Oil!

The road ran, smooth and flawless, precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand. The gr...

The number of the house was 5746 Los Robles Boulevard, and you would have had to know this land of hope in order to realize that it stood in a cabbage field. Los Robles means “t...

Once more the valleys and gorges of Guadalupe Grade resounded to the flying echoes of honking horns. This time it was not one car, but a whole fleet of them, a dozen seven-ton t...

Bunny’s mother did not bear Dad’s name, as other boys’ mothers do; she was called Mrs. Lang, and lived in a bungalow on the outskirts of Angel City. There was an arrangement whe...

Bunny was going to school. Aunt Emma and Grandmother and Bertie had got their way by incessant nagging, and he was no longer to be a “little oil gnome,” and devote his time to l...

Dad had thought things over, and studied his bank account, and given his decision; they would drill the Ross Junior-Paradise No. 1, and do it quick, and give the “Excelsior Pete...

A year had passed, and you would hardly have known the town of Paradise. The road was paved, all the way up from the valley, and lined with placards big and little, oil lands fo...

Eunice Hoyt was the daughter of “Tommy” Hoyt, of Hoyt and Brainerd, whose advertisements of investment securities you saw on the financial pages of the Beach City newspapers. To...

The first term of Bunny’s school ended in February, and he passed his examinations with reasonable success; then there was a brief holiday, and Dad produced a wonderful scheme....

Southern Pacific University had been launched by a California land baron as a Methodist Sunday-school; its professors were all required to be Methodists, and it featured scores...

At Southern Pacific University the class lines were tacitly but effectively drawn, and in the ordinary course of events a man of Bunny’s wealth, good looks and good manners, wou...

Springtime had come again, and Bunny was finishing his second year at Southern Pacific. But the bloom was now worn off the peach; he no longer took the great institution at its...

Bunny was studying and thinking, trying to make up his mind about the problem of capital versus labor. It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever...

Bunny went back to Angel City, and discovered that if he wanted to follow Vee Tracy’s program of dodging other people’s troubles, he had made a fatal mistake to get interested i...

All this summer and fall, Dad and Mr. Roscoe had been carrying a heavy burden—they were helping to make over the thinking of the American people. A presidential campaign was und...

Bunny passed his examinations, and was duly established as a “grave old senior” in Southern Pacific University. And then he hunted up his friends—and such a load of troubles as...

All that fall and winter the quail had been calling from the hills of Paradise unheeded. Bunny didn’t want to go there. But now it chanced that Dad had some matters to see to, a...

This summer of 1923 was a pleasant one for Bunny. To be one of the editors of a little paper, and be able to say what you thought, and print it week by week and distribute it, w...

The billboards of Paris broke into universal ecstasy: “Schmolsky-Superba Présente l’Etoile Américaine, Viola Tracy, dans La Couche d’Or, Cinéma-Mélodrame de la Société en Huit R...

Bunny was alone in the roaring city of New York—six or seven millions of people, and not many known to him. There were reporters, of course—it made a “human interest” story, fat...

Bunny was looking for a site for the labor college. It was a much pleasanter job than seeking oil lands; you could give some attention to the view, the woods and the hills, and...