Giant by Edna Ferber Read Free Book Online

I wonder how soon we’re going to be deposed.
    Somehow the first formality of the earlier hours was gone. Helter-skelter they had piled into the capacious cars and now there mingled affably in one big interior the prize fighter and Vashti and Pinky, Leslie, the South American and the Congressman. The car doors were slammed with the rich unctuous sound of heavy costly mechanism.
    “Do you object,” inquired the ex-Presidente as the cortege drove off, “that I ask so many questions? After all, I am here to learn. We are Good Neighbors, are we not?”
    “Oh, please!” Leslie said quickly. “Please do.”
    “Uh—Conqui? However it is spelled. Is that the name of a man like this Jettrink?”
    “That’s two names, you know. His first name is Jett. His last name is Rink. Conky. Well, they just call it that, it’s a sort of nickname for the big new hotel. The Conquistador. Jett Rink built that too.”
    “Mm! The Spanish is very popular here, I can see. And this Jett Rink whose name I hear so often. He is a great figure in the United States of America?”
    “Say, that’s a good one,” said Mott Snyth. Then, at a nudge from his wife, “Pardon me.” A little cloud of ominous quiet settled down upon the occupants of the car.
    Through this Leslie Benedict spoke coolly. “This Jett Rink about whom you hear so much—he’s a spectacular figure here in Texas.”
    “They say he was weaned on loco weed when he was a baby,” Vashti babbled. “He’s always trying to do something bigger or costsmore money than anybody else. They say this Hermoso airport’s bigger than any in the whole United States. La Guardia, even. And this hotel we’re going to, why, ever since he saw the Shamrock in Houston he said he was going to put up a hotel bigger and fancier and costing more than even it did. And that’s the way he always does. Ants,” she concluded, smiling her cherubic smile at the gravely attentive South American diplomat, “in his pants.”
    Congressman Bale Clinch spoke cautiously. “You’d be put to it, trying to explain Jett Rink outside of Texas.”
    Whirling along the broad roads, past the huddled clusters of barbecue shacks and sun-baked little dwellings like boxes strewn on the prairie. Oleanders grew weed-wild by the roadside, the green leaves and pink blossoms uniformly grey with dust.
    Little Pinky Snyth, grinning impishly, addressed himself to the visitors. He spoke in the Texas patois, perhaps perversely perhaps because instinct told him that this was the proper sauce with which to serve up a story about Jett Rink.
    “Well, say, maybe this’ll give you some notion of Jett.”
    Congressman Bale Clinch cleared his throat, obviously in warning.
    “Pinky, you ain’t aiming to tell about that little trouble with the veteran, are you, I wouldn’t if I was you, it’s liable to give a wrong notion of Texas.”
    “No. No this is nothing serious, this is about that fellow up to Dalhart,” he addressed himself to the Ambassador, and to Joe Glotch, impartially. “That’s way up in Dallam County in the Panhandle. This fella, name of Mody—yes, Mody, that was it—he had a little barbecue shack by the road up on Route 87. He got a knack of fixing barbecued ribs they say it had a different taste from anybody else’s and nobody can get the hang of the flavor even tasting it and nobody’s wangled the receipt off of him, he won’t give. So Jett Rink he hears about these ribs and one night when he’s good and stinking he gets in his plane with a couple of other umbrys, he always travels with a bunch of bodyguards, they fly up to Dalhart it’s as good as a thousand miles or nearly and the place is closed the fella’s gone to bed. Jett and the others theyrout him out they make him fix them a mess of barbecued ribs and they eat it and Jett says it’s larrupin’ and what has he got in the barbecue sauce makes it taste different. This Mody says it’s his receipt it’s his own original mix and he don’t give it