Oil, p.12
Oil!, page 12
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 “underreamer,” 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.[10] 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 mustache, 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 mustaches 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 schoolboys 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 fingernails were a “dead giveaway.” 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 “farmhand,” 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 riffraff 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 mailbox.
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.[11] 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.[12] “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 “Cooperative 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 stocks. Dad remarked to Bunny that this was probably a “shakedown”; some of the officials, and maybe some of the newspapermen, 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 center 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 boardrooms 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.”[13]
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.[14] 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.[15] 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.”[16] 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 pipeline; 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 “casinghead” that Dad had provided.[17] 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 blowout 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!
