Эптон Синклер - Oil!

The two boys skirted the slopes, and got back to the well, on the windward side, away from the flames. There they found the crew engaged in digging a shaft, as close to the fire as they could get; Bunny understood that it was in preparation for the dynamite. They had set up a barrier against the heat, a couple of those steel troughs in which they mixed cement; upon this they had a hose playing, the water turning to steam as it hit. A man would run into the searing heat, and chop a few strokes with a pick, or throw out a few shovelfuls of dirt, and then he would flee, and another man would run in. Dave Murgins was working the hose, lying flat on the ground with some wet canvas over his head. Fortunately, they had pressure from the artesian well, for their pump was out of commission, along with everything else. Dave shouted his orders, and the hole got deeper and deeper. Paul ran in to help, and Bunny wanted to, but Dave shouted him back, and so he had to stand and watch his “wild-cat” burning up, and all he could do was to bake his face a little!

They got down below the surface of the ground, and after that it was easier; but the man who worked in that hole was risking his life—suppose the wind were to shift, even for a few seconds, and blow that mass of boiling oil over him! But the wind held strong and steady, and the men jumped into the hole and dug, and the dirt flew out in showers. Presently they were tunneling in towards the well—they would go as close as they dared, before they set the dynamite.

And suddenly Bunny thought of his father, coming with the stuff; he wouldn’t be able to drive up the road, he’d have to come round by the rocky hill-side, carrying that dangerous load in the darkness. Bunny went running, as fast as he dared, to help.

There were cars down on the road; many people had seen the glare of the fire, and come to the scene. Bunny inquired for his father; and at last there came a car with much tooting, and there was Dad, and another man whom Bunny did not know. They drove as far up as they dared—the Watkins house had been long ago swallowed by the flames. They stopped and got out, and Dad told Bunny to take the car back to a safe place, and not come near him or the other man with the dynamite; they would make their way to the well, very carefully. Bunny heard Dad telling the other man to go slow, they’d not risk their lives jist to save a few barrels of oil.

When Bunny got back to the well again, Dad and the man were already there, and the crew was setting the dynamite. They had some kind of electric battery to explode it with, and presently they were ready, and everybody stood back, and the strange man pushed down a handle, and there was a roar and a burst of flame from the shaft, and the geyser of oil that was rushing out of the well was snubbed off in an instant—just as if you stopped a garden hose by pinching it! The tower of oil dropped; it leaped and exploded a few times more, and that was the end. The river of fire was still flowing down the arroyo, and would take a long time to burn itself out; but the main part of the show was over.

And nobody was hurt—that is, nobody but Bunny, who stood by the edge of the red glare, gazing at the stump of his beautiful oil derrick, and the charred foundations of his home-made bunk-house, and all the wreckage of his hopes. If the boy had been a little younger, there would have been tears in his eyes. Dad came up to him and saw his face, and guessed the truth, and began to laugh. “What’s the matter, son? Don’t you realize that you’ve got your oil?”

Strange as it may seem, that idea came to Bunny for the first time! He stared at his father, with such a startled expression that the latter put his arm about the boy and gave him a hug. “Cheer up, son! This here is nothin’, this is a joke. You’re a millionaire ten times over.”

“Gosh!” said Bunny. “That’s really true, isn’t it!”

“True?” echoed Dad. “Why, boy, we got an ocean of oil down underneath here; and it’s all ours—not a soul can get near it but us! Are you a-frettin’ about this measly little well?”

“But Dad, we worked so hard over it!”

Dad laughed again. “Forget it, son! We’ll open it up again, or drill a new one in a jiffy. This was jist a little Christmas bonfire, to celebrate our bustin’ in among the big fellers!”

A year had passed, and you would hardly have known the town of Paradise. The road was paved, all the way up from the valley, and lined with placards big and little, oil lands for sale or lease, and shacks and tents in which the selling and leasing was done. Presently you saw derricks—one right alongside Eli’s new church, and another by that holier of holies, the First National Bank. Somebody would buy a lot and build a house and move in, and the following week they would sell the house, and the purchaser would move it away, and start an oil derrick. A great many never got any farther than the derrick—for subdividers of real estate had made the discovery that all the advertising in the world was not equal to the presence of one such structure on the tract. You counted eleven as you drove to the west side of the valley, where the Excelsior gusher had spouted forth; and from the top of the ridge, you could count fifty, belonging to a score of different companies. Going east, there were a dozen more before you reached the Ross tract, and now some one was prospecting on the far side of this tract, along the slide to Roseville, where the Mineral Springs Hotel was being built.

The little Watkins arroyo was the site of a village. You counted fourteen derricks here and there on the slopes, and big tanks down below, and tool-houses and sheds, and an office. Dad had built the new home of the Watkins family near the entrance to the place; they had sold their goats, and they now irrigated a tract and raised strawberries and garden truck and chickens and eggs for the company mess. In addition to that, they had a little stand by the road-side, and Mrs. Watkins and the girls baked pies and cakes and other goodies, which disappeared down the throats of oil-workers with incredible rapidity, assisted by “soft drinks” of vivid hues. But you couldn’t buy any “smokes” at the stand, these being contrary to the Third Revelation, and obtainable at the rival stand across the road.

The new bunk-house stood a little way back, under the shelter of some eucalyptus trees. It had six shower-baths, which were generously patronized, but to Bunny’s great sorrow you seldom saw anybody in the reading-room, despite the pretty curtains which Ruth had made; the high-brow magazines were rarely smudged by the fingers of oil-workers. Bunny tried to find out why, and Paul told him it was because the men had to work too long hours; Paul himself, as a carpenter, had an eight hour day, and found time for reading; but the oil-workers were on two shifts, twelve hours each, and they worked every day in the year, both Sundays and holidays. When you had put in that much time handling heavy tools, you wanted nothing but to get your supper and lie down and snore. This was a problem which Dad was too busy to solve just now.

Paul was boss-carpenter, having charge of all the building operations; quite a responsibility for a fellow not quite of age. So far they had completed forty shacks for the workers’ families, costing about six hundred dollars each, and renting for thirty dollars a month, with water, gas and electric light free. No one knew exactly what these latter services cost, so Bunny could not determine whether the price was fair or not, and neither could the oil-workers; but Dad said they were glad to get the houses, which was the business man’s way of determining fairness.

But there was one point upon which Bunny had interfered with energy; he didn’t see why everything about the oil industry had to be so ugly, and certainly something ought to be done about these shacks. He asked Ruth about it, and they drove to a nursery in San Elido, and without saying anything to Dad, incurred a bill for a hundred young acacia trees, each in a tin can, and two hundred climbing roses, each with its roots tied up in a gunny sack. So now at every shack there was a young tree with a stake beside it, and all along the road there were frames made of gas pipe, with a rose vine getting ready to climb. It was Ruth’s duty once a month to pull one of the laborers off his job and make him soak the trees and the vines, and next day cultivate them and dig away the grass and weeds. For this service Ruth was compelled to receive a salary of ten dollars a month, and bore the imposing title of “Superintendent of Horticultural Operations.” Bunny would inspect the growing plants, and sit in his reading room, and persuade himself that he had made a start as a social reformer, resolving the disharmonies between capital and labor, about which he was being taught in the “social ethics” class in school.