And what was Bertie, that the oil workers should support her? She was a dashing and brilliant young person, who knew how to spend a great deal of money in super-elegant ways, in the company of other young persons possessing the same accomplishment; she was racing about with them, and her talk was of what they said and what they did and what they owned. Bertie was going a fast pace, seldom in before the small hours of the morning, and if she was up before lunch, it was because she had an engagement to rush away. What was the use of having a lot of money if you didn’t have a good time with it? That was the doctrine Bertie hammered into her younger brother; and Aunt Emma echoed it; and now came Eunice Hoyt, who had chosen Bunny, and had the most powerful leverage of all. Be young, be young! everybody cried. Why should you carry all the burden of the world upon your shoulders? Especially since there was not a thing you could do—since the world was fixed and ordained, and would not let you touch the least of all its vested and endowed and chartered disharmonies! VII The German submarines had sunk one American vessel too many, and America was going to war; Congress had been summoned, and the whole country was on tiptoe with belligerency. The newspapers had pages of despatches from Washington and New York, and from the capitals of Europe; so it was not surprising that the news of the Paradise oil strike got crowded out. Once in a while you saw an inch or two buried in a back page; three strikers had been arrested, charged with beating up a strike-breaker on a dark night; it was declared by the operators that the strikers had attempted to set fires in the district, and that German agents were active among the trouble-makers: some little thing like that, to remind you that three thousand men, and the wives and children of many of them, were waging a desperate struggle with starvation. Dad of course had daily reports of what was happening, and so Bunny got the news. Little by little the operators had gathered up a supply of men, paying them extra wages, and bringing them to the field. They were seldom skilled men, and there were many accidents; nevertheless, a number of the wells were back on production, and in two or three cases some drilling was being done. But on the Ross tract everything stood idle; and Bunny could see that his father was irritated by this situation. He was losing a fortune every day—and at the same time losing caste with his associates, who thought he was either crack-brained, or a traitor, they could not make out which. Of course, the Big Five were glad enough to see one of the independents cutting his own throat; but they pretended to be indignant, and spread rumors and propaganda against their rival, and magnified the trouble he was causing in the field.