Summer was here, and Bertie had plans for her brother. Bertie was now a young lady of eighteen, a brilliant, flashing creature—she picked out clothing shiny enough for a circus dancer. Her trim little legs were sheathed in the glossiest and most diaphanous silk, and her fancy, pointed shoes were without a scratch. If Bertie got a dress of purple or carmine or orange or green, why then, mysteriously, there were stockings and shoes, and a hat and gloves and even a handbag of the same shade; Dad said she would soon be having sport-cars to match. Dad was grimly humorous about the stacks of bills, and not a little puzzled by this splendid young butterfly he had helped to hatch out. Aunt Emma said the child was entitled to her fling, and so Dad paid the charges, but he stood as solid as Gibraltar against Bertie’s efforts to push him into her social maelstrom. By golly, no—he was scared to death of them high muckymucks, and especially the women, when they glared at him through their law-nets, or whatever they called them—he felt the size of a potato-bug. What could he say to people that didn’t know an under-reamer from a sucker-rod rotator?
This vulgar attitude had been taken up by Bunny, who thought it was smart—so his sister jeered. Of course a young lady of eighteen hardly condescends to be aware of the existence of a kid of sixteen; but there were younger brothers and sisters of Bertie’s rich friends, and she wanted Bunny to scrape the oil from underneath his fingernails, and come into this fashionable world, and get a more worthwhile girl than Rosie Taintor. Bunny, always curious about new things, tried it for a while, and had to confess that these ineffable rich young persons didn’t interest him very much; he couldn’t see that they knew anything, or could do anything special. Their talk was all about one another, and they had so many cryptic allusions and so much homemade slang that it amounted almost to a new language. Bunny didn’t like any of them well enough to be interested in deciphering it, and he would rather put on his oil clothes and drive out to the wells that were drilling, and if there was no other job for a roughneck, he would help the cathead-men and the tool-dressers to scrape out the mass of sand and ground-up rock that came out with the mud, and that was forever choking the way to the sump-hole.
Meantime Bunny was thinking, and pretty soon he had a scheme. “Dad,” said he, “what about that cabin we were going to build at Paradise?”
“Well, what?” asked Dad.
“Paul writes that Ruth has come to stay with him. So next fall, when we want to go after quail, there won’t be any place for us. Let’s go up there now, and have a holiday, and build that cabin now.”
“But son, it’s hot as Flujins up there in summer!” Bunny didn’t know where or what “Flujins” might be; but he answered that Paul was standing it, and anyhow it was good for you to sweat, Dad was getting too heavy, and he could sit under the bougainvillea vine in a Palm Beach suit while Bunny did carpentry work with Paul, and it would be a change, and Bunny would call up Dr. Blakiston and have him order it. Whereupon Dad grinned, and said all right, and he might jist as well adopt that Watkins pair and be done with it.
So they went up to the Rascum ranch, taking their tent along—and Paul and Ruth insisted on giving up the house, and Ruth slept in the tent, and Paul made his bed in the empty haymow. Paul had hired a horse and plow, and had a flourishing vegetable garden and big patch of beans, and had set in strawberries which he was tending with a little hand cultivator; they had half a dozen goats, and plenty of milk, and some chickens which Ruth took care of.
And most amazing of all, Paul had got the books from Judge Minter’s library. Most of them were still in boxes, because there was no place for them; but Paul had made some shelves out of a packing-box, and there stood Huxley and Haeckel and Renan, and other writers absolutely fatal to the soul of any person who reads them. But “Pap” had given up, Ruth said, she had got too growed up all of a sudden, too big to be “whaled”; and besides, Pap’s rheumatix was terrible, and Eli couldn’t heal it. Dad said that when they were ordering the lumber for the cabin they would get some stuff for bookshelves, and Paul could build them during the winter. Dad and Paul had another argument, and Dad said this was his house, wasn’t it, and he sure had a right to put some bookshelves in it if he wanted them; Paul could lend him some books when he come up here, and jist help him get a bit of education, even now, as old as he was.
It was a happy family, and a fine place to be, because it took Dad’s mind off his wells, and his trouble with one of his best foremen, that had gone and got married to a fool flapper, and didn’t have his mind on his work no more. They got the lumber from the dealer at Roseville, and Paul was the “boss-carpenter,” and Bunny was the “jack-carpenter,” and Dad kind of fussed around until he got to perspiring too hard, and then he went and sat under the bougainvillea blossoms, and Ruth opened him a bottle of grape-juice, that was part of the fancy stuff he had brought in.
And then in the evening they would
