Hawaii - James Michener [360]
"I don't think you should," Whip said coldly, and a few days later he added, "You ought to be looking for a man for yourself, Nance."
"You through with me?" Nancy asked.
"No place for you in Hawaii," he said truthfully. "How you fixed for money?"
"The family sends me my share," she assured him.
"Nance," he said in his most friendly manner, "I sure hope you have a wonderful life from here on out. Now you better get some clothes on."
She had been gone only a few hours when there was a knock at his hotel-room door, and a little man in an overcoat that reached down to his ankles entered. "My name's Overpeck, Milton Over-peck, and I hear you're interested in drilling a tunnel."
"That's right," Whip said. "Sit down, Mr. Overpeck. You like whiskey?"
"I like anything," Overpeck said.
"You a tunnel man?"
"Well, yes and no," the little man replied, gulping a huge draft of whiskey. Coughing slightly he asked, "I understand you're drilling your tunnel in order to get water."
"You've followed me around pretty well, Mr. Overpeck. Another whiskey?"
"Look, son, if you calculate on getting me drunk and outsmarting me, quit now, because you simply can't do it."
"I'm offering it in hospitality," Whip assured him.
"I never accept hospitality unless the host joins me. Now you gulp one down and catch up, and we can have a fine talk."
The two men, Whip Hoxworth twenty-four years old and Milton Overpeck in his early fifties, guzzled straight whiskey for several hours, during which the little engineer fascinated the Hawaiian landowner with a completely new theory about water. The doughty drinker, whose eyes were bright and clear after three quarters of a bottle, apparently knew more about Hawaii than Whip did, at least about the island of Oahu.
"My theory is this," he explained, using pillows, books and newspapers to build his island. "This volcano here and this one here built Oahu. That's perfectly obvious. Now, as they built, one surely must have overflowed the rightful terrain of the other. I judge all volcanic rock to be porous, so in Oahu it seems to me you have got to have a complex substructure, the bulk of it porous. All the fine water that falls on your island doesn't run immediately out to sea."
"Well, the engineer I sent out there did say that he thought the mountains were probably porous," Whip remembered.
"I'm not interested in the mountains you see above land," Overpeck snapped. "I'm interested in the subterranean ones. Because if, as I suspect, there was a rising and a falling of the entire mountain mass . . ." He stopped, studied his friend and said, "Sorry, you're drunk. I'll be back in the morning." But as he was about to leave he said, "Don't sleep on a pillow tonight. Leave everything just as it is."
Whip, through bleary eyes, tried to focus on the turmoil in his room and asked, "What's all this got to do with tunnels?"
"I wouldn't know," Overpeck replied. "I'm a well man meself."
He appeared at seven next morning, chipper as a woodchuck, his long overcoat flapping about his ankles in the cold San Francisco weather. He surprised Whip by completely dismissing the intricate construction of pillows, books and newspapers. "Best thing is to show you," he said cheerily. "Wells'11 be the making of Hawaii." And he led Whip down to the foot of Market Street, where grimy ferries left for the other side of the bay, and when after a long walk through Oakland they stood before a well he had recently dug he pointed with unconcealed admiration at a pipe protruding from the ground, from which gushed a steady volume of water that rose fourteen feet into the air.
"Does it run like this all the time?" Whip asked.
"Day and night," Overpeck replied.
"What does it?"
"Artesian, that's what it is. Artesian."
"How many gallons a day?"
"A million four."
"How long will it last?"
"Forever."
This was what Wild Whip had been dreaming of, a steady source of fresh water, but he had imagined that the only way to get it was to drive a tunnel through the mountains. If Overpeck were correct, where the water really lay was