It was amazing to see what had happened to the Prospect Hill field. All over the top of the hill and the slopes a forest of oil-derricks had arisen, and had started marching across the fields of cabbages and sugar beets. Seeing them from the distance, in the haze of sunset, you could fancy an army of snails moving forth—the kind which have crests lifted high in the air. When you came near, you heard a roaring and a grumbling, as of Pluto’s realm; at night there was a scene of enchantment, a blur of white and golden lights, with jets of steam, and a glare of leaping flame where they were burning gas that came roaring out of the earth, and which they had no way to use.
Yes, when you drove past, sitting in a comfortable car, you might mistake it for fairyland. You had to remind yourself that an army of men were working here, working hard in twelve hour shifts, and in peril of life and limb. Also you had to remember the pulling and hauling, the intrigue and treachery, the ruin and blasted hopes; you had to hear Dad’s stories of what was happening to the little fellows, the thousands of investors who had come rushing to the field like moths to a candle-flame. Then your fairyland was turned into a slaughter-house, where the many were ground up into sausages for the breakfast of the few!
Dad had a big office now, with a manager and half a dozen clerks, and he sat there, like the captain of a battleship in his conning tower. Whatever might happen to the others, Dad took care of himself and his own. He had come to be known as the biggest independent operator in the field, and all sorts of people came to him with propositions; new, wonderful, glowing schemes—with Dad’s reputation for solidity, he could organize a ten or twenty million dollar company, and the investing public would flock to him. But Dad turned all such things down; he would wait, he told Bunny, until Bunny was grown up, and through with this here education business. They would have a pile of cash by that time and would do something sure enough big. And Bunny said all right, that suited him. He hoped the “something big” might be at Paradise, for then he would have a real share in it. Dad said, sure, the Watkins ranch was his discovery, and when they come to drill there, the well would be known as the Ross Junior.
They had made no move there; they were waiting, because of an unfortunate slip-up in the negotiations for the land. An unkind fate had willed that Mr. Bandy, owner of the big Bandy tract, had been away from home on the day that Mr. Hardacre had collected his options; and when Mr. Bandy got back, and learned about all the sudden purchases, he became suspicious, and decided that he would hold onto his land. At least, it amounted to that, for he raised his price from five dollars an acre to fifty! What made this especially bad, the Bandy tract lay right next to the Watkins section; it was over a thousand acres, and ran near to where Dad and Bunny had found the oil—in fact, Dad thought the streak of oil was on Mr. Bandy’s land, he couldn’t be sure without a survey. They would wait, Dad said, and let Mr. Bandy stay in pickle for a few years. It was like a cat watching a gopher hole, and which would get tired first. Bunny asked which was Mr. Bandy, the cat or the gopher; and Dad replied that if anybody ever mistook Jim Ross for a gopher, he would jist try to show them their mistake.
So they were waiting. Some day that mythical relative of Dad’s, who was an invalid, was coming into those rocky hills and tend a few thousand goats; and meantime most of the ranches were rented to the people who had formerly owned them. Three or four were vacant, but Dad didn’t worry about that; he would leave them to the quail, he said, and told Mr. Hardacre to put up a thousand “No Trespassing” signs over the whole twelve thousand acres he had bought, so as to impress Mr. Bandy with Dad’s gluttonous attitude toward small game.
III
The greater part of the civilized world had gone to war. The newspapers which Dad and Bunny read turned themselves into posters, with streamer-heads all the way across the page, telling every day of battles and campaigns in which thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of men had lost their lives. To people in California, so peaceful and prosperous, this was a tale of “old, unhappy far-off things,” impossible to make real to yourself. America had officially declared neutrality; which meant that in the “current events” class, where Bunny learned what was going on in the world, the teacher was expected to deal with the war objectively, and to rebuke any child who expressed a partisanship offensive to any other child. To business men like Dad it meant that they would make money out of both sides; they would sell to the Allies direct, and they would sell to the Central powers by way of agents in Holland and Scandinavia, and they would raise a howl when the British tried to stop this by the blockade.
The price of “gas” of course began to mount immediately. It seemed to Bunny a rather dreadful thing that Dad’s millions should be multiplied out of the collective agony of the rest of the world; but Dad said that was rubbish, it wasn’t his fault that people in Europe insisted on fighting, and if they wanted things he had to sell, they would pay him the market price. When speculators came to him, showing how he, with his big supply of cash, could make a quick turn-over, buying shoes, or ships, or sealing-wax, or other articles of combat, Dad would reply that he knew one business, which was oil, and he had made his way in life by sticking to what he knew. When representatives of the warring powers invited him to sign contracts to deliver oil, he would answer that nothing gave him more pleasure than to sign such contracts; but they must change their European bonds into good American dollars, and pay him with these latter. He would offer to take them to the little roadside restaurant where they could see the sign: “We have an arrangement with our bank; the bank does not sell soup, and we do not cash checks.”
On the basis of his father’s reputation for unlimited resources and invincible integrity, Bunny had been chosen treasurer of the freshman football team, a position of grave responsibility, which entitled him to sit on the side-lines and help the cheer-leaders. While on the other side of the world men were staggering about in darkness and mud and snow, blind with fatigue, or with their eyes shot out, or their entrails dragging in the dirt, the sun would be shining in California, and Bunny would be facing a crowd of one or two thousand school children, lined up on benches and shrieking in unison: “Rah, rah, rah, slippery, slam!—wallibazoo, bazim, bazam! Beach City.” He would come home radiant, with barely enough voice left to tell the score; and Aunt Emma would sit beaming—he was being like other boys, and the Ross family was taking its position in society.
The Christmas holidays came; and Dad was working too hard, everybody declared; and Bunny said, “Let’s go after quail!” It wasn’t so hard to pull him loose now, for they had their own game-preserve—it sounded most magnificent, and it would obviously be a great waste not to use it. So they packed up their camping outfit, and drove to Paradise, and pitched their tent under the live oak tree; and there was the ranch, and the Watkins family, the same as before, except that the row of children was a couple of inches taller, and the girls each had a new dress to cover their growing brown legs. Things were a whole lot easier with the family, since they had an income of fifteen dollars a month from the bank, instead of an outgo of ten dollars.