Thus, day by day, Bunny got his oil lessons. He wandered about the field with Dad and the geologist and the boss driller, while they laid out the sites for future wells; and Dad took an envelope and pencil, and explained to Bunny why you place your wells on the four corners of a diamond, and not on the four corners of a square. You may try that out for yourself, drawing a circle about each well, to indicate the territory from which the oil is drained; you will see that the diamond shape covers the ground with less overlapping. Wherever you overlap, you are drilling two holes to get the same barrel of oil; and only a dub would do that.
They drove back to Beach City, and found that Bertie had come home. Bertie was Bunny’s sister, two years his senior, and she had been visiting the terribly fashionable Woodbridge Rileys, up north. Bunny tried to tell her about the fishing-job, and how things were going at Lobos River, but she was most cruelly cutting—described him as a “little oil gnome,” and said that his fingernails were a “dead giveaway.” It appeared that Bertie had become ashamed of oil; and this was something new, for of old she had been a good pal, interested in the business, and arguing with Bunny and bossing him as any older sister should. Bunny didn’t know what to make of it, but gradually he came to understand that this was a part of the fashionable education Bertie was getting at Miss Castle’s school.
Aunt Emma was to blame for this. She had granted Jim’s right to confine Bunny’s training to the making of money, but Bertie at least should be a young lady—meaning that she should learn how to spend the money which Dad and Bunny were going to make. So Aunt Emma got the name of the most expensive school for young female money-spenders, and from that time on the family saw little of Bertie; after school she went to visit her new rich friends. She couldn’t bring them to her home, there being no real butler—Rudolph was a “farmhand,” she declared. She had picked up some wonderful new slang; if she didn’t like what you said, she would tell you that you were “full of prunes”—this was away back in history, you understand. She would give a pirouette and show off her fancy lingerie, with violet-colored ribbons in it; she would laugh gleefully: “Aren’t I a speedy young thing?”—and other phrases which caused grandmother to stare and Dad to grin. She would be pained by her father’s grammar: “Oh, Dad, don’t say ‘jist’!” And Dad would grin again, and reply: “I been a-sayin’ it jist fifty-nine years.” But all the same, he began a-sayin’ it less frequently; which is how civilization progresses.
Bertie condescended to drive out to the field, and see the new derricks that were going up. They went for a walk, and whom should they meet but Mrs. Groarty, getting out of her elderly Ford car in front of her home. Bunny was naively glad to see her, and insisted upon introducing Bertie, who displayed her iciest manner, and, as they went on, scolded Bunny because of his horrid vulgar taste; he might pick up acquaintance with every sort of riffraff if he chose, but certainly he need not make his sister shake hands with them! Bunny could not understand—he never did succeed in understanding, all his life long, how people could fail to be interested in other people.
He told Bertie about Paul, and what a wonderful fellow he was, but Bertie said just what Dad had said, that Paul was “crazy.” More than that, she became angry, she thought that Paul was a “horrid fellow,” she was glad Bunny hadn’t been able to find him again. That was an attitude which Bertie was to show to Paul all through Paul’s life; she showed it at the very first instant, and poor Bunny was utterly bewildered. But in truth, it was hardly reasonable to expect that Bertie, who was going to school in order to learn to admire money—to find out by intuition exactly how much money everybody had, and to rate them accordingly—should be moved to admiration by a man who insisted that you had no right to money unless you had earned it!
Bertie was following her nature, and Bunny followed his. The anger of his sister had the effect of setting Paul upon a lonely eminence in Bunny’s imagination; a strange, half-legendary figure, the only person who had ever had a chance to get some of Dad’s money, and had refused it! Every now and then Bunny would stop by and sit on a rabbit-hutch, and ask Mrs. Groarty for news about her nephew. One time the stout lady showed him a badly scrawled note from Ruth Watkins—Paul’s sister, whom he loved—saying that the family had had no word; also that they were having a hard time keeping alive, they were having to kill a goat now and then—and Mrs. Groarty said that was literally eating up their capital. Later on there was another letter from Ruth, saying that Paul had written to her; he was up north, and still on the move, so no one could get hold of him; he sent a five-dollar bill in a registered letter, and specified that it was to go for food, and not for missions. It wasn’t easy to
