Mile on mile, as far as the eye could see, were the skeleton frames of oil rigs outlined against the sky like giant Martian figures stalking across the landscape. Horrible new towns—Bret Harte wooden-front towns—sprang up overnight on the heels of an oil strike; towns inhabited by people who never meant to stay in them; stark and hideous houses thrown up by dwellers who never intended to remain in them; rude frontier crossroad stores stuffed with the necessities of frontier life and the luxuries of sudden wealth all jumbled together in a sort of mercantile miscegenation. The thump and clank of the pump and drill; curses, shouts; the clatter of thick dishes, the clink of glasses, the shrill laughter of women; fly-infested shanties. Oil, smearing itself over the prairies like a plague, killing the grass, blighting the trees, spreading over the surface of the creeks and rivers. Signs tacked to tree stumps or posts; For Ambulance Call 487. Sim Neeley Undertaker. Call 549. Call Dr. Keogh 735.
Oklahoma—the Red People’s Country—lay heaving under the hot summer sun, a scarred and dreadful thing with the oil drooling down its face a viscid stream.
Tracy Wyatt, who used to drive the bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage, standing up to the reins like a good-natured red-faced charioteer as the wagon bumped over the rough roads, was one of the richest men in Oklahoma—in the whole of the United States, for that matter. Wyatt. The Wyatt Oil Company. In another five years the Wyatt Oil Companies. You were to see their signs all over the world. The Big Boys from the East were to come to him, hat in hand, to ask his advice about this; to seek his favor for that. The sum of his daily income was fantastic. The mind simply did not grasp it. Tracy himself was, by now, a portly and not undignified looking man of a little more than fifty. His good-natured rubicund face wore the grave slightly astonished look of a commonplace man who suddenly finds himself a personage.
Mrs. Wyatt, plainer, more horse-faced than ever in her expensive New York clothes, tried to patronize Sabra Cravat, but the Whipple blood was no match for the Marcy. The new money affected her queerly. She became nervous, full of spleen, and the Eastern doctors spoke to her of high blood pressure.
Sabra frankly envied these lucky ones. A letter from the adder-tongued Felice Venable to her daughter was characteristic of that awesome old matriarch. Sabra still dreaded to open her mother’s letters. They always contained a sting.
“All this talk of oil and millions and everyone in Oklahoma rolling in it. I’ll be bound that you and that husband of yours haven’t so much as enough to fill a lamp. Trust Yancey Cravat to get hold of the wrong piece of land. Well, at least you can’t be disappointed. It has been like that from the day you married him, though you can’t say your mother didn’t warn you. I hope Donna will show more sense.”
Donna, home after two years at Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson, seemed indeed to be a granddaughter after Felice Venable’s own heart. She was, in coloring, contour, manner, and outlook, so unlike the other Oklahoma girls—Czarina McKee, Gazelle Slaughter, Jewel Riggs, Maurine Turket—as to make that tortured, wind-deviled day of her birth on the Oklahoma prairie almost nineteen years ago seem impossible. Even during her homecomings in the summer vacations she had about her an air of cool disdain together with a kind of disillusioned calculation very disconcerting to her former intimates, not to speak of her own family.
The other girls living in Osage and Oklahoma City and Guthrie and Wahoo were true products of the new raw Southwest country. They liked to dress in crude high colors—glaring pinks, cerise, yellow, red, vivid orange, magenta. They made up naively with white powder and big daubs of carmine paint on either cheek. The daughters of more wealthy parents drove their own cars in a day when this was considered rather daring for a woman. Donna came home tall, thin to the point of scrawniness in their opinion; sallow, unrouged, drawling, mysterious. She talked with an Eastern accent, ignored the letter r, said eyether and nyether and rih’ally and altogether made herself poisonously unpopular with the girls and undeniably stirring to the boys. She paid very little heed to the clumsy attentions of the Oklahoma hometown lads, adopting toward them a serpent-of-the-Nile attitude very baffling to these frank and open-faced prairie products.
Her school days finished, and she a finished product of those days, she now looked about her coolly, calculatingly. Her mother she regarded with a kind of affectionate amusement.
“What a rotten deal you’ve had, Sabra dear,” she would drawl. “Really, I don’t see how you’ve stood it all these years.”
Sabra would come to her own defense, goaded by something strangely hostile in herself toward this remote, disdainful offspring. “Stood what?”
“Oh—you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional Marcy, and head-held-high in spite of a bum of a husband.”
“Donna Cravat, if you ever again dare to speak like that of your father I shall punish you, big as you are.”
“Sabra darling, how can you punish a grown woman? You might slap me, and I wouldn’t slap you back, of course. But I’d be terribly embarrassed for you. As for Father—he is a museum piece. You know it.”
“Your father is one of the greatest figures the Southwest has ever produced.”
“Mm. Well, he’s picturesque enough, I suppose. But I wish he hadn’t worked so hard at it. And Cim! There’s a brother! A great help to me in my career, the men folks of this quaint family.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were planning a career,” Sabra retorted, very much in the manner of Felice Venable. “Unless getting up at noon, slopping around in a kimono most of the day, and lying in the hammock reading is called a career by Dignum graduates. If it
