m.
There's Agua and Pawnee,
Walonga, Waukeetom."

He knew his Oklahoma.

"Oh!" exclaimed Maxine, in a little burst of fury; and stamped her foot
down hard. Squ-ush! said something underfoot. "Oh!" said Maxine again;
in surprise this time. October was a dry month. She peered down. Her
shoe was wet. A slimy something clung to it. A scummy something shone
reflected in the moonlight. She had not lived ten years in Oklahoma for
nothing. Arnold Hatch bent down. Maxine bent down. The greasy wet patch
lay just between the two back yards. They touched it, fearfully, with
their forefingers. Then they straightened and looked at each other. Oil.
Oil!

Things happened like that in Oklahoma.

You didn't try to swing a thing like that yourself. You leased your land
for a number of years. A well cost between forty and sixty thousand
dollars. You leased to a company represented by one or two of those
cold-blooded steely-eyed young men from Pennsylvania or New York. There
was a good deal of trouble about it, too. This was a residence
district--one of the oldest in this new town. But they bought the Pardee
place and the Hatch place. And Arnold Hatch, who had learned a thing or
two in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company, drove a
hard bargain for both. The yard was overrun with drillers, lawyers,
engineers, superintendents, foremen, machinery.

Arnold came with papers to sign. "Five hundred a day," he said, "and a
percentage." He named the percentage. Maxine and her mother repeated
this after him, numbly.

Mrs. Pardee had been the book-keeper in the Pardee menage. She tried
some mathematical gymnastics now and bumped her arithmetical nose.

"Five hundred a day. Including Sundays, Arnold?"

"Including Sundays."

Her lips began to move. "Seven times five ... thirty-five hundred a ...
fifty-two times thirty----"

She stopped, overcome. But she began again, wildly, as a thought came to
her. "Why, I could build a house. A house, up on Edgecombe. A house
like the Barstows' with lawns, and gardens, and sleeping porches, and
linen closets!... Oh, Maxine! We'll live there----"

"Not I," said Maxine, crisply. Arnold, watching her, knew what she was
going to say before she said it. "I'm going to see the world. I want to
penetrate a civilization so old that its history wanders down the
centuries and is lost in the dim mists of mythology." [See Baedeker.]

Sudden wealth had given Arnold a new masterfulness. "Marry me