SANDY STEELE ADVENTURES
Black Treasure
Danger at Mormon Crossing
Stormy Voyage
Fire at Red Lake
Secret Mission to Alaska
Troubled Waters
Sandy Steele Adventures
_BLACK TREASURE_
BY ROGER BARLOW
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
_New York, 1959_
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION
IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
COPYRIGHT © 1959 BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK 20, N. Y.
FIRST PRINTING
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 59-13882
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY H. WOLFF BOOK MFG. CO., INC., NEW YORK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1 The Man in Blue Jeans 7
2 Kit Carson Country 17
3 A “Poor Boy” Outfit 33
4 Learning the Ropes 46
5 A Light in the Window Rock 61
6 Cliff Dweller Country 75
7 Back of Beyond 90
8 Cavanaugh Shows His Colors 103
9 Fighting Fire with Fire 116
10 Pepper Makes a Play 128
11 Serendipity 144
12 Cavanaugh Makes a Mistake 154
13 Think Like a Dog 165
14 Showdown 177
15 The Fourth Touchdown 184
CHAPTER ONE
The Man in Blue Jeans
High jinks were in order as the Regional Science Fair drew to a close in
the big auditorium at Poplar City, California. A board of judges had
selected prize-winning exhibits entered by high-school students from
Valley View, Poplar City and other nearby communities. Now the winners
were blowing off steam while teachers who had supervised the fair sat in
quiet corners and fanned themselves wearily.
“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen,” Pepper March whooped like a
circus barker as he strutted in front of his First Prize winner, a
glittering maze of electronic equipment. “Broadcast your voice over my
beam of light. The very newest thing in science. Built through the
co-operation of Valley View’s own Cavanaugh Laboratories. Step right
up.... Yes, miss?” A girl had approached the exhibit, wide-eyed. “Please
speak into this microphone.”
“What do I say?” As she spoke, a quivering pencil of light leaped from a
black box in the booth and her words thundered from a loudspeaker in the
balcony.
“Oh, recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’” suggested the big blond boy, and
grinned.
“‘Mary,’” boomed the girl’s voice from the rear of the hall as Pepper
twiddled a mirror that deflected the light beam to a second
loud-speaker, “‘had a little lamb.’” (Those words seemed to come out of
the floor.) “‘Its fleece was white as snow.’” (The last phrase blared
from a chandelier.)
“Good old Pepper! Grandstanding again!” muttered Sandy Steele as the
crowd cheered. Sandy stared glumly at a small sign reading Honorable
Mention that perched on the exhibit which he and his pal Quiz Taylor had
entered in the fair. It wasn’t fancy-looking like Pepper’s, he had to
admit. It was just a mound of wet cardboard sheets stuck full of pins,
plus a homemade control panel and some batteries. “Ours _was_ better,”
he added.
“I agree,” Quiz sighed. “After all the work we put into this thing!
Molding sheets of cardboard to the shape of underground rock layers.
Soaking them with salt water so they’ll carry electric currents that
imitate the direction in which oil deposits flow.” He hooked a wire to
one of the pins and pressed a button. A flashlight bulb on the control
panel winked at him mockingly. “We sure deserve something better than a
Mention!”
“Step this way, folks,” Quiz called halfheartedly to the passers-by.
“Learn how petroleum can be located, thousands of feet beneath the
earth.”
Nobody paid any attention except one Valley View boy who was pushing his
way toward Pepper’s booth, a phonograph record under one skinny arm.
“Sour grapes,” jeered the boy. “You and Sandy better forget that mess.
Come over and watch Pepper play this stereo record over his beam. It’ll
be something!”
“Shall we?” Sandy looked at his friend miserably.
“Unh-uh,” answered the short, round-faced boy. “Here comes a customer—I
think.”
A suntanned little man in faded blue shirt and jeans had ambled up to
their booth and was studying the exhibit with his gray head tilted to
one side.
“A reservoir behavior analyzer, huh?” he said. “Represents the Four
Corners area. Right?”
“Why ... yes, sir.” Sandy stared at him, openmouthed. “We built it to
represent the geological structure of the country where the boundaries
of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. This map and card
explain—”
“I know the Four Corners,” grunted the little man as he sized up the
tall, sandy-haired youngster. “Is your gadget accurate?”
“As accurate as we could make it with the survey maps we could find.”
“Hmmm.” Their visitor’s sharp eyes studied the gray mound. “What happens
if I should drill an oil well here, in the northwest corner of the
Navajo Indian reservation?” He pointed with a lean finger.
Sandy moved a pin to the spot he indicated, connected it to the control
panel with a length of wire, and pressed a switch.
Nothing happened!
Quiz groaned. Why couldn’t the thing show off when they wanted it to?
“If you drilled there, sir, you’d just have a dry hole,” Sandy said with
more confidence than he felt. “That location must be on the far fringe
of the oil pool.”
“Right!” The little man grinned from ear to ear, showing a fine white
set of false teeth. “I did drill a wildcat well there. She was dry as a
bone. My ninth duster in a row.... Now what happens if I drill here,
near the bed of the San Juan River?”
This time a bulb glowed brightly when they stuck their pin into the
cardboard.
“We can’t be sure, sir,” Sandy hesitated. “We don’t know too much about
geology. Besides, oil is like gold. It’s where you find it, and the only
way you find it is by drilling for it. But I’d guess that, in the
neighborhood you indicated, you’d stand a chance of hitting a thousand
barrels per day.”
“Eight hundred and fifty barrels,” corrected the man in the blue jeans.
“The well I drilled on the San Juan was the only thing that kept me out
of bankruptcy.”
A blare of jazz from Pepper’s loud-speakers, now working in unison, cut
off further conversation and gave the boys a chance to study their
strange acquaintance.
“Why don’t you go over and take in that beam-of-light exhibit?” Sandy
said when Pepper had brought the sound down to bearable levels. “It won
first prize.”
“That pile of expensive junk?” sniffed the little man. “All the kid did
was to borrow some apparatus from Red Cavanaugh’s Valley View
Laboratory. If I know Red—and I do know the big fourflusher well—he
didn’t make the boy do a lick of real research on it.... Oh!” Again that
wide grin. “You think I’m crazy and want to get rid of me, don’t you?
Here.”
He dug into his jeans and came up with a greasy card which read:
The Four Corners Drilling Company
John Hall, President
Farmington, N. M.
“Guess I should have got dressed up for this shindig,” Hall apologized,
“but I just got in from Farmington. I read about your analyzer in the
_Valley View News_ when you won first prize at your high-school science
fair last month. Used to live there. That’s why I still get the paper.
Your dingus should have received first prize here too, instead of that
voice-cast thing.”
“Say! You came all this way just to see our exhibit? Thanks!” was all
Sandy could think of to say.
As the auditorium lights blinked to indicate that the fair was closing,
Hall added, “Got time for a bite? I have a proposition I’d like to sound
you out on.”
At a nearby diner, the oilman ordered full meals for all of them.
“Here’s my proposition,” he said when the boys couldn’t eat another
mouthful. “I’m a small wildcat operator. That means I hunt for oil in
places that are so wild and woolly that only wildcats can live there.
Once or twice I’ve struck it rich. Should have retired then, but there’s
something about oil exploration that gets in a feller’s blood. So I went
out, drilled some dry holes, and lost my shirt.
“Right now I’m strapped until my new field pays off—if it does. But I
think I’m onto something big in the Four Corners and I need help. You
boys must have a working knowledge of geology to build an analyzer as
good as that. How about working for me this summer?”
“Sandy’s the rock hound,” Quiz said and hesitated. “I ... I’ve only read
up on it in books.”
“All I know is what Dad has told me,” Sandy remarked. “I couldn’t have
built the exhibit without Quiz’s help.”
“Forget the mutual-admiration-society stuff,” said Hall. “Would you both
like to spend your vacations in the Four Corners, working as roustabouts
and helping me out wherever else you can? It won’t be easy. But when you
get through you’ll know a lot about oil, geology, how to get along with
Indians, and I don’t know what all.
“You’ll be out on the desert in all kinds of weather. You’ll chip rocks,
hold stadia rods, sharpen tools and dig the trucks out of holes on those
awful roads. Everything you learn will come in handy when you go to
college.... You are going, aren’t you?”
Sandy nodded but Quiz shook his head miserably.
“I doubt it,” he said, “unless things at Dad’s restaurant pick up.”
“Nonsense,” Hall snorted. “You can get a scholarship in geology if
you’ve had experience in the field. Tell you what: I know your father
slightly—he serves mighty good victuals. I’ll go over to Valley View
tomorrow and talk things over with him. I’ll bet we can work something
out for you.
“Here’s another thing, though,” he went on thoughtfully. “I’ve got
almost every cent I own tied up in oil leases right now. I can’t pay
either of you very much—say forty dollars a week. You probably can do
almost as well right at home.”
“I’d rather work with you than wait on table,” Quiz declared.
“Or cut lawns and things,” Sandy added.
“It’s settled then.” Hall shook hands gravely. “See you in Valley View.”
As they were leaving the diner, Pepper March came charging in with a
flock of admiring Valley Viewers behind him.
“Wait up,” Pepper whooped, grabbing his defeated rivals as they tried to
dodge past him. “My treat. Come have a Coke while I tell you about my
good luck.”
“_Another_ Coke!” Sandy groaned. He had practically lived on them during
the science fair. But curiosity got the better of him and he went back
to the counter, followed by Quiz. By the time he found a stool, Pepper
was holding forth.
“You know Mr. Cavanaugh, the man I got some of the stuff for my
voice-caster from?”
“The man from whom you borrowed _all_ your equipment,” Sandy corrected
between his teeth.
“That’s what _you_ think, Honorable Mention.” Pepper turned to his
admirers. “Anyway, he has a sideline: spends his summers hunting
uranium. Also, he’s the same Red Cavanaugh who was All-American
quarterback for State U. in 1930. He’s the fellow who ran three
touchdowns against California in the Thanksgiving game that year.”
“There was a Cavanaugh who made All-American,” Quiz agreed as he
scratched his round head, “but I thought....”
“See!” cried Pepper. “Quiz knows all there is to know about football.
He’s heard about Red. Well, Mr. Cavanaugh attends all the Valley View
games. Says he likes the way _I_ run touchdowns.” Pepper leered at
Sandy, who was not always the spectacular player that Pepper was. “Also,
Mr. Cavanaugh appreciates the plugs I gave to his laboratory whenever I
explained my voice-caster, so what do you think...?”
“He’s going to install you as a loud-speaker in one of his TV sets,”
Quiz suggested.
“Nah!” Pepper stopped the laughter with a lordly, upraised hand. “He’s
giving me a summer job. I’m going to help him hunt uranium.”
“Where?” Sandy gave his pal a stricken look.
“Where? Why, the place where there’s more uranium than almost anywhere
in the United States. But you wouldn’t know where that is.”
“Oh, no,” groaned Quiz. “Not the Four Corners. Not there! Ain’t there no
justice?”
“What do you mean?” Pepper looked at him doubtfully.
“I mean Sandy and I have jobs there too, and Four Corners is going to be
awfully crowded this summer.”
“Oh.” Some of the wind went out of Pepper’s sails. Then he brightened.
“I’ll buy another round of Cokes if either of _you_ is going to get
sixty dollars a week,” he crowed.
CHAPTER TWO
Kit Carson Country
“This sure isn’t my idea of a boom town!” Sandy grumbled as he and Quiz
got off the eastbound Greyhound at Farmington, New Mexico, dropped their
dusty bags and stood watching the early morning bustle on the little
town’s wide streets.
“Yeah.” Quiz wagged his head. “The Wild West shore ain’t what she used
to be, pardner. No twenty-mule-team wagons stuck in Main Street
mudholes. No gambling dives in evidence. No false store fronts. No
sheriff in a white hat walkin’ slowlike down a wooden sidewalk to shoot
it out with the bad man in a black hat. Ah, for the good old days.”
“Oh, go fly a jet,” Sandy grinned. “Let’s look up Mr. Hall. Funny, his
giving us his home address. He must have an office in town.”
They strolled along, noticing the new stores and office buildings, the
modern high school. Farmington would never become a ghost town. It was
building solidly for the future.
Suddenly Quiz grabbed his friend’s arm.
“Look at that oilman who’s just made a strike,” he said. “We’ll ask him
if he knows Mr. Hall.”
“How do you know that he is, and has?” Sandy demanded as they approached
a lanky stranger.
“Because he’s wearing a brand-new Stetson and new shoes, of course,”
Quiz explained, as to a child. “Drillers always buy them when their well
comes in.”
“Trust you to know something like that,” Sandy said in mock admiration.
“Well now,” drawled the Farmingtonian when they put their question,
“you’d have to get up earlier than this to catch John Hall in town. John
keeps his office in his hat. Might as well spend the day seeing the
sights, and look him up at his motel when he gets back from the Regions
tonight.”
“What sights?” asked Sandy when the oilman, obviously a transplanted
Texan, had stumped away in high-heeled boots that must have hurt his
feet. “Those mountains, maybe? They look close enough to touch. Let’s
walk out to them.”
“Don’t let this clear, thin air fool you,” Quiz warned. “Those mountains
are probably twenty miles away. We’d need a car to—”
A great honking and squealing of brakes behind them made the boys jump
for safety. As they turned to give the driver what-for, Pepper March
stuck his curly head out the window of a new jeep that was towing an
equally new aluminum house trailer as big as a barn.
“Welcome to our fair city,” Pepper shouted. “Saw you get off the bus, so
I prepared a proper reception. How about a guided tour while I run this
trailer over to Red’s camp?”
“How long have you been here?” Sandy asked as they climbed aboard.
“Red flew me over last Friday in his Bonanza. I’ve got the hang of his
entire layout already. Nothing to it, really.”
As he headed the jeep for the mountains, Pepper kept up a monologue in
which skimpy descriptions of the countryside were mixed with large
chunks of autobiography.
“Every square mile of this desert supports five Indians, fifty sheep,
five hundred rattlesnakes and fifty thousand prairie dogs,” he joked as
they left the pavement for a winding dirt trail. They bounced madly
through clumps of sagebrush, prairie-dog colonies, and tortured hills
made of many-colored rock.
“These roads wear out a car in a year, and you have to put in new
springs every three months,” he added as they hit a chuckhole that made
their teeth rattle.
“Look at those crazy rock formations,” he said later while the boys
sweated and puffed to jack up the rear end of the trailer so it could
get around a particularly sharp hairpin turn in the trail. (_Now_ they
knew why Pepper had extended his invitation for a tour!) “No telling
what minerals you might find if you used electronic exploration methods
on scrambled geology like this. Why, only last night, while we were
sitting around the campfire at Elbow Rock, I said to Red: ‘Red,’ I said,
just like that—we’ve become real pals already, you know—‘Red,’ I said,
‘why don’t we branch out? Why don’t we look for oil as well as uranium,
now that we’re out here?’ And Red said to me: ‘Pepper,’ he said—”
“‘—when did you get your Ph.D. in geology?’” Sandy cut in.
“Nothing like that at all! ‘Pepper,’ he said, ‘you’re right on the
electron beam. We’ll organize the Red Pepper Oil Exploration and
Contracting Company and give John Hall and those other stick-in-the-muds
a run for their money.’ Oops! Hope we didn’t break anything that time!”
The jeep’s front wheel had dropped into a pothole with a terrific thump.
They found that the axle had wedged itself against a rock. Thirty
minutes later, while they were still trying to get it loose, a
rattletrap car pulled up beside them and an Indian stuck his flat,
mahogany-colored face through its window.
“Give us a hand—please,” Pepper ordered.
The newcomer started to get out. Then his black eyes settled on the
lettering on the side of the trailer:
Cavanaugh Laboratories
Farmington, N.M. & Valley View, Cal.
“Cavanaugh! Huh!” snorted the Indian. He slammed the door of his car and
roared off in a cloud of yellow dust.
“Those confounded Indians,” snarled Pepper, staring after him in
white-faced fury. “I’d like to.... Oh, well. Come on, fellows. Guess
we’ve got to do this ourselves.”
They finally got the jeep back on the trail and drove the twenty miles
to Elbow Rock without further mishap. There Pepper parked beside a
sparkling trout stream. They raided the trailer’s big freezer for
sandwich materials and ate lunch at a spot overlooking a thousand square
miles of yellow desert backed by blue, snowcapped peaks. Pepper was at
his best as a host. For once in their lives, Sandy and Quiz almost liked
him. At least here he seemed much pleasanter than he did at home,
lording it over everyone—or trying to.
In the cool of the afternoon—85 degrees in the sun instead of the 110
degrees the thermometer had shown at noon—they rode the jeep back to
Farmington by way of a wide detour that took them within sight of the
San Juan River gorge.
“I wanted to show you those two oil-well derricks over yonder,” Pepper
explained. “They’re a mile and a half apart, as the crow flies. But,
because they’re on opposite sides of the river, they were 125 long miles
apart by car until we got that new bridge finished a few months ago.
Shows you the problems we explorers face.”
“The San Juan runs into the Colorado, doesn’t it?” Quiz asked as he
studied the tiny stream at the bottom of its deep gorge, under the fine
new steel bridge.
“Yep. And thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Cavanaugh—Red, I mean—has found
state documents down at Santa Fe showing that the San Juan used to be
navigable. But the confounded dumb Indians swear it can’t be navigated.
If boats _can_ go down the stream, even during part of the year, the
river bed belongs to the Federal government. If the stream _can’t_ be
navigated, the Navajos own the bed. That’s the law! While the argument
continues, nobody can lease uranium or oil land near the river. Red says
that, one of these days, he’s going to prove that—oops! I’m talking too
much!”
Pepper clammed up for the first time they could remember. He said hardly
a word until he dropped them off at Hall’s motel.
“I don’t get it,” Quiz said to his chum as they walked up a graveled
path from the road to the rambling adobe building.
“Don’t get what?” Sandy wanted to know.
“This uranium hunting business Pepper’s got himself into. I read in
_Time_ a while back that the Federal government stopped buying uranium
from prospectors in 1957. Since then, it has bought from existing mills,
but it hasn’t signed a single new contract. Cavanaugh doesn’t own a
uranium mill. So why is he snooping around, digging into state documents
and antagonizing the Indians?”
“I only met him once, when he snooted our exhibit as a judge at the
regional science fair,” Sandy replied. “Can’t say I took to him, under
the circumstances.”
“There’s something phony about that man. If only I could remember ...
something to do with football, I think.” Quiz scratched his head, but no
more information came out.
They found Mr. Hall, dressed as usual in faded levis and denim shirt,
sitting with several other guests of the motel on a wide patio facing
the setting sun.
“Well, here are my roustabouts,” the little man cried with a flash of
those too-perfect teeth. “I was beginning to be afraid that you had lost
yourselves in the desert.”
He introduced them to the owners of the place, two maiden ladies from
Minnesota who plainly were having the time of their middle-aged lives
here on the last frontier. The Misses Emery, as alike as two wrinkled
peas, showed the boys to their room, a comfortable place complete with
fireplace and an air conditioner.
“Supper will be served in half an hour,” said one.
“Don’t be late,” said the other.
The newcomers scrubbed the sticky dust off their bodies and out of their
hair, changed into clothes that didn’t smell of jeep, and were heading
for the dining room when Mr. Hall overtook them.
“You may be wondering why I live out here on the edge of the desert,” he
said quietly. “One reason is that I like the silence of desert nights.
Another is the good cooking. The most important reason, though, is that
some of the Farmington places are pretty nasty to Indians and Mexicans.
Me, I like Indians and Mexes. Also, I learn a lot from them when they
let their hair down. Well, here we are. You’ll find that the Misses
Emery still cook like Mother used to. I’ll give you a tip. Don’t talk
during supper. It isn’t considered polite in the Southwest.”
“Why is that?” Sandy wondered.
“It’s a hang-over from cowpunching days. If a ranch hand stopped to
talk, somebody else grabbed his second helping.”
After a silent meal, the guests gathered on the patio to watch the stars
come out.
“Folks,” said Mr. Hall, “meet Sandy Steele and Quiz Taylor. They’re
going to join my crew this summer. Boys, meet Miss Kitty Gonzales, from
Window Rock, Arizona. She’s going north in the morning to teach school
in the part of the Navajo reservation that extends into Utah. Her
schoolhouse will be a big trailer. Too bad you can’t be her students,
eh? But sixteen is a mite old for Miss Kitty’s class.”
Kitty was slim, in her late teens, and not much over five feet tall. She
had an oval face, black hair and eyes, and a warm smile that made the
newcomers like her at once.
“This is Kenneth White,” Hall went on. “Ken works for the Bureau of
Indian Affairs. When he talks, you listen!”
The white-haired man gave the boys handshakes that they felt for an
hour.
“Chief John Quail, from the Arizona side of the Navajo reservation,”
Hall said next. “The chief is here to talk over an oil lease.”
Chief Quail, a dark, heavily muscled Indian, wore a light-gray business
suit that showed evidence of the best tailoring. He surprised the boys
by giving them the limpest of handshakes.
“And Ralph Salmon, boss of my drill crew,” Hall concluded. “Ralph’s a
southern Ute from Colorado. Do exactly as he says this summer if you
want to learn oil.”
The lithe, golden-skinned young Indian nodded, but did not shake hands.
“So you’re off to your great adventure in the morning, Kitty,” White
said to break the conversational ice. He lighted a pipe and leaned
against the patio railing where he could watch the changing evening
light as it stole over the desert.
“I’m so excited I won’t be able to sleep,” the girl answered in a rich
contralto voice. “It’s all so wonderful. The oil lease money pouring in
like this, after long lean years when starvation for the Navajos was
just around the corner and it looked as though their reservation might
be taken from them. Schools and hospitals being built all over. My
wonderful new trailer with books and maps and even a kitchen and a
shower for the children. Oh, my Navajos are going places at last.” She
gave an embarrassed laugh at her long speech.
“One place your Navajos can go is to Salt Lake City,” Hall growled. “Get
the state of Utah to settle that quarrel about who owns the land your
schools and hospitals are being built on. Then I can get my hands on
some leases up there.”
“I thought the Navajo reservation was in New Mexico and Arizona,” Sandy
said.
“A small part of it is in southern Utah,” Hall explained. “That’s the
part bounded by the San Juan River.”
“The argument over school lands is less important than our other
disputes,” Chief Quail said carefully. He spoke good English but his
words seemed to be tied together with string. Plainly, he had learned
the white man’s language not many years ago. “The real problem—the one
that is, how do you say, tying up millions of dollars of lease money—is
to have a correct boundary drawn around the Hopi reservation.”
“The chief means,” Hall explained for the boys’ benefit, “that the
Navajo reservation forms a large rectangle that completely surrounds a
smaller square of land in Arizona where the Hopi Indians live.”
“Not a square, Mr. Hall,” Chief Quail objected. “The Hopis really own
only a small triangle. Those primitive, stupid cliff dwellers claim
thousands of Navajo acres to which they have no right. If I had my way
in our Council, I would....”
“The Navajos _and_ the Hopis are all grandmothers,” Salmon cut in
angrily. “Squabbling over money like palefaces! Spending their royalties
on things like schools and hospitals! When my tribe, the southern Utes,
got its first royalty check, the Council voted to have some fun with the
money. We spent it to build a race track for our fast horses!”
“Digger Indian!” The Navajo sneered at Salmon without moving a muscle of
his broad face. “Fish eater! Soon you will waste all your easy money.
When the oil runs out you will be running about naked again, living on
roots and fried caterpillars like you used to!”
“Oh, no, John.” The Ute’s grin was just visible in the gathering
darkness. “Maybe we’ll go on the warpath and take what we need from you
fat Navajo sheep herders, as we did in the good old days. Or—” he added
quickly as the chief lunged to his feet—“we’ll sing you to death. Like
this!”
Salmon began a wailing chant that set everyone’s teeth on edge. The
Navajo stopped his advance as if he had struck a wall. He clapped his
hands over his ears and, after a moment, stalked out into the night.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Ralph,” Hall said coldly. “Some day Chief
Quail is going to take you apart if you don’t stop baiting him.”
“Can you actually sing people to death, Mr. Salmon?” Sandy said to break
the tension.
“Of course not,” the Ute answered softly. “But the chief _thinks_ I can,
and I wouldn’t spoil his belief for anything. We have a set-to like this
every time we meet. Some of our medicine men can sing people _well_,
though. They chant awhile and then pull the pain right out of your
tooth, ear, or stomach.”
“What does a pain look like?” Quiz asked, half convinced.
“Looks just like a fingernail about two inches long,” the Ute answered.
“It’s bright red. If you strike it, it goes _tinnnggg_, like the reed of
a saxophone.”
“Stop your nonsense, Ralph,” White commanded, “while I go out and smooth
Quail’s ruffled feathers.” He followed the chief and brought him back
five minutes later to receive an oily apology from his ancestral enemy.
“You Indians will be broke again, one of these days, if you keep
quarreling among yourselves,” Hall said then. “Crooked white men are
hanging around the Four Corners. They’re just waiting for something like
that so they can trick you out of your oil and uranium rights, or even
your reservations.”
Everyone had to agree that this was true, so the little party settled
down in reasonable harmony to watch the giant stars come out. Salmon
produced a guitar after a while. Then he and Kitty sang Indian and
Mexican songs together. Sandy particularly liked one that went:
_I wander with the pollen of dawn upon my trail._
_Beauty surrounding me, with it I wander._
“That’s a Navajo song,” the Ute said, grinning. “We sing it in honor of
Chief Quail. Here’s one by a white man that I like:
_Mañana is a lovely word we all would like to borrow._
_It means ‘Don’t skeen no wolfs today wheech you don’t shoot
tomorrow.’_
_An’ eef you got some jobs to did, of which you do not wanna,_
_Go ’head and take siesta now; tomorrow ees mañana!”_
“Guess that’s a hint we’d better take our siestas,” Hall said to the
boys. “Big day ahead mañana.”
“This country sort of grows on one,” Sandy said to Kitty as they shook
hands. “I’m beginning to feel at home already.”
“Oh, you haven’t really seen anything yet,” the girl answered. “If you
and Mr. Taylor get up in the neighborhood of my school, look me up. I’ll
show you some of the wildest and most beautiful country on earth.”
“Mother said I’d fall in love with the place.” Sandy took a last look
across the sleeping desert. “She was born not far from here. Met my
father when he was working for the U.S. Geological Survey.”
“How interesting,” cried the girl. “Maybe my folks know her. What was
her maiden name?”
“It was Ruth Carson.”
“Oh!” Kitty snatched her hand out of his. “She’s related to Kit Carson,
isn’t she?”
“The general was my great-uncle,” Sandy said proudly. “That’s why I’m so
interested in this part of—”
He stopped because Kitty had backed away from him until her back pressed
against the motel wall. As he stared, she spat into the dust of the
patio in a most unladylike fashion before turning and running toward her
room.
“What did I do to her?” Sandy gasped, openmouthed.
“Kitty’s mother is a Navajo,” Chief Quail answered. “Back in Civil War
days, Kit Carson rounded up the Navajos to take us away from our
reservation. We went on the warpath and retreated into the mountains.
Carson followed. His soldiers shot several dozen of us, and slaughtered
all our sheep so we would either have to surrender or starve. Even
today, many of us would rather eat fish as the Utes do than touch one of
Kit Carson’s descendants!” He turned his back and marched off.
“Ouch!” Sandy groaned. “I certainly put my foot into it that time.”
“Don’t worry too much about it,” said White. “Fact of the matter is that
Kit Carson made a mighty good Indian Agent later on, and most Navajos
admit it. He was the man who insisted that they all be returned to the
reservation after the rebellion was over. He eventually died from
overwork in behalf of ‘his Indians.’ Except for a few diehards, the
Navajos won’t hold your mother’s name against you.”
“I certainly hope you’re right,” Sandy sighed as he and Quiz said good
night to the others and headed for their room.
“What a mess,” his friend said. “Navajos squabbling with Utes, Hopis and
the state of Utah. Crooks waiting to take advantage of them all. Pains
like fingernails! Cavalry heroes who turn into villains. I suppose
that’s why the biggest oil field in the Four Corners is called the
Paradox Basin!”
CHAPTER THREE
A “Poor Boy” Outfit
Hall routed Ralph Salmon and the boys out of bed before dawn the next
day. They ate a huge pancakes-and-sausage breakfast cooked by the
sleepy-eyed but cheerfully clucking Misses Emery and climbed into the
company jeep just as the sun was gilding the peaks of the mountains.
Soon their teeth were chattering in the morning cold as Salmon roared
off in a northwesterly direction toward the San Juan River lease.
“I wouldn’t have come down to Farmington at all this week,” Hall shouted
above the wind which made the jeep top pop and crack, “except that I
promised to pick up you boys, and Ralph had to get our core drill
repaired. That’s the drill you hear thumping under the seat. We’re down
a thousand feet with our second well and I should be riding herd on it
every minute.”
“You’re a worrywart, boss,” chuckled the Indian. “You know that Harry
Donovan’s on the job up there. He can handle things just as well as you
can.”
“You’re right,” Hall answered. “But somehow it doesn’t seem right to
have a geologist bossing the drill crew. That’s a hang-over from my days
with a big spit-and-polish producing company, I guess.
“Ours is what they call a ‘poor boy’ outfit here in the oil country,” he
explained to Sandy and Quiz. “We make do with secondhand drill rigs and
other equipment. Sometimes we dig our engines and cables out of junk
yards.”
“Now, now, boss, don’t cry,” said their driver. “It’s not quite that
bad.”
“It will be if this well doesn’t come in.” Hall grinned. “But we do have
to make every penny count, kids. We all pitch in on anything that needs
doing. What kind of jobs have you cooked up for our new roustabouts,
Ralph?”
“There’s a new batch of mud to be mixed,” the Indian answered. “How
about that for a starter?”
“Mud!” Quiz exploded. “What’s mud got to do with drilling an oil well?”
“Plenty, my friend. Plenty,” Ralph answered. “Mud is forced down into a
well to cool the drill bit and to wash rock cuttings to the surface. You
use mud if you have water, that is. In parts of this country, water’s so
short, or so expensive to haul, that producers use compressed air for
those purposes. We’re lucky. We can pipe plenty of water from the
river.”
“Then you mix the water with all sorts of fancy chemicals to make
something that’s called mud but really isn’t,” said Sandy, remembering
tales of the oil country that his father had told him.
“You’re forgetting that we’re a ‘poor boy’ outfit,” said Hall.
“Chemicals cost money. We dig shale from the river bed and grind it up
and use it for a mix. You’ll both have a nice new set of blisters before
this day is over.”
They followed a good paved road to the little town of Shiprock, which
got its name from a huge butte that looked amazingly like a ship under
full sail. Crossing the San Juan over the new bridge that Pepper had
pointed out the day before, they turned northwest onto a badly rutted
trail. Here and there they saw flocks of sheep, watched by half-naked
Indian children and their dogs. Occasionally they passed a six-sided
Navajo house surrounded by a few plowed acres.
“Those huts are called hogans,” Ralph explained, placing the accent on
the last syllable. “Notice that they have no windows and that their only
doors always face toward the rising sun. Never knock on a hogan door.
That’s considered bad luck. Just walk in when you go to visit a Navajo.”
“Whe-e-ew!” Sandy panted when an hour had passed and he had peeled out
of his coat, shirt, and finally his undershirt. “How can it get so hot
at this altitude?”
“Call this hot?” jeered Salmon. “Last time I was down in Phoenix it was
125 degrees in the shade, and raining cats and dogs at the same time. I
had to park my car a block from the hotel, so I ran for it. But when I
got into the lobby my clothes were absolutely dry. The rain evaporated
as fast as it fell!”
“That,” said Hall, “is what I’d call evaporating the truth just a leetle
bit.”
“Mr. Salmon....” Quiz hesitated. “Could I ask you a personal question?”
“You can if you call me Ralph,” answered the tall driller as he slowed
to let a Navajo woman drive a flock of goats across the trail. She was
dressed in a brightly colored blouse and long Spanish skirt, as if she
were going to a party instead of doing a chore, and she did not look up
as they passed.
“Well, how is it you don’t talk more—like an Indian?” Quiz asked.
“How do Indians talk?” A part of the Ute’s smile faded and his black
eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
“Why, I dunno—” the boy’s face turned red with embarrassment—“like Chief
Quail, I guess. I mean ... I thought....”
“When you’ve served a hitch in the Navy, Quiz, you get to talking just
like everyone else, whether you’re an Indian or an Eskimo.”
“Were you in Korea, Ralph?” Sandy asked to break the tension.
“I was not! I served my time working as a roustabout on oil wells in one
of the Naval Reserves.”
“And, since that wasn’t enough punishment,” Hall said as he grinned,
“Ralph came home and took advantage of the GI bill to go to school in
Texas and became a driller.”
“Yep,” Salmon agreed. “And I soon found out that an Indian oil driller
is about as much in demand as a two-headed calf.” He threaded the car
through the narrow crevice between two tall buttes of red sandstone that
stuck up out of the desert like gnarled fingers. “I was just about down
to that fried caterpillar diet that Chief Quail keeps kidding me about
when a certain man whose name I won’t mention gave me my first job.”
“And you turned out to be the best all-round oilman I ever hired,” said
Hall as he slapped the other on his bronzed, smoothly muscled back. “I
figured that if Iroquois Indians make the finest steelworkers in the
construction business, a Ute should know how to run a drill rig. I
wasn’t mistaken.”
Salmon was at a loss for words for once. His ears turned pink and he
concentrated on the road, which was becoming almost impassable, even for
a jeep.
“That’s my reservation over there across the Colorado line,” he said at
last, turning his head and pointing with outthrust lips toward the north
and east.
“Nice country—for prairie dogs. Although the southern Utes are doing all
right these days from royalties on the big oil field that’s located just
over that ridge. They tell me, too, that the reservation holds one of
the biggest coal deposits in the western United States.”
“Why didn’t you stay on the reservation, then?” Quiz wanted to know.
“I like to move around. People ask me more questions that way.”
“Oh.” Quiz stopped his questioning.
“Up ahead and to the left,” Ralph went on, “is the actual Four Corners,
the only place in the country where the boundaries of four states meet.
It also is the farthest point from a railroad in the whole United
States—one hundred and eighty miles or so, I understand. How about
stopping there for lunch, boss, as soon as we cross into Utah? Nice and
quiet.” He winked at Quiz to take any sting out of his earlier words.
After they had eaten every one of the Misses Emery’s chicken and ham
sandwiches, Hall took over as their driver and guide.
“My lease is up near the village of Bluff, on the north side of the
river,” he explained. “I’m convinced, though, that most of the oil and
uranium is in Navajo and Hopi territory south of the San Juan. I’ve had
Donovan down there running seismographic surveys and he says the place
is rich as Croesus. That’s why I’ve been talking turkey to Chief
Quail—trying to get him to get the Navajo and Hopi councils together so
we can develop the area.”
“Is Quail chief of all the Navajos?” Sandy asked. “He didn’t seem to be
exactly....” He stammered to a stop while Ralph chuckled.
“Oh, no,” Hall answered. “Quail is just a chief of one of the many
Navajo clans, or families. The real power is held by the tribal council,
of which Paul Jones is chairman. But Chief Quail swings a lot of weight
on the reservation.”
“Hah!” Ralph snorted. “Chief Quail’s a stuffed shirt. They made a
uranium strike on his farm last year, so what does he do?... Buys
himself a new pickup truck! I’d have celebrated by getting a Jaguar.”
“A Jaguar is like a British Buick,” said Quiz, suddenly coming into his
element as the talk got around to cars. “A Bentley would have been
better.”
“I know, I know,” Ralph answered. “Or a Rolls Royce if he could afford a
chauffeur. I read the ads too.”
They followed the river, now deep in its gorge and getting considerably
wider, for another twenty miles. They were out of the reservation now
and passed a number of prosperous farms. The road remained awful,
however, being a long string of potholes filled to the brim with yellow
dust. The holes couldn’t be seen until the jeep was right on top of
them. Hall had to keep slamming on his brakes at the risk of dislocating
his passengers’ necks.
“You should travel through this country when it rains,” he said
cheerfully. “Cars sink into the mud until all you can see is the tips of
their radio antennas.”
“We’d get to the well before sunset if you drove as well as you tell
tall stories,” Ralph commented dryly.
They finally made the field headquarters of the Four Corners Drilling
Company with two hours of sunlight to spare. The boys looked at the
place in disappointment. An unpainted sheet-iron shack with a sign
reading Office over its only door squatted close to the top of the San
Juan gorge. Not far from it was an odd-looking contraption of pipes,
valves and dials about as big as a home furnace. There was no sign of a
well derrick as far as they could see across deserted stretches of sand,
sagebrush, and rust-colored rock.
“There she is—Hall Number One,” said their employer. He walked over to
the contraption, patted it as though it was his best friend, and stood,
thumbs hooked in the armholes of his worn vest, while he studied the
dials proudly. “This is my discovery well. It’s what buys the baby new
shoes.”
“But where are the derricks and everything?” Quiz tried unsuccessfully
to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
“Shhh!” whispered Sandy. “They’ve skidded the derrick to the new well
site. This thing’s called a Christmas tree. It controls the flow of oil
out of the ground.”
“Smart boy,” said Hall. “We’ve got our wildcat hogtied and hooked into
this gathering line.” He pointed to a small pipe that snaked southward
across the desert. “The gathering line connects with the big new
pipeline to the West Coast that passes a few miles from here. Number One
is flowing a sweet eight hundred and fifty barrels a day.”
“But I don’t see any other well,” Quiz persisted.
“It’s over behind that butte.” Hall pointed again. “Oh, I know what’s
bothering you. You’re remembering those old pictures that show derricks
in an oil field standing shoulder to shoulder, like soldiers. We don’t
do things that way any longer. We’ve got plenty of room out here, so we
space our wells. Only drill enough of them to bring up the oil without
waste. Come on. I’ll take you over and introduce you to the gang.”
A short ride brought them to a scene of whirlwind activity. Drilling had
stopped temporarily on Hall’s second well so that a worn bit could be
pulled out of the hole and replaced with a sharp one. But that didn’t
mean work had stopped!
The boys watched, spellbound, while dripping lengths of pipe were snaked
out of the ground by a cable which ran through a block at the top of the
tall derrick and was connected to a powerful diesel engine. As every
three lengths arrived at the surface, two brawny men wielding big iron
tongs leaped forward and disconnected them from the pipe remaining in
the well. Then the 90-foot “stand” was gently maneuvered, with the help
of another man, wearing a safety belt, who stood on a platform high up
on the derrick. When a stand had been neatly propped out of the way, the
next one was ready to be pulled out of the well.
The crew worked at top speed without saying a word until the mud-covered
drill finally came in sight. They unscrewed the bit from the end of the
last stand of pipe, and replaced it with a sharp one. Then the process
was reversed. Stand after stand of pipe was reconnected and lowered
until all were back in the well. Then the engine began to roar steadily.
A huge turntable under the derrick started spinning the pipe at high
speed. Down at the bottom of the hole the bit resumed chewing into the
rock.
“Nice teamwork, Ralph,” said Hall. “You certainly have trained as good a
crew as can be found in the Regions.”
“Nice team to work _with_,” answered the driller as he looked proudly at
his men, who were about equally divided between Indians and whites. “Now
let’s see if there’s any work for our two tenderfeet before it’s time to
knock off for supper. Come on, fellows. The mud pit is slurping for
you.”
Two hours later, when the cook began hammering on his iron triangle,
Sandy and Quiz looked like mud puppies.
“You’re a howling fright,” said the tall boy as he climbed out of the
big pit where a new batch of goo was swirling and settling. He plastered
down his unruly cowlick with a slimy hand. For once the hair stayed in
place.
“And you look like a dirty little green man from the swamps of the
planet Venus.” Quiz spat out a bit of mud and roared with laughter.
“Lucky thing we don’t have to get this muck off with compressed air.
Come on. I’ll race you to the showers.”
Dinner was eaten in the same dogged quiet that they had noted at the
motel. It was a good dinner, too, although it came mostly out of cans.
The boys were introduced all around after the apple pie had been
consumed to the last crumb, but they were too tired and sleepy to sort
out names and faces. They did gather that four-man shifts—or “towers,”
as they seemed to be called—kept the drill turning day and night until
the drill struck oil or the well had to be abandoned as a “duster.”
The only person present who made a real impression was Harry Donovan,
Hall’s geologist. He was an intense, bald, wiry fellow in his thirties
who kept biting his lips, as though he was just about to impart a deep
secret. But all he seemed to talk about were mysterious things like
electronic log readings, core analyses, and the distance still to be
drilled before something called the “Gallup Pay” would be reached.
Hall and Salmon were intensely interested in Donovan’s report. Try as
they would to follow it, Sandy and Quiz soon found themselves nodding.
Finally they leaned their elbows on the oilcloth-covered dinner table
and snored gently.
Ralph shook them partially awake and showed them their beds in a
battered trailer. They slept like logs despite the fact that, bathed in
brilliant white light provided by a portable electric generator, the rig
roared and clanked steadily throughout the night as its bit “made hole”
more than a thousand feet underground.
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning the Ropes
Sandy and Quiz spent the next two weeks picking up a working knowledge
of drilling, getting acquainted with Hall’s outfit, and learning to keep
out from under the feet of the crew. Ralph saw to it that their jobs
varied from day to day as they grew lean and brown under the desert sun.
“Used to have a lot of trouble keeping fellows on the job out here next
to nowhere,” he explained with a grin. “The boys would get fed up after
a few weeks. Then they’d quit, head for town, and I’d have to spend
valuable time rounding up replacements. Now I switch their work around
so they don’t have so much chance to become bored. Let’s see ... you
mixed mud yesterday, didn’t you? Well, today I want you to help Jack
Boyd keep his diesel running.” Whereupon the boys would spend a “tower”
cleaning the engine room, or oiling and polishing the powerful but
over-age motor that Boyd nursed like a sick child to make it keep the
bit turning steadily.
On other days they were assigned to drive to Shiprock or Farmington for
supplies, to help Ching Chao in the cookhouse, or to learn the abc’s of
oil geology from Donovan. Sandy preferred to do chores around the
derrick and was very proud when he finally was allowed to handle one of
the huge tongs used to grip the stands of pipe so that they could be
removed from the well or returned to it.
Quiz, on the other hand, never tired of studying the wavering lines
marked on strips of paper by the electric log that Donovan lowered into
the well at regular intervals. He soon got so that he could identify the
different kinds of rock layers through which the bit was drilling, by
the slight changes in the shapes of those lines. Or he would train a
microscope on thin slices of sandstone sawed from the yard-long cores
that were hauled out of the well from time to time. With his usual
curiosity, he had read up enough about geology to recognize the
different marine fossils that the cores contained. He would become as
excited as Donovan did when the geologist pointed to a group of minute
shells in a slice of core and whispered, “Those are Foraminifera, boys!
We must be getting close to the oil.” And he would become as discouraged
as his teacher when careful study of another core showed no indication
of ancient sea creatures.
“I don’t get it,” Sandy would mutter on such occasions. “How come those
shells got thousands of feet underground in the first place? And what
have they got to do with finding oil?”
Then the geologist would mop his bald head with a bandanna handkerchief,
take off his thick horn-rimmed glasses and use them as a pointer while
he lectured the boys on his beloved science.
“All of this country has been deep under water several times during the
last few million years,” he would explain patiently. “In fact, most of
the center of the North American continent has been submerged at one
time or another. When the Four Corners region was a sea bottom back in
the Carboniferous era, untold generations of marine plants and animals
died in the water and sank to the bottom.
“As the ages passed, those life forms were buried by mud and silt
brought down from surrounding mountains by the raging rivers of those
days. The weight of the silt caused it to turn into sandstone or
limestone layers hundreds of feet thick. This pressure generated a great
deal of heat. Geologists think that pressure and heat compressed the
dead marine creatures into particles of oil and gas.