Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Dad and Bunny made another trip to Lobos River, and not without some difficulty they conquered the “jinx” in Number Two, and brought in a very good well. There were to be two more derricks here, and more tools to be bought and delivered. That was the way in the oil business, as fast as you got any money, you put it back into new drilling—and, of course, new responsibilities. You were driven to this by the forces inherent in the game. You were racing with other people, who were always threatening to get your oil. As soon as you had one well, you had to have “offset wells” to protect it from the people on every side who would otherwise get your oil. Also, you might have trouble in marketing your oil, and would begin to think, how nice to have your own refinery, and be entirely independent. But independence had its price, for then you would have to provide enough oil to keep the refinery going, and you would want a chain of filling-stations to get rid of your products. It was a hard game for the little fellow; and no matter how big you got, there was always somebody bigger!

But Dad had no kick just now; everything was a-comin’ his way a-whoopin’. Right in the midst of his other triumphs it had occurred to him to take one of his old Antelope wells and go a little lower, and see what he found; he tried it—and lo and behold, at eight hundred feet farther down the darn thing went and blew its head off. They were in a new layer of oil-sands; and every one of these sixteen old wells, that had been on the pump for a couple of years, and were about played out, were ready to present Dad with a new fortune, at a cost of only a few thousand dollars each!

But right away came a new problem; there was no pipe-line to this field, and there ought to be one. Dad wanted some of the other operators to go in with him, and he was going up there and make a deal. Then Bunny came to him, looking very serious. “Dad, have you forgotten, it’s close to the fifteenth of November.”

“What about it, son?”

“You promised we were going quail-shooting this year.”

“By gosh, that’s so! But I’m frightfully rushed jist now, son.”

“You’re working too hard, Dad; Aunt Emma says you’re putting a strain on your kidneys, the doctor has told you so.”

“Does he recommend a quail diet?”

Bunny knew by Dad’s grin that he was going to make some concession. “Let’s take our camping things,” the boy pleaded, “and when you get through at Antelope, let’s come home by the San Elido valley.”

“The San Elido! But son, that’s fifty miles out of our way!”

“They say there’s no end of quail there, Dad.”

“Yes, but we can get quail a lot nearer home.”

“I know, Dad; but I’ve never been there, and I want to see it.”

“But what made you hit on that place?”

Bunny was embarrassed, because he knew Dad was going to think he was “queer.” Nevertheless, he persisted. “That’s where the Watkins family live.”

“Watkins family—who are they?”

“Don’t you remember that boy, Paul, that I met one night when you were talking about the lease?”

“Gosh, son! You still a-frettin’ about that boy?”

“I met Mrs. Groarty on the street yesterday, and she told me about the family; they’re in dreadful trouble, they’re going to lose their ranch to the bank because they can’t meet the interest on the mortgage, and Mrs. Groarty says she can’t think what they’ll do. You know Mrs. Groarty didn’t get any money herself—at least, she spent her bonus money for units, and she isn’t getting anything out of them, and has to live on what her husband gets as a night watchman.”

“What you want to do about it?”

“I want you to buy that mortgage, Dad; or anything, so the Watkinses can stay in their home. It’s wicked that people should be turned out like that, when they’re doing the best they can.”

“There’s plenty o’ people bein’ turned out when they don’t meet their obligations, son.”

“But when it’s not their fault, Dad?”

“It would take a lot of bookkeeping to figger jist whose fault it is; and the banks don’t keep books that way.” Then seeing the protest in Bunny’s face, “You’ll find, son there’s a lot o’ harsh things in the world, that ain’t in your power to change. You’ll jist have to make up your mind to that, sooner or later.”

“But Dad, there’s four children there, and three of them are girls, and where are they to go? Paul is away, and they haven’t any way to let him know what’s happened. Mrs. Groarty showed me a picture of them, Dad; they’re good, kind people, you can see they’ve never done anything but work hard. Honest, Dad, I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t help them. You said you’d buy me a car some day, and I’d rather you took the money and bought that mortgage. It’s less than a couple of thousand dollars, and that’s nothing to you.”

“I know, son; but then you’ll get them on your hands—”

“No, they’re not like that, they’re proud; Mrs. Groarty says they wouldn’t take money from you, any more than Paul would. But if you bought the mortgage from the bank, they couldn’t help that. Or you might buy the ranch, Dad, and rent it back to them. Paul says there’s oil on that ranch—at least his Uncle Eby had seen it on top of the ground.”

“There’s thousands of ranches jist like that in California, son. Oil on top of the ground don’t mean anything special.”

“Well, Dad, you’ve always said you wanted to try some wildcatting; and you know, that’s the only way you’ll ever get what you talk about—a whole big tract that belongs to you, with no royalties to pay, and nobody to butt in. So let’s take a chance on Paradise, and drive through there and camp out a few days and get some quail, and we’ll see what we think of it, and we’ll help those poor people, and give your kidneys a rest at the same time.”

So Dad said all right; and he went away thinking to himself: “Gosh! Funny kid!”

The San Elido valley lay on the edge of the desert, and you crossed a corner of the desert to get to it; a bare wilderness of sun-baked sand and rock, with nothing but grey, dusty desert plants. You sped along upon a fine paved road, but the land was haunted by the souls of old-time pioneers who had crossed it in covered wagons or with pack-mules, and had left their bones beside many a trail. Even now, you had to be careful when you went off into side-trails across these wastes; every now and then a car would get stuck with an empty radiator, and the people would be lucky to get out alive.

You could get water if you sunk a deep well; and so there were fruit ranches and fields of alfalfa here and there. There came long stretches where the ground was white, like salt; that was alkali, Dad said, and it made this country a regular boob-trap. The stranger from the East would come in and inspect a nice fruit ranch, and would think he was making a good bargain to get the land next door for a hundred dollars an acre; he would set out his fruit-trees and patiently water them, and they wouldn’t grow; nothing would grow but a little alfalfa, and maybe there was too much alkali for that. The would-be rancher would have to pull up the trees, and obliterate the traces of them, and set a real-estater to hunting for another boob.

Strapped to the running board of Dad’s car, on the right hand side where Bunny sat, was a big bundle wrapped in a water-proof cover; they were camping out—which meant that the mind of a boy was back amid racial memories, the perils and excitements of ten thousand years ago. Tightly clutched in Bunny’s two hands were a couple of repeating shot-guns; he held these for hours, partly because he liked the feel of them, and partly because they had to be carried in the open—if you shut them up in the compartment they would be “concealed weapons,” and that was against the law.