Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Bertie condescended to drive out to the field, and see the new derricks that were going up. They went for a walk, and whom should they meet but Mrs. Groarty, getting out of her elderly Ford car in front of her home. Bunny was naively glad to see her, and insisted upon introducing Bertie, who displayed her iciest manner, and, as they went on, scolded Bunny because of his horrid vulgar taste; he might pick up acquaintance with every sort of riff-raff if he chose, but certainly he need not make his sister shake hands with them! Bunny could not understand—he never did succeed in understanding, all his life long, how people could fail to be interested in other people.

He told Bertie about Paul, and what a wonderful fellow he was, but Bertie said just what Dad had said, that Paul was “crazy.” More than that, she became angry, she thought that Paul was a “horrid fellow,” she was glad Bunny hadn’t been able to find him again. That was an attitude which Bertie was to show to Paul all through Paul’s life; she showed it at the very first instant, and poor Bunny was utterly bewildered. But in truth, it was hardly reasonable to expect that Bertie, who was going to school in order to learn to admire money—to find out by intuition exactly how much money everybody had, and to rate them accordingly—should be moved to admiration by a man who insisted that you had no right to money unless you had earned it!

Bertie was following her nature, and Bunny followed his. The anger of his sister had the effect of setting Paul upon a lonely eminence in Bunny’s imagination; a strange, half-legendary figure, the only person who had ever had a chance to get some of Dad’s money, and had refused it! Every now and then Bunny would stop by and sit on a rabbit-hutch, and ask Mrs. Groarty for news about her nephew. One time the stout lady showed him a badly scrawled note from Ruth Watkins—Paul’s sister, whom he loved—saying that the family had had no word; also that they were having a hard time keeping alive, they were having to kill a goat now and then—and Mrs. Groarty said that was literally eating up their capital. Later on there was another letter from Ruth, saying that Paul had written to her; he was up north, and still on the move, so no one could get hold of him; he sent a five-dollar bill in a registered letter, and specified that it was to go for food, and not for missions. It wasn’t easy to save money when you were only getting a boy’s pay, Paul said; and again Bunny was moved to secret awe. He went off and did a strange secret thing—he took a five-dollar bill, and folded it carefully in a sheet of paper, and sealed it up in a plain envelope, and addressed it to “Miss Ruth Watkins, Paradise, California,” and dropped it into a mail-box.

Mrs. Groarty was always glad to see Bunny, and Bunny, alas, knew why—she wanted to use him for an oil-well! He would politely pay her with a certain amount of information. He asked Dad about Sliper and Wilkins, and Dad said they were “four-flushers”; Bunny passed this information on, but the “medium lots” went ahead and signed up with this pair—and very soon wished they hadn’t. For Sliper and Wilkins proceeded to sell the lease to a syndicate, and so there was a tent on the lot next to the Groarty home, and free lunches being served to crowds of people gathered up in the streets of Beach City by a “ballyhoo” man. “Bonanza Syndicate No. 1,” it was called; and they hustled up a derrick, and duly “spudded in,” and drilled a hundred feet or so; and Mrs. Groarty was in heaven, and spent her thousand dollars of bonus money for a hundred units of another syndicate, the “Co-operative No. 3.” The crowds trampled her lawn, but she didn’t care—the company would move her home when they drilled the second well, and she was going into a neighborhood that was “much sweller”—so she told Bunny.

But then, on his next visit, he saw trouble in the stout lady’s features. The drilling had stopped; the papers said the crew was “fishing,” but the men said they were “fishing for their pay.” The selling of “units” slowed down, the “ballyhoo” stopped, and then the syndicate was sold to what was called a “holding company.” The drilling was not resumed, however, and poor Mrs. Groarty tried pitifully to get Bunny to find out from his father what was happening to them. But Dad didn’t know, and nobody knew—until six months or so later, long after Dad had brought in his Ross-Bankside No. 1 with triumphant success. Then the newspapers appeared with scare headlines to the effect that the grand jury was about to indict D. Buckett Kyber and his associates of the Bonanza Syndicate for fraudulent sales of oil stocks. Dad remarked to Bunny that this was probably a “shake-down”; some of the officials, and maybe some of the newspaper men, desired to be “seen” by Mr. Kyber. Presumably they were “seen,” for nothing more was heard of the prosecution. Meantime, the owners of the lease could not get anyone to continue the drilling, for the block next to them had brought in a two hundred barrel well, which was practically nothing; the newspapers now said that the south slope looked decidedly “edgy.”

So Bunny, in the midst of his father’s glory, would pass down the street and encounter poor Mr. Dumpery, coming home from the trolley with dragging steps, after having driven some thousands of shingle-nails into a roof; or Mr. Sahm, the plasterer, tending his little garden, with its rows of corn and beans that were irrigated with a hose. Bunny would see Mrs. Groarty, feeding her chickens and cleaning out her rabbit-hutches—but never again did he see the fancy evening-gown of yellow satin! He would go inside, and sit down and chat, in order not to seem “stuck-up”; and there was the stairway that led to nowhere, and the copy of “The Ladies’ Guide: A Practical Handbook of Gentility,” still resting on the centre-table, its blue silk now finger-soiled, and its gold letters tarnished. Bunny’s eyes took in these things, and he realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where many are called and few are chosen.

Scattered here and there over the hill were derricks, and the drilling crews were racing to be the first to tap the precious treasure. By day you saw white puffs from the steam-engines, and by night you saw lights gleaming on the derricks, and day and night you heard the sound of heavy machinery turning, turning—“ump-um—ump-um—ump-um—ump-um.” The newspapers reported the results, and a hundred thousand speculators and would-be speculators read the reports, and got into their cars and rode out to the field where the syndicates had their tents, or thronged the board-rooms in town, where prices were chalked up on blackboards, and “units” were sold to people who would not know an oil-derrick from a “chute the chutes.”

Who do you think stood first in the newspaper reports? You would need to make but one guess—Ross-Bankside No. 1. Dad was right there, day and night, knowing the men who were working for him, watching them, encouraging them, scolding them if need be—and so Dad had not had a single accident, he had not lost a day or night. The well was down to thirty-two hundred feet, and in the first stratum of oil-sand.

They were using an eight-inch bit, and for some time they had been taking a core. Dad was strenuous about core-drilling; he insisted that you must know every inch of the hole, and he would tell stories of men who had drilled through paying oil-sands and never known it. So the drill brought up a cylinder of rock, exactly like the core you would take out of an apple; and Bunny learned to tell shale from sandstone, and conglomerate from either. He learned to measure the tilt of the strata, and what that told the geologist about the shape of things down below, and the probable direction of the anticline. When there were traces of oil, there had to be chemical analyses, and he learned to interpret these reports. Every oil-pool in the world was different—each one a riddle, with colossal prizes for the men who could guess it!