“Well,” Fulkerson resumed, “they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and showed me their big wells—­lit ’em up for a private view, and let me hear them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives.  Why, when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they’d piped it into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground.  They say when they let one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter.  I don’t know whether it’s so or not.  But I can believe anything of natural gas.  My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well and shot a roman candle into the gas—­that’s the way they light it—­and a plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the ground under your feet!  You felt like saying: 

“‘Don’t trouble yourself; I’m perfectly convinced.  I believe in Moffitt.’  We-e-e-ll!” drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, “that’s where I met old Dryfoos.”

“Oh yes!—­Dryfoos,” said March.  He observed that the waiter had brought the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.

“Yes,” Fulkerson laughed.  “We’ve got round to Dryfoos again.  I thought I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story long.  If you’re not in a hurry, though—­”

“Not in the least.  Go on as long as you like.”

“I met him there in the office of a real-estate man—­speculator, of course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about him.  Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four miles out of Moffitt, and he’d lived there pretty much all his life; father was one of the first settlers.  Everybody knew he had the right stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those Pennsylvania Dutch.  He’d got together the largest and handsomest farm anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his ideas.  He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it was a real thing with him.  Well, when the boom began to come he hated it awfully, and he fought it.  He used to write communications to the weekly newspaper in Moffitt—­they’ve got three dailies there now—­and throw cold water on the boom.  He couldn’t catch on no way.  It made him sick to hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family.  Whenever he’d hear of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to sell out and move into town, he’d go and labor with him and try to talk him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try to make him believe it wouldn’t be five years before the Standard owned the whole region.