ddle of it." Then, reading the sympathy in our eyes,
she continued quickly: "I ain't denyin' that Jaspar has a right to do
what he pleases with what lies out o' doors. He never interfered with
me in my kitchen, never! Would you gen'lemen fancy a glass o'
lemonade? No? Wal--I'm glad you called in, fer I hev been feelin' kind
o' lonesome lately."

What Uncle Jap's Lily suffered when he mortgaged all his cattle to
sink a well nobody knows but herself, and she never told. The wizard
indicated a certain spot below the croppings of bituminous rock; a big
derrick was built; iron casing was hauled over the Coast Range; the
well was bored.

Then, after boring some two thousand feet, operations had to be
suspended, because Uncle Jap's dollars were exhausted, and his
patience. The wizard swore stoutly that the lake was there, millions
and millions of barrels of oil, but he deemed it expedient to leave
the country in a hurry, because Uncle Jap intimated to him in the most
convincing manner that there was not room in it for so colossal a
fraud. The wizard might have argued the question, but the sight of
Uncle Jap's old Navy six-shooter seemed to paralyse his tongue.

After this incident Uncle Jap ranched with feverish energy, and Mrs.
Fullalove said that the old man had gotten over a real bad dose of
swelled head.

* * * * *

Five years later came the oil boom!

Everybody knows now that it flowed in prodigious quantities into the
vats of one man, whom we shall speak of with the respect which the
billionaire inspires, as the Autocrat of Petroleum. Let us hasten to
add that we shall approach him in the person of his agent, who, so far
as Uncle Jap was concerned, doubtless acted in defiance of the will of
the greatest church builder and philanthropist in the world.

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 an