"You are not on my land, Mr. Stevens, so there is no use in discussing the matter any further."
At this juncture a man stepped up to Canfield and said; "there is a committee of about twenty persons desirous of seeing you right away up on the corner," and the famous oil operator left us in rather brusque fashion.
"I think it is all a bluff about any committee wanting to see him," remarked Whitaker. "Let's go up there and find out."
We followed after Canfield, but had barely reached the street corner upon which the Southern Hotel is situated before we were accosted by William H. McKenzie and Robert Rader, two Fresnoites, whom I then knew slightly. They engaged us in conversation relative to my alleged "jumping" of the land in Section 4, and the argument was waxing rather heated on both sides when Whitaker and myself were suddenly surrounded by fully one hundred excited persons, all clamoring like a lot of magpies, and evidently considerably put out about something. Their sudden appearance reminded me very forcibly of the scene from Sir Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake," where the signal from Roderick Dhu
"garrisoned tho glen
With full five hundred armed men!"
Page 401
