Эптон Синклер - Oil!

So Bunny learned more and more to keep his traitor doubts to himself; those theories of the “class struggle” that he learned from Paul and his fellows, and the rumors of a strike that he read in the oil workers’ journal. Instead, he would take Dad fishing, and they would pretend they were just as happy as of old in the bosom of their mother Nature—though the sad truth was that Dad was too heavy and too stiff in the joints to get much fun out of scrambling over the rocks.

Bunny spent his Easter holidays at Paradise, and it happened that Vernon Roscoe paid a visit to the tract. He had been there before, but only while Bunny was away; their meetings so far had been brief ones at the office, amid the press of business. Bunny had got a general impression of a big face and a big body and a big voice. Dad said that “Verne” had also a big heart; but Bunny’s only evidence was that Mr. Roscoe had patted him on the back, and called him “Jim Junior,” with great gusto.

Now he came; and it happened that a desert wind came with him, and made a funny combination. As a rule the heat of the day was endurable at Paradise, and the nights were always cold and refreshing; but three or four times in a year the place would be struck by a wind off the desert, and it would be like a hot hand reaching out and holding you by the throat. “A hundred and fourteen in the shade and there ain’t any shade,” was the way the oil workers put it, as they went on working in the sun, drinking barley water by the quart. The worst of it was, the hot wind blew all night, and the houses, which had heated up like furnaces, stayed that way for three or four days.

The “oil magnate,” as the newspapers called Vernon Roscoe, left Angel City after dinner, and reached the tract just before midnight. Dad and Bunny were expecting him, sitting out on the veranda, and he saw them, and his voice started before the engine of his car stopped. “Hello, Jim! Hello, Jim Junior! By Jees, what’s this you’re doing to me! Christ amighty, man, I never felt such heat. Is it going to be like this tomorrow? By Jees, I think I’ll turn my tail and run!”

He was out of the car, and coming up the path, his face as round as the moon that shone down on his half-bald head. He had taken off his coat and shirt, and was in a pink silk undershirt; no perspiration, of course, because you were always dry when you drove in this desert heat—you might stop at a filling station and stand under a hose and soak yourself, and the wind would dry everything but your sitting down place in a couple of minutes.

“Hello, Verne,” said Dad; and Bunny said, “How are you, Mr. Roscoe?” He was careful to get a grip on the magnate’s paw before the magnate got a grip on his—for he would make the bones crunch with his mighty grasp. He had been a cattlepuncher back in Oklahoma, and it was said that he had grabbed a Mexican horse-thief with his two hands and bent him backwards until he broke. He still had that strength, in spite of his rolls of fat.

“I’m hot as hell,” he said, answering Bunny’s polite inquiry. “Say, Jim, do you think I’d better stay?”

“You’ve got to stay,” said Dad. “I’m not going ahead with development on that Bandy tract till you’ve looked the field over. We’ll sit you on ice.”

“Has my beer come?” Hey, there, Kuno”—this to the Jap, who was grinning in the door-way. “Bring me some of my beer! Bring me a bucketful—a tubful. By Jees, I brought some in my car—I wouldn’t take a chance. Did you hear what happened to Pete O’Reilly? Damn fool tried to come across the border with a crate of whiskey in his car; told me it cost him a hundred dollars a quart before he got through! Christ amighty, Verne, how do you stand this?”

“Well, for one thing, I drink lemonade instead of beer.” This was a reform which Bunny had imposed upon his father, and now Dad was very proud of it.

“No pop for me!” said Verne. “By Jees, I’ll have my suds in the bath-tub. Any women about, Verne?” And Mr. Roscoe kicked off his shoes and his trousers, and sat himself under an electric fan. “The damn thing blows hot air!” he said; and then he looked at Bunny. “Well, here’s our boy Bolsheviki! Where’s the red flag!”

Now Bunny was expecting to reach the impressive age of twenty-one in a month or two, and he had heard all possible variations on this “Bolsheviki” joke. But he was host, and had to smile. “I see you read the papers.”

“Say, kiddo, you made the front page all right! It did me a lot of good in some negotiations. Come down to the office and I’ll introduce you to a Soviet commissar in disguise; they’re trying to sell me a concession in the Urals. ‘Where the hell is that?’ I says; but it seems there is really such a place, unless they have forged some atlases. The guy started to pull this brotherhood of man stuff on me, and I says, ‘Sure, I’m great on that dope,’ I says. ‘The junior member of our firm is in the business! Look at this, by Jees,’ and I showed him the papers, and we’ve been ‘Tovarish’ ever since!”

Well, Tovarish Roscoe went to bed, in Nile green silk pajamas on a cot out in the court alongside the fountain; and at five in the morning they woke him, so that he might go out with Dad and the geologist and the engineer, to O. K. the plans for the Bandy tract. He came back with the sunrise in his eyes, puffing and snorting, and yelling for beer instead of breakfast, and how would he get some more when this gave out? They persuaded him that he must not try to cross the desert until the sent went down, so he and Dad and Bunny retired into the living-room, and shut all the doors and windows, to stick it out as best they could.

Well, the sun got to work on the roof and walls of that house, and every ten minutes the great man would get up and look at the thermometer and emit another string of muleskinner’s technicalities. By the middle of the morning he was frantic; declaring that surely there must be some way to cool a house. By Jees, let’s get a hose and soak this room! But Bunny, who had studied physics, said that would only shift them from the climate of the desert to the climate of the Congo river. Mr. Roscoe suggested turning the hose on the veranda and the roof; and Bunny called the gardener boy, and pretty soon there were half a dozen sprinklers going, a regular rain-storm over the doors and windows of the living-room.

But that was not enough, so Dad went to the phone and called up the foreman of the sheet metal shop, and he said sure thing, he could design a refrigerator; and Dad said to drop everything else and build one, and he’d pay the men a dollar apiece extra if they finished it inside an hour. So here came four fellows with a truck and a big metal box with double walls all the way from the floor to the ceiling; and they cut a hole in the floor for a vent-pipe, and brought in about half a ton of cracked ice from the ice-plant, and a couple of sacks of salt, and in a few minutes the thermometer showed a zero wind blowing out from the bottom of that box. The great man moved over close to it, and in a little while he began to sigh with content, and in half an hour he gave a loud “Kerchoo!” and they all roared with laughter.

After that he was sleepy, with all the beer he had drunk, and had a nap on the lounge, while Dad went out to see to the drilling. And then the party had lunch, and Mr. Roscoe had another nap, after which he felt fine, and did a lot of talking, and Bunny learned some more about the world in which he lived. “Jim,” said the “magnate,” “I want two hundred thousand dollars of your money.”

“Where’s your gun?” said Dad, amiably.

“You’ll get it back many times over. It’s a little fund we’re raising, me and Pete O’Reilly and Fred Orpan. We can’t talk about it except to a few.”