unconsciously turning his back upon a fortune such as probably had never entered the worthy knight's imagination.
The petroleum once ignited, it is very hard to extinguish the flames; and Mr. Williams told of being one of a company of men who labored twenty-four hours in vain to subdue a burning well. They tried water, which only aggravated the trouble; they tried covering the well with earth, but the gas permeated the whole mass and blazed up more defiantly than ever; they covered the mound of earth with a carpet, (paid for at the value of cloth of gold,) and the carpet with wet sand, but a bad smell of burned wool was the only result. Finally, some incipient Bonaparte hit upon the expedient of dividing the Allies, who together defied mankind, and, bringing a huge oil-tank, inverted it over the sand, the carpet, the earth, and the well, by this time one blazing mass. Fire thus cut off from Air succumbed, and the battle was over.
"There was no one hurt that time," pursued Friend Williams, in a tone of airy reminiscence; "but mostly at our fires there'll be two or three people burned up, and more women than men, I've noticed. Either it's their clothes, or they get scared and don't look out for themselves. Now there was the Widow McClintock owned that farm above here. She was worth her hundreds of thousands of dollars, but she would put kerosene on her fire to make it burn. So one day it caught, and she caught, and in half an hour there was no such thing as Widow McClintock on Oil Creek. Still all the women keep right on pouring kerosene into their stoves, and every little while one of them goes after the Widow.
"Then there was a woman who sent to the refinery for a pail of alkali to clean her floor. The man thought he'd get benzine instead; and just as he got into the house, the fire from his pipe dropped into it, and the whole shanty was in a blaze before the poor woman knew what had happened. The stupid fool that was to blame got off, but the woman burned up.
"Then there was a woman whose house was afire, and she would rush back, after she had been dragged out, to look for her pet teacups, and she was burned up. And so they go."
Sometimes also the tanks of crude oil take fire, and these conflagrations are said to present a splendid spectacle,—the resinous parts of the oil burning with a fierce deep-red flame and sending up volumes of smoke, through which are emitted lightning-like flashes exploding the ignited gas.
Like some other things, including people, this unappeasable substance conceals its terrors beneath a placid exterior, and lies in its great tanks, or in shallow pits dug for it in the earth, looking neither volcanic nor even combustible, but more like thin green paint than anything else, except when it has become adulterated with water, when it assumes a bilious, yellow appearance, exceedingly uninviting to the spectator. In this case it is allowed to remain undisturbed in the tank until the oil and water have separated, when the latter is drawn off at the bottom.
Wandering one day among groves of derricks and villages of tanks, Miselle and her guide came upon a building containing a pair of truculent monsters in a high state of activity. These were introduced to her as a steam force-pump and its attendant engine; and she was told that they were at that moment sucking up whole tanks of oil from the neighboring wells, and pumping it up the precipitous bluff, through the lonely forest, over marsh and moor, hill and dale, to the great Humboldt Refinery, more than three miles distant, in the town of Plummer, as it is called,—although, in point of fact, Plummer, Tarr Farm, and several other settlements belong to the township of Cornplanter.
There was something about this brace of monsters very fascinating to Miselle. They seemed like subjected genii closed in these dull black cases and this narrow shed, and yet embracing miles of territory in their invisible arms. Even the genius of Aladdin's lamp was not so powerful, for he was obliged to betake himself to the scene of the wonders he was to enact,—and if imprisoned as closely as these, could not have transferred enough oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer to fill his own lamp.
Afterward, in rambling through the woods, Miselle often came upon the mound raised above the buried pipe, and always regarded it with the same admiring awe with which the fisherman of Bagdad probably looked at the copper vessel wherein Solomon had so cunningly "canned" the rebellious Afrit.