aturday and some of the men had drifted in from the surrounding
ranches; others from the cities, from the mountains, from the valleys,
from the desert, from the sea. Tinkersfield had assumed a sudden
importance as an oil town. All of the men had business connected in some
way with Tinkersfield. And all of them earned more than fifteen dollars
a week.

Therefore they disputed O-liver's statement. "If you had a wife--" said
one.

"Ah," said O-liver, "if I had--"

"Ain't you got any ambition?" Henry Bittinger demanded. Henry was
pumping out oil in prodigious quantities. He had bought a motor car and
a fur coat. It was too hot most of the time for the coat, but the car
stood now at rest across the road--long and lovely--much more of an
aristocrat than the man who owned it.

"Ambition for what?" O-liver demanded.

Henry's eyes went to the pride of his heart.

"Well, I should think you'd want a car."

"I'd give," said O-liver, "my kingdom for a horse, but not for a car."

O-liver's little mare stood quite happily in the shade; she was slim as
to leg, shining as to coat, and with the eyes of a loving woman.

"I should think you'd want to get ahead," said Atwood Jones, who sold
shoes up and down the coast. He was a junior member of the firm, but
still liked to go on the road. He liked to lounge like this in front of
the post-office and smoke in the golden air with a lot of men sitting
round. Atwood had been raised on a ranch. He had listened to the call of
the city, but he was still a small-town man.

"Ahead of what?" asked O-liver.

Atwood was vague. He felt himself a rising citizen. Some day he expected
to marry and set his wife up in a mansion in San Francisco, with
seasons of rest and recreation at Del Monte and Coronado and the East.
If the shoe business kept to the present rate of prosperity he would
probably have millions to squander in his old age.

He tried to say something of this to O-liver.

"Well, will you be any happier?" asked the young man with the bare head.
"I'll wager my horse against your car that when you're drunk with
dollars you'll look back to a day like this and envy yourself. It's
happiness I'm talking about."

"Well, are you happy?" Atwood challenged.

"Why not?" asked the young man lightly. "I have enough to eat, money for
tobacco, a book or two--an audience." He waved his hand to include the
listening group and smiled.

It was O-liver's lightness which gave him the whip hand in a