“No, I dare say you didn’t. It was a flare-up and a die-down. The men who rushed in, plodded dejectedly out again, poorer by the time they had spent.”
“Then the boom collapsed?”
“It collapsed—but why? Because the gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas caucussed and so ordained. They gathered around their map and stuck 47 pins here and there. They said, ‘This oil can come out in two ways only: by pipe line or tank cars. We will stand aloof and develop where the cost is less and the profit greater—and without us, it cannot succeed.’”
“Were there no independent concerns to bring the stuff to market?”
Snowdon laughed. “The gentlemen who hold dominion have their own defenses against competition. You may have heard of a certain dog in the manger? Well, they said as they sat about their table on which the map was spread, ‘Some day other fields may run out. Some day something may set oil soaring until even this yield may be well worth our attention. We will therefore hold this card in reserve against that day and that contingency.’ So quietly, inconspicuously, yet with a power that strangled competition, lobbies operated in State legislatures. The independents failed to secure needful charters—the lines were never laid. Those particular fields starved, and now the ignorant mountaineers who woke for a while to dreams of wealth, laugh at the man who says ‘oil’ to them. Yet at some properly, or improperly designated day, those failure fields will flash on the astonished world as something risen from the dead, and fortunes will blossom for the lucky.”
“Yes?” prompted the listener.
“Now let us suppose our opportunity hound as willing to go unostentatiously into that country; as willing to spend part of each year there for a term of years; nipping options here and there, waiting patiently and watching his chance to slip a charter through one of those bound and gagged legislatures in 48 some moment of relaxed vigilance. Such a man might find himself ultimately standing with the key to the situation in his own hand. It’s just a story, but perhaps it serves to give you my meaning.”
“Did I understand you to suggest,” inquired Spurrier with a forced calmness, “that you fancy you see in me the qualities of your opportunity hound?”
“Our own concern,” said Snowdon quietly, “is fortunate enough to have passed through the period of cooling its heels in the anterooms of capital, but we can still use a man such as I have described. There’s a place for you with us if you want it.”
“When do I go to work?” demanded the former lieutenant rising from his seat, and Snowdon countered: