"Ah," said O-liver, "if I had--"
"Ain"t you got any ambition?" Henry Bittinger demanded. Henry was pumping out oil in prodigious quant.i.ties. He had bought a motor car and a fur coat. It was too hot most of the time for the coat, but the car stood now at rest across the road--long and lovely--much more of an aristocrat than the man who owned it.
"Ambition for what?" O-liver demanded.
Henry"s eyes went to the pride of his heart.
"Well, I should think you"d want a car."
"I"d give," said O-liver, "my kingdom for a horse, but not for a car."
O-liver"s little mare stood quite happily in the shade; she was slim as to leg, shining as to coat, and with the eyes of a loving woman.
"I should think you"d want to get ahead," said Atwood Jones, who sold shoes up and down the coast. He was a junior member of the firm, but still liked to go on the road. He liked to lounge like this in front of the post-office and smoke in the golden air with a lot of men sitting round. Atwood had been raised on a ranch. He had listened to the call of the city, but he was still a small-town man.
"Ahead of what?" asked O-liver.
Atwood was vague. He felt himself a rising citizen. Some day he expected to marry and set his wife up in a mansion in San Francisco, with seasons of rest and recreation at Del Monte and Coronado and the East.
If the shoe business kept to the present rate of prosperity he would probably have millions to squander in his old age.
He tried to say something of this to O-liver.
"Well, will you be any happier?" asked the young man with the bare head.
"I"ll wager my horse against your car that when you"re drunk with dollars you"ll look back to a day like this and envy yourself. It"s happiness I"m talking about."
"Well, are you happy?" Atwood challenged.
"Why not?" asked the young man lightly. "I have enough to eat, money for tobacco, a book or two--an audience." He waved his hand to include the listening group and smiled.
It was O-liver"s lightness which gave him the whip hand in an argument.
They were most of them serious men; not serious in a Puritan sense of taking thought of their souls" salvation and the world"s redemption, but serious in their pursuit of wealth. They had to be rich. If they weren"t they couldn"t marry, or if they were married they had to be rich so that their wives could keep up with the wives of the other fellows who were getting rich. They had to have cars and money to spend at big hotels and for travel, money for diamonds and furs, money for everything.
But here was O-liver Lee, who said lightly that money weighed upon him.
He didn"t want it. He"d be darned if he wanted it. Money brought burdens. As for himself, he"d read and ride Mary Pick.
"Anyhow," said Henry, with his hands folded across his stomach--Henry had grown fat riding in his car--"anyhow, when you get old you"ll be sorry."
"I shall never grow old," said O-liver, and stood up. "I shall be young--till I--die."
They laughed at him outwardly, but in their hearts they did not laugh.
They could not think of him as old. They felt that in a hundred years he would still be strong and sure, his blond mane untouched by gray, his clear blue eyes unblurred.
Atwood rounding them all up for a drink found that O-liver wouldn"t drink.
"Drank too much, once upon a time," he confessed frankly. "But I"ll give you a toast."
He gave it, poised on his box like a young G.o.d on the edge of the world.
"Here"s to poverty! May we learn to love her for the favors she denies!"
"Queer chap," said Atwood to Henry later.
Henry nodded. "He"s queer, but he"s great company. Always has a crowd round him. But no ambition."
"Pity," said Atwood. "How"d he get that name--O-liver?"
"One of the fellows got gay and called him "Ollie." Lee stopped him. "My name is Oliver Lee. If you want a nickname you can say "O-liver." But I"m not "Ollie" from this time on, understand?" And I"m darned if the fellow didn"t back down. There was something about O-liver that would have made anybody back down. He didn"t have a gun; it was just something in his voice."
"Say, he"s wasted," said Atwood. "A man with his line of talk might be President of the United States."
"Sure he might," Henry agreed. "I"ve told him a lot of times he"s throwing away his chance."
II
The office of the incipient oil king was on the main street of the straggling town. At the back there was a window which gave a view of a hill or two and a mountain beyond. The mountain stuck its nose into the clouds and was whitecapped.
It was this view at the back which O-liver faced when he sat at his machine. When he rested he liked to fix his eyes on that white mountain.
O-liver had acquired of late a fashion of looking up. There had been a time when he had kept his eyes on the ground. He did not care to remember that time. The work that he did was intermittent, and between his industrious spasms he read a book. He had a shelf at hand where he kept certain volumes--Walt Whitman, Vanity Fair, Austin Dobson, Landor"s Imaginary Conversations, and a rather choice collection of Old Mission literature. He had had it in mind that he might some day write a play with Santa Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn.
The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene.
O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness of certain things.
Tommy Drew, who had a desk in the same office, read Vanity Fair and wanted to talk about it. "Say, I don"t like that girl, O-liver."
"What girl?"
"Becky."
"Why not?"
"Well, she"s a grafter. And her husband was a poor nut."
"I"m afraid he was," said O-liver.
"He oughta of dragged her round by the hair of her head."
"They don"t do it, Tommy," O-liver was thoughtful. "After all a woman"s a woman. It"s easier to let her go."
An astute observer might have found O-liver cynical about women. If he said nothing against them he certainly never said anything for them. And he kept strictly away from everything feminine in Tinkersfield, in spite of the fact that his good looks won him more than one glance from sparkling eyes.
"He acts afraid of skirts," Henry had said to Tommy on one occasion.
"He?" Tommy was scornful. "He ain"t afraid of anything!"
Henry knew it. "Maybe it"s because you can"t do much with women on fifteen a week."