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“And settle down in Okoochee! Never see anything! Stuck in this God-forsaken hole! This drab, dull, oil-soaked village! When there are wonderful people, wonderful places, colour, romance, beauty! Damascus! Mandalay! Singapore! Hongkong!… Hongkong! It sounds like a temple bell. It thrills me.”

“Over in Hongkong,” said Arnold Hatch, “I expect some Chinese Maxine Pardee would say, Okoochee! It sounds like an Indian war drum. It thrills me.'”

Sometimes Maxine showed signs of melting. But she always congealed again under the influence of her resolve. One evening an out-of-town diner, on hearing her name, said, “Pardee! Hm. Probably a corruption of Pardieu. A French name originally, I suppose.”

After that there was no approaching her for a week. Maxine Pardieu. Pardieu. “By God!” it meant. A chevalier he must have been, this Pardieu. A musketeer! A swashbuckler, with lace falling over his slim white hand, and his hand always ready on his sword. Red heels. Plumed hat. Pardieu!

How she hated anew the great oil tanks that rose on the town’s outskirts, guarding it like giant sentinels. The new houses. The new country club. Twenty-one miles of asphalt road. Population in 1900, only 467. In 1920 over 35,000. Slogan, Watch Us Grow. Seventeen hundred oil and gas wells. Fields of corn and cotton. Skyscrapers. The Watonga Building, twelve stories. Haynes Block, fourteen stories. Come West, young man! Ugh!

Sometimes she made little rhymes in her mind.

There’s Singapore and Zanzibar,
And Cairo and Calais.
There’s Samarkand and Alcazar,
Rangoon and Mandalay.

“Yeh,” said Arnold Hatch, one evening, when they were talking in the Pardee back yard. It was nine o’clock. Dishes done. A moon. October. Maxine had just murmured her little quatrain. They were standing by the hedge of pampas grass that separated the Pardee yard from Hatch’s next door.

“Yeh,” said Arnold Hatch. “Likewise:

“There’s Seminole and Shawnee,
Apache, Agawam.
There’s Agua and Pawnee,
Walonga, Waukeetom.”

He knew his Oklahoma.

“Oh!” exclaimed Maxine, in a little burst of fury; and stamped her foot down hard. Squ-ush! said something underfoot. “Oh!” said Maxine again; in surprise this time. October was a dry month. She peered down. Her shoe was wet. A slimy something clung to it. A scummy something shone reflected in the moonlight. She had not lived ten years in Oklahoma for nothing. Arnold Hatch bent down. Maxine bent down. The greasy wet patch lay just between the two back yards. They touched it, fearfully, with their forefingers. Then they straightened and looked at each other. Oil. Oil!

Things happened like that in Oklahoma.

You didn’t try to swing a thing like that yourself. You leased your land for a number of years. A well cost between forty and sixty thousand dollars. You leased to a company represented by one or two of those cold-blooded steely-eyed young men from Pennsylvania or New York. There was a good deal of trouble about it, too. This was a residence district–one of the oldest in this new town. But they bought the Pardee place and the Hatch place. And Arnold Hatch, who had learned a thing or two in the offices of the Okoochee Oil and Refining Company, drove a hard bargain for both. The yard was overrun with drillers, lawyers, engineers, superintendents, foremen, machinery.

Arnold came with papers to sign. “Five hundred a day,” he said, “and a percentage.” He named the percentage. Maxine and her mother repeated this after him, numbly.

Mrs. Pardee had been the book-keeper in the Pardee menage. She tried some mathematical gymnastics now and bumped her arithmetical nose.

“Five hundred a day. Including Sundays, Arnold?”

“Including Sundays.”

Her lips began to move. “Seven times five … thirty-five hundred a … fifty-two times thirty—-“

She stopped, overcome. But she began again, wildly, as a thought came to her. “Why, I could build a house. A house, up on Edgecombe. A house like the Barstows’ with lawns, and gardens, and sleeping porches, and linen closets!… Oh, Maxine! We’ll live there—-“

“Not I,” said Maxine, crisply. Arnold, watching her, knew what she was going to say before she said it. “I’m going to see the world. I want to penetrate a civilization so old that its history wanders down the centuries and is lost in the dim mists of mythology.” [See Baedeker.]