Pains like fingernails! Cavalry heroes who turn into villains. I suppose that’s why the biggest oil field in the Four Corners is called the Paradox Basin!”
CHAPTER THREE
A “Poor Boy” Outfit
Hall routed Ralph Salmon and the boys out of bed before dawn the next day. They ate a huge pancakes-and-sausage breakfast cooked by the sleepy-eyed but cheerfully clucking Misses Emery and climbed into the company jeep just as the sun was gilding the peaks of the mountains. Soon their teeth were chattering in the morning cold as Salmon roared off in a northwesterly direction toward the San Juan River lease.
“I wouldn’t have come down to Farmington at all this week,” Hall shouted above the wind which made the jeep top pop and crack, “except that I promised to pick up you boys, and Ralph had to get our core drill repaired. That’s the drill you hear thumping under the seat. We’re down a thousand feet with our second well and I should be riding herd on it every minute.”
“You’re a worrywart, boss,” chuckled the Indian. “You know that Harry Donovan’s on the job up there. He can handle things just as well as you can.”
“You’re right,” Hall answered. “But somehow it doesn’t seem right to have a geologist bossing the drill crew. That’s a hang-over from my days with a big spit-and-polish producing company, I guess.
“Ours is what they call a ‘poor boy’ outfit here in the oil country,” he explained to Sandy and Quiz. “We make do with secondhand drill rigs and other equipment. Sometimes we dig our engines and cables out of junk yards.”
“Now, now, boss, don’t cry,” said their driver. “It’s not quite that bad.”
“It will be if this well doesn’t come in.” Hall grinned. “But we do have to make every penny count, kids. We all pitch in on anything that needs doing. What kind of jobs have you cooked up for our new roustabouts, Ralph?”
“There’s a new batch of mud to be mixed,” the Indian answered. “How about that for a starter?”
“Mud!” Quiz exploded. “What’s mud got to do with drilling an oil well?”
“Plenty, my friend. Plenty,” Ralph answered. “Mud is forced down into a well to cool the drill bit and to wash rock cuttings to the surface. You use mud if you have water, that is. In parts of this country, water’s so short, or so expensive to haul, that producers use compressed air for those purposes. We’re lucky. We can pipe plenty of water from the river.”
“Then you mix the water with all sorts of fancy chemicals to make something that’s called mud but really isn’t,” said Sandy, remembering tales of the oil country that his father had told him.
“You’re forgetting that we’re a ‘poor boy’ outfit,” said Hall. “Chemicals cost money. We dig shale from the river bed and grind it up and use it for a mix. You’ll both have a nice new set of blisters before this day is over.”
They followed a good paved road to the little town of Shiprock, which got its name from a huge butte that looked amazingly like a ship under full sail. Crossing the San Juan over the new bridge that Pepper had pointed out the day before, they turned northwest onto a badly rutted trail. Here and there they saw flocks of sheep, watched by half-naked Indian children and their dogs. Occasionally they passed a six-sided Navajo house surrounded by a few plowed acres.
“Those huts are called hogans,” Ralph explained, placing the accent on the last syllable. “Notice that they have no windows and that their only doors always face toward the rising sun. Never knock on a hogan door. That’s considered bad luck. Just walk in when you go to visit a Navajo.”
“Whe-e-ew!” Sandy panted when an hour had passed and he had peeled out of his coat, shirt, and finally his undershirt. “How can it get so hot at this altitude?”
“Call this hot?” jeered Salmon. “Last time I was down in Phoenix it was 125 degrees in the shade, and raining cats and dogs at the same time. I had to park my car a block from the hotel, so I ran for it. But when I got into the lobby my clothes were absolutely dry. The rain evaporated as fast as it fell!”
“That,” said Hall, “is what I’d call evaporating the truth just a leetle bit.”
“Mr. Salmon…” Quiz hesitated. “Could I ask you a personal question?”
“You can if you call me Ralph,” answered the tall driller as he slowed to let a Navajo woman drive a flock of goats across the trail. She was dressed in a brightly colored blouse and long Spanish skirt, as if she were going to a party instead of doing a chore, and she did not look up as they passed.
“Well, how is it you don’t talk more—like an Indian?” Quiz asked.
“How do Indians talk?” A part of the Ute’s smile faded and his black eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
“Why, I dunno—” the boy’s face turned red with embarrassment—“like Chief Quail, I guess. I mean… I thought…”
“When you’ve served a hitch in the Navy, Quiz, you get to talking just like everyone else, whether you’re an Indian or an Eskimo.”
“Were you in Korea, Ralph?” Sandy asked to break the tension.
“I was not! I served my time working as a roustabout on oil wells in one of the Naval Reserves.”
“And, since that wasn’t enough punishment,” Hall said as he grinned, “Ralph came home and took advantage of the GI bill to go to school in Texas and became a driller.”
“Yep,” Salmon agreed. “And I soon found out that an Indian oil driller is about as much in demand as a two-headed calf.” He threaded the car through the narrow crevice between two tall buttes of red sandstone that stuck up out of the desert like gnarled lingers. “I was just about down to that fried caterpillar diet that Chief Quail keeps kidding me about when a certain man whose name I won’t mention gave me my first job.”
“And you turned out to be the best all-round oilman I ever hired,” said Hall as he slapped the other on his bronzed, smoothly muscled back. “I figured that if Iroquois Indians make the finest steelworkers in the construction business, a Ute should know how to run a drill rig. I wasn’t mistaken.”
Salmon was at a loss for words for once. His ears turned pink and he concentrated on the road, which was becoming almost impassable, even for a jeep.
“That’s my reservation over there across the Colorado line,” he said at last, turning his head and pointing with outthrust lips toward the north and east.
“Nice country—for prairie dogs. Although the southern Utes are doing all right these days from royalties on the big oil field that’s located just over that ridge. They tell me, too, that the reservation holds one of the biggest coal deposits in the western United States.”
“Why didn’t you stay on the reservation, then?” Quiz wanted to know.
“I like to move around. People ask me more questions that way.”
“Oh.” Quiz stopped his questioning.
“Up ahead and to the left,” Ralph went on, “is the actual Four Corners, the only place in the country
