Next morning they said good-bye to Paul, and went back into the mountains, and spent most of the day getting fish; and then they set out for Beach City, and got in just about bed-time. Bunny went back to school, and his new duties as treasurer for the baseball team; and Dad set to work putting four more wells on the Armitage tract, and three on the Wagstaff tract. And meantime the nations of Europe had established for themselves two lines of death, extending all the way across the continent; and millions of men, as if under the spell of some monstrous enchantment, rushed to these lines to have their bodies blown to pieces and their life-blood poured out upon the ground. The newspapers told about battles that lasted for months, and the price of petroleum products continued to pile up fortunes for J. Arnold Ross. 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 hand-bag 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?