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Show I sssSksss3sssgsS3s: By Edna Fen-lbeff ssssksskssssssssksSsssks p 3" i j ri Copyright by Edna FerbBr.- WNO Service fa 3 THE STORY Yancey Cravftt, Just returned from th newly opened Indian territory, relates his experiences to a large gathering of the Ven-able Ven-able family. Yancey is married to Sabra Venable, is a criminal lawyer and editor of the Wichita Wigwam. CHAPTER I Continued 2 "Yon could feel the alkali cake on yonr tongue. Well, my head went back at X drank, and I got one look at that woman's face. Her eyes were on me on my throat, where the Adam's apple had Just given that one big gulp after the first swallow. All bloodshot the whites of her eyes, and a look in them like a dying man looks at a light. Her mouth was open, and her lips were all split with the heat and the dust and the sun, and dry and flaky a ashes. And then she ahut her lips a little and tried to rwallow nothing, and couldn't. There wasn't any spit in her mouth. I couldn't down another mouthful, t parching as I was. I'd have seen her terrible face to the last day of my life. So I righted it, and held it out to her and said, 'Here, sister, take the rest of it I'm through.' " . Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little Joke. "Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and weather-beaten? weather-beaten? And that about her hair and bootB and hands?" Cravat, standing behind , his wife's chair, looked down at her; at the fine white line that marked the parting of her thick black hair. With one forefinger fore-finger he touched her cheek, gently. "Dead sure, Jouett. I left out one thing, though." Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. "Her teeth," Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. "Broken and discolored discol-ored like those of a woman of seventy. And most of them gone at the side." Here Yancey could not resist charging charg-ing up and down, flirting his coat tails and generally ruining the fine flavor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping It) had been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild melee of the Run in the first place. Now he stood surveying these handsome hand-some futile faces, and a great Impatience Impa-tience shook him, and a flame of rage shot through him, and a tongue of malice flicked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end. "I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fe train that was standing, steam up, ready to run into the Nation. But you couldn't get on. There wasn't room for a flea. They were hanging on the cow-catcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting sit-ting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn't even do that. They went twenty miles in ninety minutes. I decided I'd use my Indian pony. I knew I'd get endur- ance, anyway, If not speed. And that's what counted In the end. "There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the border, ns near as they'd let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for miles into the Na-Hon, Na-Hon, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the sooners, too, who had sneaked In and were hiding In the scrub oaks. In the draws, wherever they could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready to shoot those of us who came In, fair and square, In the Kun. I knew the piece I wanted. A Utile creek ran through the land, and the prairie rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around It, but on that section, because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons nnd cotton-woods cotton-woods and even a grove of pecans. I had noticed It many a time, riding the range." (U'ml Riding the range! All the Vcnables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat's past.) "Ten o'clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the land-hungry land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I've seen the same look exactly on the faces of men who were ravenous for food. "Well, eleven o'clock, and they were crowding and cursing and fighting for places near the line. They shouted and snng nnd yelled nnd argued, and f the sound they made wasn't human at all, but like thousands of wild animals penned up. The sun blazed down. It was cruel. The dust hung over everything every-thing in a thick cloud, Minding you and choking you. The black dust of s the burned prairie was over evory- thing. We were like a horde of fiends with our red eyes and our cracked lips and our blackened faces. I'leven-thirly. I'leven-thirly. It was a picture straight out of hell. The roar grew louder. I'eo- pie fought for an Inch of gain on the ""-" ttti border. Just next to me was a girl who looked about eighteen she turned out to be twenty-five and a beauty she was, too on a coal-black thoroughbred." "Aha !" said Cousin Jouett Goforth. He was the kind of man who savs, "Aha." "On the other side was an old fellow fel-low with a long gray beard a plainsman, plains-man, 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 min-ute or two. He was mounted on an Indian pony like mine. As we wnited we fell to talking, the three of us, though you couldn't hear much in that uproar. The girl said she had trained her thoroughbred for the race. He was from Kentucky, and so was she. She was bound to get her hundred and sixty acres, she said. She had to have It. She didn't say why, and I didn't ask her. We were all too keyed up, anyway, to make sense. Oh, I forgot. She had on a get-up that took the attention at-tention of anyone that saw her, even in that crazy mob. The. better to cut the wind, she had shortened sail and wore a short skirt, black tights, and a skullcap." Here there was quite a bombardment bombard-ment of sound as silver spoons and knives and forks were dropped from shocked and nerveless feminine Venable Ven-able fingers. "It turned out that the three of us, there In the front line, were headed down the old freighters' trail towards the creek land. I said, 'I'll be the first in the Run to reach Little Bear.' That was the name of the creek on the section. The girl pulled her cap down tight over her ears. 'Follow me,' she laughed. 'I'll show you the way.' Then the old fellow with the wooden leg and the whiskers yelled out, 'Whoop-ee! I'll tell 'em along the Little Bear you're both a-comin.' "There we were, the girl on my left, the old plainsman on my right. Eleven forty-five. Alpng the border were the soldiers, their guns in one hand, their watches in the other. Those last five minutes seemed years long; and funny, they'd quieted till there wasn't a sound. Listening. The last minute was an eternity. Twelve o'clock. There went up a roar that drowned the crack of the soldiers' musketry as they fired in the air as the signal of noon and the start of the Run. You could see the puffs of smoke from their guns, but you couldn't hear a sound. The thousands surged over the line. It was like water going over a broken dam. We swept across the prairie in a cloud of black and red dust that covered our faces and hands In a minute, so that we looked like black demons from hell. The old man on his pony kept in one rut, the girl on her thoroughbred In the other, and I on my Whitefoot on the raised place In the middle. That first half mile was almost a neck-and-neck race. The old fellow was yelling aud waving one arm aud hanging on somehow. He was beating his pony with the flask on his flanks. Then he began to drop behind. Next thing I heard a terrible scream and a great shouting behind me. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. The old plainsman's pony hnd stumbled and fallen. His bottle smashed Into bits, his six-shooter flew in another direction, and he lay sprawling full length in the rut of the trail. The next instant he was hidden It Was Like Water Going Over a Broken Dam. In a welter of pounding hoofs and flying fly-ing dirt and cinders aud wagon wheels." A dramatic pause. The faces around the table were balloons pulled by a single string. They swung this way and that with tancey Cravat's Cra-vat's pace as he strode the room, his l'rlnce Albert coat tails billowing. This way the faces turned toward the sideboard. That way they turned toward the windows. Yancey held the little moment of silence like a Jewel in the circlet of faces. Pabra Cravat's Cra-vat's voice, hiirh and sharp with suspense, sus-pense, cut the stillness. "What happened? What happened to the old man?" Yancey's pliant hands flew up In a gesture of inevitability. "Oh, he was trampled to death in the mad mob that charged over him. Crazy. They couldn't stop for a one-legged old whiskers with a quart flask." Out of the well-bred murmnr of horror hor-ror that now arose about the Venable board there emerged the voice of Felice Venable, sharp-edged with disapproval. dis-approval. "And the girl. The girl with the black " Unable to say It. Southern. "The girl and I funny, I never did learn her name were In the lead because be-cause we had stuck to the old trail. The girl was close behind me. That thoroughbred she rode was built for speed, not distance. A race horse, blooded. I could hear him blowing. He was trained to short bursts. My Indian In-dian pony was Just getting his second wind as her horse slackened into a trot We had come nearly sixteen miles. I was well in the lead by that time, with the girl following. We had left the others behind, hundreds going this way, hundreds that, scattering for miles over the prairie. Then I saw that the prairie ahead was afire. The tall grass was blazing. Only the narrow nar-row trail down which we were galloping gal-loping was open. On either side of it was a wall of flame. Some skunk of a sooner, sneaking in ahead of the Run, had set the blaze to keep the boomers off, saving the land for himself. him-self. The dry grass burned like oiled paper. I turned around. The girl was there, her racer stumbling, breaking and going on, his head lolling now. I saw her motion with her hand. She was coming. I whipped off my hat and clapped It over Whltefoot's eyes, gave him the spurs, crouched down low and tight, shut my own eyes, and down the trail we went Into the furnace. fur-nace. Hot 1 It was h 1. I could smell the singed hair on the flanks of the mustang. My own hair was singeing. singe-ing. I could feel the flames licking my legs and back. Another hundred yards and neither the horse nor I could have come through it. But we broke out into the open, choking and blinded and half suffocated. I looked down the lane of flame. The girl hung on her horse's neck. Her skullcap was pulled down over her eyes. She was coming through game. I knew that my land the piece that I had come through hell for was not more than a mile ahead. I knew that hanging around here would probably get me a shot through the head, for the sooner that started that fire must be lurking somewhere in the high grass ready to kill anybody that tried to lay claim to his land. I began to wonder, too, if that girl wasn't headed for the same section that I was bound for. I made up my mind that, woman or no woman, this was a race, and devil take the hindmost. My poor little pony was coughing and sneezing and trembling. Her racer must have been ready to drop. I wheeled and went on. I kept thinking how, when I came to Little Bear creek, I'd bathe my little mustang's mus-tang's nose nnd face and his poor heaving flanks, and how I mustn't let him drink too much, once he got his muzzle in the water. "Just before I reached the land I was riding for I had to leave the trail and cut across the prairie. I could see a clump of elms ahead. I knew the creek was near by. But just before be-fore I got to it I came on one of those deep gullies you find in the plains country. Almost ten feet across this one was, and deep. No way around it that I could see, and no time to look for one. I put Whitefoot to the leap and, by G d, he took It, landing on the other side with hardly an Inch to spare. I heard a wild scream behind be-hind me. I turned. The girl on her spent racer had tried to make the gulch. He had actually taken it a thoroughbred and a gentleman,- that animal but he came down on his knees Just on the farther edge, rolled, aud slid down the gully side into the ditch. The girl had flung herself free. My clnim was fifty yards away. So was the girl, with her dying horse. She lay there on the prairie. As I raced toward her my own poor little mount was nearly gone by this time site scrambled to her knees. I can see her face now, black with cinders and soot and dirt, her hair all over her shoulders, her cheek bleeding where she had struck a stone in her fall, her black tights torn, her little short skirt sagging. She sort of sat up and looked around her. Then she staggered stag-gered to her feet before I reached her and stood there swaying, and pushing her hair out of her eyes like some one who'd been asleep. She pointed down the gully. The black of her face was streaked with tears. "'Shoot him!' she said. 'I can't. 1 1 is two forelegs are broken. I heard them crack. Shoot him ! F God's sake!' "So I off my horse and down to the gully's edge. There the animal lay, his eyes all whites, his poor lo.-'S doubled under liim. his flanks black and sticky with sweat and dirt, lie was done for, all rirr'it. I took out my six-shooter and aimed right between be-tween his eyes. He kicked once. s..rt of leapeii or tried to, and then lay still. I stood there a minute, to see If he had to have another. lie was so game that, some way. I didn't want to give him more than he needed. "Then something made me turn around. The girl had mounted my mustang. She was off toward the creek section. Before I had moved ten paces she had reached the very piece I had marked In my mind for my own. She leaped from the horse, ripped off her skirt, tied it to her riding whip that she still held tight In her hand, dug the whip butt into the soil of the prairie planted her flag and the land was hers by right of claim." Yancey Cravat stopped talking. There was a moment of stricken silence. Sabra Cravet staring, staring at her husband with great round eyes. Lewis Venable, limp, yellow, tremulous. Felice Venable, upright and quivering. It was she who spoke first And when she did she was every Inch the thrifty descendant of French forbears; nothing noth-ing of the southern belle about her. "Yancey Cravat do you mean that you let her have your quarter section on the creek that you had gone to the Indian territory for! That you had been gone a month fori That you had left your wife and child for I That" "Now, mamma !" You saw that all the Venable In Sabra was summoned to keep the tears from her eyes, and that thus denied they had crowded themselves into her trembling voice. "Now, mamma !" "Don't you 'now mamma' me I What of the land that you were to have hadl It was bad enough to think of your going to that wilderness, but to " She paused. Her voice took on a new and more sinister note. "I don't believe a word of it" She whirled on Yancey, her black eyes blazing. "Why did you let that trollop trol-lop in the black tights have that land?" Yancey regarded this question with considerable Judicial calm, but Felice, knowing him, might have been warned by the way his great head was lowered low-ered like that of a charging bull buffalo. "If it had been a man I could have shot him. A good many had to, to keep the land they'd run fairly for. But you can't shoot a woman." "Why not?" demanded the erstwhile southern belle, sharply. The Venables, as one man, gave a little Jump. A nervous sound, that was half gasp and half shocked titter, went round the Venable board. A startled "Felice!" was wrung from Lewis Venable. "Why, mamma!" said Sabra. , Yancey Cravat, enormously vital, felt rising within him the tide of Irritability Ir-ritability which this vitiated family always al-ways stirred in him. Something now about their shocked and staring faces, their lolling nnd graceful forms, roused in him an unreasoning rebellion. rebel-lion. He suddenly hated them. He wanted to be free of them. He wanted to be free of them of Wichita of convention of smooth custom of no, not of her. He now smiled his brilliant sweet smile which alone should have warned Felice Venable. Ven-able. But that Intrepid matriarch was not one to let a tale go unpointed. "I'm mighty pleased, for one, that It turned out as it did. Do you suppose I'd have allowed a daughter of mine a Venable to go traipsing down into the wilderness to live among drunken one-legged plainsmen, nnd toothless scrags in calico, and trollops iu tights! Never! It's over now, and a mighty good thing, too. Perhaps now, Yancey, you'll stop this ramping up and down and be content to run that newspaper of yours and conduct your law practice such as It Is with no more talk of this Indian territory. ter-ritory. A daughter of mine in boots and calico and sunbonnet, if you please, a-pioneering among savages. Keared as she was! No, indeed." , .. ,. v..w.w.ji..v.jtjtJi.-V.Jf.jfc.V-JJ..v.A...y... Yancey was strangely silent He was surveying his fine white hands critically, critical-ly, Interestedly, as though seeing them in admiration for the first time another an-other sign that should have warned the brash Felice. When he spoke It was with utter gentleness. "I'm no farmer. I'm no rancher. I didn't want a section of farm land, anyway. The town's where I belong, and I should have made for the town sites. There were towns of ten thousand thou-sand and over sprung up in a night during the Run. Wagallala Sperry Wawhuska Osnge. It's the last frontier in America, that new country. There isn't a newspaper in one of those towns or wasn't, when I left. I want to go back there and help build a state out of prairie and Indians and scrub oaks and red clay. For It'll b a state some day mark my words." "Ho hum," yawned Cousin Jouett Goforth, and rose, fumblingly. "This has all been very interesting odd, but interesting. But if you will excuse me now I shall have my little siesta. I am accustomed after dinner . , ." Lewis Venable, so long silent, now, too, reached for his cane and prepared to rise. He was not quick enough Felice Venable's hand, thin, febrile darted out and clutched his coat sleeve pressed him back so that he be came at once prisoner and Judge In nil chair at the head of the table. "Lewis Venable, you heard him ! Are you going to sit there? He says he's going back. How about youi She Sort of Sat Up and Looked Around Her. daughter?" She turned blazing black eyes on her son-in-law. "Do you mean you're going back to that Indian country? coun-try? Do you?" "I'll be back there In two weeks. And remember, It's white man's country coun-try now." Sabra stood up, the boy Cim grasped about his middle in her arms, so that he began to whimper, dangling there. Her eyes were startled, enonaous. "Yancey! Yancey, you're not leaving me again !" "Leaving you, my beauty !" He strode over to her. "Not by a long shot. This time you're going with me." "And I say she's not !" Felice Venable Ven-able rapped it out. "And neither are you, my fine fellow. You were tricked out of your land by a trollop in tights, and that ends It. You'll stay here with your wife and child." He shook his great head gently. Ills voice was dulcet "I'm going back to the Oklahoma country ; and Sabra and Cim with me." Felice whirled on her husband. "Lewis ! You can sit there and see your daughter dragged off to bo scalped among savages!" The sick man raised his fine white head. The faded blue eyes were turned on the girl. The child, sensing conflict, had buried his head in her shoulder. "Y"ou came with me, Felice, more than twenty years ago, and your mother thought you were going to the wilderness, too. You remember? She cried and made mourning for weeks." "Sahra's different. Sabra's different." dif-ferent." (TO BE CONTINUED.) |