letter. He'd been thinking matters over. Of course she could hold him to his promise if she wanted to, but
He ended by telling her that he was going away to look for work, but he was careful not to tell her where, and when he crawled into his blankets again, shaking with the cold, it was to sleep more quietly than he had for many nights.
The next day he inducted the Colorado boy into the new job, got him to ride that night with him to the water tank at Prairie Dog—a coal tipple, tank and one house—in order to take his horse back, and with a war bag for his gear, and empty pockets, climbed Bill's train and found himself in the old familiar environment of water butts, lanterns, coal bin, bed-rolls, green order slips and dented coffee pot on a red hot stove. No one asked him any questions. Bill was glad to see him, the rest of the crew accepted him. And by the freemasonry of their order they passed him on; he moved from caboose to caboose, but always South. The weather moderated; he had left winter and was finding spring, and the young life in him, which had apparently been frozen, began to revive.
"Old Man's sure been good to these folks," he said to the last conductor, when they were rolling across the plains of Oklahoma.
"Sure has. Twelve feet of good earth on top and oil underneath."
He understood that later on when he got off at the town near the ranch and saw the great oil refinery and the miles of storage tanks. To and from the refinery engines were moving long lines of tank cars. They crept along endlessly, and as a result ships ploughed their way under forced draft to strange parts of the world, locomotives moved, houses were heated, automobiles sped along.
For the first time in all his hard-driven young life Tom saw the spectacle of easy money. Up to that time he had seen the earth as something from which one wrung a difficult livelihood, and Nature as a stepmother, alternating between moods of tolerance and cruelty. This then was how the Dowlings and their kind were made. They found where Nature was generous, and exploited her. It was not that
