"'You'll be wasting time,' I told him, even more sweetly, 'for dad and
I have that twenty west of Burkburnett.'

"Well! You'd have thought I had stuck a hatpin into Bell. And Henry's mouth actually dropped open. Think of it: Colonel Henry Nelson, the hero of Whatever-it-is, with his imperial mouth open and nothing coming out of it—not even the imperial breath!"

"Bob" rocked backward and kicked up her neatly shod feet; she hugged herself and snickered with a malicious enjoyment not wholly Christian-like.

"But—we 'ain't even got an option! It takes money to lease close-in stuff." Tom was bewildered.

"Of course. And they realized that, or Bell did, as soon as he'd had time to collect himself. But it was too late then; he had betrayed himself and he knew it. Oh, he was sore! He'd have flung me out if I'd been a man. I got mad, too, and I told him it made no real difference whether I was bluffing or not; the jig was up, so far as he was concerned. I reminded him of what Henry had just said—that the oil business is a game of wits, and that when you know what the other fellow is doing you have him licked. I admitted that he could probably keep me from getting the lease, but I could also keep him from getting it. Bell nearly had a stroke at that threat. Henry behaved very decently throughout. I think it must have pleased him to find that somebody in Wichita, besides him, had the courage to defy his father; anyhow, he said, '"Bob" has beaten us at our own game. She knows enough now to place that lease in half an hour, and I think we'd better take her in. Otherwise she'll wire Knute, and he'll probably protect her for an interest.'

"That made me feel awfully fraudulent, but his smarty remarks about women in the oil business still rankled, so I just sat pretty and blinked like a little owl. Bell swo