“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
