Texas by the Tail

The fireplace was in the kitchen of the Zearsdale home. Zearsdale, in shirt sleeves and a butcher's apron, had led him back to the kitchen immediately upon his arrival, and they were now seated at a large wooden table-one of those sturdy Utility tables such as one sees in restaurant kitchens-and drinking a very authoritative ale from pewter mugs.

The oil man sighed on a subtly happy note, brushing alefoam from his mouth as he looked around the huge beamed room. 'I think I'd live in here if I could move a bed in,' he said. 'There's something about it that makes me feel relaxed and at peace with myself.'

'It's a lot of kitchen,' Mitch smiled. 'I know I've never seen anything like it outside of a big hotel.'

'And you never will,' Zearsdale said, nodding toward the range which ran practically the width of the room. 'Three cooks can work at that at the same time. You could run five thousand meals off of it in a day if you had to.'

'I can believe it. You do a lot of entertaining out here, I suppose?'

'Practically none.' Zearsdale shook his head. 'I just happen to like a big, well-equipped kitchen. I like to see it and be in it. I'm not married, and any entertaining I do is usually done at the club. But still… well, I suppose it goes back a long way. How about you, Corley? What kind of home life did you have as a boy?'

Mitch said that he hadn't had much in the accepted sense of the word. 'We always lived in hotels. My father sold various kinds of intangibles, and my mother worked with him.'

'They must have hit it lucky somewhere along the line.'

'Pure luck, I'm afraid, Mitch said deprecatingly. 'I don't know too much about it, since I was just a kid at the time. But I know they sunk a lot of money in things that never panned out.'

Zearsdale poured more ale for him, remarking that their backgrounds were not dissimilar. 'We ran the cookshack for drilling crews. My mother and I did, rather; my dad usually got some kind of little job flunkying around the rig. A drilling rig runs twenty-four hours a day, of course, which meant that we had to serve meals around the clock. I don't think my mother and I ever got to sleep more than two hours in a row.'

He shook his head, remembering, his eyes wandering over the room's extravagantly elaborate equipment. 'We did all the cooking on a four-burner oil-stove, and we lived and slept in the same room we cooked in. We… well, never mind. There's nothing very interesting about drudgery.'

'It's a good story,' Mitch said. 'I'd like to hear it.'

'Well,' Zearsdale shrugged. 'I'll keep it short then…'

The owner of a wildcat lease on which they were working (he continued) had become deeply in debt to them. So deeply that by the time the well was drilled in-a gusher-they owned a large share of the property. Borrowing money from friends, he tried to pay them off for the actual cash amount of his debt. When they refused, he wangled a secret agreement with the pipeline company.

The company contracted to take the oil, being legally bound to. But payment was to be upon delivery; at such time, that is, as the pipeline was connected with the well. It soon became apparent that that time was not going to come as long as the Zearsdales retained their share. There was one delay after another. Delays that were an obvious ploy in a game of freeze-out. But there was no money to go into court and prove it.

'My dad was all for settling-he wasn't a very strong man, I'm afraid…' A contemptuous note crept into Zearsdale's voice. 'But my mother had other ideas. He wouldn't go along with them, so she and I handled it ourselves. We had to, you know, Corley? Here a great wrong was being done, and the law couldn't touch the people who were doing it. So we had to. I was fourteen years old at the time, but it's a lesson I've never forgotten: That the strong people of the world have an obligation to that world. That's why they have been made strong, you understand. To crack down hard when they see someone getting out of line…'

'Mmm, yes. Very interesting,' Mitch said. 'But just what did you and your mother do?'

'Well…' Zearsdale chuckled. 'No one could prove that we did anything, Corley. They didn't even suggest that we did. It was put down as an accident, and it really raised holy hell. You see, that was ranching country out there. Rolling grasslands with cattle grazing as far as the eye could see. When the fire broke out-and my mother and I were a long way off, naturally-'

'Fire?' Mitch stared at him. 'Do you mean you-… you-'

'Fire. From the seepage around the well. It wouldn't have happened if the pipeline had been connected as it should have been, so they were held liable for the damages. Ten million dollars, plus another hundred thousand to have the fire put out. On top of that, we collected our pro rata share of the cost of every barrel of oil that had burned.' Zearsdale chuckled again. Grimly. 'There was no more stalling after that. No more trouble. From them or anyone else.'

He had Mitch accompany him into a large walk-in refrigerator to help select their dinner steaks. He cooked and served them expertly, and fortunately Mitch was very hungry. Otherwise, he might not have been able to ignore the picture which their odor aroused in his mind: a picture of charred grasslands, littered as far as the eye could see with the smoking carcasses of cattle that had been roasted alive.

After dinner, Zearsdale washed and dried the dishes, politely but firmly declining Mitch's offer to help. 'I'm an old pro at this, Corley, and I kind of like to keep my hand in. God knows I've got plenty of hired help if I didn't choose to do it.'

Mitch assumed that the servants had been let off for the evening. But Zearsdale said they had never been on.

'They need time of their own as well as I do. Aside from that, most of them are getting along in years-they've been with me since my mother's time-and I wouldn't want to keep them up late.'

He stripped out of his apron and dried his hands on it, shaking his head to Mitch's remark that he was very generous with his servants.

'No. No, I'm afraid I'm not, Corley. It isn't possible for a man to be generous when he has a half- billion dollars, which is my estimated net worth. He's lost his capacity to be touched by what he does, you know. He has no personal identification with it. There's neither a sacrifice in giving away a million nor a gain in making one. Now, I do try very hard to be fair, and I think I succeed most of the time. But you'll find a lot of people who would disagree. Such as,' he grimaced distastefully, 'our cheating friend, Birdwell.'

The memory of the prematurely gray man, his easy laughter, the obvious liking of the people around him, moved Mitch uneasily. 'I can't help feeling sorry for him,' he said. 'I almost wish I'd kept my mouth shut about his cheating.'

'I feel sorry for him, too,' Zearsdale said gravely. 'He's thrown away a fine career. He's dragged his family down with him. But he did it, not I nor you. We can't ignore wrong, 'Corley, and we can't reward people for doing it.'

'But he had a good record with you, didn't he? He'd been with you for a long time.'

'He had a very good record,' Zearsdale nodded, 'and he'd been very well rewarded for it. Now, if I reward a man for being good, and believe me I do-I've given anonymous help to many people who have no connection with my company-then I must punish him for being bad. Or don't you agree with me?'

Mitch hesitated, looking into the thick-lipped face with its sharp, cold eyes-utterly sincere eyes. Looking away again.

'Well,' he said, 'I should think that would be a very Uncomfortable responsibility for you. Like being God, you know.'

'Yes,' Zearsdale agreed gravely, 'that's exactly what it is. Like being God.'

The intent eyes remained on Mitch for a moment, and Mitch fought down an almost irresistible impulse to laugh. He was half-inclined to believe, for that matter, that he was expected to laugh-that the oil man had been giving him a dead-pan ribbing.

Take that bit about setting an oil well on fire. Now, that didn't ring true, did it?

Zearsdale suddenly grinned, remarking that they didn't have to solve all the world's problems