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Show THE MIDVA LE .JOtTRNAL Thursd ay, Septem ber 10, 1931 Synthetic Sunlight . •••• • .' Copyrlcht by Edna Ferber. CHAPTER XU-Cont inued -17:Mrs. Wyatt, plainer, more horsefaced 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 aff'ected Mrs. Wyatt queel"ly. She became nervous, full of spl<>:>n, and the eastern doctors spoke to her o! high blood pressure. Sabra frankly envied these lu<'ky ones. A letter from the adder-tongue d Fellce Venable to her daughter was characteristi c of that awesome old matriarch. l'labt·a still dreaded to open her mother's letters. They always contained a stint;. "All this talk of oil and millions and every one in Oklahoma rolling in it. I'll be bound that you and that husband of yours bavE<n't so much ns enough to fill a lamp. Trust Yancey Cravat to get hold of the wrong piece of land. Well, at least you can't be dlooppointed. 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 Dlgnum's on the Hudson, seemed Indeed to be a granddaught er after Felice Venable's own heart. She was, In coloring, contour, manner, and outlook, so unlike the other Oklahoma girls-Czarin a McKee, Gazelle Slaughter, Jewel Riggs, Maurine Turket-as to make that tortured, wincl-deviled ilay of her birth on the Oklahoma prairie almost nineteen years age seem impossible. Even during her homecomIngs in the summer vacations she had about her an air of cool di~dain 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-glari ng pinks, ceris~. yellow, r~d. vivid orange, magenta. They made up nai\·ely with white powder and big daubs of carmine 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: !allow, 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 Okla· boma home-town lads, adopting toward them a serpent-of-th e-Nile attitude very baffling to these frank and openraced prairie products. Her school days finished, and she a llnlshed product of those days, she oow looked about her coolly, calculatIngly. Her mother she regarded with a kind of affectionate amusement. "Wnat a rotten deal you've had, Sabra dear," she would drawl. "Rih'ally, I don't see how you've stood it all these years." Sobra would come to her own detense, goaded by something strangely hostile In herself toward this remote, l)lsdainful offspring. "Stood what?" "Oh-you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional . I1111111111///11/1/flll!/1111 ,1111 I' I "What a ~etten Deal You've Had, Sabra, Dear." Marcy and head-held-high in spite of a bum of a husband." "Donna Cravat, !f 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 piere. You know it.'' "Your father Is one of the greatest figurPs the Southwest has ever producer]." "~lm. Well, he's picturesque enough, I snppo»e. flut I wish he hadn't workPcl f:O hard at it. And Cim! 'fhpre'R li ~>other! A great help to . . . ' ...... ·•··· ··,' ·,. ' .. . .: . ' •..loj• By Edn a Ferb er . 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 Is, you·re the outstanding success of your class." "Darling, I adore you when ~·ou 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 ahout 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. I! 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. Del'cribing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sunflowers at one of Cassandra Sipes' parties." Goaded by curiosity ancl a kind of wonder at this unnatural cr(>ature, l'abra must put her question: "What do you want to do, then 'i" "I want to marry the rlch(>>:t man In Oklahoma, and build a palace that I'll hardly ever live in, and tra ,·el 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-le t me see. · From your requirement s 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 fiftyone, and you being nineteen, there's plenty of time I! 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 f'ravat, 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 str~ak in her that Sabra had never understood and that corresponded to the practical joker in Yancey. 'l'hot, too, had al.ways bewildered her. Absorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper the conversation faded to a dim and almost unimportant memory. Sabra was sufficiently !<hrewd and level headed to take Sol Levy's sound advice. ''You settle do\vn to running your paper, Sabra, and you won't need any oil wells. You can haYe the bestpaying paper and the most powerful In the Southwest. Bic:ger than Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. Because Osage is going to be bigger and richer than any of them. You mark wnat 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, So!, how can tlJUt be?" "You'll see. There wh<'re the gambling tpnt 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 Xew 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 hacl 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 overshadowe d his return. He entered as he had left, with no word of explanation, so bizarre as to rause everything else to fade into the background. He came riding, as al wars. but It was a sorry enough uag tl1at he bestrode this time; and his whtte sombrero was grimed and batterecl, the Prince Albert coat was spotted, the linen frayed. the whole figure covered with the heavy red dust of the tram- \ WNU service. ' pled 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, 1t 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 Jo,·ian laughtet· as he strode into the Wigwam office where she sat at her neat orderly desk ju~t 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 sombrero to the desk top, I1e swept her Into his arms, he set her down. "Sabra! Here's news for you. Jesse! Heb, Jesse! \Vhere's that rumsoaked son of a printer's devil? Jesse! Come In here! G-d, I've been laugh· lng so that I almost rolled off my horse." He was striding up and down as of old, his si1abby coat tails spreading with the vigor of his movements, the beautiful hands gesticulating , the fine ~yes-bloodshot now-still flashIng with the fire that would burn until it consumed him. "Oil, my children! ~!ore oil than anybody ever thought there was in any one spot in the world. And where! Where! On the Osage Indian reservation. It came In an hour ago, like the ocean. It makes every other field look like the Rahara. There never was such a joke! It's cosmicit's terrible. How the gods must be roaring. 'Laughter unquenchabl e among the bleRsed gods!' " "Yancey dear, we're used to oil out here. It's an old story. Come now. Come home and have a hot bath and clean clothes." In her minrl's eye she saw those fine white linen shirts of his all neatly stacked In the drawer as he had left them. For answer he reached out with one great arm and swept a pile of exchanges, copy paper, galley proofs, and clippings off the desk. while with the other hand he seizerl the typewriter bv . its steel bar and plumped It to the\ floor with a force that wrung a protesting whine and zing from its startled Insides. lfe had always scorned to use a typewriter. The black swathes of his herculean pencil bit deeper into the paper's surface than any typewriter'R metal tel"th. '·Hot bath! !lot h-1, honey! Do you realize what this means? Do you understand that two thousand Osage Indians. squatting in their rags In front of their miserable shanties, are now the richest nation in the world? In the world, I tell you. They were given that land-the barest, meanest desert land In the whole of the Oklahoma country. And the government of these United States said, 'There, you red dogs, take that and live on it. And it you can't live on it, then die on it.' God A'mlghty, I could die mys~lf with laughing. Millions and millions of dollars. They're spattering, I tell you, all over the Osage ri'Servation. There's no stopping that flow. Every buck and squaw on the Osage reservation is a millionaire. They own that land, and, by G-d, I'm going to see that no one takes it away from them!" "Oh, Yancey, be ~areful." He was driving his pencil across the paper. "Send this out A. P. They tried to keep it dark when the flow came. but I'll show them. Sabra, k!ll your editorial lead, whatever it was. I'll write it. Make this your news lead, too. Listen. "fhe gaudiest star· spangled cosmic joke that ever was played on a double-dealing government burst Into fireworks today when, with a roar that could be heard for miles around, thousands of barrels of oil shot Into the air on the miserable desert land known as the Osage Indian reservation and occupied by tnose duped and wretched-! " Experiments in London by the National Physical laboratory llave shown that artificial sunlight, shinIng through imitation windows to further approximate the effect of real daylight, wi11 speed up the production of night workers. The eyes are more comfortable under conditions as nearly approaching naturai daylight as possible and better vision produces better work. In the experiments coloring of the light to approximate the sun's rays was found to be or paramount importance. - "We can't use that, I tell you." "Why not?" "This isn't the Cimarron. It's the state of Oklahoma. That's treasonthat's anarchy-" "It's the truth. It's history. I can prove it. They'll be down on those Osages like a pack of wolves. At least I'll let th~m know they're expected. I'll run the story, by G-d, as I want it run, and th~>y can shoot me for it." "And I say you won't. You can't come In here l!ke that. I'm editor of this paper." He turned quietly and looked at her, the great head jutting out, the eyes like steel. "'Vho is?" ''I am." Without a word he grasped her wrist and Jed her out, across the old porch, down the steps and into the street. 'fhere, on Pawhuska avenue, in the full glare of noonday, he point· ed to the weather-wor n sign that he himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, had hung there almost twenty years before. She had had it painted and repainted. She had had it repaired. She had never replaced it with another. THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM Yancey Cravat Prop. and Editor. "When you take that down, Sabra, honey, and paint your own name up in my place, you'll be the editor of this newspaper. Until you d(} that, I erantly. Many of them were rich now, counting the.tr riches not in thousands but in millions. They had owned a piece of Oklahoma dirt, or a piece of a piece of dirt-and suddenly, through no act of theirs, l,t .was worth Its weight In diamonds. Pat Leary, the pugnacious little Irish lawyer who had once been a section hand in thP. early days of the building of the Santa Fe road, was now so rich throu.-:h liis vast oil holdings that his Indian wifl\ Crook Nose, was considered a quaint and picturesque note by the wives ot eastern operators who came down on oil husiuess. After the first shrill excitement of it Sabra Cravat relinquished the hope of making sudden millions as other luckier ones had done. Her land had yielded no oil; she owned no oil leases. It was a curious fact that Sabra still queened it in Osage and had actually become a power in the state. The MercolizedWax Keeps Skin Young Get an ounce and t11e &I direoted. Fine :oartiole1 of t.aed akin peel off until all defects aueh as pimple• . liver apots, tan and fret".klea diuppea.r. Skin ia then 10ft and velvety. Your fa.ee loob years younae.r. Meroollzed Wax brinp out tbe hidden beauty of your s1do. Te "mov• wrinkles UAe one ounce Powdered S&%0llte diaaolved. in one--ba.U oint witch hazel. At d.ru& atore.. Teachers, ~nroll tor all public ochool vos!- tions. Intermountain Teachers' A~sn .• 411412 Atlas Bldg., Salt Lake City, Utah. World Has Changed In the year 1!!05 I had the privi- Lege as a young officer of being ln\lted to lunch with Sir William Har<'Ourt. In the course of the conversation I asked the question, "What will happen then?" ")ly dear Winston," replied the old Victorian statesman, "the experience of a long life has convinced me that nothing ever happens." Since that moment it seems to me nothing has ceased happening.Winston Churchill In "The World Crisis." am.n As they stood there, she in her neat blue serge, fte in his crumpled and shahby attire, she knew that she never would do it. . • • . • .. Young Cim ('arne home from Colora- do for the summ~r vacation, was caught up in the oil flood, and never went back. With his geological know!· edge, slight as it was, and his familIarity with the region, he was shuttled back and forth from one end of the state to the other. Curiously enough Cim, like his father, was more an onlooker than a participant In this fan· tastic spectacle. The quality of business acumen se~med to be lacking in both these men ; or perhaps a certain mad fastidiousne ss in them kept them from taking part in the feverish fight. A hint of oil in this corner, a trace of oll in that, and the thousands were upon it, pushing, scrambling, nose to the ground, down on all-fours like pigs in a trough. A hundred times Yancey could have hought an oll lease share for a song. Head lolling on his breast, lids lowered over the lightning eyes, he shrugged Indifferent shoulders. "I don't want the filthy muck," he said. "It stinks. Let the Indians have it. It's theirs. And the 'Big Boys' from the East-let them sweat and scheme for it. They know where Oklahoma Is now, all right." His comings and goings had ceased to cause Sabra the keen agony of earlier days. She knew now that their existence, so long as Yancey lived, would always he made up of just such unexplained absences and melodramatic homecomings. She had made up her mind to accept the Inevitable. She dld not mind that Yancey spent much time on the oil fields. He knew the men he called the "Big Boys" from the East. and they often sought him out for his company, which they found amusing, and for a certain regional wisdom that they considered valuable. He despised them and spent most of his time with the pumpers and roustabouts, drillers and tool dressers and !~hooters-a hard·drinkln g, hard-talk· lng, hard-fighting crew. In his white sombrero and his outdated Prince Albert and his high-heeled boots he was known as a picturesque character. Years of heavy drinking were taking their toll of the magnificent body and mind. The long locks showed streaks of gray. Local townsmen who once had feared and admired him began to patronize him or to Iough at him, to!- How to train BABY'S BO WL S "When You Take That Do n, Sabra, Honey, You'll Be the Editor of This Newspaper." Babies, bottle-fed or breast-fed, with any tendency to be constipated, would thrive if they received daily half a teaspoonful of this old family doctor's prescription for the bowels. That is one Sl.Jre way to train tiny bowels to healthy regularity. To avoid the fretfulness, vomiting, crying, failure to gain, and other ills of constipated babtes. Dr. Caldw~n·:. Syrup Pepsin is good for any baby. For this, you haoe the word of a /amous doctor. Fortyseven yearrs o practice taught him just what babies need to keep their little bowels active, regular; keep little bodies _plump and healthy. For Dr. Caldwell spectalized in the treatment of women and little ones. He attended over 3500 births without loss of one mother or baby. paper was read, respected, and feared throughout the Southwest. It was said with pride by Osage's civic mind· ed that no oll was rich enough to stain the pages of the Oklahoma Wigwam. '£hough few realized it, and though Sabra herself never admitted it, it was Yancey who had made this true. He neglected it for years together, but he always turned up In a crisis, whether political, economic, or social, to hurl his barbed editorials at the heads of the offenders, to sting with the poison Da. W. B. CALDWELL'S of his ridicule. He championed the Indians, he denounced the oil kings, he laughed at the money grabbers, he exposed the land thieves. He was A /)octor~ Fami{JI Laxative afraid of nothing. He would absent himself for six months. The Wigwam would run along smoothly, placidly. Storm Was Thorouab He would return, torch In hand, and Lightning struck a building in San again set fire to the paper until the Dimas, Calit., during an electrical town, the county, the state were storm, fired the bulldlng and set oft ablaze. 'fhe Osages came to him with the automatic fire alarm. Then, havtheir legal problems, and he advised ing started. the fire and summoned them soundly and took a minimum fee. the fire department, the storm un· He seemed always to sense an Im- loosed a downpour of rain which exportant happening from afar and to tinguished the blaze before the fireemerge, growling like an old lion, from men could arrive. his hidden jungle lair, broken, mangy, but fighting, the fine eyes still alight, Early to Bed the magnificent head still as menacing '!'he age of discretion is when you as that of a huffalo charging. He had, get over the idea that sophisticatio n on one occasion, come back just in consists in losing sleep. time to learn of Dlxie Lee's death. Dixie had struck oil and had reA Clear Ca1e tired, a rich woman. She had closed "They sent the blacksmith to jall." her house and gone to Oklahoma City, "\Vhat for?" and there she bought a house in a de''Forgery." cent neighborhoo d and adopted a baby girl. She had gone to Kansas City for it, and though she had engaged a capable and somewhat bewildered nurse on that trip, Dixie herself carried the child home !n her arms, its head close against the expensive satin bosom. No one knew what she had used to pull the wool over the eyes of the ***************************************************** Kansas City authorities. She never ('ould have done it In Oklahoma. She had had the child almost a year wilen the women of Osage got wind of It. Tracing time and its changes back re<'ede, its tidal pull had become so They say she took it out herself in its to the very bpg·innin:; of things, Sir powerful that this mountain was toru perambulato r daily, and P.e rhaps some James Jeans of Cnmbriilge gives, in a to pieces and threw off small frag- one recognized her on the street, recently published work, a won(}erful ments of itself, much as the crest of a though she lool;ed like any plump and picture of the birth of our solar sys- wave throws off spray. Th(>Re small respectable matron now, In her rit'b, 11 11 tem as the result of a collision so1nt> fragments have been circulating quiet dress and her pince nez, a little around their parent sun ever since. gray showing In the black abundant 2,000,000,000 years ae;o. You CAN be young at sixty. Or old at Thl'y are the planetR, great and small, hair. "A second star, wandering hlindly twenty. It's all a matter of taking care Sabra C'ravat heard of it. Mrs. through spare, hap[Jf'ned to come with· or '' hich our earth is one.'' of your health. Wyatt. ~Irs. Doc Nisbett. llfrs. Pack. • in hailing distance of the sun. .rust as If you feel "run-down", and have no 1'hey took the child away from her Owl in Squirrel Neat the sun and moon raise tides on the "pep", take Fellows' Syrup. You will be by Jaw. Six months later Dixie Lee earth. so this second star mu~t have The long-eared owl is of medium amazed at the way it restores faggedraised tides on the surface of the size with extreme!~· long ear tufts. rlied; the sentimPntal said of a broken out nerves and tired bodies. sun ... a huge tidal wave must have They live throughout temperate North heart. It was YanCP.Y Cravat wl.o Fellows' Syrup, with its valuable traveled over the surface of the sun, America and bt·eed south to Viq:~inia, ' wrote her obituary: health-buildin g properties, has been pre"Dixie Lee, for years one of the ultimately formin~t a mountain o! pro- Arkan!'aS, northern Texas and south· scribed by physicians in 58 countries of digious height, which would rise even ern California, spend the winter in most prominent citir.ens of Osage and the world. It is obtainable at your drughigher and higher as the cause of the most of their range and south to cen- a pioneer In the early days of Oklagist's. Get a bottle today. You won't rlisturhance rame nearer and nearer. tral :\1e:xico. The nest, says Nature homa, ha\ ing made the Run In '89, one regret it. And, be fore the seconrl star began to ~Iagu?;ine, may be that of some large of the few women who had the couror a squirrel, carelessly repaired; age to entpr that hi~toric and terrible -- - - - - - - - itbirdIs u~uul!y in a 1h•nse growth of ever- race. is dead. "She was murdered by the good Poodle's Human Trait gn•en trees and placed from ten to women of Osage. . . ." "A poodle dog,'· said lli Hu. the sage twenty feet up. 'fhey are very beneThe story was a nine-days' wonder, of Chinatown, "has traits that are ficial, for their food consists lar-Jely even In that melodramati c state. very human. He barks at strangers of meadow mice and otlt~r small mamSabra read it, white faced. The c!rcu· beouuse he Is sure his friends nre pow· mals, insects, spiders, crayfish, Smhll lation of the Wigwam took another erful enough to protect him."-Wash · snakes; frogs, snaUs and ~.rthworms bound upward. W. N. U., Salt Lake City, No. 37-.1931. ington Star. are known to be taken as well. (1'0 BE CONTINCJilD. ) SYRUP PEPSIN Interest ing Picture of Birth of Solar System How old is old ? FELLOWS' SYRUP • |