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