So Bunny, in the midst of his father’s glory, would pass down the street and encounter poor Mr. Dumpery, coming home from the trolley with dragging steps, after having driven some thousands of shingle-nails into a roof; or Mr. Sahm, the plasterer, tending his little garden, with its rows of corn and beans that were irrigated with a hose. Bunny would see Mrs. Groarty, feeding her chickens and cleaning out her rabbit-hutches—but never again did he see the fancy evening-gown of yellow satin! He would go inside, and sit down and chat, in order not to seem “stuck-up”; and there was the stairway that led to nowhere, and the copy of “The Ladies’ Guide: A Practical Handbook of Gentility,” still resting on the centre-table, its blue silk now finger-soiled, and its gold letters tarnished. Bunny’s eyes took in these things, and he realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where many are called and few are chosen. VIII Scattered here and there over the hill were derricks, and the drilling crews were racing to be the first to tap the precious treasure. By day you saw white puffs from the steam-engines, and by night you saw lights gleaming on the derricks, and day and night you heard the sound of heavy machinery turning, turning—“ump-um—ump-um—ump-um—ump-um.” The newspapers reported the results, and a hundred thousand speculators and would-be speculators read the reports, and got into their cars and rode out to the field where the syndicates had their tents, or thronged the board-rooms in town, where prices were chalked up on blackboards, and “units” were sold to people who would not know an oil-derrick from a “chute the chutes.” Who do you think stood first in the newspaper reports? You would need to make but one guess—Ross-Bankside No. 1. Dad was right there, day and night, knowing the men who were working for him, watching them, encouraging them, scolding them if need be—and so Dad had not had a single accident, he had not lost a day or night. The well was down to thirty-two hundred feet, and in the first stratum of oil-sand. They were using an eight-inch bit, and for some time they had been taking a core. Dad was strenuous about core-drilling; he insisted that you must know every inch of the hole, and he would tell stories of men who had drilled through paying oil-sands and never known it. So the drill brought up a cylinder of rock, exactly like the core you would take out of an apple; and Bunny learned to tell shale from sandstone, and conglomerate from either. He learned to measure the tilt of the strata, and what that told the geologist about the shape of things down below, and the probable direction of the anticline. When there were traces of oil, there had to be chemical analyses, and he learned to interpret these reports. Every oil-pool in the world was different—each one a riddle, with colossal prizes for the men who could guess it!