“Good Lord!” said Bunny.
“Of course I don’t know yet, but I’m going to dig it out. Then I remembered that Roscoe is an associate of your father’s, and it occurred to me, it would be awkward as the devil if I was to come on anything—well, you know what I mean, Bunny—after your father was so kind to me, and you put up money for the college—”
“Sure, I know,” said Bunny. “You don’t have to worry about that, Dan. You go ahead and do your job, just as if you’d never known us.”
“That’s fine of you. But listen—I was afraid maybe some day there might be a misunderstanding, unless I got this clear, that I never got any hint on this subject from you. My recollection is positive, you’ve never mentioned it in my hearing. Is that right?”
“It’s absolutely right, Dan.”
“You’ve never discussed your father’s business with me at all—except the strike; and you haven’t discussed Roscoe’s or O’Reilly’s, either.”
“That is true, Dan. There’ll never be any question about that.”
“There will be, Bunny, rest assured—if I should bust loose in Washington, nothing would ever convince Roscoe and O’Reilly that I hadn’t wormed it out of you. I’m afraid nothing would convince your father, either. But I want to be sure that your own mind is clear, I haven’t been dishonorable.”
Bunny gave him his hand on it; and not one of the veteran poker-players who sat all night in the smoke-filled living-room of the ranch-house at Paradise could have acted more perfectly the part of impassivity. Bunny even made himself finish lunch, and he wrote a check to cover part of the debt of the labor college, and gave his friend a hearty farewell and best wishes for his new job. Then he drove off in his car, and was free to look as he felt, which was quite unhappy!
He decided that it was his duty to tell his father about this conversation. It couldn’t make any difference to Dan Irving’s work, and it might yet be possible to keep Dad out of the mess. But when the elder Ross got home that evening, Bunny had no time to get in a word. “Well, son, we got those leases!”
“You don’t say, Dad!”
“They’ve been approved, and Verne left for Washington today. They’ll be signed next week, and you and me are going to take a trip and have some fun!”
IX
Joe and Ikey Menzies had been out of jail for a couple of months, their comrades of the Workers’ party having scraped together the bail. Now came their trial, with several other members of the party. The state was undertaking to show that this organization was nothing but the Communist party under a camouflage; it was the “legal” part of the organization, but the real direction was in the hands of an “underground” group, which received funds and took orders from Moscow. It advocated the forcible overthrow of the “capitalist state,” and the setting up of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” after the Russian pattern. On the other hand, the indicted men claimed that they had organized a legitimate working-class political party, and their attitude to violence was purely defensive. They believed the capitalists would never permit the power to be taken from them peaceably; it was the capitalists who would overthrow the constitution, and the workers would have to defend themselves.
The prisoners were all tried at once, and the procedure took three weeks and was quite an education in contemporary problems—or would have been, had the newspapers reported both sides. To get the workers’ side, you had to sit in the court room; and Bunny went whenever he could get loose from the university. He was there when the prosecution sprung a “surprise” witness, and it was a surprise to Bunny also—his boyhood friend, Ben Skutt! Ben, it appeared, had grown a moustache and taken a course in the Moscow dialect, and had turned up as an oil worker out of a job, and been admitted to the Workers’ party, and before long had got a job in the office. Now he had harrowing stories to tell of the criminal things he had heard said, and of efforts the party had made to incite the oil workers to rise and destroy the wells. On the other hand, so Bunny was told by Ikey Menzies, the Communists were ready to swear that Ben Skutt had himself done all the proposing of destruction—at the crisis of the strike he had spent his time insisting that the only way to save the situation was to get a bunch of real fighting men and burn up half a dozen oil fields.
Bunny went home to his father. “Dad, just what was it made you get rid of Ben Skutt?”
“Why, I found he’d been taking commissions from the other feller. He’d been up to other rascalities, too.”
“Just what?”
Dad laughed. “He had a scheme that was a wonder. You know, down there at Prospect Hill, people were in a crazy hurry to drill; the owner of the next lot was getting his well down first, and draining all the oil away. Ben and another feller would find a bunch of lot owners jist on the point of making a good lease; and Ben would have his pal give him a quitclaim deed to one of those lots. Ben would record the deed, and of course, when the title company come to report on the property, there was that cloud on the title. The owner would come hustling after Ben Skutt in a panic, what the hell was this? And Ben would look shocked, and tell how he had bought the lot from some feller in good faith. Who was the feller? Well, the feller had disappeared,
