Oil was struck in pints, quarts, gallons, buckets, and finally in thousands and tens of thousands of barrels!  It flowed copiously in our cow-county; it greased, so to speak, the wheels—­and how ramshackle some of them were!—­of a score of enterprises, it saturated all things and persons.

Now, conceive, if you can, the triumphant I-told-you-so-boys expression of Uncle Jap.  He swelled again visibly:  head first, then body and soul.  The county kowtowed to him.  Speculators tried to buy his ranch, entreated him to name a price.

“I’ll take half a million dollars, in cold cash,” said Uncle Jap.

The speculators offered him instead champagne and fat cigars.  Uncle Jap refused both.  He was not going to be “flimflammed,” no, sir!  Not twice in his life, no, Siree Bob!  He, by the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, proposed to paddle his own canoe into and over the lake of oil.  If the boys wished him to forgo the delights of that voyage, let ’em pungle up half a million—­or get.

They got.

Presently, after due consultation with a famous mining engineer, Uncle Jap mortgaged his cattle for the second time, and sank another well.  He discovered oil sand, not a lake.  Then he mortgaged his land, every stick and stone on it, and sunk three more wells.  It was a case of Bernard Palissy.  Was Bernard a married man?  I forget.  If so, did he consult his wife before he burnt the one and only bed?  Did she protest?  It is a fact that Uncle Jap’s Lily did not protest.  She looked on, the picture of misery, and her mouth was a thin line of silence across her wrinkled impassive countenance.

When every available cent had been raised and sunk, the oil spouted out.  Who looked at the fountain in the patch of lawn by the old fig trees?  Possibly Mrs. Panel.  Not Uncle Jap.  He, the most temperate of men, became furiously drunk on petroleum.  He exuded it from every pore.  Of course he was acclaimed by the county and the State (the Sunday editions published his portrait) as the star-spangled epitome of Yankee grit and get-there.

At this point we must present, with apologies, the agent of the Autocrat, the agent, the High-muck-a-muck of the Pacific Slope, with a salary of a hundred thousand a year and perks!  In his youth Nat Levi smelt of fried fish, unless the smell was overpowered by onions, and he changed his lodgings more often than he changed his linen.  Now you meet him as Nathaniel Leveson, Esquire, who travelled in his private car, who assumed the God, when the God was elsewhere, who owned a palace on Nob Hill, and some of the worst, and therefore the most paying, rookeries in Chinatown, who never refused to give a cheque for charitable purposes when it was demanded in a becomingly public manner, who, like the Autocrat, had endowed Christian Churches, and had successfully eliminated out of his life everything which smacked of the Ghetto, except his nose.