Oil!

Yes, he had "the stuff," barrels of it - and what is a magician who pulls rabbits and yards of ribbon out of his sleeves, compared with one who can pull out a couple of dozen oil-derricks, and as many miles of steel casing, and tanks, and fleets of motor-trucks, and roads for them to run on?
- p 60

Drilling was always a dirty business; you swam in pale grey mud until the well came in, and after that you slid in oil.
- p 65

It was like fishing - that is, for real fish, like you catch in water, not in oil-wells; you remember where you got the big fish, and you expect another bite there. But the big fish always come at a new place, said Dad, and it was the same with "speed-cops." 
- p 69

It was amazing to see what had happened to the Prospect Hill field. All over the top of the hill and the slopes a forest of oil derricks had arisen, and had started marching acros s the fields of cabbages and sguar beets. Seeing them from the distance, in the haze of sunset, you could fancy an army of snails moving forth - the kind which have rests lifted high in the air. When you came near, you heard a roaring and a grumbling, as of Pulot's realm; at night there was a scene of enchantment, a blur of white and golden lights, with jets of steam, and a glare of leaping flame where they were burning gas that came roaring out of the earth, and which they had no way to use.
- p 113

...but they must change their European bonds into good American dollar,s and pay him with these latter. He would offer to take them to the little roadside restaurant where they could see the sign: "We have an arrangement with our bank; the bank does not sell soup, and we do not cash checks."
- p 115

Eli was a lunatic, and a dangerous one, but a kind that you couldn't put in an asylum, because he used the phrases of religion.
- p 123

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 thave their bodies blown to pieces and their life blood puoured 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.
- p 130

Bunny - of course without any hint that he had ever had personal knowledge of such a thing - had asked the lady teacher about the possibility of a business man's paying a public official extra sums for his time and trouble in public matters; and the lady teacher had been shocked by such a suggestion, and had declared that it would be bribery without question. So now Bunny told Dad, and the latter explained. It was the difference between a theoretical and a practical view of a question. The lady teacher had never had to drill an oil well, her business didn't depend on moving heavy materials over a sheep-trail; all she did was jist to sit in a room and use high-soundin words, like "ideals" and "democracy" and "public service." That was the trouble with this education business, the people that taught was people that never done things, and had no real knowledge of the world.
- p 137

They stopped and got out, and Dad told Bunny to take the car back to a safe place, and not come near him or the other man with the dynamite; they would make their way to the well, very carefully. Bunny heard dad telling the other man to go slow, they'd not risk their lives jist to save a few barrels of oil.
When Bunny got back to the well again, Dad and the man were already there, and the crew was setting dynamite. They had some kind of electric battery to explode it with, and presently they were ready, and everybody wsstood back, and the strange man pushed down a handle, and there was a roar and a burst of flame fro mthe shaft, and the geyser of oil thgat was rushing out of the well was snubbed off in an instant - just as if you stopped a garden hose by pinching it! The tower of oil dropped; it leaped and exploded a few times more, and that was the end. The river of fire was still flowing down the aarroyo, and would take a long time to burn itself out; but the main part of the show was over.
And nobody was hurt - that is, nobody but Bnny, who stood by the edge of the red glare, gaing at the stump of his beautiful oil derrick, and the charred foundations of his home-made bunkhouse, and all the wreckage of his hopes. If the boy had been a little younger, ther ewould have been tears in his eyes. Dad came up to him and saw his face, and guessed the truth, and began to laugh. "Waht's the matter, son? Don't you realize that you've got your oil? ...Cheer up, son! This here is nothin, this is a joke. You're a millionaire ten times over."
- p 163 

“Listen, Dad,” the boy pleaded; “isn’t there some way we could break that combination? Couldn’t you stop your new developments, and put everything on a cash basis, and go slow? You know, that might be better, in a way; you’re trying to do too much, and you need a rest badly.” The other could not help smiling, in spite of the pain he read in Bunny’s face. “Son,” he answered, “if I set out to buck that game, I’d never have another hour’s rest, till you buried me up there on the hill beside Joe Gundha.” “But you’ve got the oil, and if you settle with the men, it will go on flowing. It will be the only oil from this whole district!” “Yes, son, but oil ain’t cash; it has got to be sold.” “You mean they wouldn’t take it from you?” “I can’t say, son; I’ve never known such a case, and I don’t know jist what they’d do. All I say is this—they wouldn’t let me lose their strike for them! They’d find some way to get me, jist as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise!”
- p 177

“When my father set up his will, and tried to keep me from thinking and learning the truth, I opposed him, didn’t I? And you encouraged me to do it—you thought that was all right.” 
“But Paul! If I were to oppose Dad in such a thing—why, I’d break his heart.” “Well, maybe I broke my father’s heart—I don’t know, and neither do you. The point is, you father’s doing wrong, and you know it; he’s helping to turn these ruffians loose on us, and deprive us of our rights as citizens, and even as human beings. You can’t deny that, and you have a duty that you owe to the truth.” There was a silence, while Bunny tried to face the appalling idea of opposing Dad, as Paul had opposed old Mr. Watkins. It had seemed so right in the one case, and seemed
so impossible in the other! At last Paul went on. “I know how it is, son. You won’t do it, you haven’t the nerve for it—you’re soft.” He waited, while those cruel words sank in. “Yes, that’s the word, soft. You’ve always had everything you wanted—you’ve had it handed to you on a silver tray, and it’s made you a weakling. You have a good heart, and you know what’s right, but you couldn’t bear to act, you’d be too afraid of hurting somebody.” And that was the end of their talk. Paul had nothing more to say, and Bunny had no answer. 
- p 194



It was like the “big scene” in the old “ten-twenty-thirty” melodrama that we used to see on the Bowery in our boyhood, in which the heroine is lashed to a log in the saw-mill, and being swiftly drawn to the place where she will be sliced down the middle; the hero comes galloping madly on horseback, and leaps from his steed, and smashes in the door with an axe, and springs to the lever and stops the machinery at exactly the critical instant. Or, if you want to be more high-brow and dignified, it was like the ancient Greek tragedies, in which, after the fates of all the characters have been tied into a hopeless knot, a god descends from the sky in a
machine, and steps out, and resolves the perplexities, and virtue is triumphant and vice is cast down. You believe this, because it is in a Greek classic; but you will find it less easy to believe that the “open shop crowd” of California, the whole power of their industrial system, with all the millions of their banks, their political machine and their strike-breaking agencies, their spies and gunmen, and their state militiamen with machine-guns and armored cars in the background—that all this terrific power felt its hand suddenly grasped by a stronger hand, and drawn back from the throat of its victim! Another god descended from a machine—a lean old Yankee
divinity, with a white goatee and a suit made of red and white stripes with blue stars spangled over it; Uncle Sam himself stretched out his mighty hand, and declared that oil workers were human beings as well as citizens, and would be protected in their rights as both! 
- p 196


Then in the morning there would be Dad, and the day’s grinding of their tremendous big machine. Dad at least was dependable, Dad had something he was sure of. Also, he seemed to know all about Bunny without being told, he was gentle and sympathetic in a tactful way, not saying a word, but trying to entertain Bunny, and find things they could do together. Come to think of it, Dad had been through things like this himself! 
- p 217

Bunny went back to Beach City, to face a trial of the same sort. Grandma did not cry or faint, she just went up to her studio-room and locked the door and did not appear, even for meals. When Bunny was ready to go, he went and knocked on the door, and Grandma let him into her laboratory of paints and oils and high art. Her face was drawn but grim, and only her withered red eyelids gave her away. “Little boy,” she said—he was still that to her, he would never grow up—“little boy, you are a victim of the old men’s crimes. That means nothing to you now, but remember it, and some day, long after I’m gone, you’ll understand.”
- p 228

Like all Western universities, Southern Pacific was co-educational; so Bunny was exposed to the impact of a mass of femininity, the distilled and concentrated essence of allurement. Such swarms of graceful figures, trim ankles, dimpled white and brown arms, costumes the color of Brazilian butterflies; a kaleidoscope of smiles and flashing eyes, a perpetual zephyr of soft scents, blown from lilac-bushes and jasmine vines and miles upon miles of California orange and lemon-orchards. Something was bound to
happen to a young idealist in such an environment—especially when he had just spent the summer in a training-camp for men only!
- p 241


“It’s all very well for a feller to go off in his study and figure out how the world ought to be; but that don’t make it that way, son. There has got to be oil, and we fellers that know how to get it out of the ground are the ones that are doing it. You listen to these Socialists and Bolshevikis, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil-lands and developing them—there’d be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for. I’m on the inside, where I can watch it, and I know that when you turn over anything to the
government, you might jist as good bury it ten thousand miles deep in the earth. You talk about laws, but there’s economic laws, too, and government can’t stand against them, no more than anybody else. When government does fool things, then people find a way to get round it, and business men that do it are no more to blame than any other kind of men. This is an oil age, and when you try to shut oil off from production, it’s jist like you tried to dam Niagara falls.” It was a critical moment in their lives. In after years Bunny would look back upon it, and think, oh why had he not put his foot down?
He could have broken his father, if
he had been determined enough! If he had said, “Dad, I will not stand for buying the presidency; and if you go in with Mr. Roscoe on that deal, you’ve got to know that I renounce my inheritance, I will not touch a cent of your money from this day on. I’ll go out and get myself a job, and you can leave your money to Bertie if you want to.” Yes, if he had said that, Dad would have given way; he would have been mortally hurt, and Mr. Roscoe would have been hurt, but Dad would not have helped to nominate Senator Harding.
- p 300



It was a world in which some people worked all the time, and others played all the time. To work all the time was a bore, and no one would do it unless he had to; but to play all the time was equally a bore, and the people who did it never had anything to talk about that Bunny wanted to listen to. They talked about their play, just as solemnly as if it had been work: tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, polo matches—all sorts of complicated ways of hitting a little ball about a field! Now, it was all right, when you needed exercise and recreation, to go out and hit a little ball; but to make a life-work
of it, to give all your time and thought to it, to practice it religiously, read and write books about it, discuss it for hours on end—Bunny looked at these fully grown men and women, with their elaborate outfits of “sports clothes,” and it seemed to him they must be exercising a kind of hypnosis upon themselves, to make themselves believe that they were really enjoying their lives.
- p 302



The world was so beautiful, and at the same time strange, and interesting to be alive in! What must it be like to be a seal? What did they think concerning this arrogant being who commandeered their resting places? Did they see the Rhine castle on the shore, or did they see only fish to eat, and how did they understand so clearly that they must not eat a man? Embarrassing if one of them should be a “red,” and rebel against the genial customs of the phocidae! Thus Bunny—just the same at the age of twenty-one as when first we
met him, driving over the Guadalupe grade and speculating about the feelings of ground-squirrels and butcher-birds. He had completed in the meantime a full course at the Beach City High School, and half a course at Southern Pacific University, but neither institution had told him what he wanted to know!
- p 337


Verne hitched himself a few inches across the desk, and stuck a large finger at Bunny’s face. “Kiddo,” he said, “get this straight: I can buy any officials, just the same as I can buy any politicians, or anybody else that a bunch of boobs can elect to office. And I know what you’re thinking—here’s an old cow-puncher, without any fine ideals, and he’s got a barrel o’ money and thinks he can do anything he pleases with it. But that ain’t the point, my boy—it’s
because I had the brains to make the money, and I got the brains to use it. Money ain’t power till it’s used, and the reason I can buy power is because men know I can use it—or else, by Jees, they wouldn’t sell it to me. You get that?” “Yes, but what are you going to do with the power, Mr. Roscoe?” “I’m going to find oil and bring it to the top of the ground and refine it and sell it to whoever’s got the price. So long as the world needs oil, that’s my job; and when they can get along without oil, I’ll do something else. And if anybody wants a share in that job, let him do
like I done, get out and sweat, and work, and play the game.”
- p 384



Methodists who constituted the faculty were conniving at the procedure, to the extent of permitting these young huskies to pass farcical examinations—well knowing that any professor who presumed to flunk a promising quarterback would soon be looking for some other university to presume in. Was not “Young Pete”
showing what he thought of professors, by paying a football coach three times the salary of the best? And of course these hired athletes were hired to win, and did not bother about the rules of the game; they slugged and fouled, and the rival teams paid them back, and there was a nasty mess, with charges and countercharges, bribery and intimidation—all the atmosphere of a criminal trial. Along with secret professionalism, came its accompaniments of the underworld, bootleggers and bookmakers and prostitutes. Study was a joke to hired gladiators, and quickly became a joke to students
who associated with them. The one purpose was to win games, and the reward was two hundred thousand dollars in gate receipts; and when it came to distributing this prize, there were just as many kinds of graft as if it had been a county government: students putting in bills for this and that, students looking for easy jobs, students and alumni building up a machine, and paying themselves and their henchmen with contracts and favors. Such was the result of an oil king’s resolve to manufacture culture wholesale, by executive order!
- p 409


Bunny and Vee loved each other, just as passionately as ever. At
least, they told themselves it was as ever, but all the while the subtle chemistry of change was at work. Men and women are not bodies only, and cannot be satisfied with delights of the body only. Men and women are minds, and have to have harmony of ideas. Can they be bored with each other’s ideas, and still be just as much in love? Men and women are characters, and these characters lead to actions—and what if they lead to different actions? What if the man wants to read a book, while the woman wants to go to a dance?
- p 413



“That’s the way an unpopular cause has to grow—there’s no other way. Here I am, an obscure workingman, and nobody pays any attention to what I think or say; but if they try me as a Communist, I make people talk and think about our ideas.”
- p 431


“I used to think I was going to do a lot of great things. But the last few years have taught me that a workingman isn’t very important in this capitalist world, and he has to remember his place. A lot of us are going to jail, and a lot more are going to die. The one thing we must be sure of is that we help to awaken the slaves.”
- p 431