Meantime Dad would be spending the day at his little office down in the business part of the town. There he had a stenographer and a bookkeeper, and all the records of his various wells. There came people who wanted to offer him new leases, and hustling young salesmen to show him a wonderful new device in the way of an “under-reamer,” or to persuade him that wrought casing lasts longer than cast steel, or to explain the model of a new bit, that was making marvelous records in the Palomar field. Dad would see them all, for they might have something, you never could be sure. But woe to the young man who hadn’t got his figures just right; for Dad had copies of the logs of every one of his wells, and he would pull out the book, and show the embarrassed young man exactly what he had done over at Lobos River with a Stubbs Fishtail number seven.
Then the postman would come, bringing reports from all the wells; and Dad would dictate letters and telegrams. Or perhaps the phone would ring—long distance calling Mr. Ross; and Dad would come home to lunch fuming—that fellow Impey over at Antelope had gone and broke his leg, letting a pipe fall on him: that chap with the black moustache, you remember? Bunny said, yes, he remembered; the one Dad had bawled out. “I fired him,” said Dad; “and then I got sorry for his wife and children, and took him back. I found that fellow down on his knees, with his head stuck between the chain and the bull-wheel—and he knew we had no bleeder-valve on that engine! Jist tryin’ to get out a piece of rope, he said—and his fingers jammed up in there! What’s the use a-tryin’ to do anything for people that ain’t got sense enough to take care of their own fingers, to say nothing of their heads? By golly, I don’t see how they ever live long enough to grow black moustaches on their faces!” So Dad would fuss—his favorite theme, the shiftlessness of the working-class whom he had to employ. Of course he had a purpose; drilling is a dangerous business at best, and Bunny must know what he was doing when he went poking about under a derrick.
There came a telegram from Lobos River; Number Two was stuck. First, they had lost a set of tools, and then, while they were stringing up for the fishing job, a roughneck had dropped a steel crowbar into the hole! They were down four thousand feet, and fishing is costly sport at that depth! Seemed like there was a jinx in that hole; they had jammed three times, and they were six weeks behind their schedule. Dad fretted, and he would call up the well every couple of hours all day, but nothing doing; they tried this device and that, and Dad phoned them to try something else, but in vain. The hole caved in on them, and they had to clean out and fish ahead, run after run. They had caught the tools and jarred them out, but the crowbar was still down there, wedged fast.
The third evening Dad said he guessed he’d have to run over to Lobos River; it was time to set a new casing anyhow, and he liked to oversee those cement fellows. Bunny jumped up, crying, “Take me, Dad!” And Dad said, “Sure thing!” Grandmother made her usual remark about Bunny’s education going to pot; and Dad made his usual answer, that Bunny would have all his life to learn about poetry and history—now he was going to learn about oil, while he had his father to teach him. Aunt Emma tried to get Mr. Eaton to say something in defense of poetry and history, but the tutor kept a discreet silence—he knew who held the purse-strings in that family! Bunny understood that Mr. Eaton didn’t mind about it; he was preparing a thesis that was to get him a master’s degree, and he used his spare time quite contentedly, counting the feminine endings in certain of the pre-Elizabethan dramatists.
VII
Well, they made the trip back to the old field; and Bunny remembered all the adventures of the last ride, the place where they had had lunch, and what the waitress had said, and the place where they had stopped for gas, and what the man had said, and the place where they had run into the speed-cop. It was like fishing—that is, for real fish, like you catch in water, not in oil wells; you remember where you got the big fish, and you expect another bite there. But the big fish always come at a new place, said Dad, and it was the same with speed-cops. A cop picked them up just outside Beach City, passing a speed-trap at forty-seven miles; and Dad grinned and chaffed the cop, and said he was glad he hadn’t been really going fast.
They got to Lobos River that evening; and there was the rig, fishing away—screwing the stands of pipe together and working down into the hole with some kind of grabbing device on the end, and then hauling up and unscrewing—stand after stand, fifty or sixty of them, one after another—until at last you got to the bottom one, only to find that you had missed your “fish!”
Well, Dad said his say, in tones that nobody could help hearing. If he couldn’t find men who would take care of their own bones, it was doubtless too much to hope they would take care of his property. They stood there, looking like a lot of schoolboys getting a birching—though of course the roughneck who was wholly to blame had been turned loose on the road long ago.
There was a salesman from a supply house there with a patent device which he guaranteed would bring up
