better food or
service in any restaurant, New York or I don't care where. But say,
hotel meals are hotel meals. You get tired of 'em. Ever eat at Pardee's,
up the street? Say, there's food! If you're going to be here in town any
time why'n't you call up there some evening before six--you have to
leave 'em know--and get one of Pardee's dinners? Thursday's chicken. And
when I say chicken I mean----Well, just try it, that's all.... And for
God's sake don't make a mistake and tip Maxine."

Pardee's you find to be a plain box-like two-story frame house in a
quiet and commonplace residential district. Plainly--almost
scantily--furnished as to living room and dining room. The dining room
comfortably seats just twenty, but the Pardees "take" eighteen
diners--no more. This because Mrs. Pardee has eighteen of everything in
silver. And that means eighteen of everything from grapefruit spoons to
cheese knives; and finger bowls before and after until you feel like an
early Roman. As for Maxine--the friendly warning is superfluous. You
would as soon have thought of slipping Hebe a quarter on Olympus--a
rather severe-featured Hebe in a white silk blouse ordered through
_Vogue_.

All this should have been told in the past tense, because Pardee's is no
more. But Okoochee, Oklahoma, is full of paradoxes like Pardee's. Before
you understand Maxine Pardee and her mother in the kitchen (dishing up)
you have to know Okoochee. And before you know Okoochee you have to
know Sam Pardee, missing.

There are all sorts of stories about Okoochee, Oklahoma--and almost
every one of them is true. Especially are the fantastic ones true--the
incredible ones. The truer they are the more do they make such Arabian
knights as Aladdin and Ali Baba appear dull and worthy gentlemen in the
retail lamp and oil business, respectively. Ali Baba's exploit in oil,
indeed, would have appeared too trivial for recounting if compared with
that of any one of a dozen Okoochee oil wizards.

Take the tale of the Barstows alone, though it hasn't the slightest
bearing on this story. Thirteen years ago the Barstows had a parched
little farm on the outskirts of what is now the near-metropolis of
Okoochee, but what was then a straggling village in the Indian
Territory. Ma Barstow was a woman of thirty-five who looked sixty;
withered by child-bearing; scorched by the sun; beaten by the wind;
gnarled with toil; gritty with dust. Ploughing the barren little farm
one day Clem B