She did not seem to pay much heed to this, but it must have penetrated her numbed brain at last, for presently she stopped the painful sobbing and looked down at his lovely smiling face in her lap, the long lashes, like a girl’s, resting so fragilely on the olive cheek.
“He wanted to go. I wouldn’t let him. Is is too late, Sol?”
“Go? Go where?”
“The Colorado School of Mines. Geology.”
“Too late! That kid there! Don’t talk foolish. September. This is the time to go. It just starts. Sure he’ll go.”
They drove through the yard, over Sabra’s carefully tended grass, of which she was so proud, right to the edge of the porch steps, and so, dragging again and pulling, they got him in, undressed him; she washed his dust-smeared face.
“Well,” said Sol Levy. “I guess I go and open the store and then have a good cup of coffee.”
She put out her hand. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, sharp and tight. Her face was distorted absurdly with her effort not to cry. But when he would have patted her grimed and trembling hand with his own, in a gesture of comforting, she caught his hand to her lips and kissed it.
The sound of the horses’ hoofs died away on the still morning air. She looked down at Cim. She thought, I will take a bath, and then I will have some coffee, too. Yancey has gone again. Has left me. I know that. How do I know it? Well, nothing more can happen to me now. I have had it all, and I have borne it. Nothing more can happen to me now.
XX
For years Oklahoma had longed for statehood as a bride awaits the dawn of her wedding day. At last, “Behold the bridegroom!” said a paternal government, handing her over to the Union. “Here is a star for your forehead. Meet the family.”
Then, at the very altar, the final words spoken, the pact sealed, the bride had turned to encounter a stranger—an unexpected guest, dazzling, breathtaking, embodying all her wildest girlish dreams.
“Bridegroom—hell!” yelled Oklahoma, hurling herself into the stranger’s arms. “What’s family to me! Go away! Don’t bother me. I’m busy.”
The name of the gorgeous stranger was Oil.
Oil. Nothing else mattered. Oklahoma, the dry, the windswept, the burning, was a sea of hidden oil. The red prairies, pricked, ran black and slimy with it. The work of years was undone in a day. The sunbonnets shrank back, aghast. Compared to that which now took place the early days following the Run in ’89 were idyllic. They swarmed on Oklahoma from every state in the Union. The plains became black with little eager delving figures. The sanguine roads were choked with every sort of vehicle. Once more tent and shanty towns sprang up where the day before had been only open prairie staring up at a blazing sky. Again the gambling tent, the six-shooter, the roaring saloon, the dance hall, the harlot. Men fought, stole, killed, died for a piece of ground beneath whose arid surface lay who knew what wealth of fluid richness. Every barren sunbaked farm was a potential fortune; every ditch and draw and dried-up creek bed might conceal liquid treasure. The Wildcat Field—Panhandle—Cimarron—Crook Nose—Cartwright—Wahoo—Bear Creek—these became magic names; these were the Seven Cities of Cibola, rich beyond Coronado’s wildest dream. Millions of barrels of oil burst through the sand and shale and clay and drenched the parched earth. Drill, pump, blast. Nitroglycerin. Here she comes. A roar. Oklahoma went stark raving mad.
Sabra Cravat went oil mad with the rest of them. Just outside the town of Osage, for miles around, they were drilling. There was that piece of farm land she had bought years ago, when Yancey first showed signs of restlessness. She had thought herself shrewd to have picked up this fertile little oasis in the midst of the bare unlovely plain. She was proud of her bit of farm land with its plump yield of alfalfa, corn, potatoes, and garden truck. She knew now why it had been so prolific. By a whim of nature rich black oil lay under all that surrounding land, rendering it barren through its hidden riches. No taint of corroding oil ran beneath that tract of Cravat farm land, and because of this it lay there now, so green, so lush, with its beans, its squash, its ridiculous onions, taunting her, deriding her, like a mirage in the desert. Queerly enough, she had no better luck with her share in an oil lease for which she had paid a substantial sum—much more than she could afford to lose. Machinery, crew, days of drilling, weeks of drilling, sand, shale, salt. The well had come up dry—a duster.
That which happened to Sabra happened to thousands. The stuff was elusive, tantalizing. Here might be a gusher vomiting millions. Fifty feet away not so much as a spot of grease could be forced to the surface. Fortune seemed to take a delight in choosing strange victims for her pranks. Erv Wissler, the gawk who delivered the milk to Sabra’s door each morning, found himself owner of a gusher whose outpourings yielded him seven thousand dollars a day. He could not grasp it. Seven dollars a day his mind might have encompassed. Seven thousand had no meaning.
“Why, Erv!” Sabra exclaimed, when he arrived at her kitchen door as usual, smelling of the barnyard. “Seven thousand dollars a day! What in the world are you going to do with it!”
Erv’s putty features and all his loose-hung frame seemed to stiffen with the effort of his new and momentous resolve. “Well, I tell you, Mis’ Cravat, I made up my mind I ain’t going to make no more Sunday delivery myself. I’m a-going to hire Pete Lynch’s boy to take the milk route Sundays.”
Everyone in Osage knew the story of Ferd Sloat’s wife when the news was
