desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the
spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush
and stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that
attends the rainy seasons in a tropic clime. It was a land peopled
by a hard-bitten race of nesters--come from God knows where and for
God knows why--starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous
environment from which they lacked means of escape.

Geologists had claimed for some time that there must be coal in
these north Texas counties, a contention perhaps based upon a
comfortable belief in the law of compensation, upon a theory that
a region so poor aboveground must of necessity contain values of
some sort beneath the surface. But as for other natural resources,
they scouted the belief in such. Other parts of the state yielded
oil, for instance, but here the formation was all wrong. Who ever
heard of oil in hard lime?

Nevertheless, petroleum was discovered, and among the fraternity
that dealt in it Ranger became a word of contradiction and of deep
meaning. Aladdin rubbed his lamp, and, lo! a magic transformation
occurred; one of those thrilling dramas of a dramatic industry was
played. A gypsy camp sprang up beside the blacksmith shop, and as
the weeks fled by it changed into a village of wooden houses, then
into a town, and soon into a city of brick and iron and concrete.
The railroad became clogged with freight, a tidal wave of men
broke over the town. Wagons, giant motor trucks, caterpillar
tractors towing long strings of trailers, lurched and groaned and
creaked over the hills, following roads unfit for a horse and
buggy. Straddling derricks reared themselves everywhere; their
feet were set in garden patches, in plowed fields, in lonely