Although Arthur hardly comprehended these figures, they interested him, and he now asked: “How many barrels of oil will we have to get out of our well, grandpapa, to give us as much money as we need?”
“That is rather a hard question to answer,” laughed Colonel Dale; “for, as a general thing, the more money people have, the more they think they need. However, always supposing that it is not a ‘duster,’ as you have taught me to call a dry hole, if our well yields twenty-five barrels a day I shall be pleased. If it should yield fifty barrels I should be perfectly satisfied; while with a daily yield of one hundred barrels, I should be amazed and delighted. In that case you might well be called a ‘little oil Prince’; for, with oil at three dollars per barrel, your income would be at the rate of a hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“But suppose it should yield more than a hundred barrels a day?” persisted Arthur. “How would you feel then?”
“I am sure I do not know,” laughed his grandfather, “for I cannot conceive of such a thing as happening. I expect I should feel something as Mr. Kier of Pittsburgh did in 1860, when the oil that he had been getting at the rate of two or three barrels a day from his salt wells, and selling as a medicine for fifty cents a half pint, was suddenly produced in such quantities that the price fell to about ten cents per barrel. So, if our well should flow too freely, I should be afraid that its product would become a drug on the market.”
“Just what Mr. Kier’s had been, but ceased to be,” laughed Miss Hatty.
“What?” asked Arthur, innocently.
“Why, a drug on the market. Didn’t uncle say that it was formerly sold as a medicine?”
“Oh, yes,” said Arthur, soberly, “I see.”
Just then Miss Hatty, who was very fond of figs, invested ten cents in a small box of “fig tablets,” as the train-boy called them. She and Arthur at once began to eat them with evident relish, but Colonel Dale refused the proffered box.
“What do you suppose you are eating?” he asked, smiling.