“You see I used to live down in Tennessee. One day I met a farmer driving a mule that looked as innocent as a cherub. The farmer had a whip with a brad in the end of it. Just as I came up he gave the mule a prod. Next moment he was gone. It almost took my breath away to see a chap snuffed out so quick. The mule merely ducked his head and struck out behind. A crash, a cloud of splinters and the mule and I were alone, with not a trace of farmer or wagon in sight. Next day the papers had accounts of a shower of flesh over in Kentucky and I was the only person who could explain the phenomenon. No, gentlemen, the dynamite and Nitro-Glycerine at Hell-Gate couldn’t hold a candle to that Tennessee mule!”
The silence that followed this tale was as dense as a London fog and might have been cut with a cheese-knife. It was finally broken by a Derrick writer, who was a newspaper man and not easily taken down, extending an invitation to the crowd to drink to the health of Eli Perkins’s and Joe Mulhatten’s greatest rival.
William A. Meyers, whom every man and woman at Bradford knew and admired, handled tons of explosives and shot hundreds of wells. He had escapes that would stand a porcupine’s quills on end. To head off a lot of fellows who asked him for the thousandth time concerning one notable adventure, he concocted a new version of the affair. “It was a close call,” he said, “and no mistake. In the magazine I got some glycerine on my boots. Soon after coming out I stamped my heel on a stone and the first thing I knew I was sailing heavenward. When I alighted I struck squarely on my other heel and began a second ascension. Somehow I came down without much injury, except a bruised feeling that wore off in a week or two. You see the glycerine stuck to my boot-heels and when it hit a hard substance it went off quicker than Old Nick could singe a kiln-dried sinner. What’ll you take, boys?”
So the darkest chapter in petroleum history, a flood of litigation, a mass of deception, a black wave of treachery and a red streak of human blood, must be charged to the account of Nitro-Glycerine.
GRAINS OF THIRD SAND.
Many expressions coined in or about the oil-regions condense a page into a line. Not a few have the force of a catapult and the directness of a rifle-ball. Some may be quoted:
“A fat bank-account won’t fatten a lean soul.”—Charles Miller.
“The poorest man I know of is the man who has nothing but money.”—John D. Rockefeller.
“Don’t size up a man by the size of his wad.”—Peter O. Conver.
“Never be the mere echo of any man on God’s green earth.”—David Kirk.