread Yancey Cravat had eaten almost nothing. Here was an audience to his liking. Here was a tale to his taste. His story, wild, unbelievable, yet true, was of the opening of the Oklahoma country; of a wilderness made populous in an hour; of cities numbering thousands literally sprung up overnight, where the day before had been only prairie, coyotes, rattlesnakes, red clay, scrub oak, and an occasional nester hidden in the security of a weedy draw.
He had been a month absent. Like thousands of others he had gone in search of free land and a fortune. Here was an empire to be had for the taking. He talked, as always, in the highfalutin terms of the speaker who is ever conscious of his audience. Yet, fantastic as it was, all that he said was woven of the warp and woof of truth. Whole scenes, as he talked, seemed to be happening before his listeners’ eyes.
II
Coat tails swishing, eyes flashing, arms waving, voice soaring.
“Folks, there’s never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was History made in an hour—and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast commonwealth of ours” (he talked like that) “traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. ‘Lands of lost gods, and godlike men!’ They came like a procession—a crazy procession—all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand—scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. God knows why—for they all knew that once arrived there they’d have to wait like penned cattle for the firing of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the prairie. They came from Texas, and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback. In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I saw a surrey, honey colored, with a fringe around the top, and two elegant bays drawing it, still stepping high along those rutted clay roads as if out for a drive in the Presidio. There was a black boy driving it, brass buttons and all, and in the back seat was a dude in a light tan coat and a cigar in his mouth and a diamond in his shirtfront; and a woman beside him in a big hat and a pink dress laughing and urging the horses along the red dust that was halfway up to the wheel spokes and fit to choke you. They had driven like that from Denver, damned if they hadn’t. I met up with one old homesteader by the roadside—a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg—who told me he had started weeks and weeks before, and had made the long trip as best he could, on foot or by rail and boat and wagon, just as kindhearted people along the way would pick him up. I wonder if he ever got his piece of land in that savage rush—poor old devil.”
He paused a moment, perhaps in retrospect, perhaps cunningly to whet the appetites of his listeners. He wrung a breathless, “Oh, Yancey, go on! Go on!” from Sabra.
“Well, the Border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July celebration on Judgment Day. The militia was lined up at the boundary. No one was allowed to set foot on the new land until noon next day, at the firing of the guns. Two million acres of land were to be given away for the grabbing. Noon was the time. They all knew it by heart. April twenty-second, at noon. It takes generations of people hundreds of years to settle a new land. This was going to be made livable territory overnight—was made—like a miracle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves and the Fishes and the parting of the Red Sea were nothing—mere tricks.”
“Don’t be blasphemous, Yancey!” spoke up Aunt Cassandra Venable.
Cousin Dabney Venable tittered into his stock.
“A wilderness one day—except for an occasional wandering band of Indians—an empire the next. If that isn’t a modern miracle—”
“Indians, h’m?” sneered Cousin Dabney, meaningly.
“Oh, Dabney!” exclaimed Sabra, sharply. “Why do you interrupt? Why don’t you just listen!”
Yancey Cravat raised a pacifying hand, but the great buffalo head was lowered toward Cousin Dabney, as though charging. The sweetest of smiles wreathed his lips. “It’s all right, Sabra. Let Cousin Dabney speak. And why not? Un cabello hace sombra.”
Cousin Dabney’s ivory face flushed a delicate pink. “What’s that, Cravat? Cherokee talk?”
“Spanish, my lad. Spanish.”
A little moment of silent expectation. Yancey did not explain. A plump and pretty daughter-in-law (not a Venable born) put the question.
“Spanish, Cousin Yancey! I declare! Whatever in the world does it mean? Something romantic, I do hope.”
“Not exactly. A Spanish proverb. It means, literally ‘Even a hair casts a shadow.’ ”
Another second’s silence. The pretty daughter-in-law’s face became quite vacuous. “Oh. A hair—but I don’t see what that’s got to do with …”
The time had come for Felice Venable to take charge. Her drawling, querulous voice dripped its slow sweetness upon the bitter feud that lay, a poisonous pool, between the two men.
“Well,
