Cimarron quotes

Here were passion flower and wistaria and even Bougainvillea in season. Honeysuckle gave out its swooning sweetness. In the early spring lilies of the valley thrust the phantom green of their spears up through the dead brown banking the lilac bushes.

That coarse vulgarian, the Kansas sunflower, was a thing despised of the Venables.

If one so much as showed its broad face among the scented élégantes of that garden it suffered instant decapitation. On one occasion Felice Venable had been known to ruin a pair of very fine-tempered embroidery scissors while impetuously acting as headsman.

“

Do even the flowers have to be useful in Kansas?

” drawled Felice Venable. She was not very popular with the bustling wives of Wichita. They resented her ruffled and trailing white wrappers of cross-barred dimity;

Now and then the sudden white ridge of a hard-set muscle showed along the line of a masculine jaw.

Their eyes were those of men who follow a game in which they would fain take part.

The women listened, a little frightened, their lips parted. They shushed their children when they moved or whimpered, or, that failing, sent them, with a half-tender, half-admonitory slap behind, to play in the sunny dooryard.

… in actual content, he had those priceless gifts of the born orator, a vibrant and flexible voice, great sweetness and charm of manner, an hypnotic eye, and the power of making each listener feel that what was being said was intended for his ear alone.

Something of the charlatan was in him, much of the actor, a dash of the fanatic.

Any tale told by Yancey Cravat was likely to contain enchantment, incredibility (though this last was not present while he was telling it), and a tinge of the absurd. Yancey himself, even at this early time, was a bizarre, glamorous, and slightly mythical figure.

His past, before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this; slander whispered that.

Rumor, romantic, unsavory, fantastic, shifting and changing like clouds on a mountain peak, floated about the head of Yancey Cravat.

They say he has Indian blood in him. They say he has an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known as “Cimarron” Cravat, hence his son’s name, corrupted to Cim.

Wichita, roaring, said he should have called his sheet the Rooster. The combination law and newspaper office itself was a jumble and welter of pied type, unopened exchanges, boilerplate, legal volumes, paste pots, loose tobacco, old coats, and racing posters.

Wichita, professing scorn of the Wigwam, read it.

Wichita perused his maiden editorial entitled “Shall the Blue Blood of the Decayed South Poison the Red Blood of the Great Middle West?” and saw him, two months later, carry off in triumph as his bride Sabra Venable, daughter of that same Decay;

He had been a month absent. Like thousands of others he had gone in search of free land and a fortune.

Here was an empire to be had for the taking.

He talked, as always, in the highfalutin terms of the speaker who is ever conscious of his audience. Yet, fantastic as it was, all that he said was woven of the warp and woof of truth.

“

Well, the Border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July celebration on Judgment Day.

The militia was lined up at the boundary. No one was allowed to set foot on the new land until noon next day, at the firing of the guns. Two million acres of land were to be given away for the grabbing.

“

Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home.

Pioneer women.”

But it’s there, just the same.

And if it’s ever told straight you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.

”

“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.

“Stuff!” interrupted Mother Bridget. “He’s going for the adventure of it. They always have, no matter what excuse they’ve given, from the Holy Grail to the California gold fields. The difference in America is that the women have always gone along.

When you read the history of France you’re peeking through a bedroom keyhole. The history of England is a joust.

The womenfolks were always Elaineish and anemic, seems. When Ladye Guinevere had pinned a bow of ribbon to her knight’s sleeve, why, her job was done for the day. He could ride off to be killed while she stayed home and stitched at a tapestry.

Mother Bridget stepped close to the wheel. “It’ll be all right.

There’s no such thing as a new country for the people who come to it. They bring along their own ways and their own bits of things and make it like the old as fast as they can.

”

… wagons contained, this might have been one of those informal excursions into a nearby wood which Cim so loved, where they lunched in the open, camped near a stream, and he was allowed to run barefoot in the shadow of his aristocratic grandmother’s cool disapproval.

Felice Venable loathed all forms of bucolic diversion and could, with a glance, cause more discomfort at an al fresco luncheon than a whole battalion of red ants.

There was a lunatic week preceding their departure from Wichita.

As in all newly settled countries, there were here hundreds of such tales. The sparsely settled land was full of them.

The poorer the class the more glittering the treasure.

These people, wresting a meager living from the barren plains, consoled themselves with tales of buried Spanish gold; of jewels.

Cim heard dozens of these tales as they dragged their way across the red clay of Oklahoma, as they forded rivers, passed little patches of blackjack or cottonwood. He was full of them.

They became as real to him as the rivers and trees themselves.

During the day Yancey told him stories of the Indians. He taught him the names of the Five Civilized Tribes, and Cim remembered the difficult Indian words and repeated them—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw.

Her prim girlhood, which, because she had continued to live in her parents’ household, had lasted into her marriage, was now behind her. Ahead of her lay all manner of unknown terrors and strangeness, but here in the wilderness she was secure.

She ruled her little world.

Her husband was hers, alone. Her child, too. The little black boy Isaiah was as much her slave as though the Emancipation Proclamation had never been.

It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness.

The street stopped abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.

“Pawhuska Avenue,” said a tipsy sign tacked on the front of a false-front pine shack. Yancey chose this unfortunate time to impart a little Indian lore to Cim, wide eyed on the wagon seat beside his mother.

It was midnight when Yancey came in. She sat up in bed in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown.

Her eyes, in her white face, were two black holes burned in a piece of paper.

“What was it? What was it?”

“And so it is, my pet. That’s very poetic of you.

The prairie’s an ocean of land.

” He seemed enormously elated—jubilant, almost. His coat tails switched; he stepped high in his fine Texas star boots. She tucked her hand in her handsome husband’s arm. The air was sweet, and they were young, and it was morning.

Crude and ugly though the scene was that now spread itself before Sabra and Yancey, it still was not squalid. It had vitality. You sensed that behind those bare boards people were planning and stirring mightily.

There was life in the feel of it.

The very names tacked up over the store fronts had bite and sting. Sam Pack. Mott Bixler. Strap Buckner. Ike Hawes. Clint Hopper. Jim Click.

They risked their lives for a few hundred dollars.

Here was a vast domain without written laws, without precedent, without the customs of civilization; part of a great country, yet no part of its government.

Here a horse was more valuable than a human life. A horse thief, caught, was summarily hanged to the nearest tree; the killer of a man often went free.

They risked their lives for a few hundred dollars. Here was a vast domain without written laws, without precedent, without the customs of civilization; part of a great country, yet no part of its government.

Here a horse was more valuable than a human life.

A horse thief, caught, was summarily hanged to the nearest tree; the killer of a man often went free.

… 1889, was living a conventionally civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws, millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been set back according to the frontier standards of half a century earlier.

Literally she was pioneering in a wilderness surrounded but untouched by civilization.

Yancey had reverted. Always—even in his staidest Wichita incarnation—a somewhat incredibly romantic figure, he now was remarkable even in this town of fantastic humans gathered from every corner of the brilliantly picturesque Southwest.

To Sabra, coming to the door from time to time, dish towel or ladle in hand, the clamor seemed out of all proportion to the results achieved.

She thought (privately) that two women could have finished the job in half the time with one tenth the fuss.

She still was far too feminine, tactful, and in love with her husband to say so. Cim enjoyed the whole thing enormously, as did his black satellite, bodyguard, and playmate, Isaiah. They capered, shouted, whooped, and added much to the din.

Yancey, still her passionate lover, had always treated her tenderly, as a charming little fool, and this role she had meekly—even gratefully—accepted. But now suspicion began to rear its ugly head.

These last three weeks had shown her that the male was often mistaken, as a sex, and that Yancey was almost always wrong as an individual.

But these frightening discoveries she would not yet admit even to herself. Also that he was enthralled by the dramatics of any plan he might conceive, but that he often was too impatient of its mechanics to carry it through to completion.

… back and the side doors of the dwelling looked out on a stretch of Oklahoma red clay, littered with the empty tin cans that mark any new American settlement, and especially one whose drought is relieved by the thirst-quenching coolness of tinned tomatoes and peaches.

Perhaps the canned tomato, as much as anything, made possible the settling of the vast West and Southwest.

In the midst of this clay and refuse, in a sort of shed-kennel, lived little Isaiah; rather, he slept there, like a faithful dog, for all day long he was about the house and the printing office, tireless, willing, invaluable.

But here they swept over it in a day. You know that as well as I do. Wilderness one day; town sites the next. And the cowboys and rangers having no more chance than chips in a flood. Can’t you see it?

Shanties where the horizon used to be; grocery stores on the old buffalo trails.

They went plumb locoed, I tell you. They couldn’t fight progress, but they could get revenge on the people who had taken their world away from them and cut it into little strips and dirtied it.”

Live and let live. Clean politics instead of the skulduggery all around; a new way of living and of thinking, because we’ve had a chance to see how rotten and narrow and bigoted the other way has been.

Here everything’s fresh. It’s all to do, and we can do it.

There’s never been a chance like it in the world. We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of the other pioneers to profit by.

We can make a model empire out of this Oklahoma country, with all the mistakes of the other pioneers to profit by. New England, and California, and the settlers of the Middle West—it got away from them, and they fell into the rut.

Ugly politics, ugly towns, ugly buildings, ugly minds.

” He was off again. Sabra, all impatience, stopped him.

Running a newspaper’s my way of earning a living. Of course,” he continued brightly, as an afterthought, “there have been times when running a newspaper has saved the editor the trouble of ever again having to earn a living.”

The faces of the two were blank as a sponged slate.

Suddenly—“Come on, boys. Who killed Pegler?”

In these precocious cities his artistic tastes had been developed. He knew that the eye, as well as the gullet, must have refreshment in hours of ease. A little plump man, Grat, with a round and smiling countenance, strangely unlined.

He looked like an old baby.

He now, at Yancey’s entrance, called his attention to the newly acquired treasure, expressing at the same time his admiration for it.

“

Divine worship! Why, hell, yes, Yancey

,” he replied, graciously.

There were, too, a few rude benches on which the players usually sat. The remainder must stand. The meeting was to be from eleven to twelve. As early as nine o’clock they began to arrive. They seemed to spring out of the earth.

The horizon spewed up little hurrying figures, black against the brilliant Oklahoma sky.

They came from lonely cabins, dugouts, tents. Ox carts, wagons, buggies, horsemen, mule teams. They were starving for company. It wasn’t religion they sought; it was the stimulation that comes of meeting their kind in the mass.

As early as nine o’clock they began to arrive. They seemed to spring out of the earth. The horizon spewed up little hurrying figures, black against the brilliant Oklahoma sky. They came from lonely cabins, dugouts, tents. Ox carts, wagons, buggies, horsemen, mule teams.

They were starving for company. It wasn’t religion they sought; it was the stimulation that comes of meeting their kind in the mass.

They brought picnic baskets and boxes prepared for a holiday. The cowboys were gorgeous. They wore their pink and purple shirts, their five-gallon hats, their gayest neckerchiefs, their most ornate high-heeled boots.

The rest of the congregation stood. Sabra glanced shyly about her. Men—hundreds of men. They were strangely alike, all those faces; young-old, weather-beaten, deeply seamed, and, for the most part, beardless.

The Plains had taken them early, had scorched them with her sun, parched them with her drought, buffeted them with her wind, stung them with her dust.

Sabra had grown accustomed to these faces during the past two weeks. But the women—she was not prepared for the women. Calico and sunbonnets there were in plenty;

and that she contemplated building a house of her own, planned for her own peculiar needs, if business warranted. Finally, she brought the news, gained God knows how or where, that the Katy was to be extended to Osage and perhaps beyond it.

Thus harlotry, heretofore a sordid enough slut in a wrapper and curling pins, came to Osage in silks and plumes, with a brain behind it and a promise of prosperity in its gaudy train.

Dixie Lee, shrewd saleswoman, had been quick to learn of Sunday’s meeting, and quicker still to see the advantage of this opportunity for a public advertisement of her business.

But anyway, you all know it, and that’s the main thing. Kindly favor us with the pitch, will you, Shanghai? Will the ladies kindly join in with their sweet soprano voices? Now, then, all together!”

It was a well-known song in the Territory where, on coming to this new and wild country, so many settlers with a checkered⁠—not to say plaid⁠—past had found it convenient to change their names.

The congregation took it up feelingly, almost solemnly:

“That’s all right, Pete.

Once we buy an organ we’ll have to build a church to put it in.

Stands to reason. Members of the congregation, anybody putting in less than two bits will be thrown out of the tent by me. Indians not included.”

“That’s right, too,” agreed Jesse Rickey, looking up, ink smeared, from his case. “Get the women folks to reading the paper.”

Sabra was emerging slowly from her role of charming little fool.

By degrees she was to take more and more of a hand in the assembling of the paper’s intimate weekly items, while Yancey was concerned with cosmic affairs.

The practical joke being revealed and the bona fide paper issued, this was considered a superb triumph for Yancey, and he was again borne away to receive the congratulatory toasts of his somewhat sheepish associates.

It was a man’s town. The men enjoyed it.

They rode, gambled, swore, fought, fished, hunted, drank. The antics of many of them seemed like those of little boys playing robber’s cave under the porch. The saloon was their club, the brothel their social rendezvous, the town women their sweethearts.

that greed, injustice, and dishonesty in office were everywhere; that here, in this wild and virgin land, was a chance for a Utopian plan. But he had no plan. He was sentimental about the underdog; overgallant to women; emotional, quick-tempered, impulsive, dramatic, idealistic.

And idealism does not flourish in a frontier settlement.

Yancey Cravat, with his unformed dreams—much less the roistering play boys of saloon and plain and gambling house—never had a chance against the indomitable materialism of the women.

or, on the wall, a crayon portrait or even an oil painting of some stern and bewhiskered or black-silk and fichued parent looking down in surprised disapproval upon the ructions that comprised the daily activities of this town.

From stark ugliness the house interiors were thus transformed into grotesque ugliness, but the Victorian sense of beauty was satisfied.

The fact was that these women were hungry for the feel of soft silken things; their eyes, smarting with the glare, the wind, the dust, ached to rest on that which was rich and soothing;

“

It’s just that you can’t bear not to have everybody think you’re fascinating.

”

It was Sabra who started the Philomathean Club. The other women clutched at the idea. It was part of their defense against these wilds.

After all, a town that boasted a culture club could not be altogether lost.

Sabra had had no experience with this phase of social activity. The languorous yet acid Felice Venable had always scorned to take part in any civic social life that Wichita knew.

“And as for culture! Why, the Venables and the Marcys have had it in this country for three hundred years, not to speak of England and France, where they practically started it going.

Besides, I don’t believe in women running around to club meetings. They’ll be going into politics next.

”

Sabra remembered something that Yancey once had said about Texas. Mischievously she paraphrased it in order to shock her tactless mother. “

Oklahoma is fine for men and horses, but it’s hell on women and oxen.

”

She missed the pace, the exhilarating uncertainty of the Oklahoma life. The teacup conversation of her girlhood friends seemed to lack tang and meaning. Their existence was orderly, calm, accepted. For herself and the other women of Osage there was everything still to do.

There lay a city, a county, a whole vast Territory to be swept and garnished by an army of sunbonnets.

Paradoxically enough, she was trying to implant in the red clay of Osage the very forms and institutions that now bored her in Wichita. Yet it was, perhaps, a very human trait.

Yancey had told her, tenderly, that she was a charming little fool, and she had believed it—though perhaps with subconscious reservations. It was not until he left her, and the years rolled round without him, that she developed her powers.

The sombrero had ridden gayly away. The head under the sunbonnet had held itself high in spite of hints, innuendoes, gossip.

A man like Yancey Cravat—spectacular, dramatic, impulsive—has a thousand critics, scores of bitter enemies.

the pride of the Southern Venables. Curiously enough, in spite of all that had happened to her she still had that virginal look—that chastity of lip, that clearness of the eye, that purity of brow.

Men come back to the women who look as Sabra Cravat looked, but the tempests of men’s love pass them by.

She told herself that he was dead. She told the world that he was dead. She knew, by some deep and unerring instinct, that he was alive. Donna had been so young when he left that he now was all but wiped from her memory.

Refreshments were termed elegant. Osage matrons turned from the sturdy baked beans, cole slaw, and veal loaf of an earlier day to express themselves in food terms culled from the pictures in the household magazines. They heard about fruit salads.

They built angel-food cakes whose basis was the whites of thirteen eggs, and their husbands, at breakfast, said, “What makes these scrambled eggs so yellow?”

Countrified costumes were described in terms of fashion. The wilted prairie flowers that graced weddings and parties were transformed into rare hothouse blooms by the magic touch of the Oklahoma Wigwam hand press.

“

Some day, Mrs. Cravat, you and I will look back on this and we will laugh⁠—but not very loud.

”

She was in his arms with an inarticulate cry, she was weeping, her arms were about him, the buttons of his uniform crushed her breasts. His uniform. She realized then, without surprise, that he was in the uniform of the Oklahoma Rough Riders.

It is no use saying to a man who has been gone for five years, “Where have you been?”

Besides, there was not time. Next morning he was on his way to the Philippines. It was not until he had gone that she realized her failure actually to put this question that had been haunting her for half a decade.

a story of a land so remote from the brilliant scarlet and orange of the burning Southwest country that the very sound of the words he used in describing it fell with a strange cadence on the ears of the eager listeners.

And as always when Yancey was telling the tale, he filled his hearers with a longing for the place he described; a longing that was like a nostalgia for something they had never known.

Well, folks, winters at fifty below zero. Two hours of bitter winter sunshine, and then blackness. Long splendid summer days in May and June, with twenty hours of sunshine and four hours of twilight.

“

The Territory’s rotten. But, by God, every citizen’s still got the legal right to fight for existence!

” He put her gently aside.

mud roads to the edge of the sunbaked prairie, and thereafter no road; grab what you need; fight for what you want—the men who had come to the wilderness of the Oklahoma country had expected no more than this; and this they had got.

A man’s country it seemed to be, ruled by men for men. The women allowed them to think so.

The word feminism was unknown to the Sabra Cravats, the Mrs. Wyatts, the Mrs. Hefners, the Mesdames Turket and Folsom and Sipes. Prim, good women and courageous, banded together by their goodness and by their common resolve to tame the wilderness.

“White men. They hounded them from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which they now live in squalor and misery.

It isn’t fit for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now.

Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the country that has taken their country away from them.

“

I can’t live my children’s lives for them, Sabra, honey. They’ve got to live their own.

I believe what I believe. This town is rotten—the Territory—the whole country. Rotten.”

Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas, and scrollwork.

There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with bubonic plague.

There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms on the second floor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace.

“You wait. You’ll see. She knows what she wants. She’ll get it, too.”

“Sure it isn’t you who know what you want her to want?”

But Sabra had sent her off to Miss Dignum’s on a diet of prunes and prisms that even her high-and-mighty old grandmother Felice Venable approved.

“She can’t make a newspaper man out of that kid,” he said. “Not in a million years.

Newspaper men are born, not made.

Cim, he just naturally hates news, let alone a newspaper office. He was born without a nose for news, like a fellow that’s born without an arm, or something. You can’t grow it if you haven’t got it.”

Strangely enough, they were likely to stay longer and to chat more freely if Yancey and not Sabra were there to receive them. Sabra was polite but businesslike to her own sex encountered in office hours. But Yancey made himself utterly charming.

He could no more help it than he could help breathing.

It was almost functional with him. He made the stout, commonplace, middle-aged women feel that they were royal—and seductive. He flattered them with his fine eyes; he bowed them to the door; their eyeglasses quivered.

The light buggy rocked and bounced over the rutted roads. Sol asked her nothing. They drove in silence. Presently she began to talk, disjointedly. Yet, surprisingly enough, he seemed intuitively to understand—to fill in the gaps with his own instinct and imagination.

What she said sounded absurd; he knew it for tragedy.

“… pineapple and marshmallow salad … hates that kind of thing … queer for a long time … moody … drinking … Ruby Big Elk … Cim … his face … peyote … Mescal Ceremony … Osage … white doeskin dress … Theresa Jump …”

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.”

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.

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!”

She wiped them now on a corner of her gingham apron with a gesture of utter finality. Her meager shoulders straightened. The querulous voice took on a note of defiance.

“From now on I’m goin’ to have the washin’ done out.”

In those first few frenzied weeks there was no time for scientific methods. That came later. Now, in the rush of it, they all but burrowed in the red clay with their finger nails.

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 …

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.

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?”

“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 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.

He would return, torch in hand, again set fire to the paper until the town, the county, the state were ablaze. The Osages came to him with their legal problems, and he advised them soundly and took a minimum fee.

He seemed always to sense an important happening from afar and to emerge, growling like an old lion, from his hidden jungle lair, broken, mangy, but fighting, the fine eyes still alight, the magnificent head still as menacing as that of a buffalo charging.

He had, on one occasion, come back just in time to learn of Dixie Lee’s death.

Osage was so sophisticated that it had again become simple.

The society editor of the Oklahoma Wigwam used almost no adjectives.

Twenty-five years earlier anybody who was anybody in Oklahoma had dilated on his or her Eastern connections.

Iowa, if necessary, was East.

They had been a little ashamed of the Run. Bragged about the splendors of the homes from which they had come.

Now it was considered the height of chic to be able to say that your parents had come through in a covered wagon. Grandparents were still rather rare in Oklahoma.

As for the Run of ’89⁠—it was Osage’s Mayflower.

At the huge dinner given in Sabra Cravat’s honor when she was elected Congresswoman, and from which they tried to exclude Sol Levy over Sabra’s vigorous (and triumphant) protest, the chairman of the Committee on Arrangements explained it all to Sol, patronizingly.

There were rare plants, farms, forests, lakes, tennis courts, golf links, polo fields, race tracks, airdromes, swimming pools. Whole paneled rooms had been brought from France. In the bathrooms were electric cabinets, and sunken tubs of rare marble, and shower baths glass enclosed.

These bathrooms were the size of bedrooms, and the bedrooms the size of ballrooms, and the ballroom as big as an auditorium.

There was an ice plant and cooling system that could chill the air of every room in the house, even on the hottest Oklahoma windy day.