Nothing so great as this Kansas and Indian Territory field had ever been known. Every well was to be a gusher, every settlement a city. On every side they were selling town lots and stock in oil companies. One of the most irresponsible stock-selling schemes I have ever known, I happened on in one of these trips. Two anxious-faced boys were going about among experienced oilmen begging them for oil leases, preferably oil leases on which there was a proved well. The lads had come as sightseers and had been caught in the wild excitement of the region. Everybody had a scheme to make himself and his friends rich. Why not they? And largely as a joke they had sent out a flamboyant letter offering stock in a mythical oil field. The letter had gone to scores of innocents in the East, and in answer schoolteachers, clergymen, and women with little or no money had poured in subscriptions. If there had been few subscriptions they would have been able to return them, but here they were when I saw them with literally a suitcase full of checks and money orders and not a foot of land leased, and in the excitement there was practically no land to be had. They must either get a lease or go to the penitentiary, they concluded. Hence their alarm, their pitiful begging of older men to help them out of the predicament into which their irresponsibility had plunged them. It was not long before I found I was being taken for something more serious than a mere journalist. Conservative Standard Oil sympathizers regarded me as a spy and not infrequently denounced me as an enemy to society. Independent oilmen and radical editors, who were in the majority, called me a prophet. It brought fantastic situations where I was utterly unfit to play the part. A woman of twenty-five, fresh, full of zest, only interested in what was happening to her, would have reveled in the experience. But here I was—fifty, fagged, wanting to be let alone while I collected trustworthy information for my articles—dragged to the front as an apostle. The funniest things were the welcomes. The funniest of all was at the then new town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had arrived late at night in what seemed to me a no man’s land, and after considerable trouble had found a place in a rough little hostelry where I was so suspicious of the look of things that I moved the bureau against the lockless door. I am sure now that I was as safe there as I should have been in my bed at home. I had registered, of course, and the next morning before I had finished my breakfast I was waited on by the editor of the local newspaper, who took me to his office, a barnlike structure next door, for an interview. Almost immediately a handsome youth in knickerbockers and high laced boots came hurriedly in. “I think I ought to tell you, Miss Tarbell,” he said with a grin, “that you are in for a serenade.” “A serenade,” I said, “what do you mean?”