THE DRILLING
I
Once more the valleys and gorges of Guadalupe Grade resounded to the
flying echoes of honking horns. This time it was not one car, but a
whole fleet of them, a dozen seven-ton trucks, broad and solid, with
broad and solid double wheels, and trailers on behind, that carried even
more tons. The first load towered high, a big stationary engine, held in
place by heavy timbers bolted fast at the sides; that truck went
carefully round the curves, you bet! Behind it came the “mud-hogs” and
the “draw-works”; and then the “string” of drilling tools, hollow tubes
of the best steel, that were screwed end to end and went down into the
earth, a mile or more, if need be. These tubes extended over the end of
the trailers, where red flags waved in warning; on the short curves they
swept the road, and if you met a car coming in the opposite direction,
you had to stop while the other car crept carefully by; if there was not
room enough, the other car would have to back up to a place where the
road was straighter. All this required continuous clamor of horns; you
would have thought some huge flock of prehistoric birds—did the
pterodactyls make noises?—had descended upon Guadalupe Pass, and were
hopping along, crying: “Honk! Honk! Honk!”
What they were really saying was: “Dad is waiting for us! Dad has signed
his lease, and the derrick is under way, and his ‘rig’ must be on time!
Clear the road!” Dad would not trust to railroads for a rush job like
this; they switched your stuff onto sidings, and you spent a week
telephoning and interviewing dumb officials. But when you hired
motor-trucks, you owned them for the time being, and they came right
through. There was insurance to cover all possible accidents—including
the value of any man you might chance to send rolling down a
mountain-side in a Ford car!
So here came the dozen valiant tooters, toiling slowly up the grade, at
far less than the ordained speed of fifteen miles per hour. Their
radiators were hissing with steam, and every mile or so they would have
to stop and cool off. But they got to the summit all right; and then
came the slow crawl downwards, a man going ahead with a red flag,
warning other cars into safe pockets on the road, to wait till the whole
fleet had got by. So they got out of the pass, and onto the straight
road, where they could go flying like any other cars; then it was a
mighty roaring and a jolly sight. “Honk! Honk! Get out of the way! Dad
is waiting!”
Perched on top of the drilling tools were young fellows in blue-jeans
and khaki, giving abundant evidence that their last well had not been a
dry hole, but had given its due yield of smeary treasures. However, they
had got their faces clean, and they met the sunny landscape with no less
sunny smiles. They sang songs, and exchanged jollifications with the
cars they passed, and threw kisses to the girls in the ranch-houses and
the filling-stations, the orange-juice parlors and the “good eats”
shacks. Two days the journey took them, and meantime they had not a care
in the world; they belonged to Old Man Ross, and it was his job to
worry. First of all things he saw that they got their pay-envelopes
every other Saturday night—and that the envelopes contained one dollar
per day more than anybody else nearby was getting; moreover, you got
this pay, not only while you were drilling, but while you were sitting
on top of a load of tools, flying through a paradise of orange-groves at
thirty miles an hour, singing songs about the girl who was waiting for
you in the town to which you were bound.
II
Dad had signed up with the man on the North slope, Mr. Bankside, a
gentleman who knew what he wanted, and didn’t waste your time. It was
not so close to the discovery well, therefore Dad would have to pay only
a sixth royalty, and a bonus of five thousand dollars on the two and
one-half acres.
Dad and Bunny called at the offices of the Sunset Lumber Company, and
had a very special private interview with the president of this concern.
Mr. Ascott was a heavy gentleman with flushed cheeks and a manner of
strenuous cordiality; he rumpled Bunny’s hair, and swapped cigars in
gold-foil, and discussed the weather and the prospects of the new field,
so that you’d have thought he and Dad were life-long chums. Until at
last Dad got down to business, and said that he positively had to have
the lumber for a derrick delivered on the ground within three days;
whereupon Mr. Ascott threw up his hands and declared that such an order
could not be filled for God Almighty himself. The demand for derrick
material had simply emptied all the yards, and orders were piling up a
score a day. But Dad interrupted—he knew all that, but this was
something special, he had jist got himself into a contract with a big
forfeit posted at the bank, and he didn’t believe in steel derricks, but
the lumber men would sure have to help him, unless they wanted to lose
him for good. He wanted to place an order for half a dozen more
derricks, to be delivered in the course of the next three months; and
moreover, Mr. Ascott must understand that this well Dad proposed to
drill was going to extend the field, and lead to new developments, and a
big increase in the lumber business, so it was really a public service
Dad was performing, and they must all stand together and help him.
Moreover, Dad was forming a little syndicate to handle a part of this
first well—jist a quiet affair for a few people that knew a good thing
when they saw it, and would appreciate getting in on the ground floor;
and Mr. Ascott knew Dad for a man of his word, and no piker.
Mr. Ascott said that yes, he did; and Dad said that he had come to that
field to give most of his time to it, and he was a-goin’ to make a big
thing there, and he wanted to get a little organization together—they
would all stand by one another, and that was the way to make things go
in this world. Mr. Ascott said that of course, co-operation was the word
in modern business, he granted that; and he wrinkled up his forehead,
and studied some papers on his desk, and did some figuring on a pad, and
asked at just what hour Dad had to have that lumber. And Dad explained
that his cement-man had the cellar and the foundations half done, and
his boss-carpenter was a-gettin’ a crew together—in a matter like this
he wouldn’t trust no contractor. It would suffice if Mr. Ascott would
have the sills there by Thursday night.
Mr. Ascott said they were having a lot of trouble because the roads
about Prospect Hill were in such bad condition; and Dad said he knew
that, and something would have to be done about it quick, he was jist
a-goin’ to see the county superintendent of roads. So then Mr. Ascott
said all right, he would do his part; and Dad invited him to come down
and look the field over, and let Dad put him onto a few good things down
there; and they shook hands, and Bunny had his hair rumpled
again—something which in the course of business he had to pretend that
he didn’t mind.
So that was that. And as they got into their car and drove away, Dad
repeated his maxim that grease is cheaper than steel. Dad meant by that,
you must let people have a share of your profits, so they would become a
part of your “organization,” and do quickly whatever you said. And
meantime they had come to the office of the superintendent of roads,
where they had another very special private interview. This official,
Mr. Benzinger, a sharp little man with nose-glasses, was not dressed
like a man of money, and Bunny knew it by the difference in the tone Dad
took. There was no exchanging of gold-foil cigars, and no talk about the
weather; but Dad got right down to business. He had come to Beach City
to put through a job that would employ hundreds of men, and mean
millions of dollars to the community; the question was, would the road
authorities co-operate to make this possible.
Mr. Benzinger answered that of course, the authorities wanted to do
everything to that end—it was the purpose for which they were in
office; the trouble was that this “strike” at Prospect Hill had caught
them without any funds for rush work. Dad said that might be, but there
must be some way to handle such a situation, everybody’d ought to get
together.
Mr. Benzinger hesitated, and asked just what it was that Mr. Ross
wanted. So Dad explained that he was jist about to drill on such and
such a tract, and he drew a little map showing the streets that he
needed to have graded, and the holes filled up with crushed rock, so his
sills could be delivered on Thursday night. Mr. Benzinger said that
might be arranged, perhaps, and asked his secretary, the only other
person in the room, to step out and ask Mr. Jones to come in; Dad caught
the meaning of that, and as soon as the secretary was gone, he pulled a
little roll of bills out of his pocket, remarking that Mr. Benzinger
would have to work overtime on the matter, and be put to extra trouble
and expense, and it was only fair that Dad should make it up to him; he
hoped Mr. Benzinger would understand that they would have many dealings
in future, as Dad believed in taking care of his friends. Mr. Benzinger
put the bills quietly into his pocket, and said that he understood
fully, and the county authorities wished to give every help to men who
came in to build up the community and its industries; Dad might count
upon it that the work on those streets would start in the morning.
So then they shook hands, and Dad and Bunny went out, and Dad told Bunny
that he must never under any circumstances mention what he had seen in
that office, because every public official had enemies who were trying
to take his job away, and would try to represent it that Dad had paid
him a bribe. But of course it wasn’t anything of the sort; it was the
man’s business to keep the roads in repair, and what Dad gave him was
jist a little tip, by way of thanks, so to speak. You wouldn’t feel
decent not to give him something, because you were going to make a lot
of money yourself, and these here poor devils had to live on a beggar’s
salary. No doubt Mr. Benzinger had a wife and children at home, and they
were in debt; maybe the wife was sick, and they had no way to pay the
doctor. The man would have to stay late at his office, and go out
tonight and hustle up some men to do that job, and maybe get scolded by
his superiors for having acted without authority; the superiors were
doubtless in the pay of some of the big companies, which didn’t want
roads built except to leases of their own. There was all kinds of wires
like that being pulled, said Dad, and you had to be on the watch every
minute. Never imagine that you’d be allowed to come into a new place and
take out several million dollars worth of wealth from the ground, and
not have all kinds of fellers a-tryin’ to get it away from you!
That all sounded reasonable, and Bunny listened while Dad impressed his
favorite lesson: take care of your money! Some day an accident might
happen to Dad, and then Bunny would have the whole thing on his
shoulders; so he could not begin too early to realize that the people he
met would be trying, by devices more or less subtle, to get a hold of
his money. Bunny, not thinking of opposing his father’s arguments, but
merely getting things straight in his own mind, was moved to remark:
“But Dad, you remember that boy Paul? He certainly wasn’t trying to get
our money, for I offered him some, and he wouldn’t take it; he went away
without my seeing him again.”
“Yes, I know,” said Dad; “but he told you his whole family is crazy, and
he’s jist crazy a little different, that’s all.”
III
This was a moral problem which Bunny debated within himself: was Paul
Watkins crazy, because of the way he behaved? If so, there must be a
crazy streak in Bunny also, for he had been enormously impressed by
Paul, and could not help thinking about him. He had paid a tribute to
Paul’s sense of honor, by resolving that he, Bunny, would permit himself
the luxury of not being a liar—not even in trivial things. Also, the
meeting with Paul had caused Bunny to become suddenly aware what an easy
time he was having in life. The very next morning, when he opened his
eyes, lying in the deep soft mattress of the hotel-bed, with its heavy
linen sheets so smooth and white, and its warm blankets, soft as fleece,
and striped the color of ripe strawberries—at once his thought was: how
had Paul slept that night, without shelter and without cover? Had he
lain on the ground? But grandmother, if she saw you even sitting on the
ground in the evening, would cry out that you would “catch your death!”
And down in the spacious dining-room of the hotel, the thought of Paul
without breakfast had quite ruined the taste of grape-fruit in crushed
ice, and cereal and thick cream, and bacon and eggs, and wheat-cakes
with maple syrup. Paul would be going hungry, because he was too proud
to eat food until he had earned it; and some strange perversity caused
Bunny, in the midst of comfort, to yearn toward this fierce anchorite
who spurned the flesh!
The morning after the meeting at Mrs. Groarty’s, Bunny had sat under a
palm-tree in front of the hotel, hoping that Paul would come by.
Instead, there had come Mrs. Groarty and her husband, bringing Mr.
Dumpery, and followed by Mr. and Mrs. Bromley, with their temporary
friends the Jewish tailors. It was a deputation from the “medium lots,”
explaining that they had continued their meeting until one o’clock that
morning, and had decided to rescind their community agreement, and go
each man for himself; now the “medium lots” wanted Dad to take their
lease. Bunny told them that Dad was out in the field with the geologist;
they might wait for him, but Bunny knew how emphatic Dad was about
offset wells, so there was no chance of his taking a small lease.
After which Bunny took a seat on the bench next to Mrs. Groarty, for the
purpose of finding out whether Paul had revealed himself to her. Bunny
confessed to her that he had done something very wrong the previous
evening; he had failed to lock the kitchen door after looking out on the
porch. Following his program of telling the exact truth, he stated that
somebody had gone into her kitchen and taken some food; Bunny had
promised not to tell who it was, but it was someone who was very hungry,
and Bunny had felt sorry about it. If Mrs. Groarty would let him—and he
hauled out his little purse.
Mrs. Groarty was all aglow with pleasure at the delicacy of feeling of
the aristocracy; she had quite fallen in love with this strange little
fellow, who was so pretty to look at, with sensitive red lips like a
girl’s, and at the same time had the manners of an elderly marquis, or
something like that, as Mrs. Groarty had come to know such persons in
moving pictures. She refused his money, at the same time thinking what a
shame her own fortune had not been made earlier in life, so that her
children could have worn such lovely clothes, and learned to express
themselves with old-fashioned elegance!
Two or three days later, while Bunny was poking about the “field,”
watching the interesting sights, he happened to pass the Groarty home,
and saw the future oil-queen feeding her rabbits. “Oh, little boy!” she
called; and when Bunny had come near, she said: “I had a letter from
Paul.”
“Where is he?” cried Bunny, in excitement.
“The letter was mailed in San Paulo. But he says not to look for him,
because he’s hitch-hiking, and he’ll be gone.”
“And how is he?”
“He says he’s all right and not to worry. The poor child, he sent me
two-bits in stamps, to pay for that food he took! He says he earned the
money—bless him!” Tears ran down the lady’s ample cheeks; and Bunny
learned the difficult lesson that human nature is a complicated thing,
so that the same fat lady can be at one moment a hyena of greed, and at
the next a mater dolorosa.
These two sat down on a rabbit-hutch, and had a good talk. Bunny told
Mrs. Groarty just how it had happened, and it was a relief to get it off
his conscience. Mrs. Groarty in turn told him about the Watkins family,
and how they had moved from Arkansas, traveling in the old fashion, by
wagon, when Mrs. Groarty was a girl; before that, she had been driven,
as a baby in arms, from the mountains of Tennessee. Their place at
Paradise, in the San Elido country, was a goat-ranch, with a spring in a
little rocky valley; there was only a couple of acres you could
cultivate, and for part of that you had to pump irrigating water by
hand. It was a desert country, and she didn’t see how they could
possibly get along without Paul’s work; she would send them a little of
her oil money, but she didn’t know whether Abel—that was her brother,
Paul’s father—would take anything from her, he was so crazy with his
religion.
Bunny asked whether he had always been a “roller”; and the other
answered no, it was a notion he had taken up, just a few years ago. As
for Mrs. Groarty, when she had married her present husband, three years
back, she had found her home in the one true faith which had never
changed through the ages; it was a comfortable faith, and let you alone,
and you weren’t always getting crazy new notions and splitting up into
sects. They had a lovely church in Beach City, and Father Patrick had
such a kind heart and a big, splendid voice—had Bunny ever been to a
Catholic service? Bunny said he hadn’t; and Mrs. Groarty might perhaps
have found a handsome and wealthy convert, had it not been that she was
just then being so sorely tempted by the powers of this world.
Yes—Satan had brought her there, and set her on a rabbit-hutch, and was
showing her all the kingdoms of the earth! Right across the street, at
number 5743 Los Robles Boulevard, the Couch Syndicate had set up a big
tent, plastered with red signs, and there were automobiles driving up
all day, with people to buy “units” at ten dollars each. Mrs. Groarty’s
group of “medium lots” had not yet leased, she explained; they had
several offers—the best from Sliper and Wilkins, and had Bunny ever
heard anything about these operators? And was Dad really quite decided
that the best oil prospects lay on the north side? Mrs. Groarty and her
husband were thinking of putting their bonus money, when they got it,
into some units of “Eureka Pete”—the Eureka Petroleum Company—which
was promising a quick drilling on the north slope. And Bunny found
himself suddenly recollecting Dad’s warning: “Look out for people who
mistake you for an oil well, and try to put you on the pump!”
IV
Mr. Benzinger had sent two truck-loads of Mexicans and fixed up the
roads; and Mr. Ascott had kept his promise and delivered the lumber for
the derrick; and Dad’s boss-carpenter had got his gang, and they had cut
mortise-joints in the sills, and drilled holes through them, and set
them with bolts; then stage by stage the towering derrick had come into
being, 122 feet high, straight and true and solid. There was a ladder,
and a platform half-way up, and another place to stand at the top; it
was all nice and clean and new, and Dad would let you climb, and you
could see the view, clear over the houses and the trees, to the blue
waters of the Pacific—gee, it was great! And then came the fleet of
motor-trucks, thundering in just at sunset, dusty and travel-stained,
but full of “pep”—judging by the racket they made, tooting a greeting
to J. Arnold Ross and his son. The ditch by the roadside had been filled
with crushed rock, making a place where they could drive in to the
field; and there they stood, twelve of them lined up in a row.
There were bright electric lights on the derrick, and men waiting, the
sleeves of their khaki shirts rolled up. They went to it with a will;
for they were working under the eye of the “old man,” the master of the
pay-roll and of their destinies. They respected this “old man,” because
he knew his business, and nobody could fool him. Also they liked him,
because he combined a proper amount of kindliness with his sternness; he
was simple and unpretentious—when the work was crowded, you would have
him eating his beans and coffee on a stool in the “eats” joint alongside
you. He was a “real guy”; and with this he combined the glamour of a
million dollars. Yes, he had “the stuff,” barrels of it—and what is a
magician who pulls rabbits and yards of ribbon out of his sleeves,
compared with one who can pull out a couple of dozen oil-derricks, and
as many miles of steel casing, and tanks, and fleets of motor-trucks,
and roads for them to run on?
Also they liked the “kid,” because he put on no more airs than his Dad,
but was jolly, and interested in what you were doing, and asked sensible
questions and remembered your explanations. Yes, a kid like that would
learn the business and carry it on; the old man was teaching him right.
He knew all the crew by their first names, and took their joshing, and
had a suit of old clothing, duly smeared with grease, which he would put
on, and tackle any job where a half-sized pair of hands could get a
hold.
But there was no joshing now; this was a time for breaking records.
There was a big cement block for the engine, and a wooden block on top
of that, to take up the vibration; and now the truck with the engine on
was backed into place, and blocked firm, and the skids made solid, and
in a jiffy the engine was slid into place and ready for business. At the
same time another crew had got the big steam boiler ready. There was a
tank of fuel oil at hand, and the feed-pipe was hitched up, and she was
ready to make steam. And meantime the next truck was backed into place,
and the skids put under the “draw-works”; when Bunny came back the next
morning he found the big “drum” bolted into place, and the running
tackle up in the derrick, and they were unloading the “drill-stem.” They
would fit a steel chain about three of the heavy pipes at once, and a
pulley with a steel hook would come down and seize the chain; the engine
would start thumping, and the chain and the steel cable would draw
tight, and the pipe would slide off the truck. These pipes were twenty
feet long, and weighed nineteen pounds to the foot, and when you had
your well a mile deep, you could figure it for yourself, there was fifty
tons of steel, and your derrick had to carry that weight, and your steel
cables had to lift it, and your drum and engine had to stand the strain.
People kicked at the price of gasoline, but they never thought about the
price of drill-stem and casings!
All these things Bunny had heard a hundred times, but Dad never tired of
telling them. He was never entirely content unless the boy was by his
side, learning the business. You mustn’t fool yourself with the idea
that you could hire experts to attend to things; for how could you know
that a man was an expert, unless you knew as much as he did? Some day
your foreman might drop dead, or some other fellow would buy him away
from you, and then where would you be? Be your own expert, said Dad!
The machinery which did the turning was called a “rotary table”; it was
connected with the engine by a steel chain, exactly like the
sprocket-chain of a bicycle, except that the links were as big as your
fist. The rotary table had a hole through the centre, where the
drill-stem went through; there was a corresponding hole in the
derrick-floor—and soon there would be one in the ground! The hole in
the rotary-table was square, and the top drill-stem, known as your
“Kelly joint,” was square, and fitted this hole; you lowered it
through—but first you screwed in your “collar” and “bit,” the tool
which did the actual cutting. They were starting with a “disc-bit”—it
had two steel things like dinner-plates, set opposite each other, and as
they went round and round, the weight of the pipe caused them to chew
their way into the earth. You started with an eighteen-inch “bit,” and
as it flopped round, it cut you a hole two feet across.
Well, the time came when the last tool was on hand, and the last bolt
made tight, and the drilling tools ready for their long journey into the
bowels of the earth. This was a great moment, akin to the launching of a
ship, or the inauguration of the first president of a republic. Your
friends gathered, and the workers from nearby jobs, and a crowd of
sightseers. The crew had been hustling for three weeks, with this as
their goal, and now they stood, both the day shift and the night shift,
proud of their past, and eager for their future. The engineman had his
hand at the lever, and his eye on Dad; Dad gave him a nod, and he shoved
the lever, and the engine started, and the gears made a roaring racket,
and the bit hit the ground—“Spud! Spud!” At least that is what men
imagine they hear, and so they call the operation “spudding in.” “All
aboard for China!” sang the foreman; and everybody who had clean hands
shook hands with Dad—including Mr. Bankside, whose land they were
drilling, and Mrs. Bankside and the whole Bankside family. They carried
Dad and Bunny to their home, which was on the lease, and they opened a
bottle of champagne, and drank a wee sip to the health of the
Ross-Bankside Number 1, which was already a half-dozen feet down in the
ground.
V
It was cool at the beach in summer, and back at Lobos River it was hot
as the original fires; so the family was going to move. Dad wasted very
little time on such a matter; he dropped in at a real estate agent’s,
and asked for the best furnished house in town, and drove out to an
imitation palace on the ocean-front, and looked it over, and went back
to the office and signed a six month’s lease for twenty-five hundred
dollars.
Outside, this house was plaster applied to chicken-wire, or something
that looked like it; inside, it was shiny like the home of Mrs. Groarty,
only it was imitation mahogany instead of imitation oak. There was a big
entrance hall, and a drawing-room on one side, and on the other a
dining-room, with elaborate up-to-date “built-in” features. To these the
owner had added furniture regardless of expense or period:
spindley-legged gilded French things, done in flowered silk; mid-century
American black walnut, with roses and rosettes; black Chinese teak-wood,
carved with dragons. There were statues of nude ladies, in highly
polished marble, and also a marble clergyman in a frock coat and a
string tie. Upstairs were six bed-rooms, each done in a different color
by a lady from the best department-store in town. Some people might have
found the place lacking in the elements of home, but Bunny never thought
of such a thing—he had learned to be happy in a hotel room, with the
use of the lobby. All his life that he could remember, home had been a
place which you rented, or bought with the idea of holding it as a real
estate speculation. As the Indians in the Hudson Bay country kill a
moose in the winter-time, and move to the moose, so Dad started an oil
well, and moved to the well.
First came Mr. Eaton, the tutor; he was used to getting a telephone
call, informing him where the carcase of the moose was to be found. He
would pack his two suit-cases and his steamer-trunk, and take the train
or the motor-bus to his pupil. He was a rather delicate young man, very
retiring, with pale blue eyes, and pockets that bagged because he put
books in them. He had been engaged with the express restriction that oil
was to come before culture; in other words, he was to teach his pupil at
such times as Dad was not doing it. Dad was not quite clear on the
subject of book knowledge; at times he would say it was all “bunk,” but
at other times he would pay it a tribute of embarrassment. Yes, he was a
“roughneck,” of course, and Bunny would have to know more than he; but
at the same time he was jealous of that knowledge, troubled by fear it
might be something he would disapprove of. He was right in this, for Mr.
Eaton told Bunny quite shamelessly that there were things in the world
more important than oil.
Then came the family limousine, with grandmother and Aunt Emma, driven
by Rudolph, who was a combination of chauffeur and gardener, and would
put on a frock coat and be a butler at parties. Beside him on the front
seat rode Sing, the Chinese cook, who was too precious to be trusted to
motor-bus or train. Nellie, the house-maid, could be more easily
replaced, so she brought herself. A truck brought the trunks and
miscellaneous belongings—Bunny’s bicycle and Aunt Emma’s hat-boxes, and
grandmother’s precious works of art.
Old Mrs. Ross was seventy-five years of age, and her life had been that
of a ranch-woman, in the days before automobiles and telephones and
machinery. She had slaved in poverty, and raised a family, and seen one
daughter die in child-birth, and a son of typhoid in the Spanish war,
and another son as a drunkard; now “Jim” was all she had left, and he
had made a fortune late in his life, and lifted her to leisure at the
end of hers. You might have been a long time guessing what use she would
make of it. Out of a clear sky she announced that she was going to be a
painter! For sixty years, it appeared, she had cherished that dream,
while washing dishes, and spanking babies, and drying apricots and
muscat grapes.
So now, wherever they lived, grandmother had a spare room for a
“studio.” A wandering artist had taught her the handling of crude and
glaring colors. This artist had painted desert sunsets, and the
mountains and rocky coasts of California; but old Mrs. Ross never
painted anything she had ever seen. What she was interested in was
gentility—parks, and lawns, and shady avenues with ladies in
hoop-skirts, and gentlemen with wide-bottomed trousers. Her masterpiece
was six feet by four, and always hung in the dining-room of the rented
home; it showed in the background an extremely elegant two-story house,
with two-storied porches having pillars on which you could see every
curlicue. In front ran a circular drive, with a fountain in the middle,
and water which was very plainly splashing. Around the drive rolled a
victoria—or maybe it was a landau or a barouche—with a lady and a
gentleman being driven by a Negro coachman. Behind the vehicle raced a
little dog, and playing on the lawn were a boy, and a girl in wide
skirts, having a hoop in her hand. Also there were iron deer on the
lawn—you never got tired of looking at this picture, because you could
always find something new in it; Dad would show it to visitors, and say:
“Ma painted that; ain’t she a wonder, for an old lady seventy-five?”
Agents who had come with leasing propositions, or lawyers with papers to
be gone over, or foremen coming for orders, would examine it carefully,
and never disagreed with Dad’s judgment.
Aunt Emma was the widow of the son who had died a drunkard; and to her
also prosperity had come late in life. Dad set no limits—the ladies
charged anything they wanted, and even drew checks on Dad’s account. So
Aunt Emma went to the fanciest shops and got herself raiment, and went
out to uphold the prestige of the Ross family in the town or city where
they were staying. There were ladies’ clubs, and Aunt Emma would attend
their functions, and listen to impressive personalities who rose and
said, “Madam Chairman,” and read papers on the Feminine Element in
Shakespeare’s Plays, and the Therapeutic Value of Optimism, and What
Shall We Do for Our Youth? Once every month the two ladies gave a
tea-party, and Dad always managed to be “spudding in” a new well, or
seeing to a difficult job of “cementing off” on that afternoon.
Aunt Emma particularly patronized the drug-store counters where they
sold cosmetics, and she knew by name the fashionable young ladies who
presided there; also she knew the names of the latest products they
handled, pronouncing these names in quite naive and shameless
American—“Roodge finn dee Theeayter” and “Pooder der Reeze ah lah
corbeel flurry”—which, it must be added, was the only way she could
have got the sales-ladies to know what she meant. Her dressing-table was
covered with rows of delicate little boxes and jars and bottles,
containing paints and powders and perfumes and beauty clays and enamels,
and she alone knew what else. One of Bunny’s earliest memories was of
Aunt Emma, perched on a chair, looking like an enlarged parokeet in a
harness. She was only half dressed, paying no attention to him, because
he was so little; so he observed how she was laced and strapped up in
armor—tight corsets and dress-shields and side-garters and tightly
laced little boots. She sat, erect and serious, putting things on her
cheeks and eye-brows, and dabbing herself with little puffs of pink and
white powder; and at the same time telling Bunny about her husband,
deceased many years ago. He had had many virtues, in spite of his one
tragic weakness; he had had a kind heart, so sweet and generous—“yes,
yes,” said Aunt Emma, “he was a good little man; I wonder where he is
now.” And then, dab, dab, she was patting the tears away from her cheeks
and making them pink again!
VI
Far down in the ground, underneath the Ross-Bankside No. 1, a great
block of steel was turning round and round. The under surface of it had
blunt steel teeth, like a nutmeg-grater; on top of it rested a couple of
thousand feet of steel tubing, the “drill-stem,” a weight of twenty tons
pressing it down; so, as it turned, it ate into the solid rock, grinding
it to powder. It worked in the midst of a river of thin mud, which was
driven down through the center of the hollow tubing, and came up again
between the outside of the tubing and the earth. The river of mud served
three purposes: it kept the bit and the drill-stem from heating; it
carried away the ground-up rock; and as it came up on the outside of the
drill-stem, it was pressed against the walls of the hole, and made a
plaster to keep the walls rigid, so that they did not press in upon the
drill-stem. Up on the top of the ground was a “sump-hole,” of mud and
water, and a machine to keep up the mixture; there were “mud-hogs,”
snorting and puffing, which forced it down inside the stem under a
pressure of 250 pounds to the square inch. Drilling was always a dirty
business; you swam in pale grey mud until the well came in, and after
that you slid in oil.
Also it was an expensive business. To turn those twenty tons of steel
tubing, getting heavier every day as they got longer—that took real
power, you want to know. When the big steam engine started pulling on
the chain, and the steel gears started their racket, Bunny would stand
and listen, delighted. Some engine, that! Fifty horsepower, the
cathead-man would say; and you would imagine fifty horses harnessed to
an old-fashioned turn-table with a pole, such as our ancestors employed
to draw up water from a well, or to run a primitive threshing-machine.
Yes, it took money to drill an oil well out here in California; it
wasn’t like the little short holes in the East, where you pounded your
way down by lifting up your string of tools and letting them drop again.
No siree, here you had to be prepared to go six or seven thousand feet,
which meant from three hundred to three hundred and fifty joints of
pipe; also casing, for you could not leave this hole very long without
protection. There were strata of soft sand, with water running through,
and when you got past these you would have to let down a cylinder of
steel or wrought iron, like a great long stove pipe; joint after joint
you would slide down, carefully rivetting them together, making a
water-proof job; and when you had this casing all set in cement, you
would start drilling with a smaller bit, say fourteen inches, leaving
the upper casing resting firmly on a sort of shelf. So you would go,
smaller and smaller, until, when you got to the oil-sands, your hole
would have shrunk to five or six inches. If you were a careful man, like
Dad, you would run each string of casing all the way up to the
derrick-floor, so that in the upper part of the hole you would have four
sets of casing, one inside the other.
All day and all night the engine labored, and the great chain pulled,
and the rotary-table went round and round, and the bit ate into the
rock. You had to have two shifts of men, twelve hours each, and because
living quarters were scarce in this sudden rush, they kept the same bed
warm all the time. A crew had to be on the job every moment, to listen
and to watch. The engine must have plenty of water and gas and oil; the
pump must be working, and the mud-river circulating, and the
mixing-machine splashing, and the drill making depth at the proper rate.
There were innumerable things that might go wrong, and some of them cost
money, and some of them cost more money. Dad was liable to be waked up
at any hour of the night, and he would give orders over the telephone,
or perhaps he would slip into his clothes and drive out to the field.
And next morning, at breakfast, he would tell Bunny about it; that
fellow Dan Rossiger, the night-foreman, he sure was one balky mule; he
jist wouldn’t make any time, and when you kicked, he said, “All right,
if you want a ‘twist-off’.” And Dad had said, “‘Twist-off’ or no
‘twist-off,’ I want you to make time.” And so, sure enough, there was a
“twist-off,” right away! Dad vowed that Dan had done it on purpose;
there were fellows mean enough for that—and, of course, all they had to
do was to speed up the engine.
Anyhow, there was your “twist-off”; which meant that you had to lift out
every inch of your two thousand feet of pipe. You pulled it up, and
unscrewed it, four joints at a time—“breaking out,” the men called that
operation; each four joints, a “stand,” were stood up in the derrick,
and the weary work went on. You couldn’t tell where the break was, until
you got to it; then you screwed off the broken piece, and threw it away,
and went to your real job, “fishing” for the remainder of your
drill-stem, down in the hole. For this job you had a device called an
“overshot,” which you let down with a cable; it was big and heavy, and
went over the pipe, and caught on a joint when you pulled it
up—something like an ice-man’s tongs. But maybe you got it over, and
maybe you didn’t; you spent a lot of time jiggling it up and down—until
at last she caught fast, and up came the rest of your stem! Then you
unscrewed the broken piece, and put in a sound piece, and let it all
back into the hole, one stand at a time, until you were ready to start
again. But this time you went at the rate Dan Rossiger considered safe,
and you didn’t nag at him for any more “twist-offs!”
Meantime Dad would be spending the day at his little office down in the
business part of the town. There he had a stenographer and a bookkeeper,
and all the records of his various wells. There came people who wanted
to offer him new leases, and hustling young salesmen to show him a
wonderful new device in the way of an “under-reamer,” or to persuade him
that wrought casing lasts longer than cast steel, or to explain the
model of a new bit, that was making marvelous records in the Palomar
field. Dad would see them all, for they might “have something,” you
never could be sure. But woe to the young man who hadn’t got his figures
just right; for Dad had copies of the “logs” of every one of his wells,
and he would pull out the book, and show the embarrassed young man
exactly what he had done over at Lobos River with a Stubbs Fishtail
number seven.
Then the postman would come, bringing reports from all the wells; and
Dad would dictate letters and telegrams. Or perhaps the phone would
ring—long distance calling Mr. Ross; and Dad would come home to lunch
fuming—that fellow Impey over at Antelope had gone and broke his leg,
letting a pipe fall on him: that chap with the black moustache, you
remember? Bunny said, yes, he remembered; the one Dad had bawled out. “I
fired him,” said Dad; “and then I got sorry for his wife and children,
and took him back. I found that fellow down on his knees, with his head
stuck between the chain and the bull-wheel—and he knew we had no
bleeder-valve on that engine! Jist tryin’ to get out a piece of rope, he
said—and his fingers jammed up in there! What’s the use a-tryin’ to do
anything for people that ain’t got sense enough to take care of their
own fingers, to say nothing of their heads? By golly, I don’t see how
they ever live long enough to grow black moustaches on their faces!” So
Dad would fuss—his favorite theme, the shiftlessness of the
working-class whom he had to employ. Of course he had a purpose;
drilling is a dangerous business at best, and Bunny must know what he
was doing when he went poking about under a derrick.
There came a telegram from Lobos River; Number Two was stuck. First,
they had lost a set of tools, and then, while they were stringing up for
the fishing job, a “roughneck” had dropped a steel crowbar into the
hole! They were down four thousand feet, and “fishing” is costly sport
at that depth! Seemed like there was a jinx in that hole; they had
“jammed” three times, and they were six weeks behind their schedule. Dad
fretted, and he would call up the well every couple of hours all day,
but nothing doing; they tried this device and that, and Dad phoned them
to try something else, but in vain. The hole caved in on them, and they
had to clean out and fish ahead, run after run. They had caught the
tools and jarred them out, but the crowbar was still down there, wedged
fast.
The third evening Dad said he guessed he’d have to run over to Lobos
River; it was time to set a new casing anyhow, and he liked to oversee
those cement fellows. Bunny jumped up, crying, “Take me, Dad!” And Dad
said, “Sure thing!” Grandmother made her usual remark about Bunny’s
education going to pot; and Dad made his usual answer, that Bunny would
have all his life to learn about poetry and history—now he was going to
learn about oil, while he had his father to teach him. Aunt Emma tried
to get Mr. Eaton to say something in defense of poetry and history, but
the tutor kept a discreet silence—he knew who held the purse-strings in
that family! Bunny understood that Mr. Eaton didn’t mind about it; he
was preparing a thesis that was to get him a master’s degree, and he
used his spare time quite contentedly, counting the feminine endings in
certain of the pre-Elizabethan dramatists.
VII
Well, they made the trip back to the old field; and Bunny remembered all
the adventures of the last ride, the place where they had had lunch, and
what the waitress had said, and the place where they had stopped for
gas, and what the man had said, and the place where they had run into
the “speed-cop.” It was like fishing—that is, for real fish, like you
catch in water, not in oil wells; you remember where you got the big
fish, and you expect another bite there. But the big fish always come at
a new place, said Dad, and it was the same with “speed-cops.” A cop
picked them up just outside Beach City, passing a speed-trap at
forty-seven miles; and Dad grinned and chaffed the cop, and said he was
glad he hadn’t been really going fast.
They got to Lobos River that evening; and there was the rig, fishing
away—screwing the stands of pipe together and working down into the
hole with some kind of grabbing device on the end, and then hauling up
and unscrewing—stand after stand, fifty or sixty of them, one after
another—until at last you got to the bottom one, only to find that you
had missed your “fish!”
Well, Dad said his say, in tones that nobody could help hearing. If he
couldn’t find men who would take care of their own bones, it was
doubtless too much to hope they would take care of his property. They
stood there, looking like a lot of school-boys getting a
birching—though of course the “roughneck” who was wholly to blame had
been turned loose on the road long ago.
There was a salesman from a supply house there with a patent device
which he guaranteed would bring up the obstacle the first run; so they
tried it, and left the device in the hole—it had held on too tight!
Evidently there was a pocket down there, and the crowbar had got wedged
crossways; so they’d have to try a small chunk of dynamite, said Dad.
Ever listen to an explosion four thousand feet under the ground? Well,
that was how they got the crowbar loose; and then they had a job of
cleaning out, and drilling some more, and setting a casing to cover the
damaged place in the hole.
Thus, day by day, Bunny got his oil lessons. He wandered about the field
with Dad and the geologist and the boss driller, while they laid out the
sites for future wells; and Dad took an envelope and pencil, and
explained to Bunny why you place your wells on the four corners of a
diamond, and not on the four corners of a square. You may try that out
for yourself, drawing a circle about each well, to indicate the
territory from which the oil is drained; you will see that the diamond
shape covers the ground with less overlapping. Wherever you overlap, you
are drilling two holes to get the same barrel of oil; and only a dub
would do that.
They drove back to Beach City, and found that Bertie had come home.
Bertie was Bunny’s sister, two years his senior, and she had been
visiting the terribly fashionable Woodbridge Rileys, up north. Bunny
tried to tell her about the fishing-job, and how things were going at
Lobos River, but she was most cruelly cutting—described him as a
“little oil gnome,” and said that his finger-nails were a “dead
give-away.” It appeared that Bertie had become ashamed of oil; and this
was something new, for of old she had been a good pal, interested in the
business, and arguing with Bunny and bossing him as any older sister
should. Bunny didn’t know what to make of it, but gradually he came to
understand that this was a part of the fashionable education Bertie was
getting at Miss Castle’s school.
Aunt Emma was to blame for this. She had granted Jim’s right to confine
Bunny’s training to the making of money, but Bertie at least should be a
young lady—meaning that she should learn how to spend the money which
Dad and Bunny were going to make. So Aunt Emma got the name of the most
expensive school for young female money-spenders, and from that time on
the family saw little of Bertie; after school she went to visit her new
rich friends. She couldn’t bring them to her home, there being no real
butler—Rudolph was a “farm-hand,” she declared. She had picked up some
wonderful new slang; if she didn’t like what you said, she would tell
you that you were “full of prunes”—this was away back in history, you
understand. She would give a pirouette and show off her fancy lingerie,
with violet-colored ribbons in it; she would laugh gleefully: “Aren’t I
a speedy young thing?”—and other phrases which caused grandmother to
stare and Dad to grin. She would be pained by her father’s grammar: “Oh,
Dad, _don’t_ say ‘jist’!” And Dad would grin again, and reply: “I been
a-sayin’ it jist fifty-nine years.” But all the same, he began a-sayin’
it less frequently; which is how civilization progresses.
Bertie condescended to drive out to the field, and see the new derricks
that were going up. They went for a walk, and whom should they meet but
Mrs. Groarty, getting out of her elderly Ford car in front of her home.
Bunny was naively glad to see her, and insisted upon introducing Bertie,
who displayed her iciest manner, and, as they went on, scolded Bunny
because of his horrid vulgar taste; he might pick up acquaintance with
every sort of riff-raff if he chose, but certainly he need not make his
sister shake hands with them! Bunny could not understand—he never did
succeed in understanding, all his life long, how people could fail to be
interested in other people.
He told Bertie about Paul, and what a wonderful fellow he was, but
Bertie said just what Dad had said, that Paul was “crazy.” More than
that, she became angry, she thought that Paul was a “horrid fellow,” she
was glad Bunny hadn’t been able to find him again. That was an attitude
which Bertie was to show to Paul all through Paul’s life; she showed it
at the very first instant, and poor Bunny was utterly bewildered. But in
truth, it was hardly reasonable to expect that Bertie, who was going to
school in order to learn to admire money—to find out by intuition
exactly how much money everybody had, and to rate them
accordingly—should be moved to admiration by a man who insisted that
you had no right to money unless you had earned it!
Bertie was following her nature, and Bunny followed his. The anger of
his sister had the effect of setting Paul upon a lonely eminence in
Bunny’s imagination; a strange, half-legendary figure, the only person
who had ever had a chance to get some of Dad’s money, and had refused
it! Every now and then Bunny would stop by and sit on a rabbit-hutch,
and ask Mrs. Groarty for news about her nephew. One time the stout lady
showed him a badly scrawled note from Ruth Watkins—Paul’s sister, whom
he loved—saying that the family had had no word; also that they were
having a hard time keeping alive, they were having to kill a goat now
and then—and Mrs. Groarty said that was literally eating up their
capital. Later on there was another letter from Ruth, saying that Paul
had written to her; he was up north, and still on the move, so no one
could get hold of him; he sent a five-dollar bill in a registered
letter, and specified that it was to go for food, and not for missions.
It wasn’t easy to save money when you were only getting a boy’s pay,
Paul said; and again Bunny was moved to secret awe. He went off and did
a strange secret thing—he took a five-dollar bill, and folded it
carefully in a sheet of paper, and sealed it up in a plain envelope, and
addressed it to “Miss Ruth Watkins, Paradise, California,” and dropped
it into a mail-box.
Mrs. Groarty was always glad to see Bunny, and Bunny, alas, knew
why—she wanted to use him for an oil well! He would politely pay her
with a certain amount of information. He asked Dad about Sliper and
Wilkins, and Dad said they were “four-flushers”; Bunny passed this
information on, but the “medium lots” went ahead and signed up with this
pair—and very soon wished they hadn’t. For Sliper and Wilkins proceeded
to sell the lease to a syndicate, and so there was a tent on the lot
next to the Groarty home, and free lunches being served to crowds of
people gathered up in the streets of Beach City by a “ballyhoo” man.
“Bonanza Syndicate No. 1,” it was called; and they hustled up a derrick,
and duly “spudded in,” and drilled a hundred feet or so; and Mrs.
Groarty was in heaven, and spent her thousand dollars of bonus money for
a hundred units of another syndicate, the “Co-operative No. 3.” The
crowds trampled her lawn, but she didn’t care—the company would move
her home when they drilled the second well, and she was going into a
neighborhood that was “much sweller”—so she told Bunny.
But then, on his next visit, he saw trouble in the stout lady’s
features. The drilling had stopped; the papers said the crew was
“fishing,” but the men said they were “fishing for their pay.” The
selling of “units” slowed down, the “ballyhoo” stopped, and then the
syndicate was sold to what was called a “holding company.” The drilling
was not resumed, however, and poor Mrs. Groarty tried pitifully to get
Bunny to find out from his father what was happening to them. But Dad
didn’t know, and nobody knew—until six months or so later, long after
Dad had brought in his Ross-Bankside No. 1 with triumphant success. Then
the newspapers appeared with scare headlines to the effect that the
grand jury was about to indict D. Buckett Kyber and his associates of
the Bonanza Syndicate for fraudulent sales of oil stock. Dad remarked to
Bunny that this was probably a “shake-down”; some of the officials, and
maybe some of the newspaper men, desired to be “seen” by Mr. Kyber.
Presumably they were “seen,” for nothing more was heard of the
prosecution. Meantime, the owners of the lease could not get anyone to
continue the drilling, for the block next to them had brought in a two
hundred barrel well, which was practically nothing; the newspapers now
said that the south slope looked decidedly “edgy.”
So Bunny, in the midst of his father’s glory, would pass down the street
and encounter poor Mr. Dumpery, coming home from the trolley with
dragging steps, after having driven some thousands of shingle-nails into
a roof; or Mr. Sahm, the plasterer, tending his little garden, with its
rows of corn and beans that were irrigated with a hose. Bunny would see
Mrs. Groarty, feeding her chickens and cleaning out her
rabbit-hutches—but never again did he see the fancy evening-gown of
yellow satin! He would go inside, and sit down and chat, in order not to
seem “stuck-up”; and there was the stairway that led to nowhere, and the
copy of “The Ladies’ Guide: A Practical Handbook of Gentility,” still
resting on the centre-table, its blue silk now finger-soiled, and its
gold letters tarnished. Bunny’s eyes took in these things, and he
realized what Dad meant when he compared the oil-game to heaven, where
many are called and few are chosen.
VIII
Scattered here and there over the hill were derricks, and the drilling
crews were racing to be the first to tap the precious treasure. By day
you saw white puffs from the steam-engines, and by night you saw lights
gleaming on the derricks, and day and night you heard the sound of heavy
machinery turning, turning—“ump-um—ump-um—ump-um—ump-um.” The
newspapers reported the results, and a hundred thousand speculators and
would-be speculators read the reports, and got into their cars and rode
out to the field where the syndicates had their tents, or thronged the
board-rooms in town, where prices were chalked up on blackboards, and
“units” were sold to people who would not know an oil-derrick from a
“chute the chutes.”
Who do you think stood first in the newspaper reports? You would need to
make but one guess—Ross-Bankside No. 1. Dad was right there, day and
night, knowing the men who were working for him, watching them,
encouraging them, scolding them if need be—and so Dad had not had a
single accident, he had not lost a day or night. The well was down to
thirty-two hundred feet, and in the first stratum of oil-sand.
They were using an eight-inch bit, and for some time they had been
taking a core. Dad was strenuous about core-drilling; he insisted that
you must know every inch of the hole, and he would tell stories of men
who had drilled through paying oil-sands and never known it. So the
drill brought up a cylinder of rock, exactly like the core you would
take out of an apple; and Bunny learned to tell shale from sandstone,
and conglomerate from either. He learned to measure the tilt of the
strata, and what that told the geologist about the shape of things down
below, and the probable direction of the anticline. When there were
traces of oil, there had to be chemical analyses, and he learned to
interpret these reports. Every oil-pool in the world was different—each
one a riddle, with colossal prizes for the men who could guess it!
Dad guessed that he was right over the pool, and so he had ordered his
“tankage.” There was going to be a rush for this, as for everything
else, and Dad had the cash—and still more important, the reputation for
having the cash! He would get his “tankage” onto the lease, and if he
were disappointed in his hopes for oil—well, somebody else would get
it, and they would be glad to take the “tankage” off his hands. So there
came a stream of heavy trucks, and stacked up on the field were flat
sheets of steel, and curved sheets, all fitting exactly. You may be sure
the buyers of “units” did not fail to make note of that! They were
hanging round the derrick day and night, trying to pick up hints; they
followed the men to their homes, and tried to bribe them, or to get into
conversation with their wives. As for Bunny, he was about the most
popular boy in Beach City; it was wonderful how many kind gentlemen, and
even kind ladies there were, anxious to buy him ice-cream, or to feed
him out of boxes of candy! Dad forbade him to say a word to strangers,
or to have anything to do with them; and presently Dad banned
discussions at the family table—because Aunt Emma was chattering in the
ladies’ clubs, and the ladies were telling their husbands, besides
gambling “on their own!”
The core showed more signs, and Dad gave orders to build the foundations
of the tanks; then he ordered the tanks put up, and the clatter of
riveting machines was heard, and magically there rose three ten thousand
barrel tanks, newly-painted with flaming red lead. And then—hush!—they
were in the real oil-sands; Dad set a crew of Mexicans to digging him a
trench for a pipe-line; and the lease-hounds and the dealers in units
discovered that, and the town went wild. In the middle of the night Dad
was routed out of bed, and he called Bunny, and they jumped into their
old clothes and went racing out to the well, and there were the first
signs of the pressure, the mud was beginning to jump and bubble in the
hole! The drilling had stopped, and the men were hastily screwing on the
big “casing-head” that Dad had provided. He wasn’t satisfied even with
that—he set them to fastening heavy lugs to the head, and he hustled up
a couple of cement-men and built great blocks of cement over the lugs,
to hold her down in spite of any pressure. There wasn’t going to be a
blow-out on Ross-Bankside No. 1, you bet; whatever oil came through that
hole was going into the tanks, and from there into Dad’s bank account!
It was time for the “cementing off,” to make the well water-proof, and
protect the precious oil-sands. Down there under the ground was a pool
of oil, caught under a layer of impermeable rock, exactly like an
inverted wash-basin. The oil was full of gas, which made the pressure.
Now you had drilled a hole through the wash-basin, and the oil and gas
would come to you—but only on condition that you did not let any
surface water down to kill the pressure. All the way down you had been
tapping underground streams and pools of water; and now you had to set a
big block of cement at the bottom of the hole, solid and tight, filling
every crevice, both inside and outside your casing. Having got this
tight, you would drill a hole through it, and on down into the
oil-sands, thus making a channel through which the oil could flow up,
and no water could leak down. This was the critical part of your
operation, and while it was going on the whole crew was keyed up, and
the owner and his son, needless to say.
First you put down your casing, known as the “water-string.” If you were
a careful man, like Dad, you ran this “string” all the way up to your
derrick-floor. Next you began pumping down clean water; for many hours
you pumped, until you had washed the dirt and oil out of the hole; and
then you were ready for the cement-men. They came with a truck, a
complete outfit on wheels, ready to travel to any well. Another truck
brought the sacks of cement, a couple of hundred of them; the job called
for pure cement, no sand. They got everything ready before they started,
and then they worked like so many fiends—for this whole job had to be
put through in less than an hour, before the cement began to set.
It was an ingenious scheme they had, very fascinating to watch. They
fitted inside the casing a cast-iron “packer,” having rubber discs at
the top and bottom, so that it floated on the water in the casing; the
cement went on top of this. The sacks were jerked open, and dumped into
the hopper of the mixing machine, and the mixer began to revolve, and
the river of grey liquid to pour into the hole. It ran fast, and the
heavy pumps set to work, and drove it down, stroke after stroke. In half
an hour they had filled several hundred feet of the casing with cement;
after which they put on a rubber “packer,” fitting tight to the casing;
and again the heavy pumps went to work, and drove the mass of cement,
between the two “packers,” down into the hole. When they came to the
bottom, the bottom packer would drop, and the cement would pour in, and
the pressure of the top packer would force it into every cranny of the
hole, and up between the outside of the casing and the earth—one or two
hundred feet high it would rise, and when it set, there you would have
your “water shut-off.”
What could be more fun to watch than a job like this? To know what was
going on under the ground; to see the ingenuity by which men overcame
Nature’s obstacles; to see a crew of workers, rushing here and there,
busy as beavers or ants, yet at the same time serene and sure, knowing
their job, and just how it was going!
The job was done; and then you had to wait ten days for your cement to
get thoroughly set. The state inspector came and made his tests, to be
sure you had got a complete “shut-off”; if you hadn’t, he would make you
do it over again—some poor devils had to do it twenty or thirty times!
But nothing like that happened to Dad; he knew about “cementing
off”—and also about inspectors, he added with a grin. Anyhow, he got
his permit; and now Ross-Bankside No. 1 was drilling into the real
oil-sands, going down with a six-inch hole. Every few hours they would
test for pressure, to be sure they had enough, but not too much. You
were right on the verge of triumph now, and your pulse went fast and you
walked on tiptoe with excitement. It was like waiting for Christmas
morning, to open your stocking, and see what Santa Claus had brought!
There were crowds staring at the well all day, and you put up rude signs
to make them keep their noses out.
Dad said they were deep enough now, and they proceeded to set the last
casing—it was known as the “liner,” and had holes like a sieve, through
which the treasure would flow. They were working late into the night,
and both Dad and Bunny had old clothes on, and were bathed in oil and
mud. At last they had the “liner” all ready, and the tools out, and they
started to “wash” the well, pumping in fresh water and cleaning out the
mud and sand. That would go on for five or six hours, and meantime Dad
and Bunny would get their sleep.
When they came back, it was time to “bail.” You understand, the pressure
of the gas and oil was held down by the column of water, two thirds of a
mile deep. Now they had what they called a “double-section bailer,”
which was simply a bucket fifty feet long. They would let that down, and
lift out fifty feet of the water-column, and dump it into the sump-hole.
Then they would go down for another fifty; and presently they would find
they didn’t have to go down so far, the pressure was shoving the column
of water up in the hole. Then you knew you were getting near to the end;
one or two more trips of the bailer, and the water would be shot out of
the hole, and mud and water and oil would spout up over the top of the
derrick, staining it a lovely dripping black. You must drive the crowds
off the lease now, and shout “Lights out!” to the fools with cigarettes.
There she came! There was a cheer from all hands, and the spectators
went flying to avoid the oily spray blown by the wind. They let her
shoot for a while, until the water had been ejected; higher and higher,
way up over the derrick—she made a lovely noise, hissing and splashing,
bouncing up and down!
It was just at sundown, and the sky was crimson. “Lights out!” Dad kept
calling—nobody must even start a motor-car while she was spouting.
Presently they shut her off, to try the valve of the casing-head; they
worked on, late into the night, letting her spout, and then shutting her
off again; it was mysteriously thrilling in the darkness. At last they
were ready to “bring her in”—which meant they would screw up the
“flow-line” between the casing-head and the tank, and let the oil run
into the latter. Just as simple as that—no show, no fuss, you just let
her flow; the gauge showed her coming at the rate of thirty thousand
gallons every hour, which meant that the first tank was full by noon the
next day.
Yes, that was all; but the news affected Beach City as if an angel had
appeared in a shining cloud and scattered twenty-dollar gold pieces over
the streets. You see, Ross-Bankside No. 1 “proved up” the whole north
slope; to tens of thousands of investors, big and little, it meant that
a hope was turned into glorious certainty. You couldn’t keep such news
quiet, it just didn’t lie in the possibility of human nature not to
tell; the newspapers bulletined the details—Ross-Bankside was flowing
sixteen thousand barrels a day, and the gravity was 32, and as soon as
the pipe-line was completed—which would be by the end of the week—its
owner would be in possession of an income of something over twenty
thousand dollars every twenty-four hours. Would you need to be told that
the crowds stared at Dad and at Bunny, everywhere they went about the
streets of the city? There goes the great J. Arnold Ross, owner of the
new well! And that little chap is his son! Say, he’s got thirteen
dollars coming to him every minute of the day or night, whether he’s
awake or asleep. By God, a fellow would feel he could afford to order
his lunch, if he was to have an income like that!
Bunny couldn’t help but get a sense of importance, and think that he was
something special and wonderful. Little thrills ran over him; he felt as
if he could run up into the air and fly. And then Dad would say: “Take
it easy, son! Keep your mouth shut, and don’t go a-gettin’ your head
swelled. Remember, you didn’t make this here money, and you can lose it
in no time, if you’re a lightweight.” Dad was a sensible fellow, you
see; he had been through all this before, first at Antelope, and then at
Lobos River. He had felt the temptation of grandeur, and knew what it
must be to a boy. It was pleasant to have a lot of money; but you must
set up a skeleton at the feast, and while you quaffed the wine of
success, you must hear a voice behind you whispering, “Memento mori!”