Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE DUKE AND THE DUCATS was often to discover, however, the good men do lives after them—and when it has the appearance of evil, it seems to live forever. WO HOURS later the two flyers dropped their ton-and-@-half De- Haviland into the airdréme of the Border Patrol flight at Laredo. Within fifteen minutes the gas and oil tanks had been refilled, and they were in the air again. Considerable information regard- ing the town of Verona had also come their way from the flyers. If evidence was needed of the fact that an oil boom had changed conditions along that part ‘of the border, the Duke thought to himself, a look from the air supplied it. Laredo was the nearest railroad ter- minus, and that sizeable town had changed considerably since last he had seen it. Close to the railroad station gaunt frame warehouses had arisen like mushrooms, and the streets of the town were crowded. The one road which led back into the rolling mesquite was a sight to see. It crawled through the chaparral like a gray snake, and it was crowded with vehicles of all descriptions, from huge trucks to small wagons drawn by burros. It was rutted so deeply as to, be almost impassable. - There was not a break in the clogged traffic between Laredo and _ Verona. Daly felt a thrill as, from five thousand feet, he looked down on the newly created town. It looked almost like a gargantuan circus lot, because tempo- rarily it seemed to be built of canvas. Hundreds of tents of all sizes lined the main road, and side streets had been hacked from the mesquite. There were many crude shacks of all sizes, and foot- paths were lined with every species of temporary structure, from pup tents to square, steel roofed frame _ buildings. Around what had evidently been the original cross roads, with its small cluster of permanent buildings, was the main part of town. Verona was a tent city, almost a mile square already, and here and _ there 5 through the mesquite there were isolated clusters of tents. The streets were so jammed with people that the circus illusion grew on him. - No midway, just before show time, had ever been more densely populated. From the air it seemed that a man could have crossed any of the crude streets on the tops of the slowly moving vehicles. There were no sidewalks, and what were called streets, he could see, were merely trails, for the most part, and those trails had been gored by thousands of wheels until they were like freshly plowed fields. Many automobiles and trucks were stalled. Others were barely able to move. “Gosh! If it ever rains not a wheel will turn for days!” he thought. From the town as a nucleus, dozens of zigzag trails, hewn from the chaparral, snaked away in all directions. Derricks thrust themselves from the mesquite on all sides. Pipeline gangs were working here and there, and every road was full of vehicles. Jets of steam showed whitely in many places to indicate where drilling was going on, and here and there were large areas which were blackened with oil. He saw a half dozen sumps, the oil show- ing black inside them, and there were dozens of others being dug. Transpor- tation was so difficult, doubtless, that storage tanks would be the last things brought in. His heart leaped to the thrill of the raw power of it all. It was as though he were watching men at grips with Mother Nature herself, wringing her riches from her against overwhelming odds. There was an effect of tremendous struggle in the slowness with which the wagons and trucks moved. The gaunt derricks, in all stages of construction, seemed more like wreckage than like usable pieces of machinery. Drillers, roughnecks, pipe line men, and laborers swarmed over an area of three or four square miles like busy ants, and the town was like a teeming ant hill. Stuck out there in the middle of the wilderness, with every bit of food, to say nothing of machinery, transport- ed from fifty miles away, it seemed comicloooks.com