"Yes," Fulkerson laughed. "We've got round to Dryfoos again. I thought
I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story
long. If you're not in a hurry, though--"

"Not in the least. Go on as long as you like."

"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator,
of course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and
public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about
him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four
miles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life;
father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the right
stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those
Pennsylvania Dutch. He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm
anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was
in some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the
papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his
ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads;
it was a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated
it awfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the
weekly newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and
throw cold water on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him
sick to hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and
that stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he'd
hear of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was
going to sell out and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and
try to talk him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty
thousand would last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company
before him, and try to make him believe it wouldn't be five years before
the Standard owned the whole region.

"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a man's offered a
big price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary
from the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of
the other fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of has
own family even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and
did was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But
the young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away
to school. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't be
spar