“Darling, I adore you when you get viperish and Venable like that. Perhaps you influenced me in my early youth. That’s the new psychology, you know. You used to tell me about Grandma trailing around in her white ruffled dimity wrappers and her high heels, never lifting a lily hand.”
“At least your grandmother didn’t consider it a career.”
“Neither do I. This lovely flowerlike head isn’t so empty as you think, lolling in the front porch hammock. I know it’s no use counting on Father, even when he’s not off on one of his mysterious jaunts. What is he doing, anyway? Living with some squaw? … Forgive me, Mother darling. I didn’t mean to hurt you. … Cim’s just as bad, and worse, because he’s weak and hasn’t even Dad’s phony ideals. You’re busy with the paper. That’s all right. I’m not blaming you. If it weren’t for you we’d all be on the town—or back in Wichita living on Grandma in genteel poverty. I think you’re wonderful, and I ought to try to be like you. But I don’t want to be a girl reporter. Describing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sunflowers at one of Cassandra Sipes’ parties.”
Goaded by curiosity and a kind of wonder at this unnatural creature, Sabra must put her question: “What do you want to do, then?”
“I want to marry the richest man in Oklahoma, and build a palace that I’ll hardly ever live in, and travel like royalty, and clank with emeralds. With my skin and hair they’re my stone.”
“Oh, emeralds, by all means,” Sabra agreed, cuttingly. “Diamonds are so ordinary. And the gentleman that you consider honoring—let me see. From your requirements that would have to be Tracy Wyatt, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Donna, calmly.
“You’ve probably overlooked Mrs. Wyatt. Of course, Tracy’s only fifty-one, and you being nineteen, there’s plenty of time if you’ll just be patient.” She was too amused to be really disturbed.
“I don’t intend to be patient, Mamma darling.”
Something in her hard, ruthless tone startled Sabra. “Donna Cravat, don’t you start any of your monkey business. I saw you cooing and ah-ing at him the other day when we went over the Wyatts’ new house. And I heard you saying some drivel about his being a man that craved beauty in his life, and that he should have it; and sneering politely at the new house until I could see him beginning to doubt everything in it, poor fellow. He had been so proud to show it. But I thought you were just talking that New York talk of yours.”
“I wasn’t. I was talking business.”
Sabra was revolted, alarmed, and distressed, all at once. She gained reassurance by telling herself that this was just one of Donna’s queer jokes—part of the streak in her that Sabra had never understood and that corresponded to the practical joker in Yancey. That, too, had always bewildered her. Absorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper, Sabra let the conversation fade to a dim and almost unimportant memory.
Sabra was sufficiently shrewd and level headed to take Sol Levy’s sound advice. “You settle down to running your paper, Sabra, and you won’t need any oil wells. You can have the best-paying paper and the most powerful in the Southwest. Bigger than Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. Because Osage is going to be bigger and richer than any of them. You mark what I say. Hardly any oil in the town of Osage, but billions of barrels of oil all around it. This town won’t be torn to pieces, then. It’ll grow and grow. Five years from now it’ll look like Chicago.”
“Oh, Sol, how can that be?”
“You’ll see. There where the gambling tent stood with a mud hole in front of it a few years ago you’ll see in another five years a skyscraper like those in New York.”
She laughed at that.
Just as she had known that Yancey had again left her on that night of the Mescal ceremony, so now she sensed that he would come back in the midst of this new insanity that had seized all Oklahoma. And come back he did, from God knows where, on the very crest of the oil wave, and bringing with him news that overshadowed his return. He entered as he had left, with no word of explanation, and, as always, his entrance was so dramatic, so bizarre as to cause everything else to fade into the background.
He came riding, as always, but it was a sorry enough nag that he bestrode this time; and his white sombrero was grimed and battered, the Prince Albert coat was spotted, the linen frayed, the whole figure covered with the heavy red dust of the trampled road. He must have ridden like an avenging angel, for his long black locks were damp, his eyes red rimmed. And when she saw this Don Quixote, so sullied, so shabby, her blood turned to water within her veins for pity.
She thought, it will always be like this as long as he lives, and each time he will be a little more broken, older, less and less the figure of splendor I married, until at last …
She only said, “Yancey,” quietly.
He was roaring, he was reeling with Jovian laughter as he strode into the Wigwam office where she sat at her neat orderly desk just as she had sat on that day years before. For a dreadful moment she thought that he was drunk or mad. He flung his soiled white sombrero to the desk top, he swept her into his arms, he set her down.
“Sabra! Here’s news for you. Jesse! Heh, Jesse! Where’s that rum-soaked son of a printer’s devil? Jesse! Come in here! God, I’ve been laughing so that I almost rolled off my horse.” He was striding up and down as of old, his shabby coat tails spreading with the vigor of his movements, the beautiful hands gesticulating, the fine eyes—bloodshot now—still flashing with the fire
