I
All that fall and winter the quail had been calling from the hills of Paradise unheeded. Bunny didn’t want to go there. But now it chanced that Dad had some matters to see to, and his chauffeur had got sent to jail for turning bootlegger in his off hours. Dad was having spells of bad health, when he did not feel equal to driving; and this being a Friday, his son offered to take him.
The Ross Junior tract had nothing left of Bunny but the name. There was a strange woman as housekeeper in the ranch-house, and the Rascum cabin had been moved, and the bougainvillea vine replaced by a derrick. Every one of the fellows who had met with Paul was gone, and there were no more intellectual discussions. Paradise was now a place where men worked hard at getting out oil, and kept their mouths closed. There were hundreds of men Bunny had never seen before, and these had brought a new atmosphere. They patronized the bootleggers and the pool-rooms, and places for secret gambling and drinking. “Orange-pickers” was the contemptuous name the real oil workers applied to this new element, and their lack of familiarity with their jobs was a cause of endless trouble; they would slip from greasy derricks, or get crushed by the heavy pipe, and the company had had to build an addition to the hospital. But of course that was cheaper than paying union wages to skilled men!
A deplorable thing happened to Bunny; his reading of a book was interrupted by a visit from the wife of Jick Duggan, one of the men in the county jail. The woman insisted on seeing him, and then insisted on weeping all over the place, and telling him harrowing tales about her husband and the other fellows. She begged him to go and see for himself, and he was weak enough to yield—you can see how imprudent it was, on the part of a young oil prince who was trying to grow his hard-shell, so that he could be a help to his old father, and enjoy life with a darling of the world. Bunny knew that he was doing wrong, and showed his guilt by not telling his father where he was going that rainy Saturday afternoon.
They let him into the jail without objection; the men who kept the place being used to it, and unable to foresee the impression it would make upon a young idealist. The ancient dungeon had been contrived by an architect with a special genius for driving his fellow beings mad. The “tanks,” instead of having doors with keys, like other jail cells, were designed as revolving turrets, and whenever you wanted to put a prisoner in or take one out, you revolved the turret until an opening in one set of bars corresponded with an opening in another set. This revolving was done by means of a hand-winch, and involved a frightful grinding and shrieking of rusty iron. There were three such tanks, one on top of the other, and the revolving of any one inflicted the uproar on everybody. In the course of the jail’s forty years of history, scores of men had gone mad from having to listen to these sounds at all hours of the day and night.
Have you ever had the experience of seeing some person you know and love shut behind bars like a wild beast? It was something that hit Bunny in the pit of his stomach, and made him weak and faint. Here were seven fellows, all but two of them young as himself, crowding together like so many friendly and affectionate deer, nuzzling through the bars and expecting lumps of sugar or bits of bread. Their pitiful clamor of welcome, the grateful light on their faces—just for a visit, a few minutes of a rich young man’s time!
These were all ranch-fellows, outdoor men, that had worked in the sun and rain all their lives, and grown big and bronzed and sturdy; but now they were bleached white or yellow, dirty and unshaven, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. Jick Duggan was coughing, just as his wife had said, and there was not one healthy-looking man in the bunch. If Bunny had been able to say to himself that these men had done some vile deed, and this was their atonement, he might have justified it, even while he questioned what good it would do; but they were there because they had dared to dream of justice for their fellows, and to talk about it, in defiance of the “open shop” crowd of big business men!
Bunny had sent them some books—they were allowed to have books that didn’t look radical to very ignorant jailers, and provided the books came direct from the publishers, so that they would not have to be searched too carefully for concealed objects such as saws and dope. Now they wanted to tell him how much these books had helped, and to ask for more. And what did Bunny know about their prospects of getting a trial? Had he seen Paul, and what did Paul think? And what about the union—was there anything left of it? They were not allowed any sort of “radical” paper, so they were six or seven months behind the news of their own world.