After this incident Uncle Jap ranched with feverish energy, and Mrs. Fullalove said that the old man had gotten over a real bad dose of swelled head.
* * * * *
Five years later came the oil boom!
Everybody knows now that it flowed in prodigious quantities into the vats of one man, whom we shall speak of with the respect which the billionaire inspires, as the Autocrat of Petroleum. Let us hasten to add that we shall approach him in the person of his agent, who, so far as Uncle Jap was concerned, doubtless acted in defiance of the will of the greatest church builder and philanthropist in the world.
Oil was struck in pints, quarts, gallons, buckets, and finally in thousands and tens of thousands of barrels! It flowed copiously in our cow-county; it greased, so to speak, the wheels--and how ramshackle some of them were!--of a score of enterprises, it saturated all things and persons.
Now, conceive, if you can, the triumphant I-told-you-so-boys expression of Uncle Jap. He swelled again visibly: head first, then body and soul. The county kowtowed to him. Speculators tried to buy his ranch, entreated him to name a price.
"I'll take half a million dollars, in cold cash," said Uncle Jap.
The speculators offered him instead champagne and fat cigars. Uncle Jap refused both. He was not going to be "flimflammed," no, sir! Not twice in his life, no, Siree Bob! He, by the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, proposed to paddle his own canoe into and over the lake of oil. If the boys wished him to forgo the delights of that voyage, let 'em pungle up half a million--or get.
They got.
Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle Jap mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well. He discovered oil sand, not a lake. Then he mortgaged his land, every stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells. It was a case of Bernard Palissy. Was Bernard a married man? I forget. If so, did he consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed? Did she protest? It is a fact that Uncle Jap's Lily did not protest. She looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of silence across her wrinkled impassive countenance.