Bunny went to Paradise, and studied the new wells, and the drawings for the new pipe-lines, and the “set-up” of the proposed refinery; he wandered over the hills with Dad and shot quail, and at night he lay in his lonely bed and writhed in misery. It seemed to him that he was turning into an old man—surely he would find all his hair grey in the morning! He was losing more sleep than if he had taken Eunice to the dances, and what was the sense of that? At school they were teaching him biology and nineteenth century English poets, and how was that going to help drive the Germans out of France? Eunice was so fragile, so beautiful, and she was going to be so unhappy! She was different from other girls, difficult to understand, and the next fellow would not be so good to her as Bunny had been! Also, the world that was trying to tear them apart was the same blind and stupid world that was killing millions of people; maybe Grandma was right after all, the whole thing was a chaos of cruelty, and it didn’t matter what you did, or which side won.

Then in the morning there would be Dad, and the day’s grinding of their tremendous big machine. Dad at least was dependable, Dad had something he was sure of. Also, he seemed to know all about Bunny without being told, he was gentle and sympathetic in a tactful way, not saying a word, but trying to entertain Bunny, and find things they could do together. Come to think of it, Dad had been through things like this himself! It would have been interesting to talk straight with him—only it would have embarrassed him so. Bunny thought of his “little Mamma,” whom he had not seen for more than a year; she had gone to New York, and Bunny suspected that Dad had increased her allowance on condition that she would stay there. Bunny wished that he might talk with her about Eunice, and get her opinion on the subject of exchangeable lovers.

He stuck it out, and when he went back home, he did not go to see Eunice. Whenever he met her, his heart would give a jump that hurt, but he would turn the other way and walk a few miles to get over it. The news spread among the “Zulus” that the pair had broken for good, and several sprightly young ladies began making overtures to the young oil prince. But Bunny hardly saw them, his heart was dead within him, he told himself that he would never look at another girl. One of the nineteenth century poets was Byron, and in his romances Bunny found exactly the mood of aristocratic broken-heartedness to which he could respond. As for Eunice, she went on petting parties with her former football captain, and apparently managed to escape every one of the calamities which Bunny had feared for her.

CHAPTER IX
THE VICTORY

I

The first term of Bunny’s school ended in February, and he passed his examinations with reasonable success; then there was a brief holiday, and Dad produced a wonderful scheme. He could not help feeling a little uncomfortable, with the Watkins family living right there on the tract, and he taking millions of dollars out of the ground for which he had paid them thirty-seven hundred. Dad had an impulse to do something, yet he was afraid to do too much, for fear he might “spoil” them, giving them the notion he owed them more. What he proposed was a family excursion; he would take Bunny and Ruth and Meelie and Sadie in the big limousine, and hire an extra car for old Mr. Watkins and his wife, and drive to the cantonment where Paul was working, and pay him a visit and see the new army in the making. They would stay a couple of days at some hotel nearby, and see all the sights, including the revival meetings which Eli was holding in a huge tent near the encampment.

The girls of course were wild with happiness. It was the first time they had ever had a long automobile trip in the whole of their unsophisticated lives. Bunny spoke to Ruth, who spoke to her mother, who in turn spoke to her husband, and obtained his promise that he would do his best to persuade the Holy Spirit not to send them any revelations or inspire any rolling or talking in tongues until they had got to the camp-meeting. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit had recently declared, through Eli as prophet of the Third Revelation, that these inspirational gymnastics had served their purpose and were to be dropped. No reason was vouchsafed, but there were rumors that the well-to-do people who were backing Eli in his evangelical campaigns were opposed to the rolling, and did not regard the speech of the archangels as having any meaning for mortal ears. One of these disciples was an eminent judge, and another was a proprietor of chain grocery-stores; their wives had taken Eli in hand and rubbed off the rough spots and improved his grammar, explaining that because one said heathen, one did not necessarily say healen; also they had taught him where to get his clothes and how to hold a knife and fork, so that Eli was becoming a social success.

It was almost like going to see the war: this tremendous city of canvas and corrugated iron and redwood siding which had arisen as if by Arabian Nights magic, swarming with eager young men in khaki, all of them as busy as ants—yet never too busy to take note of the presence of three good-looking girls in a row! You could go through this city at certain hours, if you got the proper permit, and see a bit of the drilling; at certain other hours Paul could get off, and while the old folks and the girls went to hear Eli, Dad and Bunny and Paul sat on the hotel veranda and talked about the state of the world.

The Russians had just concluded a peace with Germany, withdrawing entirely from the war, and giving up a lot of territory to the enemy. Dad discussed this event, and repeated his opinion of the treacherous “Bolshevikis.” Then Paul said how it seemed to him; Bunny saw that even here, with all the work he had to do, Paul had found time to read and to think his own thoughts. “Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you had never been to Paradise, and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil wells. Some day maybe we’ll know what they’re doing, but it won’t be from newspaper stories made up by the allied diplomats and the exiled grand dukes.”

That made Dad rather warm, because he had been reading this news for three or four months, and believing every word of it. He wanted to know if Paul didn’t believe there had been any killing of the rich classes in Russia. Paul said he didn’t doubt there had been some, because he had read about the French revolution. What you had to remember was the way the Russian people had been treated by their ruling classes, and the kind of government they were used to; you had to judge their revolution by their standards and not by ours. Paul smiled and added that it was a mistake for an American employer who had tried to give his men a square deal, to identify himself with those masters in Russia who had beaten their men with knouts, and turned them over to the Cossacks if they attempted any protest.