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Tom Owen was a good man, and he was also a good driller, but there was one thing that Denver held against him he had been a drinking man when Arizona was wet. And a man who has drunk, no matter when, is never quite the same in a contest. He has lost that narrow margin of vital force, those last few ounces of strength and stamina which win or lose at the finish.
What do you figure as the daily output of the gusher?" asked Graham. "Don't know. It's a whale of a well. Seems to have tapped a great lake of oil half a mile underground. My driller Burns figures it at from twenty to thirty thousand barrels a day. I cayn't even guess, because I know so blamed little about oil."
He declared the outfit he was working for were no good and wouldn't pay a driller a bonus if he made a well for them. He was sick of making other people rich and getting nothing for himself.... It was time the drilling crews shared in the profits.... He'd see that nobody froze him out again if he had to spoil the hole.
"Don't get excited about that railroad, son," drawled the former hard-rock driller, chewing his cud equably. "I rode a horse to death fifteen years ago to beat the choo-choo train in here, an' I notice it ain't arriv yet." Bob left them to their argument. He was not just now in a mood for badinage. He moved up the street past the scattered suburbs of the little frontier town.
You know he thinks he's a mining expert, and he's been crazy to look at the diamond drill cores; and the other day the boss driller was over and he told me how he got rid of him. You know, in drilling down they run into cavities where the lime has been leached away, and in order to keep the bore intact they pour them full of cement.
An admirable organizer and indefatigable driller of ships, though apparently a poor disciplinarian, Howe lacked the breadth of view, the clear intuitions, the alacrity of mind, brought to bear upon the problem by Jervis and Nelson, who, thus inspired, framed the sagacious plan to which, more than to any other one cause, was due the exhaustion alike of the Revolutionary fury and of Napoleon's imperial power.
Rollins said he was an oil driller. Mr. Rollins went into the station there." Tom motioned to the radio operating room beyond a closed door. "Asked me to throw on the juice so he could use the telephone." "Whom did he talk to?" "Why, I don't know," said Tom. "How would I?" "How long was he in there?" "Why, fifteen, twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. Why, Jack? Anything wrong?"
With all the excitement and everybody running double 'towers' and trying to beat the other fellow down to the sand, it struck me as queer that a contract driller like Pete would be here in Wichita in conference with Bell and Henry Nelson, when he ought to be out on the lease fishing for a lost bit. It didn't sound right.
That meant annoyance, at best, and a possible impairment of credit, and the Nelson credit right now was a precious thing, as Henry well knew. Eloquently he cursed the day he had met Calvin Gray. What next, he wondered. He discovered what next when the driller he had sent up to Arkansas in charge of his rig one day came into the office in great agitation.
At the junction he took the stage for Malapi. Already he could see that he was going into a new world, one altogether different from that he had last seen here. These men were not cattlemen. They talked the vocabulary of oil. They had the shrewd, keen look of the driller and the wildcatter. They were full of nervous energy that oozed out in constant conversation.
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