"Lady, if you please."
"I beg pardon--the most sensible lady of my acquaintance, and the most contented with the little home you've made for her."
"She helped make it. O' course, it's nateral, you bein' so young an' innercent, that you should think you know more about Mis' Panel's inside than I do, but take it from me that she's pined in secret for what I'm a-goin' ter give her before I turn up my toes."
With that he rode away on his old pinto horse, smiling softly and nodding his grizzled head.
Later, he travelled to San Francisco, where he interviewed presidents of banks and other magnates. All and sundry were civil to Uncle Jap, but they refused to look for a needle in a haystack. Uncle Jap confessed, later, that he was beginning to get "cold feet," as he expressed it, when he happened to meet an out-of-elbows individual who claimed positively that he could discover water, gold, or oil, with no tools or instruments other than a hazel twig. Uncle Jap, who forgot to ask why this silver-tongued vagabond had failed to discover gold for himself, returned in triumph to his ranch, bringing with him the wizard, pledged to consecrate his gifts to the "locating" of the lake of oil. In return for his services Uncle Jap agreed to pay him fifty dollars a week, board and lodging included. When he told us of the bargain he had made, his face shone with satisfaction and confidence. He chuckled, as he added slyly--
"I peeked in to some o' them high-toned joolery stores on Montgomery and Kearney Streets. Yas, I did. An' I priced what they call a ti- airy, sort o' di'mond crown. They run up into the thousands o' dollars. Think o' Mis' Panel in a ti-airy, boys; but shush-h-h- h! Not a word to her--eh?"
We pledged ourselves to secrecy, but when Uncle Jap's back was turned, Ajax cursed the wizard as the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims cursed the jackdaw. When we saw Mrs. Panel, she seemed to be thinner and more angular, but her lips were firmly compressed, as if she feared that something better left unsaid might leak from them. An old sunbonnet flapped about her red, wrinkled face, her hands, red and wrinkled also, trembled when we inquired after the wizard and his works.
"He's located the lake," she replied. Suppressed wrath boiled over, as she added fiercely: "I wish 'twas a lake o' fire an' brimstone, an' him a-bilin' in the middle of it." Then, reading the sympathy in our eyes, she continued quickly: "I ain't denyin' that Jaspar has a right to do what he pleases with what lies out o' doors. He never interfered with me in my kitchen, never! Would you gen'lemen fancy a glass o' lemonade? No? Wal--I'm glad you called in, fer I hev been feelin' kind o' lonesome lately."
What Uncle Jap's Lily suffered when he mortgaged all his cattle to sink a well nobody knows but herself, and she never told. The wizard indicated a certain spot below the croppings of bituminous rock; a big derrick was built; iron casing was hauled over the Coast Range; the well was bored.
Then, after boring some two thousand feet, operations had to be suspended, because Uncle Jap's dollars were exhausted, and his patience. The wizard swore stoutly that the lake was there, millions and millions of barrels of oil, but he deemed it expedient to leave the country in a hurry, because Uncle Jap intimated to him in the most convincing manner that there was not room in it for so colossal a fraud. The wizard might have argued the question, but the sight of Uncle Jap's old Navy six-shooter seemed to paralyse his tongue.