Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, had started a campaign against the disgraceful condition of the new oil towns. With an imposing party of twenty made up of front-page oil men, Senators, Congressmen, and editors, she led the way to Bowlegs, newest and crudest of the new oil strikes.
Cities like Osage were suave enough in a surface way. But what could a state do when oil was forever surging up in unexpected places, bringing the days of the Run back again? At each newly discovered pool there followed the rush and scramble. Another Bret Harte town sprang up on the prairie; fields oozed slimy black; oil rigs clanked; false-front wooden shacks lined a one-street village. Dance halls. Brothels. Gunmen. Brawls. Heat. Flies. Dirt. Crime. The clank of machinery. The roar of traffic boiling over a road never meant for more than a plodding wagon. Nitroglycerin cars bearing their deadly freight. Overalls, corduroys, blue prints, engines. The human scum of each new oil town was like the scum of the Run, but harder, crueler, more wolfish and degraded.
The imposing party, in high-powered motor cars, bumped over the terrible roads, creating a red dust barrage.
“It is all due to our rotten Oklahoma state politics,” Sabra explained to the great Senator from Pennsylvania who sat at her right and the great editor from New York who sat at her left in the big luxurious car. “Our laws are laughed at. The Capitol is rotten with graft. Anything goes. Oklahoma is still a Territory in everything but title. This town of Bowlegs. It’s a throwback to the frontier days of forty years ago—and worse. It’s like the old Cimarron. People who have lived in Osage all their lives don’t know what goes on out here. They don’t care. It’s more oil, more millions. That’s all. Any one of you men, well known as you are, could come out here, put on overalls, and be as lost as though you had vanished in the wilderness.”
The Pennsylvania Senator laughed a plump laugh and with the elbow nearest Sabra made a little movement that would have amounted to a nudge—in anyone but a Senator from Pennsylvania. “What they need out here is a woman Governor—eh, Lippmann!” to the great editor.
Sabra said nothing.
On the drive out from Osage they stopped for lunch in an older oil town hotel dining room—a surprisingly good lunch, the Senators and editors were glad to find, with a tender steak, and little green onions, and near beer, and cheese, and coffee served in great thick cups, hot and strong and refreshing. The waitress was deft and friendly: a tall angular woman with something frank and engaging about the two circles of vermilion on the parchment of her withered cheeks.
“How are you, Nettie?” Sabra said to her.
“I’m grand, Mis’ Cravat. How’s all your folks?”
The Senator from Ohio winked at Sabra. “You’re a politician, all right.”
Arrived at Bowlegs, Sabra showed them everything, pitilessly. The dreadful town lay in the hot June sun, a scarred thing, flies buzzing over it, the oil drooling down its face, a slimy stream. A one-street wooden shanty town, like the towns of the old Territory days, but more sordid. A red-cheeked young Harvard engineer was their official guide: an engaging boy in bone-rimmed glasses and a very blue shirt that made his pink cheeks pinker. That is what I wanted my Cim to be, Sabra thought with a great wrench at her heart. I mustn’t think of that now.
The drilling of the oil. The workmen’s shanties. The trial of a dance-hall girl in the one-room pine shack that served as courtroom. The charge, nonpayment of rent. The little room, stifling, stinking, was already crowded. Men and women filled the doorway, lounged in the windows. The judge was a yellow-faced fellow with a cud of tobacco in his cheek, and a Sears-Roebuck catalogue and a single law book on a shelf as his library. It was a trial by jury. The jurors were nine in number, their faces a rogues’ gallery. There had happened to be nine men loafing near by. It might have been less or more. Bowlegs did not consider these fine legal points. They wore overalls and shirts. The defendant was a tiny rat-faced girl in a soiled green dress that parodied the fashions, a pathetic green poke bonnet, down-at-heel shoes, and a great run in her stocking. Her friends were there—a dozen or more dance-hall girls in striped overalls and jockey caps or knee-length gingham dresses with sashes. Their ages ranged from sixteen to nineteen, perhaps. It was incredible that life, in those few years, could have etched that look on their faces.
The girls were charming, hospitable. They made way for the imposing visitors. “Come on in,” they said. “How-do!”—like friendly children. The mid-afternoon sun was pitiless on their sick eyes, their bad skin, their unhealthy hair. Clustered behind the rude bench on which the jury sat, the girls, from time to time, leaned a sociable elbow on a juryman’s shoulder, occasionally enlivening the judicial proceedings by a spirited comment uttered in defense of their sister, and spoken in the near-by ear or aloud, for the benefit of the close-packed crowd.
“She never done no such thing!”
“He’s a damn liar, an’ I can prove it.”
No one, least of all the tobacco-chewing judge, appeared to find these girlish informalities at all unusual in the legal conduct of the case.
In the corner of the little room was a kind of pen made of wooden slats, like a sizable chicken coop, and in it, on the floor, lay a man.
“What’s he there for?” Sabra asked one of the girls. “What is that?”
“That’s Bill. He’s in jail. He shot a man last night, and he’s up for carrying concealed weapons. It ain’t allowed.”
“I’m going to talk to him,” said Sabra. And crossed the room, through the crowd. The jurors had just filed out. They repaired to a draw at the side of the road to make their finding. Two or three of the dance-hall girls, squatted on the floor, were talking to Bill through the bars. They asked Sabra her name, and she told them, and they gave her their own. Toots. Peewee. Bee.
The face of the boy on the floor was battered and blood-caked. There was a festering sore on his left hand, and the hand and arm were swollen and angry looking.
“You were carrying a concealed weapon?” Sabra asked, squatting there with the girls. A Senator or two and an editor were just behind her.
An injured look softened Bill’s battered features. He pouted like a child. “No, ma’am. I run the dance hall, see? And I was standing in the middle of the floor, working, and I had the gun right in my hand. Anybody could see. I wasn’t carrying no concealed weapon.”
The jury filed back. Not guilty. The rat-faced girl’s shyster lawyer said something in her ear. She spoke in a dreadful raucous voice, simpering.
“I sure thank you, gents.”
The dance-hall girls cheered feebly.
Out of that fetid air into the late afternoon blaze. “The dance halls open about nine,” Sabra said. “We’ll wait for that. In the meantime I’ll show you their rooms. Their rooms——” she looked about for the fresh-cheeked Harvard boy. “Why, where——”
“There’s some kind of excitement,” said the New York editor. “People have been running and shouting. Over there in that field we visited a while ago. Here comes our young friend now. Perhaps he’ll tell us.”
The Harvard boy’s color was higher still. He was breathing fast. He had been running. His eyes shone behind the bone-rimmed spectacles.
“Well, folks, we’ll never have a narrower squeak than that.”
“What?”
“They put fifty quarts in the Gypsy pool but before she got down the oil came up——”
“Quarts of what?” interrupted an editorial voice.
“Oh—excuse me—quarts of nitroglycerin.”
“My God!”
“It’s in a can, you know. A thing like a can. It never had a chance to explode down there. It just shot up with the gas and oil. If it had hit the ground everything for miles around would have been shot to hell and all of us killed. But he caught it. They say he just ran back like an outfielder and gauged it with his eye while it was up in the air, and ran to where it would fall, and caught it in his two arms, like a baby, right on his chest. It didn’t explode. But he’s dying. Chest all caved in. They’ve sent for the ambulance.”
“Who? Who’s he?”
“I don’t know his real name. He’s an old bum that’s been around the field, doing odd jobs and drinking. They say he used to be quite a fellow in Oklahoma in his day. Picturesque pioneer or something. Some call him old Yance and I’ve heard others call him Sim or Simeon or——”
Sabra began to run across the road.
“Mrs. Cravat! You mustn’t—where are you going?”
She ran on, across the oil-soaked field and the dirt, in her little buckled high-heeled slippers. She did not even know that she was running. The crowd was dense around some central object. They formed a wall—roustabouts, drillers, tool dressers, shooters, pumpers. They were gazing down at something on the ground.
“Let me by! Let me by!” They fell back before this white-faced woman with the white hair.
He lay on the ground, a queer, crumpled, broken figure. She flung herself on the oil-soaked earth beside him and lifted the magnificent head gently, so that it lay cushioned by her arm. A little purplish bubble rose to his lips, and she wiped it away with her fine white handkerchief, and another rose to take its place.
“Yancey! Yancey!”
He opened his eyes—those ocean-gray eyes with the long curling lashes like a beautiful girl’s. She had thought of them often and often, in an agony of pain. Glazed now, unseeing.
Then, dying, they cleared. His lips moved. He knew her. Even then, dying, he must speak in measured verse.
“ ‘Wife and mother—you stainless woman—hide me—hide me in your love!’ ”
She had never heard a line of it. She did not know that this was Peer Gynt, humbled before Solveig. The once magnetic eyes glazed, stared; were eyes no longer.
She closed them, gently. She forgave him everything. Quite simply, all unknowing, she murmured through her tears the very words of Solveig.
“Sleep, my boy, my dearest boy.”
THE END