“First-rate, first-rate!” said the old man; but when the Italian had bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly to Fulkerson, “I reckon they didn’t have to torpedo that well, or the derrick wouldn’t look quite so nice and clean.”

“Yes,” Fulkerson answered, “and that ain’t quite the style—­that little wiggly-waggly blue flame—­that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of it.  This might do for weak gas”; and he went on to explain: 

“They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down; and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light and heat his house.  I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain.  My, my, my!  You fel—­you gentlemen—­ought to go out and see that country, all of you.  Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let ’em see how it works!  Mind that one you torpedoed for me?  You know, when they sink a well,” he went on to the company, “they can’t always most generally sometimes tell whether they’re goin’ to get gas or oil or salt water.  Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn’t ripe for gas yet.  Now they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don’t seem to strike anything worth speaking of.  Then they put a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it.  They have a little bar of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please!  You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick’s painted—­got a coat on that ’ll wear in any climate.  That’s what our honored host meant.  Generally get some visiting lady, when there’s one round, to drop the Go-devil.  But that day we had to put up with Conrad here.  They offered to let me drop it, but I declined.  I told ’em I hadn’t much practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn’t very well myself, anyway.  Astonishing,” Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, “how reckless they get using dynamite when they’re torpedoing wells.  We stopped at one place where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of ’em in his hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it was.  I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit.  You could see he was the fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he’d keep on hammering that cartridge, just to show that it wouldn’t explode, till he blew you into Kingdom Come.  When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman.  ’Pay Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,’ says he.  ’He’s too safe a man to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.’  I never saw anybody so cool.”