Snake Oil

THE TURQUOISE -- Anya Sefon --Houghton Mitt in ($2.50).

"Get ye out o' my sight for aye!" screamed crusty Sir James Cameron to his son, whom the old laird suspected (unjustly) of poisoning his cousin. So young Andrew Cameron packed his cowhide trunk and packed himself off to the U.S. "The twain of us," he said, with "rueful humor," to the Spanish girl he married in Santa Fe, "[are] cut off from our pasts for aye, and we maunna greet about it, but gae staunchly forward into the future taegether-r."

Out of their "Gaelic and Spanish . . . capacity for swift, passionate love" came the daughter whom they christened Santa Fe. Sante Fe Cameron is the slice of pineapple in this fruity, old-fashioned cocktail mixed by Anya Seton (daughter of Wild-Life Popularizer Ernest Thompson Seton), whose last novel, Dragonwyck, was one of 1944's bestsellers.

When Author Seton kills off Father & Mother Cameron in a few swift pages of cholera and hemorrhages, kindly Mexicans adopt Fey. Later, handsome, rascally Terry Dillon finds Fey a helpful partner in selling Dr. Dillon's Extra Special Elixir, a snake oil whose chief ingredient is river water. Said the Indians: "The Great Spirit meant you for a better destiny."

Terry married Fey, took her to Manhattan. When Fey became pregnant, Terry walked out on her. So Fey danced and sang in low cabarets, read Walt Whitman, and worked in the Quaker hospital where her daughter Lucy was born. "I would not bother with thee, Fey," said the Quaker woman doctor, "did I not know thee has glimpses of the Light within." But naughty Fey glimpsed nothing but Railroad Tycoon Simeon Tower, whom she married after divorcing Terry.

Soon "the silver basket in the vestibule of the Tower house contained the cards of Sylvester Bull, Templeton Snelling, and Ward McAllister, besides a hundred others." Mrs. Astor herself, dressed as Queen Elizabeth, attended the gorgeous Tower costume ball. Also present at the ball was rascally Terry, who had gate-crashed, disguised as a Mexican caballero. Simeon shot Terry dead. Cried little Lucy: "Why did papa hurt my real papa?"

After a dramatic trial scene, Author Seton packs Fey off to New Mexico again, where she devotes the rest of her life to "patient day-by-day self-sacrifice."

Step up, folks, step right up! Get your genu-wine snake oil, only $2.50 a copy.

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