barrels a day as regular as a ticking clock.”
“Might be worth me taking a look.”
“I don’t know what else is there or how big the field is,” Stroube said. “But that big chalk well is making somebody a lot of money.”
Max Williams frowned, thought it over for a moment, then casually asked, “Where in the world is Giddings?”
“Somewhere east of Austin. Not far from LaGrange. A little west of Brenham.”
Williams nodded and filed the information away in the back of his mind. Somewhere between noon and midnight, his mind was made up. Come morning, he would be on his way to Giddings. The big chalk well, if it were indeed tucked back against the Giddings airport, had waited a long time for someone to stumble across it. He would not keep the well waiting much longer.
Ray Holifield had been asked by Max Williams and Irv Deal to find another oil play even before they drove away from Pearsall. The chalk continued to intrigue them, but the chalk stretched across Texas, through Louisiana, and down to the Mississippi coast. As was his custom, Holifield began most days by diligently thumbing through a stack of information generated and published by the Texas Railroad Commission, the regulators of the oil industry in the state. The commission duly noted each well in Texas, marked its location, and divulged the amount of oil it was producing on a daily basis.
One well, however, intrigued him a great deal. He had originally been aware of its existence because of the rumors drifting from one oil rig to another. The well certainly did not occupy the heart of any great field. It was sitting perched on the edge of Giddings, drilled smack dab in the formidable chalk, and Holifield had always possessed a bad feeling about the chalk. It ground the bones of men into sand, scattered by the winds. It offered paybacks and very few paydays.
The City of Giddings No. 1 was a perplexing conundrum, a lonesome well, an orphan well, situated out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by untold acres of dry farmlands, dry creek beds, and dry holes.
Holifield had already circled the location on a worn Texas land map by the time Max Williams telephoned to say he thought he had tracked down the big chalk well that everyone had been talking about in Pearsall.
“That’s the one,” Holifield said.
“How do you know?”
“I have the data right here in front of me.”
“Can we find another well just like it?”
Holifield sighed. “The odds say we can’t.”
“I’m not betting on the odds,” Williams said. ‘I’m betting on you.”
He was on his way to Giddings, and he wanted Holifield to unearth as much data as he could on the old airport well. Was it any good? Was it worth chasing? Was Giddings, perhaps, the next great hope? Or the next great hoax?
Holifield already knew. But a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. It defied all logic, unexpected and unexplained. Some old boy had dabbled in the chalk and gotten rich, Holifield figured. The City of Giddings No. 1 had been a steady producer for a long time, flowing three hundred barrels of oil a day for at least the last four years. The field wasn’t large, just a single big well next door to an abandoned airport and a handful of dry holes. There may have been only one well, and it was lodged firmly in the chalk, but it was a dandy.
Max Williams had driven down a lonesome highway past rolling farmlands, and only a bare horizon rose up in front of him. He gazed across an unbroken landscape that covered the chalk like the jacket on a book. The big chalk well was the stuff of legends. But not all legends were true. Max Williams grinned. He would find out soon enough.
By the time Williams reached Giddings, picked up Walter Schneider, and turned his Blazer toward the airport, he was convinced that his bare-boned strategy just might work. Find the best chalk well in Texas, which he believed he had. Lease a little land around it. Try to determine which way the faults or fractures ran in the chalk. Move in as close as possible to the City of Giddings No. 1. And drill an off-setting well. The oil was down there. No doubt about it. Trying to locate it with a string of drill pipe, battling through chalk that, at times, appeared to be impenetrable, and probing around ten thousand feet below the surface of the ground had never been an easy task.
One place to hit. An ungodly amount of places to miss.
The oil patch had forever been rife with a lot of odd theories about the locations where oil could be discovered and ways to discern where it might be. For more than a century, poor boy operators had met with mediums and spiritualists, used water witches, divining rods, and doodlebugs, outfitted with an array of electrical wires, dials, and bells.
A doodlebug was placed in a shrouded sedan chair and carried across empty pastures by four men. A wildcatter knew to drill on the spot where the bells caught life and began to ring. Some oilmen only chose to spud in their wells near cemeteries because tombstones always occupied the high ground, which might be a salt dome.
A few, H. L. Hunt among them, drilled near a creek or wouldn’t drill at all. They were constantly searching for a faint trace of oil that might be coating the top of the water and were classified as creekologists. Others were more like H. R. Stroube, known as closeologists. They were adamant about trying their luck as close as they could get to a high-dollar, money-making well, so close, in fact, they could smell the strong aroma of oil coming out of the ground. Max Williams may not have realized it at the time, but he was quickly becoming a self-styled closeologist.
If Williams were right and Ray Holifield was as good a geologist as advertised, Giddings just might be on the threshold of becoming a town – no longer forgotten, no longer ignored or overlooked – that had the potential of changing many lives, not the least of which was his own.
After surveying the rusting carcass of a dead well brought back to life, a well whose pulse had never weakened, Williams drove Walter Schneider back to his service station and talked again to Ray Holifield. He had seen the well. The myth was as real as he had hoped it would be. He needed for Holifield to track down the right locations and Randy Stewart to lease the right acreage. Irv Deal would handle the operation and put the crew together.
Williams would raise the money. His nerves were on edge. He wasn’t for sure whether the gamble in hard ground around Giddings excited him, frightened him, or just made him wary. The difference between riches and financial disaster was often a single step, a single decision, right or wrong.
Ray Holifield, tucked away in his Dallas office, sat down with a lease map and began carefully marking the fault lines where he believed they extended away from the City of Giddings well. He handed the map to Randy Stewart and said, “Get me every available acre of land within those lines.”
Back in the beginning, Stewart said he really had no idea what oil or gas looked like underground. He simply referred to himself as a legal mind getting paid for doing some legal work. While Williams and Deal folded up their real estate businesses and began poking around for oil in Palo Pinto and Pearsall, Stewart suddenly found himself spending more and more time out of the office, on the road, and trying to piece together scraps of acreage that made up those elusive leases. He pored through musty old records hour after hour, day after day, tracking down those who owned the land or the leases, and figuring out who, if anybody, possessed a clear title to the acreage. He assembled it all. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Did the phone still work? Had that sacred patch of ground been abandoned, sold, passed on, settled during probate, or lost to hard times?
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