“Who? Me?” asked Carson inelegantly. “Oh, I’m sorry, but I can’t go in with you. I’m going right on through to the coast. Oklahoma isn’t healthy for me for a couple of months. All I’ll charge you for the information is ten per cent. royalty, payable when your first well flows. My worst enemy couldn’t call me mean.”
“Got something to show you, Carson,” said the man with eye-glasses. “Come on back into the sleeper and I’ll unstrap the suitcase.”
The three rose, tossed away their cigar butts, and went up the aisle. Bob waited till they had gone into the next car, intending then to go back to Betty. His intentions were frustrated by a lanky individual who dropped into the seat beside him.
“Smoke?” he said in friendly fashion, offering Bob a cigarette. “No? Well, that’s right. I didn’t smoke at your age, either. Fact is, I was most twenty-three before I knew how tobacco tasted. Slick-looking posters went up the aisle just now, what?”
Bob admitted that there was something peculiar about them.
“Sharpers, if I ever saw any,” said the lanky one. “We’re overrun with ’em. They come out from the East, and because they can dress and know how to sling language——Say,” he suddenly became serious, “you’d be surprised the way the girls fall for ’em. My girl thinks if a man’s clothes are all right he must be a Wall Street magnate, and the rest of the girls are just like her. They’re the men that give the oil fields a shady side.”
In spite of his roughness, Bob liked the freckle-faced person, and he had proved that he was far from stupid.
“You’ve evidently seen tricky oil men,” he said guardedly. “Do you work in the oil fields? I’m going to Oklahoma.”
“Me for Texas,” announced his companion. “I change at the next junction. No, the nearest I ever come to working in the oil fields is filling tanks for the cars in my father’s garage. But o’ course I know oil—the streets run with it down our way, and they use it to flush the irrigation system. And I’ve seen some of the raw deals these sharpers put through—doing widows and orphans out of their land. Makes you have a mighty small opinion of the law, I declare it does.”