sort of
shape.

Larry the visionary, with the plunger's mirage always teasing him
through the arid conditions of a low salaried exile, had, it seemed,
caught at the fringes of success--and slipped into disaster. Through
years he had hoarded small savings out of his frugal income with the
gambler's eagerness to have a "stake" against the swift passing of the
golden opportunity. Finally he had thought that it had not all been in
vain. His eye had appraised other fields where the coal ran out in
sparse and attenuated veins but where the "sand blossom" spoke of oil.
His hoardings had gone straightway into options, at prices based on
farming valuations where farms were cheap.

It had remained then to enlist the interest of capital in taking up
these many options and securing others, and that required a large sort
of sum. Larry had gone to the directors of the company that employed
him. He had haunted their offices and they had endured his obdurate
besieging only because he was an efficient man cheaply employed, and, as
such, entitled to one hare-brained eccentricity.

Columbus striving to raise money from a world convinced of the earth's
flatness, with which to sail round a sphere, encountered a scepticism no
more stolid, and yet in the end Masters had convinced them. The
persuasion was accomplished only when other adventurers were beginning
to clip coupons from just such enterprises in adjacent fields. When, to
the monied men, "Masters' folly" became "Masters' discovery," the native
landowners were growing as wary as ducks that have been decoyed, and
dealing with them at a tempting profit required subterfuge. Besides the
options already held there were more to be secured before the
proposition was rounded into unity. Masters had therefore lined up, as
his purchasing agents, men of native blood and apparently of no
organized unity. Employing cash instead of checks bearing tell-tale
signatures, they could still acquire at a song, and a poor song, too,
large oil-bearing tracts virgin to the drill.

So, with his plan patiently built, like a house of cards that had often
tumbled but which at last seemed steady, Masters had turned away from
the Lexington interview with a black bag containing treasure enough to
awaken all the old, long-prostrate dreams. A life tarnished with
futility seemed on the bright verge of redemption. A share in the
Eldorado would be his own, and after years of eating the bread of
discontent his crush