The old man, Carberry, had set out to homestead a claim to some lands nearby; and oil had been discovered, and Mid-Central Pete had just come in and shoved him out, paying him not a cent for his twenty-two hundred dollars of improvements. They could do this—the old man had a copy of the law to show how it read, excluding mineral lands from homestead rights; there were thousands in this part of the state who had been caught in that trap. But Carberry had actually got a patent on his land, and so had a valid claim; but somebody had managed to doctor the government records, and now for several years he had been struggling for redress. With pathetic trustfulness he had written to his congressman, to get a lawyer in Washington to represent him, and the congressman had recommended a lawyer, and Carberry had sent him money several times with no result—and then, going to Washington, had discovered that the alleged lawyer was simply a clerk in the congressman’s office, plundering land claimants and presumably dividing the graft with his employer!
A pitiful, pitiful story—and the worst part of it, you could see it wasn’t a single case, but a system. One more way by which the rich and powerful were plundering the poor and weak! Carberry had with him a government document he had managed to get in Washington, the report of a congressional investigation of California land cases. Bunny spent an evening glancing through it—a thousand pages of wholesale fraud and stealing in close print. For example, the seizure of oil rights by the railroads! The government land grants had turned over to the railroads every other section of land along their right of way, but had specifically exempted all mineral lands. Wherever minerals might be discovered, the roads were bound to surrender these sections and take other sections. Under the law, the word “minerals” included petroleum; but were the railroads paying any attention to that law? The Southern Pacific alone had California oil lands to a value of more than a billion dollars; but every effort to recover these properties for the state had been blocked by cunning lawyers and purchased politicians and judges. As they drove home, Bunny tried to tell his father about this; but what could Dad do? What could he do about old Carberry, who had been robbed of his home by “Mid-Central Pete”? You could be sure that Dad wasn’t going “smelling round Verne’s outhouse”!
XVII
The Exposure
I
All that fall and winter the quail had been calling from the hills of Paradise unheeded. Bunny didn’t want to go there. But now it chanced that Dad had some matters to see to, and his chauffeur had got sent to jail for turning bootlegger in his off hours. Dad was having spells of bad health, when he did not feel equal to driving; and this being a Friday, his son offered to take him.
The Ross Junior tract had nothing left of Bunny but the name. There was a strange woman as housekeeper in the ranch-house, and the Rascum cabin had been moved, and the bougainvillea vine replaced by a derrick. Every one of the fellows who had met with Paul was gone, and there were no more intellectual discussions. Paradise was now a place where men worked hard at getting out oil, and kept their mouths closed. There were hundreds of men Bunny had never seen before, and these had brought a new atmosphere. They patronized the bootleggers and the poolrooms, and places for secret gambling and drinking. “Orange-pickers” was the contemptuous name the real oil workers applied to this new element, and their lack of familiarity with their jobs was a cause of endless trouble; they would slip from greasy derricks, or get crushed by the heavy pipe, and the company had had to build an addition to the hospital. But of course that was cheaper than paying union wages to skilled men!
A deplorable thing happened to Bunny; his reading of a book was interrupted by a visit from the wife of Jick Duggan, one of the men in the county jail. The woman insisted on seeing him, and then insisted on weeping all over the place, and telling him harrowing tales about her husband and the other fellows. She begged him to go and see for himself, and he was weak enough to yield—you can see how imprudent it was, on the part of a young oil prince who was trying to grow his hard-shell, so that he could be a help to his old father, and enjoy life with a darling of the world. Bunny knew that he was doing wrong, and showed his guilt by not telling his father where he was going that rainy Saturday afternoon.
They let him into the jail without objection; the men who kept the place being used to it, and unable to foresee the impression it would make upon a young idealist. The ancient dungeon had been contrived by an architect with a special genius for driving his fellow beings mad. The “tanks,” instead of having doors with keys, like other jail cells, were designed as revolving turrets, and whenever you wanted to put a prisoner in or take one out, you revolved the turret until an opening in one set of bars corresponded with an opening in another set. This revolving was done by means of a hand-winch, and involved a frightful grinding and shrieking of rusty iron. There were three such tanks, one on top of the other, and the revolving of any one inflicted the uproar on everybody. In the course of the jail’s forty years of history, scores of men had gone mad from having to listen to these sounds at all hours of the day and night.
Have you ever had the experience of seeing some person you know and love shut behind bars like a wild beast?
