"Whatever that means!" Winnie laughed. "You'll be some little petroleum engineer yourself one of these days! I don't know anything about it myself, but it seems to me the figures that Wiley stated to the governor as the initial cost of development were pretty steep; twenty-five million, including an eight-inch pipe line to Limasito and tankage equipment there."
"No, that's not excessive," demurred Vernon. "The pumping stations every ten miles will average fifty thousand alone, and every foot of the pipe must be transported by peons—laborers, you know—on their shoulders through the swamps. Moreover, now that it seems inevitable that we shall get in the war ourselves, it's going to be next to impossible to get tankers at any price to bring the oil up from Mexico.—But I'm only a tyro yet; Kearn Thode can give you the details far better than I can. What's become of him, by the way?"
"He's out West, somewhere." Winnie ground out the stub of his cigarette. "He went soon after your cousin——er——"
"By Jove!" Vernon rose. "I'd give anything to see Willa again! Wasn't she the most wonderful little thoroughbred that ever lived!"
"She was," Winnie responded, his voice very low. "We'll never know a girl just like her, Verne. There's not another in the world."
Vernon glanced with unusual keenness at his friend and when he spoke his tone was roughly sympathetic.
"Hard hit, Winnie? Well, so was I, for that matter. Not that she would ever have looked at me, of course, but if she'd stayed another day I meant to ask her to stay always. She put me on the road to making a man of myself; some day I'll tell you how, maybe. It has a good deal to do with my distrust of Starr and his 'Almas Perderse'."
At an ungodly hour the next morning Winnie North was summoned to the telephone.
"Hello! What the deuce is it?" he demanded sleepily, but the voice which came to him over the wire speedily dispelled his somnolence.
"That you, Win? This is Kearn Thode."