This is the God’s truth—and mine, too.
Now, kindly figure out for me, if you can, where anyone had been worsted through my part in the transaction. Two “bright” young clerks in the bank here—whom I shall not name—caught it at once. That mysterious $375 check had alerted them. They put their own erroneous construction on it—and passed the word along. Then I caught “hail Columbia” from the younguns’ superior (in point of banking tenure) who had “invested $125 in his wife’s name—the idea being that a banker himself ought to have more sense than to dabble in such matters. His “boys,” as he called them, meant well, of course—and it didn’t take me too long to convince the banker that I had taken no part in the promotion. But, what if I had? It would not have been a crime. I want to say, however, that the banker did me the favor of trying to correct the false impressions he had helped set afloat. Once in a blue moon even the worst of us will meet such a manful man.
In this story I only aim to hit the high spots—not, at any time, deviating from the truth. It was not all easy sailing for the Trustee. In a case of this kind, the conscientious person representing his friends, does not wish to let them down because of failure to collect rentals in full. With syndicate members widely scattered, the Trustee must make his own decisions—and quick. He can put up the delinquent amount himself, or he can forfeit the lease—if he does not wish to raise the ire of his friends who have paid.
Our syndicate was in reality an unfinanced holding partnership—barred from creating indebtedness, euphoniously christened “The Elkmore Oil and Gas Syndicate.” Here, I must give the wife credit—if, in the long run it really merited credit—for suggesting this expressive name, which embraces, in split infinitives, the location of the lease holdings (Elk County) and the home (Wetmore) of the “investors.” It pleased Dr. Shaffer—no end. I think it got Myrtle included in that proposed free entertainment at his hospital in Moline.
Like Doctor Purdum’s good natured crack at my purebred seed corn, those altruistically donated helpings of “grapes” showered on me by Cortner and Shaffer, had begun to “sour”—and, I may say, that they deteriorated until less than nothing was left of the windfall. It posed a perplexing dilemma.
As there was little chance of getting action before the expiration of the leases, aggravated by draggy collections of rentals, a feeler was mailed to all subscribers, in ample time before the fifth year’s payments were due. More than half of them favored dropping the leases, and sent me their written authorization. Nearly half of the interests remained expressionless. The four leases were canceled. The majority of the interests wished it so. But, it was the delinquents who hollered most, even censured me for giving up the lease—when some of the acreage came into production several years later. It seemed not to have occurred to them that wo would have lost out, anyway.
But, in the Moline field we got some experience which should have taught us a lesson, that a bird in hand is worth a whole flock in the bush—but it didn’t. We could have sold our leases at a nice profit.
An oil gusher was brought in on a large tract of pasture land one mile away from our holdings. Dr. Shaffer wired me to come down at once. He drove me out to the well. There was a terrific jam—at the well, on the road, in Moline. Crowds of people were at the well ahead of us that morning—Art Hough, a former Wetmore boy, and his oil-rich partner, from Independence, among them. Excitement was running high. One man was killed in his overturned car while rushing out from town. And I, myself, spent the night in a Moline hospital. This fact, however, does not necessarily pertain to the gusher—except to show that there was genuine good-feeling all round. I was the guest of Dr. Shaffer and his wife, who were the only other occupants of his new hospital, not yet ready for public patronage. Dr. Shaffer owned a one-eighth interest in our leases.
If you have never seen an oil-gusher, you don’t know what a thrilling sight it is—especially, if you own nearby leases. Oil spurted in gusts at regular intervals high into the air, spread out in all directions and arched down over the four case-setters, stripped to the waist, encasing them in a film of oil so heavy as to exclude them from view, at times. Art Hough and his partner, who owned some producing wells in the shallow field near Independence, wanted to buy our leases—but who would want to sell in the midst of all that excitement? And, anyway, I was not in a position to deal with them on the spot, as there were fifty-three signers in the group to an agreement which provided for fifty-one per cent of the interests to say when to sell. We did, however, later, arrange to sell part of the leases—carrying a provision for drilling—and the papers were sent to the Moline bank; but the prospective buyer was unable to come through with the money.
The gusher was on land owned, or controlled, by a Moline banker, and another man. I heard one of the partners say, not once but many times, always the same sing-song word for word, “I just told the Lord that since He had been so good to me, I shall never desecrate His holy name.” If I may express myself, unbiasedly, I would say the Lord played no favorites in the Moline field; that I think He had nothing to do with the man’s good luck, except, possibly, in a general way of being the creator of all things—else why would He have destroyed the gusher with salt-water, and got the owners the threat of a robust lawsuit to boot—for polluting a God-given stream of fresh water?