Эптон Синклер - Oil!

“But that’s just the trouble,” said Mr. Sahm; “what is the majority?”

“We take a wote,” said Mr. Chaim Lohlker, “and we find out.”

Mr. Merriweather, the lawyer, had been consulting in whispers with his clients. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he now declared, “I am authorized by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Black to say that they have been greatly impressed by what Mr. Ross has said, and they wish to make any concession necessary to harmony. They are willing to waive the point which I raised at the beginning of this discussion, and to sign the lease as it stands.”

“But what does that mean?” demanded Mrs. Groarty. “Are they to get a royalty on a ninety-five foot lot?”

“Our offer is to sign the document as it stands, and the question of interpretation may be decided later.”

“Oho!” said Mr. Groarty. “A fine concession that—and when we’ve just heard Mr. Prentice tell us that the law reads your way!”

“We agreed to sign it,” said Mr. Hank, doing his best to make his voice sound pleasant.

“Oh, listen to who’s talking!” cried Miss Snypp. “The gentleman that was saying, less than a half an hour ago, that we should go back to our original arrangement—‘the only sensible one, share and share alike, all lots equal, same as we vote.’ Have I quoted you correct, Mr. Hank?”

“I agreed to sign this lease,” declared the ex-goldminer, stubbornly.

“And for my part,” said the trained nurse, “I said it once and I’ll say it again, never on this earth!”

Old Mrs. Ross, Bunny’s grandmother, was accustomed to protest strenuously against a boy being taken about on these business trips. It was enough to destroy all the sweetness of his nature, she declared; it would make him a hardened cynic in his childhood, all this sordidness and hatefulness of money-grabbing. But Bunny’s father answered that that was life, and there was no good fooling yourself; Bunny would have to live in the world some day, and the quicker he learned about it the better. So there the boy sat, on his perch in the window-sill, watching, and recalling his grandmother’s words.

Yes, they were a mean bunch, sure enough; Dad was right when he said you had to watch out every minute, because somebody would be trying to take something away from you. These people had simply gone crazy, with the sudden hope of getting a lot of money in a hurry. Bunny, who had always had all the money he could use, looked down with magnificent scorn upon their petty bickering. You couldn’t trust such people around the corner, he decided; there was nothing they wouldn’t do to you. That fat old woman in the yellow satin dress, with her fat red arms and her fat legs cased in silk—it wouldn’t take much more to have her clawing somebody’s face. And that hatchet-faced man with the voice like a buzz-saw—he would be capable of sticking a knife into you on a dark night!

Dad wanted his son to understand every detail of these business arrangements: the terms of the lease, the provisions of the law, the size of the different lots, the amounts of money involved. He would talk about it afterwards, and it would be a kind of examination, to see how much the boy had really understood. So Bunny listened attentively, and put this and that together, remembering the points of the lease as he had heard his father going over them with Ben Skutt and Mr. Prentice while they were driving out to the field in the latter’s car. But the boy could not keep his mind from going off to the different personalities involved, and their points of view, and the hints one got of their lives. That old fellow with the stooped shoulders and the gnarled hands—he was some kind of poor workingman, and you could see he was unhappy over this arguing; he wanted somebody he could trust, and he looked this way and that, but there was no such person in the crowd. That young woman with the nose-glasses, she was a hard one—what did she do when she wasn’t quarreling? That elderly couple that looked rich—they were very much on their dignity, but they had come to get their share, all the same, and they weren’t having any generous emotions towards the “little lots”!

The old gentleman drew his chair over beside Dad and began a whispered conversation. Bunny saw Dad shake his head, and the old gentleman drew away. Dad spoke to Skutt, and the latter rose and said: “Mr. Ross wishes me to make clear that he isn’t interested in any proposition for leasing a portion of the block. He wouldn’t put down a well without room for offset wells. If you people can’t agree, he’ll take another lease that I’ve found him.”

This struck a chill to them, and stopped the wrangling. Dad saw it, and nodded to his “lease-hound,” who went on: “Mr. Ross has an offer of a lease on the north side, which has very good prospects, because we believe the anticline runs that way. There are several acres which belong to one party, so it will be easy to agree.”—Yes, that scared the wits out of them; it was several minutes before they were quarreling again!

Where Bunny sat in the window-sill, he could see the lights of the “discovery well,” now shut off and awaiting the building of tanks; he could hear through the open window the hammering of the riveters on the tanks, and of carpenters building new derricks along the slope. His attention was wandering, when suddenly he was startled by a whispered voice, coming from the darkness, apparently right alongside him: “Hey, kid!”

Bunny peered around the edge of the window, and saw a figure, flattened against the side of the house. “Hey, kid,” said the whisper again. “Listen to me, but don’t let nobody know you’re listenin’. They mustn’t know I’m here.”

Bunny’s thought was, “A spy! Trying to find out about the lease!” So he was on the alert; he listened to a steady persistent whisper, intense and moving:

“Hey, kid! I’m Paul Watkins, and the lady what lives here is my aunt. I dassn’t let her know I’m here, see, ’cause she’ll make me go back home. I live on a ranch up in the San Elido, and I run away from home ’cause I can’t stand it, see. I got to get a job, but first I got to have somethin’ to eat, ’cause I’m near starved. And my aunt would want me to have it, ’cause we’re friends, see—only she’d want me to go back home, and I can’t stand it. So I want to get somethin’ to eat out of the kitchen, and when I earn some money, I’ll mail it to her, so I’ll just be borrowin’, see. What I want you to do is to unlock the kitchen door. I won’t take nothin’ but a piece of pie, and maybe a sandwich or somethin’, see. All you got to do is, tell my aunt to let you go into the kitchen and get a drink of water, and then turn the key in the door and go back into the house. You come out the front door if you want to, and come round and make sure it’s all like I tell you. Say, kid, be a good scout, ’cause I’m up against it, it’s sure tough not to have a meal all day, and I been hitch-hikin’ and walkin’ a lot o’ the time, and I’m done up. You come out and I’ll tell you about it, but don’t try to talk to me here, ’cause they’ll see your lips movin’, see, and they’ll know there’s somebody out here.”

Bunny thought quickly. It was a delicate ethical question—whether you had a right to unlock somebody else’s back-door, so that a possible thief could get in! But of course it wasn’t really a thief, if it was your aunt, and she would give it to you anyhow. But how could you know if the story was true? Well, you could go out, like the fellow said, and if he was a thief you could grab him. What decided Bunny was the voice, which he liked; even before he laid eyes on Paul Watkins’ face, Bunny felt the power in Paul Watkins’ character, he was attracted by something deep and stirring and powerful.