arstow had noticed a strange oily scum. It seeped up
through the soil and lay there, heavily. Oil! Weeks of suspense, weeks
of disappointment, weeks of hope. Through it all Ma Barstow had washed,
scrubbed, cooked as usual, and had looked after the welfare of the
Barstow litter. Seventeen years of drudgery dull the imagination. When
they struck the great gusher--it's still known as Barstow's Old
Faithful--they came running to her with the news. She had been washing a
great tubful of harsh greasy clothes--overalls, shirts, drawers. As the
men came, shouting, she appeared in the doorway of the crazy wooden
lean-to, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Oil!" they shouted, idiotically. "Millions! Biggest gusher yet! It'll
mean millions! You're a millionaire!" Then, as she looked at them,
dazedly, "What're you going to do, Mis' Barstow, huh? What're you going
to do with it?"

Ma Barstow had brought one hand up to push back a straggling wisp of
damp hair. Then she looked at that hand as she brought it down--looked
at it and it's mate, parboiled, shrunken, big-knuckled from toil. She
wiped them both on her apron again, bringing the palms down hard along
her flat thighs. "Do?" The miracles that millions might accomplish burst
full force on her work-numbed brain. "Do? First off I'm a-going to have
the washing done out."

Last week Mrs. Clement Barstow was runner-up in the women's amateur golf
tournament played on the Okoochee eighteen-hole course. She wore tweed
knickers. The Barstow place on the Edgecombe Road is so honeycombed with
sleeping porches, sun dials, swimming pools, bird baths, terraces,
sunken gardens, and Italian marble benches that the second assistant
Japanese gardener has to show you the way to the tennis courts.

That's Okoochee.

It was inevitable that Sam Pardee should hear of Okoochee; and, hearing
of it, drift there. Sam Pardee was drawn to a new town, a boom town, as
unerringly as a small boy scents a street fight. Born seventy-five years
earlier he would certainly have been one of those intrepid Forty-niners;
a fearless canvas-covered fleet crawling painfully across a continent,
conquering desert and plain and mountain; starving, thirsting, fighting
Indians, eating each other if necessity demanded, with equal dexterity
and dispatch. Perhaps a trip like this would have satisfied his
wanderlust. Probably not. He was like a child in a berry patch. The
fruit just beyond was always the ripest and reddest. The