What they were really saying was: “Dad is waiting for us! Dad has signed his lease, and the derrick is under way, and his ‘rig’ must be on time! Clear the road!” Dad would not trust to railroads for a rush job like this; they switched your stuff onto sidings, and you spent a week telephoning and interviewing dumb officials. But when you hired motortrucks, you owned them for the time being, and they came right through. There was insurance to cover all possible accidents—including the value of any man you might chance to send rolling down a mountainside in a Ford car!
So here came the dozen valiant tooters, toiling slowly up the grade, at far less than the ordained speed of fifteen miles per hour. Their radiators were hissing with steam, and every mile or so they would have to stop and cool off. But they got to the summit all right; and then came the slow crawl downwards, a man going ahead with a red flag, warning other cars into safe pockets on the road, to wait till the whole fleet had got by. So they got out of the pass, and onto the straight road, where they could go flying like any other cars; then it was a mighty roaring and a jolly sight. “Honk! Honk! Get out of the way! Dad is waiting!”
Perched on top of the drilling tools were young fellows in blue-jeans and khaki, giving abundant evidence that their last well had not been a dry hole, but had given its due yield of smeary treasures. However, they had got their faces clean, and they met the sunny landscape with no less sunny smiles. They sang songs, and exchanged jollifications with the cars they passed, and threw kisses to the girls in the ranch-houses and the filling-stations, the orange-juice parlors and the “good eats” shacks. Two days the journey took them, and meantime they had not a care in the world; they belonged to Old Man Ross, and it was his job to worry. First of all things he saw that they got their pay-envelopes every other Saturday night—and that the envelopes contained one dollar per day more than anybody else nearby was getting; moreover, you got this pay, not only while you were drilling, but while you were sitting on top of a load of tools, flying through a paradise of orange-groves at thirty miles an hour, singing songs about the girl who was waiting for you in the town to which you were bound.
II
Dad had signed up with the man on the North slope, Mr. Bankside, a gentleman who knew what he wanted, and didn’t waste your time. It was not so close to the discovery well, therefore Dad would have to pay only a sixth royalty, and a bonus of five thousand dollars on the two and one-half acres.
Dad and Bunny called at the offices of the Sunset Lumber Company, and had a very special private interview with the president of this concern. Mr. Ascott was a heavy gentleman with flushed cheeks and a manner of strenuous cordiality; he rumpled Bunny’s hair, and swapped cigars in gold-foil, and discussed the weather and the prospects of the new field, so that you’d have thought he and Dad were lifelong chums. Until at last Dad got down to business, and said that he positively had to have the lumber for a derrick delivered on the ground within three days; whereupon Mr. Ascott threw up his hands and declared that such an order could not be filled for God Almighty himself. The demand for derrick material had simply emptied all the yards, and orders were piling up a score a day. But Dad interrupted—he knew all that, but this was something special, he had jist got himself into a contract with a big forfeit posted at the bank, and he didn’t believe in steel derricks, but the lumber men would sure have to help him, unless they wanted to lose him for good. He wanted to place an order for half a dozen more derricks, to be delivered in the course of the next three months; and moreover, Mr. Ascott must understand that this well Dad proposed to drill was going to extend the field, and lead to new developments, and a big increase in the lumber business, so it was really a public service Dad was performing, and they must all stand together and help him. Moreover, Dad was forming a little syndicate to handle a part of this first well—jist a quiet affair for a few people that knew a good thing when they saw it, and would appreciate getting in on the ground floor; and Mr. Ascott knew Dad for a man of his word, and no piker.
Mr. Ascott said that yes, he
