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THE FRANKLIN PRESS TWi";r)AV, MARCH ?fl, 1331. PAGE TWO (t dmuv FOREWORD Only the more' fantastic and' tmprobabable events .contained in this book are true. There is no at tempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma. All the characters, the towns, and many of the hap penings contained herein are imag inary. But through reading the scant, available records, document:,, and histories (including the Okla homa State Historical .library . col lection) and through many talks .with men and women .who have lived in Oklahoma since tin- day of the Opening, something of tin spirit, the color, the movement, the life of that incredible common wealth has, I -hope, been caught. Certainly the Kim, the Sunday service in the gambling tent,- the death of Isaiah and of Arila Ked Feather, the catching, of the 'can of nitroglycerin, many of the shooting affrays, most descriptive passages, all of the oil phase, and the Osage Indian material complete these are based on actual happenings. In many cases, material entirely true was discarded as unfit for use because it was so melodrama tic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fiction. There is no- city of Osage, Okla. It is a composite, of perhaps, five existent Oklahoma cities. The Kid is not meant to be the notorious Billy the Kid of an earlier day. There was no Yancey Cravat he is a blending of a number of dashing Oklahoma figures of a past and present day. There is no Sabra Cravat, but she exists in a score of bright-eyed, white-haired, intensely interesting women of sixty-five or thereabouts who told me many strange things as we talked and rocked on an Okla homa front porch (tree-shaded . now). . Anything can haw happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has. F.UNA IT.RBKR. CHAPTER I All the Venables sal at Sunday dinner." All those handsome inbred Venable faces were turned, en thralled,' toward . Yancey Cravat, who was talking. The 'combined effect was almost blinding, as of incandescence; but Yancey Cravat was not bedazled. A sun sur rounded by lesser planets, he gave out a radiance so powerful as to dim the luminous circle about him. The Venables, dining, strangely resembled one of those fertile and dramatic family .groups portrayed lolling unconventionally at meat in 1 C r& TZk Ro v e r-iu A Sale Edna Ferber 11! nstvatioi! S lrwiiv llyovs the less spiritual of those liiblical canvases that glow richly down at one from the great gallery walls of Europe. Though their garb was sober enough, being characteristic of the time--1W9--and the place Kansas it yet conveyed an impres sion as of purple and scarlet robes enveloping, these gracile shoulders. You would not have been surprised to see, moving silently about this board, Nubian blacks in loincloths, bearing aloft golden vessels piled with exotic fruits or steaming with strange', pasties in which night ingales' tongues figured prominent ly. Blacks, as a matter of fact, did move about the Venable table, but these, too. -, wore the conventional garb of the servitor. This branch of the Venable fam ily tree had been transplanted from Mississippi to Kansas more than two decades before, but the mid west had failed to set her bour geois stamp upon them. Straitened though it was, there still obtained in that household, by some gene alogical miracle, 'many of those charming ways, remotely oriental, that were of the -South whence they had sprung. Unwilling em igres, war ruined, Lewis Venable and his wife Felice had brought their dear customs with thein into exile, as well as the superb ma hogany oval at which liny now. sat, and the war-salvaged silver which gave elegance-to the Wichita, Kan sas, board. . As the family sat at its noonday meal, it was plain that while two decades of living in the Middle West had done little to quicken the speech or hasten the move ments of Lewis Venable and his wife Felice (they still "you-alled ;" they declared to goodness; the eighteenth letter of the alphabet would forever be ah to them) it had 'made a noticeable difference in the younger generation. Up and down the long table they ranged, suns and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law;- grandchildren; remoter kin such as visiting nieces and nephew's and cousins, offshoots of this far-flung family. As the more northern-bred members o( the company exclaimed at the tare they now were hearing you noted that their vowels 'were shorter, their diction more clipped, the turn of the head, the lift of the hand less leisurely. In all those faces there was a resemblance, one to the other. Perhaps the listening look which all of them now wore served to accentuate this. , Yancey Cravat was talking. Ik had been talking for the better part of an hour. This very morn ing he had returned from the Okla- Acx At Sandere hotr.a country the newly opened Indian tirriloiy where he had made the Kun that maiki l tin- settling nt this v.iM tract i ny.'i land l.nowii colloipiiidly .is the .Nation Now, as lit lallud, the faces ihe others had the rapt look of those who listen to a saga. The men leaned forward, tin ir hands clasped rather loosely be tween their knees or on the cloth before them, their plates pushed away, their chairs shoved back. Now and then the sudden white ridge of a hard-set muscle, showed along the line of a masculine jaw. Their eyi s were those of men win follow a game in which it hey would fain take. part. Sometimes a wo man's hand reached out possesivc lv, reinindiugly, and was laid on the arm or the hand of the man seated beside her. "1 am here," tlu hand's pressure said. "Your plaif is with me. IWt listen to him like that. ''Don't believe him. 1 am your wife. I am safety. I am security. 1 am comfort. 1 am habit. I am convention. Don't listen like that.- Don't look like that." But the man would shake off the hand, no roughly, but with absent minded resentment. Of all that circlet of faces, linked by the enchantment of the tale now being unfolded before them, there. stood out lambent as a flame the face of Sabra Cravat as she sat there at table, her child Cim in her lap. Though she, like her mother, Felice Venable, was defi nitely of the olive-skinned type, her face seemed luminously white as she listened to the amazing, in credible, and . slightly ridiculous story now being unfolded by her husband. It was plain, too, that in her, as in her mother, the strain 1 of the pioneering French Marcys, her ancestors, .was strong. Her abundant hair was as black, and her eyes ; and the strong brows arched with a swooping curve like the twin scimitars that hung above the fireplace in the company room. There- was ' something more New Ijigland than southern in the di rectness of her glance, the quick turn of. her head, the briskness of her speech and manner. Twenty one now, married at sixteen, moth er of a four-year-old boy, and still in love with her picturesque giant of a husband, there was about Sabra Cravat a bloom, a glow, sometimes seen at that exquisite and transitory time in a woman's life when her chemical, emotional, and physical make-up attains its highest point and fuses. Lewis , Venable, in his armchair at the head ot the table, was spellbound. Curiously enough, ev en the bov Cim had listened, or seemed to listen, as he sat in his mother's lap. Perhaps it was the curiously musical quality of the story-teller's voice that lulled him. Sabra Venable's disgruntled suitors had said when she married Yancey Cravat, a stranger, mysterious, out of Texas and the Cimarron, that, it was his voice that had bewitched her. They, were in a measure right for though Yancey Cravat was ver bose, frequently even windy, ami though much that he said was dry enough in actual content, he had those priceless gifts of the born orator, a vibrant and flexible voice, great sweetness and charm of man ner, a 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 tutor, a' dash of the fanatic No room seemed big enough for his gigantic frame; no chair but MM Franklin, - North' Carolina- dwindled beneath the breadth of his shoulders, lie seemed actually to loom morethan his six feet two. I lis blaik loiks he wore overlotig, vo lli.it thiy cut led a little about Mr. neek in the manner of Booth, His cheeks and forehead were, in places, deeply pitted, as with the pox. Women, perversely enough, found that attractive. His mouth, full and sensual, had still an expression of great sweet ness. His eyelashes were long and curling, like a beautiful girl's, and when he raised his heavy head to look at you, bene'ath the long black locks and the dark lashes you saw with something of. bewilderment that his eyis were a deep and un fathomable ocean gray. Now, in the course of his story, and under the excitement of it, he left the table and sprang to his feet, striding about and talking as he strode. His step was amaz ingly light and graceful for a man of his powerful frame. His cos tuiue was a Prince Albert of fine black broadcloth whose skirts swooped and spread with the vigor of his' movements; a pleated white shirt, soft and of exquisite ma terial; a black string tie; trousers tucked into the gay boot-tops; and, always, a white felt hat, broad brimmed and rolling. On occasion Yancey Cravat he simply blubbered Shakespeare, the Old Testament, the Odyssey, tha . I Iliad. His speech was- spat tered with bits of Latin, and with occasional' Spanish phrases, relic of his Texas days. He flattered you with his fine eyes; he bewitched you with ihs voice;. he mesmerized you with his hands. He drank a quart of whisky a day; was almost never drunk, but on rare occasions when the liquor fumes bested him he would invariably select a hap less victim and, whipping out the pair of molher-o'-pearl-handled six- shooters he always wore at his belt, would force him tb dance by shooting at his feet a pleasing fancv bioimht with him from Texas and the Cimarron. After ward, sobered, hi was always filled with shame. Wine, he quoted sad ly, is a mocker, strong drink is raging. Yancey Cravat could have been (in fact was, though most of America never knew it) the great est criminal lawyer of his day. It was said that he hypnotized jury with his eyes and his hands and his voice. His law practice yielded him nothing, or less than that, for being sentimental and melodramatic he usually found him self out of pocket following his brilliant and successful defense of some Dodge City dance-hall girl or ft t U.M U. T 0) roistering cowboy whose six-shooter had been pointed the wrong way, His past, .before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this; slander whispered that. Rumor, ro mantic, unsavory, fantastic, shift ing 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 some where, ami a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known as "Cimarron" Cravat, hence his son's name, corrputcd to Cim. They say his real name is Cimarron Seven, of the Choctaw Indian family of Sevens; he was raised in a tepee; a wickiup had been his bedroom, a blanket his robe. It was known he had been one of the early boomers who fol lowed the banner of the pictur esque and splendidly mad David Payne in the first wild dash of that adventurer into Indian terri tory. He had dwelt, others whis pered, in that sinister strip, thirty- four miles wide and almost two hundred miles long, called No-Man's-Land as early as 1854, and, later,, known as the Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning wild or un ruly. Here, in this strange unown ed empire without laws and with out a government, a paradise for horse thieves, murderers, despera does it was rumored he had spent at least a year (and for good reason). They said the evidences of his Indian blood ' were plain; look at his skin, his hair, manner of walking. And why did he pro test in his newspaper against the government's treatment of those dirty, thieving, lazy, good-for-noth ing wards of a beneficent country ! As for his newspaper its very name was a scandal: The Wichita Wigwam. And just below this: All ihe News.' Any Scandal Not Libelous. Published Once a Week If Convenient. Wichita, professing scorn of the Wigwam, read it. Wichita perused hij maiden edi torial entitled, "Shall the Blue Blood of the Decayed South Pots on the Red Blood of the Great Middle West?" and saw him, two months later, carry off in triumph as his bride Sabra Venable, daugh ter of that same Decay. Sabra Venable, at sixteen, might have had her pick of the red-blooded lads of Kansas, all the way from Salina to Winfield. Not to men tion more legitimate suitors of blue-blooded stock up from the South, such as Dabney Venable himself, Sabra's cousin, who re sembled at once Lafayette and oh) Lewis, even to the premature sil ver of his hair, the length of the fine, dolichocephalic, slightly de cadent head, and the black stock at sight of which Wichita gasped. When, from among all these el- igibles. Sabra had chosen the ro mantic but mysterious Cravat, Wi chita mothers of marriageable daughters felt themselves revenged of the Venable airs. Strangely enough, the marriageable daugh ters seemed more resentful than ever, and there was a noticeable falling off in the number of young ladies who had been wont to drop round at the Wigwam office with notices of this or that meeting or social event to be inserted in the columns of the paper. During the course of the bounti ful meal with which the Venable table was spread Yancey Cravat had eaten almost nothing. Here was an audience to his liking. Here wa a tale " to this taste. His story, wild, unbelievable, yet true, was of the opening of the Oklahoma country ; of a wilder ri n M n ness made populous in an hour; of cities numbering thousands literally sprung up overnight, where the day before had been only .prairie, coyotes, rattlesnakes, red clay, scrub oak, and an oc casional nester hidden in the se curity of a weedy draw. Coat tails swishing, eyes flash ing, arms waving, voice soaring. "Folks, there's never been any thing like it since Creation. Crea tion! II 1! That took six days, this was done m one. It was history made in an hour and 1 helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast ; commonwealth of ours" (he talked like that) "traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. 'Lands of- lost gods, and godlike men!' They came like, a procession a crazy procession all (thc way to the border, covering the ground as . fast as they could, by any means at hand scrambling' over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. "They came from Texas, and Ar kansas, and Colorado and Mis souri. They came on foot, by fi d, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and milk-back. Tn prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I met up with one old homesteader by the roadside a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg who toll! me he had started weeks and weeks before and had made the I . 60-Tooth McCormick Deer ing Peg Harrow How About a New Peg Harrow? Have you looked 'over your peg-tooth har row lately? Better get a line on its condition ahead of the rush season. You want each sec tion to be rigid and solid no shimmying, no trailing of the teeth. Every tooth has its own job to do ; be sure it does it. If you find the sections are worn and wob bly, and the teeth are badly dulled, better come in and let us fix you up with a new harrow or as many new sections as you need. We have a full stock of McCormick-Deering Peg-Tooth Harrows in the styles you like. Each section is put together to stay. No danger of a McCormick-Deering twisting out of shape. Well-braced, solidly built, No teeth-trailing possible. We are ready at all times to discuss time saving, money-making machines and methods. Macon County Supply Co. Farm Implements and General Hardware c trip as best he count, on i i by rail and boat and wagon, just as kind-hearted people along ' the way would pick, him up. I wonder f he ever got his piece of land t. ........ nA in that savage iusm i".m devil." lie passed a moment, perhaps in retrospect, pi i haps cunningly to whet the appetites of his listeners. He wrung a breathless, "Oh, Yancey, go on ! Go 'on!" from Sabra. . "Well, the border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July ecle- . bration on Judgment day, The militia was lined up at the boun dary. No one was allowed to set fool on the new land until noon next day, at the f iring of the guns. Two millions acres of land were to be given away for the grabbing. Noon was the time. They all knew it by heart. April 22, at noon. It takes generations of people hundreds of ytars to settle a new land. This was go ing to be made livable territory over night was made like a mir acle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves and the Fishes and the parting of the Red sea were nothing mere tricks." Pausing only a . moment at the sideboard to toss off three fingers of Spanish brandy, like burning liquid amber, Yancey patted his lips with his fine linen handker chief. "I've tasted nothing like that in a month, I can I ell you. Raw corn whisky fit to tear your throat out. And as for the water! Red mud. There wasn't a drink Continued on next page Ems ervice 1
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