But Dad had no kick just now; everything was a-comin’ his way a-whoopin’. Right in the midst of his other triumphs it had occurred to him to take one of his old Antelope wells and go a little lower, and see what he found; he tried it—and lo and behold, at eight hundred feet farther down the darn thing went and blew its head off. They were in a new layer of oil-sands; and every one of these sixteen old wells, that had been on the pump for a couple of years, and were about played out, were ready to present Dad with a new fortune, at a cost of only a few thousand dollars each!
But right away came a new problem; there was no pipeline to this field, and there ought to be one. Dad wanted some of the other operators to go in with him, and he was going up there and make a deal. Then Bunny came to him, looking very serious. “Dad, have you forgotten, it’s close to the fifteenth of November.”
“What about it, son?”
“You promised we were going quail-shooting this year.”
“By gosh, that’s so! But I’m frightfully rushed jist now, son.”
“You’re working too hard, Dad; Aunt Emma says you’re putting a strain on your kidneys, the doctor has told you so.”
“Does he recommend a quail diet?”
Bunny knew by Dad’s grin that he was going to make some concession. “Let’s take our camping things,” the boy pleaded, “and when you get through at Antelope, let’s come home by the San Elido valley.”
“The San Elido! But son, that’s fifty miles out of our way!”
“They say there’s no end of quail there, Dad.”
“Yes, but we can get quail a lot nearer home.”
“I know, Dad; but I’ve never been there, and I want to see it.”
“But what made you hit on that place?”
Bunny was embarrassed, because he knew Dad was going to think he was queer. Nevertheless, he persisted. “That’s where the Watkins family live.”
“Watkins family—who are they?”
“Don’t you remember that boy, Paul, that I met one night when you were talking about the lease?”
“Gosh, son! You still a-frettin’ about that boy?”
“I met Mrs. Groarty on the street yesterday, and she told me about the family; they’re in dreadful trouble, they’re going to lose their ranch to the bank because they can’t meet the interest on the mortgage, and Mrs. Groarty says she can’t think what they’ll do. You know Mrs. Groarty didn’t get any money herself—at least, she spent her bonus money for units, and she isn’t getting anything out of them, and has to live on what her husband gets as a night watchman.”
“What you want to do about it?”
“I want you to buy that mortgage, Dad; or anything, so the Watkinses can stay in their home. It’s wicked that people should be turned out like that, when they’re doing the best they can.”
“There’s plenty o’ people bein’ turned out when they don’t meet their obligations, son.”
“But when it’s not their fault, Dad?”
“It would take a lot of bookkeeping to figger jist whose fault it is; and the banks don’t keep books that way.” Then seeing the protest in Bunny’s face, “You’ll find, son there’s a lot o’ harsh things in the world, that ain’t in your power to change. You’ll jist have to make up your mind to that, sooner or later.”
“But Dad, there’s four children there, and three of them are girls, and where are they to go? Paul is away, and they haven’t any way to let him know what’s happened. Mrs. Groarty showed me a picture of them, Dad; they’re good, kind people, you can see they’ve never done anything but work hard. Honest, Dad, I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t help them. You said you’d buy me a car some day, and I’d rather you took the money and bought that mortgage. It’s less than a couple of thousand dollars, and that’s nothing to you.”
“I know, son; but then you’ll get them on your hands—”
“No, they’re not like that, they’re proud; Mrs. Groarty says they wouldn’t take money from you, any more than Paul would. But if you bought the mortgage from the bank, they couldn’t help that. Or you might buy the ranch, Dad, and rent it back to them. Paul says there’s oil on that ranch—at least his Uncle Eby had seen it on top of the ground.”
“There’s thousands of ranches jist like that in California, son. Oil on top of the ground don’t mean anything special.”
“Well, Dad, you’ve always said you wanted to try some wildcatting; and you know, that’s the only way you’ll ever get what you talk about—a whole big tract that belongs to you, with no royalties to pay, and nobody to butt in. So let’s take a chance on Paradise, and drive through there and camp out a few days and get some quail, and we’ll see what we think of it, and we’ll help those poor people, and give your kidneys a rest at the same time.”
So Dad said all right; and he
