“You are Herr John Spurrier?” he inquired.
The man nodded.
“It is, perhaps, in the nature of a formality, which you will be able to arrange,” said the officer. “But I am directed to place you under arrest. England is in the war. You are said to be a former soldier.”
CHAPTER XX
Over the ragged lands that lay on the “nigh side” of Hemlock Mountain breathed a spirit of excitement and mighty hope. It had been two years since John Spurrier had left the field he had planned to develop, and in those years had come the transition of rebirth.
Along muddy streets the hogs still wallowed, but now they were deeply rutted by the teaming of ponderous oil gear, and one saw young men in pith helmets and pig-skin puttees; keen-faced engineers and oil prospectors drawn in by the challenge of wealth from the far trails of Mexico and the West. One heard the jargon of that single business and the new vocabulary of its devotees. “Wild-catters” following surface indications or hunches were testing and well-driving. Gushers rewarded some and “dry holes” and “dusters” disappointed others. Into the mediæval life of hills that had stood age-long unaltered and aloof came the infusion of hot-blooded enterprise, the eager questing after quick and miraculous wealth.
In Lexington and Winchester oil exchanges carried the activity of small bourses. In newspapers a new form of advertisement proclaimed itself.
Oil was king. Oil and its by-product, gasoline, that the armies needed and that the thousands of engines on the earth and in the air so greedily devoured.