"You—" The banker was gasping. "You're doing your damnedest to—to start something, aren't you?"
"Every day. Every hour. Every minute." The speaker bowed. "In defense of my promise to fight fair, let me assure you, however, that I did not start this. As a matter of fact, I knew nothing about it until you had been hooked. Apropos of that quixotic promise, please remember that your own actions have absolved me from it."
The men stared at each other for a moment that seemed interminable. Gray was watchful, expectant; Nelson was plainly shaken by a desire so desperate that resistance left him weak. He was like an animal frozen in the very attitude of springing.
"Foxy, aren't you?" he managed to say, at last. "Tempting me to—make the first move." With a mighty effort of will he forced his tense body to relax. "The act of a bully! Bah! Wouldn't I be a fool—"
"A bully is usually a coward," Gray said, slowly. "Neither of us is a coward. I'm not ready to—join the issue that way, especially in a place like this. The game is too exciting to—"
"You'll get all the excitement you're looking for," Nelson cried, wrathfully. "You've cost me a lot of money, but you could have cost me a lot more if you hadn't been fool enough to brag about it and give me warning. Now—I'll send you out of Texas afoot."
"On my back, perhaps, but never on my feet."
Without another word the banker passed on, but he went blindly, for his mind was in black chaos. No chance now for secrecy; he was in for a bit of hell. He managed to kill the story in the local papers, but it appeared in the Dallas journals, which was even worse, and for the first time in his life he found himself an object of ridicule. The Arkansas transaction was made to appear the most outrageous swindle of recent oil history, and, coming so quickly after the Jackson exposure, it excited double interest and amusement.
In truth, the facts about the salting of that Arkansas tract did make a story, for the methods employed had been both new and ingenious. Nelson had been fooled by a showing of oil in an ordinary farm well, and by a generous seepage into a running stream some distance away. Not until a considerable sum had been spent in actual drilling operations, however, did those seepages diminish sufficiently to excite suspicion sufficiently, in fact, to induce the crew to pump the water well dry. This done, an amazing fraud had been discovered. It had been found that the vendor of the land had removed the rock curbing and behind it had packed a liberal quantity of petroleum-soaked cotton waste. Naturally, when the well had been walled up again and permitted to resume its natural level, the result was all that the unscrupulous owner could have expected.
The creek seepage had turned out to be equally counterfeit, but even more ingeniously contrived. It had manifested itself where a stratum of clean white sand, underlaid with clay, outcropped at the foot of a high bank. In the undergrowth, quite a way back from the stream, tardy investigation disclosed that a hole had been dug down to that layer of sand and into the hole had been poured several barrels of "crude." The earth from the digging had been removed and the hole had been cunningly covered up. Naturally, the oil from this reservoir had followed the sand stratum and—the resultant phenomenon at the water's edge had been well calculated to excite even the coldest-blooded observer. It had excited Henry Nelson to such an extent that he had bought not only this farm, but a lot of other farms. And Nelson was shrewd. Oh, it was a great joke! The whole mid-continent field rocked with laughter at it.