Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little joke. “Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and weather-beaten? And that about her hair and boots and hands?”
Cravat, standing behind his wife’s chair, looked down at her; at the fine white line that marked the parting of her thick black hair. With one forefinger he touched her cheek, gently. He allowed the finger to slip down the creamy surface of her skin, from cheek bone to chin. “Dead sure, Jouett. I left out one thing, though.” Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. “Her teeth,” Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. “Broken and discolored like those of a woman of seventy. And most of them gone at the side.”
Here Yancey could not resist charging up and down, flirting his coat tails and generally ruining the fine flavor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping it) had been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild melee of the Run in the first place. Now he stood surveying these handsome futile faces, and a great impatience shook him, and a flame of rage shot through him, and a tongue of malice flicked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end.
“I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fe train that was standing, steam up, ready to run into the Nation. But you couldn’t get on. There wasn’t room for a flea. They were hanging on the cowcatcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn’t even do that. They went twenty miles in ninety minutes. I decided I’d use my Indian pony. I knew I’d get endurance, anyway, if not speed. And that’s what counted in the end.
“There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the Border, as near as they’d let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for miles into the Nation, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the Sooners, too, who had sneaked in and were hiding in the scrub oaks, in the draws, wherever they could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready to shoot those of us who came in, fair and square, in the Run. I knew the piece I wanted. An old freighters’ trail, out of use, but still marked with deep ruts, led almost straight to it, once you found the trail, all overgrown as it was. A little creek ran through the land, and the prairie rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around it, but on that section, because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons and cottonwoods and even a grove of pecans. I had noticed it many a time, riding the range.”
(H’m! Riding the range! All the Venables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat’s past.)
“Ten o’clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Hundreds of us had been followers of Payne and had gone as Boomers in the old Payne colonies, and had been driven out, and had come back again. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I’ve seen the same look exactly on the faces of men who were ravenous for food.
“Well, eleven o’clock, and they were crowding and cursing and fighting for places near the Line. They shouted and sang and yelled and argued, and the sound they made wasn’t human at all,
