Эптон Синклер - Oil!

“I should think that trick would have been tried a lot of times,” remarked Bunny; and Dad answered, it would be tried jist long enough for the news to git round, and then some lot owner would stick a gun under Ben’s nose, and settle it that way. What had happened in his case was the usual thing, a woman had got hold of him and plucked him clean, and that was why he was doing spy work for the patriotic societies.

Bunny knew that his father didn’t owe anything to this slippery rascal, and wouldn’t mind his being exposed, provided Bunny’s name was not dragged in. It would be easy to trace the matter down, by looking up Ben’s real estate transactions in the county records; he would have given a quit-claim deed to the lot owners whom he had held up, and if these men were still in the neighborhood, no doubt they would testify, or could be made to. Bunny saw Rachel at the university next morning and told her the story, and gave her a hundred dollar bill to cover the costs of a title search. She passed it on to Joe or Ikey, and two days later Ben was confronted by half a dozen infuriated citizens, male and female, who did a good deal to shake the jury’s faith in his testimony as to secret conspiracies in the Workers’ party! The jury disagreed in the case of all but two men, the leading party directors; these got six years apiece, but the Menzies boys got off, and the party held a celebration, which was described in the newspapers as an orgy of red revolutionary raving.

Dad was not so much troubled by the news which Bunny told him, that Dan Irving was on the trail of Vernon Roscoe in the national capital. There was bound to be gossip about the lease, of course; there were always “soreheads,” trying to make trouble, but everybody would understand it was jist politics. It was the biggest “killing” of Dad’s life-time, and of Verne’s, too; they would go ahead and drill the land and out the oil, and nothing else would count. You had to be a sort of hard-shell crab in this game; it was too bad Bunny wasn’t able to grow the necessary shell. Also, it was too bad that a nice young feller like “the professor” couldn’t find anything better to do with himself than to go smelling round Verne’s out-house.

There had been a new company formed, to develop this greatest oil field in America, and Dad was part owner of the stock, and a vice-president, with another hundred thousand a year for directing the development work. But he wasn’t going to wear himself out with detail, he promised Bunny; he had trained some competent young fellers by now, and all he had to do was direct them. It was a wonderful job, and he was all wrapped up in putting it through, working harder than ever, in defiance of his doctors.

A telegram came from Verne; the leases had been signed. Bunny arranged to get a week off from his studies—such favors could be had by a grave old senior, especially when there was hope that his father might endow a chair of research in petroleum chemistry. They took a long drive to Sunnyside, a remote part of the state, grazing country, with very few settlers, and poor roads. They stayed in a crude country hotel, and inspected the new fields, riding horseback part of the time. Dad’s geologists were there, and the engineers and surveyors; they decided upon the drilling sites, and the roads, and the pipe lines, and the tank-farm—yes, even a town, and how the streets were to run, and where the moving picture theatre and the general store were to be! The necessary wires had been pulled, and the county was to start work on a paved road next week. It was all hunkydory!

Bunny ought to have been interested in all this; he ought to have been proud of the “killing,” like any loyal son. Instead of that, here he was as usual, “smelling round the out-house” to use the ex-mule-driver’s crude phrase. The fates which willed that Bunny should be always on the wrong side of his father’s work followed him here to this country hotel, and brought him into contact with an old ranchman, a feeble-faced, pathetic old fellow with skin turned to leather by sixty years of baking heat and winds. Anxious watery blue eyes he had, and a big case of papers under his arm, which he wouldn’t leave in his room for fear they would be stolen. He wanted Dad to consider a lease, and of course Dad had no time to fool with little leases, and told him so, and that settled it. But the old man found out somehow that Bunny lacked the customary hard-shell of the big oil-crabs, and succeeded in luring the young man to his room and showing his documents. It was a certified file from the department of the interior, all fixed up with impressive red seals and blue ribbons—but all the same it wasn’t complete, the old man declared; somebody had stolen the essential documents from the government files, which showed how “Mid-Central Pete” had done him out of his homestead. “It’s a feller named Vernon Roscoe, one of the big crooks in this game.”

The old man, Carberry, had set out to homestead a claim to some lands nearby; and oil had been discovered, and Mid-Central Pete had just come in and shoved him out, paying him not a cent for his twenty-two hundred dollars of improvements. They could do this—the old man had a copy of the law to show how it read, excluding “mineral lands” from homestead rights; there were thousands in this part of the state who had been caught in that trap. But Carberry had actually got a patent on his land, and so had a valid claim; but somebody had managed to doctor the government records, and now for several years he had been struggling for redress. With pathetic trustfulness he had written to his congressman, to get a lawyer in Washington to represent him, and the congressman had recommended a lawyer, and Carberry had sent him money several times with no result—and then, going to Washington, had discovered that the alleged lawyer was simply a clerk in the congressman’s office, plundering land claimants and presumably dividing the graft with his employer!

A pitiful, pitiful story—and the worst part of it, you could see it wasn’t a single case, but a system. One more way by which the rich and powerful were plundering the poor and weak! Carberry had with him a government document he had managed to get in Washington, the report of a congressional investigation of California land cases. Bunny spent an evening glancing through it—a thousand pages of wholesale fraud and stealing in close print. For example, the seizure of oil rights by the railroads! The government land grants had turned over to the railroads every other section of land along their right of way, but had specifically exempted all “mineral lands.” Wherever minerals might be discovered, the roads were bound to surrender these sections and take other sections. Under the law, the word “minerals” included petroleum; but were the railroads paying any attention to that law? The Southern Pacific alone had California oil lands to a value of more than a billion dollars; but every effort to recover these properties for the state had been blocked by cunning lawyers and purchased politicians and judges. As they drove home, Bunny tried to tell his father about this; but what could Dad do? What could he do about old Carberry, who had been robbed of his home by “Mid-Central Pete”? You could be sure that Dad wasn’t going “smelling round Verne’s out-house”!

All that fall and winter the quail had been calling from the hills of Paradise unheeded. Bunny didn’t want to go there. But now it chanced that Dad had some matters to see to, and his chauffeur had got sent to jail for turning bootlegger in his off hours. Dad was having spells of bad health, when he did not feel equal to driving; and this being a Friday, his son offered to take him.