So the Rascum cabin became what the Angel City newspapers were accustomed to describe as a “Bolshevik nest.” Much as these workingmen might differ about tactics, they were a unit on the proposition that capital and labor had nothing in common but a fight. And they made no bones about saying it; they would start an argument on the job, or while a bunch of the men were eating their lunch; the echoes would spread all over the place. There were “wobblies” in the field also, you would find their literature in the bunk-houses. Dad must have known about it, but he did nothing; his men had always been free to say what they pleased, and he would take his chances. Indeed, he could hardly do anything else, while every man on the place knew that the discoverer and heir-apparent of the field was one of the “reddest” of the bunch!
Ever since the war, the union of the oil workers had been recognized and dealt with, as the government had decreed. But now the hand of Uncle Sam was beginning to relax; the idealistic President was a semi-invalid in Washington, and in Angel City the “open shop” crowd were getting ready to bring back the good old days. At least that was the rumor among the union officials, and how were they going to meet the employers’ move? The wage agreements expired towards the end of the year, and this was the issue to which all the arguments of the oil workers led, whether among the “reds” in Paul’s cabin, or among the rank and file. Over Bunny’s head the prospect of another strike hung like a black shadow of doom.
Dad never gave up longing to have his son take an interest in the company and its growing activities. And Bunny, always aware of this loving bond, would study monthly reports of production, and cost sheets and price schedules, and go out to the wells that were drilling, and take part in long consultations with the foremen. Only a few years ago, an oil well had been to him the most interesting thing in the world; but now cruel fate had brought it about that one oil well seemed exactly like another oil well! Number 142 had brought in six hundred thousand dollars, whereas Number 143 had brought in only four hundred and fifty thousand. But what difference did it make, when all you would do with the extra hundred and fifty thousand was to drill another well?
Dad’s answer was kept in stock on the shelves of his mind: “The world has got to have oil.” But then, you looked at the world, and saw enormous crowds of people driving to places where they were no better off than at home! But it would annoy Dad to have you say that—it was a step outside the range of his thinking. To Bunny he now seemed like an old horse in a treadmill; he climbed and climbed, all day long, and at night he climbed in dreams. But if you should let him out of the treadmill, he would die—for lack of any reason for living.
So Bunny learned more and more to keep his traitor doubts to himself; those theories of the class struggle that he learned from Paul and his fellows, and the rumors of a strike that he read in the oil workers’ journal. Instead, he would take Dad fishing, and they would pretend they were just as happy as of old in the bosom of their mother Nature—though the sad truth was that Dad was too heavy and too stiff in the joints to get much fun out of scrambling over the rocks.
II
Bunny spent his Easter holidays at Paradise, and it happened that Vernon Roscoe paid a visit to the tract. He had been there before, but only while Bunny was away; their meetings so far had been brief ones at the office, amid the press of business. Bunny had got a general impression of a big face and a big body and a big voice. Dad said that “Verne” had also a big heart; but Bunny’s only evidence was that Mr. Roscoe had patted him on the back, and called him “Jim Junior,” with great gusto.
Now he came; and it happened that a desert wind came with him, and made a funny combination. As a rule the heat of the day was endurable at Paradise, and the nights were always cold and refreshing; but three or four times in a year the place would be struck by a wind off the desert, and it would be like a hot hand reaching out and holding you by the throat. “A hundred and fourteen in the shade and there ain’t any shade,” was the way the oil workers put it, as they went on working in the sun, drinking barley water by the quart. The worst of it was, the hot wind blew all night, and the houses, which had heated up like furnaces, stayed that way for three or four days.
The “oil magnate,” as the newspapers called Vernon Roscoe, left Angel City after dinner, and reached the tract just before midnight. Dad and Bunny were expecting him, sitting out on the veranda, and he saw them, and his voice started before
