Bunch Grass Part 22

This, mind you, was before the discovery of the now famous oil fields.

Even in those early days experts were of opinion that oil might be found below the croppings of bituminous rock by any pioneer enterprising enough to bore for it.

About this time we began to notice that Uncle j.a.p was losing interest in his ranch. Cattle strayed through the fence because he neglected to mend it, calves escaping were caught and branded by unscrupulous neighbours, a colt was found dead, cast in a deep gulch.

"What's the matter with Uncle j.a.p?" we asked, at the May-Day picnic.

Mrs. Fullalove, a friend of Mrs. Panel, answered the question.

"I'll tell ye," she said sharply. "Jaspar Panel has gotten a disease common enough in Californy. He's sufferin' from a dose o' swelled head."

Mrs. Panel sprang to her feet. Her face was scarlet; her pale eyes snapped; the nostrils of her thin nose were dilated.

"Susan Jane Fullalove," she cried shrilly, "how dare you?"

Mrs. Fullalove remained calm.

"It's so, Lily. Yer so thin, I didn't see ye sittin' edgeways, but ye needn't to ramp an' roar. Yer ranch _is_ flyin' to flinders because Mr. Panel's tuk a notion that it's a-floatin' on a lake of ile."

"An' mebbe it is," replied Mrs. Panel, subsiding.

Shortly afterwards we heard that Uncle j.a.p was frequenting saloons, hanging about the hotels in the county town, hunting, of course, for a capitalist who would bore for oil on shares, seeking the "angel" with the dollars who would transport him and his Lily into the empyrean of millionaires. When he confided as much to us, my brother Ajax remarked--

"Hang it all, Uncle j.a.p, you've got all you want."

"That's so. I hev. But Lily----Boys, I don't like ter give her away-- this is between me an' you--she's the finest in the land, ain't she?

Yas. An' work? Great Minneapolis! Why, work come mighty near robbin'

her of her looks. It did, fer a fact. An' now, she'd ought ter take things easy, an' hev a good time."

"She does have a good time."

"Ajax, yer talkin' through yer hat. What do you know of wimmenfolk?

Not a derned thing. They're great at pretendin'. I dessay you, bein' a bachelor, think that my Lily kind o' wallers in was.h.i.+n' my ole duds, an' cookin' the beans and bacon when the thermometer's up to a hundred in the shade, and doin' ch.o.r.es around the hog pens an' chicken yards?

Wal--she don't. She pretends, fer my sake, but bein' a lady born an'

bred, her mind's naterally set on--silks an' satins, gems, a pianner-- an' statooary."

"I can't believe it," said my brother. "Mrs. Panel has always seemed to me the most sensible woman----"

"Lady, _if_ you please."

"I beg pardon--the most sensible lady of my acquaintance, and the most contented with the little home you've made for her."

"She helped make it. O' course, it's nateral, you bein' so young an'

innercent, that you should think you know more about Mis' Panel's inside than I do, but take it from me that she's pined in secret for what I'm a-goin' ter give her before I turn up my toes."

With that he rode away on his old pinto horse, smiling softly and nodding his grizzled head.

Later, he travelled to San Francisco, where he interviewed presidents of banks and other magnates. All and sundry were civil to Uncle j.a.p, but they refused to look for a needle in a haystack. Uncle j.a.p confessed, later, that he was beginning to get "cold feet," as he expressed it, when he happened to meet an out-of-elbows individual who claimed positively that he could discover water, gold, or oil, with no tools or instruments other than a hazel twig. Uncle j.a.p, who forgot to ask why this silver-tongued vagabond had failed to discover gold for himself, returned in triumph to his ranch, bringing with him the wizard, pledged to consecrate his gifts to the "locating" of the lake of oil. In return for his services Uncle j.a.p agreed to pay him fifty dollars a week, board and lodging included. When he told us of the bargain he had made, his face shone with satisfaction and confidence.

He chuckled, as he added slyly--

"I peeked in to some o' them high-toned joolery stores on Montgomery and Kearney Streets. Yas, I did. An' I priced what they call a ti- airy, sort o' di'mond crown. They run up into the thousands o'

dollars. Think o' Mis' Panel in a _ti_-airy, boys; but shush-h-h- h! Not a word to her--eh?"

We pledged ourselves to secrecy, but when Uncle j.a.p's back was turned, Ajax cursed the wizard as the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims cursed the jackdaw. When we saw Mrs. Panel, she seemed to be thinner and more angular, but her lips were firmly compressed, as if she feared that something better left unsaid might leak from them. An old sunbonnet flapped about her red, wrinkled face, her hands, red and wrinkled also, trembled when we inquired after the wizard and his works.

"He's located the lake," she replied. Suppressed wrath boiled over, as she added fiercely: "I wish 'twas a lake o' fire an' brimstone, an' him a-bilin' in the middle of it." Then, reading the sympathy in our eyes, she continued quickly: "I ain't denyin' that Jaspar has a right to do what he pleases with what lies out o' doors. He never interfered with me in my kitchen, never! Would you gen'lemen fancy a gla.s.s o'

lemonade? No? Wal--I'm glad you called in, fer I hev been feelin' kind o' lonesome lately."

What Uncle j.a.p's Lily suffered when he mortgaged all his cattle to sink a well n.o.body knows but herself, and she never told. The wizard indicated a certain spot below the croppings of bituminous rock; a big derrick was built; iron casing was hauled over the Coast Range; the well was bored.

Then, after boring some two thousand feet, operations had to be suspended, because Uncle j.a.p's dollars were exhausted, and his patience. The wizard swore stoutly that the lake was there, millions and millions of barrels of oil, but he deemed it expedient to leave the country in a hurry, because Uncle j.a.p intimated to him in the most convincing manner that there was not room in it for so colossal a fraud. The wizard might have argued the question, but the sight of Uncle j.a.p's old Navy six-shooter seemed to paralyse his tongue.

After this incident Uncle j.a.p ranched with feverish energy, and Mrs.

Fullalove said that the old man had gotten over a real bad dose of swelled head.

Five years later came the oil boom!

Everybody knows now that it flowed in prodigious quant.i.ties into the vats of one man, whom we shall speak of with the respect which the billionaire inspires, as the Autocrat of Petroleum. Let us hasten to add that we shall approach him in the person of his agent, who, so far as Uncle j.a.p was concerned, doubtless acted in defiance of the will of the greatest church builder and philanthropist in the world.

Oil was struck in pints, quarts, gallons, buckets, and finally in thousands and tens of thousands of barrels! It flowed copiously in our cow-county; it greased, so to speak, the wheels--and how ramshackle some of them were!--of a score of enterprises, it saturated all things and persons.

Now, conceive, if you can, the triumphant I-told-you-so-boys expression of Uncle j.a.p. He swelled again visibly: head first, then body and soul. The county kowtowed to him. Speculators tried to buy his ranch, entreated him to name a price.

"I'll take half a million dollars, in cold cash," said Uncle j.a.p.

The speculators offered him instead champagne and fat cigars. Uncle j.a.p refused both. He was not going to be "flimflammed," no, sir! Not twice in his life, _no, Siree Bob_! He, by the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, proposed to paddle his own canoe into and over the lake of oil. If the boys wished him to forgo the delights of that voyage, let 'em pungle up half a million--or get.

They got.

Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle j.a.p mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well.

He discovered oil sand, not a lake. Then he mortgaged his land, every stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells. It was a case of Bernard Palissy. Was Bernard a married man? I forget. If so, did he consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed? Did she protest? It is a fact that Uncle j.a.p's Lily did not protest. She looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of silence across her wrinkled impa.s.sive countenance.

When every available cent had been raised and sunk, the oil spouted out. Who looked at the fountain in the patch of lawn by the old fig trees? Possibly Mrs. Panel. Not Uncle j.a.p. He, the most temperate of men, became furiously drunk on petroleum. He exuded it from every pore. Of course he was acclaimed by the county and the State (the Sunday editions published his portrait) as the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there.

At this point we must present, with apologies, the agent of the Autocrat, _the_ agent, the High-muck-a-muck of the Pacific Slope, with a salary of a hundred thousand a year and _perks_! In his youth Nat Levi smelt of fried fish, unless the smell was overpowered by onions, and he changed his lodgings more often than he changed his linen. Now you meet him as Nathaniel Leveson, Esquire, who travelled in his private car, who a.s.sumed the G.o.d, when the G.o.d was elsewhere, who owned a palace on n.o.b Hill, and some of the worst, and therefore the most paying, rookeries in Chinatown, who never refused to give a cheque for charitable purposes when it was demanded in a becomingly public manner, who, like the Autocrat, had endowed Christian Churches, and had successfully eliminated out of his life everything which smacked of the Ghetto, except his nose.

Nathaniel Leveson visited our county, opened an office, and began to lay his pulpy white hands upon everything which directly or indirectly might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle j.a.p to dine with him at the Paloma Hotel, in San Lorenzo. The old man, with the hayseed in his hair, and the stains of bitumen upon his gnarled hands, ate and drank of the best, seeing a glorified vision of his Lily crowned with diamonds at last. The vision faded somewhat when Nathaniel began to talk dollars and cents. Even to Uncle j.a.p, unversed in such high matters as finance, it seemed plain that Leveson & Company were to have the dollars, and that to him, the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there were to be apportioned the cents.

"Lemme see," he said, with the slow, puzzled intonation of the man who does not understand; "I own this yere oil----"

"Subject to the mortgage, Mr. Panel, I believe?"

"That don't amount to shucks," said Uncle j.a.p.

"Quite so. Forgive me for interrupting you."

"I own this yere oil-field, lake I call it, and, bar the mortgage, it's bin paid for with the sweat of my--soul."