“You wouldn’t try to stop my mouth with candy,” reproached Henrietta, “if you knew what you are bottling up thereby. Something’s happened—something wonderful. Something perfectly grand.”
“Tell us,” pleaded Jean, who could see that Henrietta was fairly bubbling over with news, “Come on, girls. Here’s a story.”
“Well,” began Henrietta, “once there was a man who was always moving around from one town to another looking for work. When he had work he wasn’t always satisfied with it. Sometimes he gave up a fairly good job and just went some place else because he happened to feel like it.”
“One of those rolling stones,” suggested Maude.
“Yes, a regular rolling stone. Well, after awhile he rolled out West. He tried ranching at first; but he didn’t care much about that. But there was a sort of cowboy chap that he did like—a young Englishman—and they decided to be partners. They tried mining for awhile but that didn’t pan out so they went down to Texas. They worked for an old man down there who was sick. They did something really worth while for him—something about saving a lot of cattle for him—and he was so grateful that he died and left his ranch to them.”
“Oh, Henrietta!” teased Hazel, “that was gratitude.”
“Well, I mean that when he died, he left his ranch to those two men. But the ranch wasn’t very much good—there was something wrong with the soil and nothing would grow—not even grass. But now pick up your ears, girls. One day, in one of the fields where the soil was particularly bad, the older man stepped into something soft and some queer greasy stuff oozed up out of the hole. It was oil. Experts came and tested it. They really had oil.
“Well, even when they had sold all their cattle they hadn’t money enough to develop their oil mine—”
“Oil well,” corrected Miss Wilson. “My father has them—but go on.”
“Yes, oil well. So the cowboy suggested going home to England where he had a lot of wealthy relatives and friends, to borrow the money. He wanted, for one thing, to let his own relatives reap some of the benefit if there was any. Well, that cowboy was—and is—sort of a distant cousin of my father’s; and my father was one of the men he wanted especially to see.