had told him.
“Well! Well!” Peter looked at him with more respect. “That’s exactly right. Pretty little varmints, whickles, but they developed a powerful taste for crude oil. Soon as a well came in, they’d smell it from miles away. That’s no great feat, I’ll admit, for crude oil sure has a strong odor. Anyway, they’d descend on the well in swarms so thick that they’d darken the sky. And they’d suck it plumb dry before you could say Jack Robinson, unless you capped it quick.
“Well, Gib got one of his big ideas. He went out to one of his dusters that he hadn’t pulled up yet, poured several barrels of oil down it, and ‘salted’ the ground with more oil. Pretty soon, here came the whickles. They lapped up all the oil on the ground. Then a big whickle, probably the boss, rose up in the air and let out a lot of whickle talk about how he personally had discovered the biggest oil highball on earth. After that he dived into the well, and all the others followed him, like the animals that went into the ark. Soon as the last one was down the hole, Gib grabbed a big wooden plug and capped the well. We haven’t had any whickle trouble since.”
“Then all the poor whickles died?” Quiz rose to the bait.
“Oh, no,” Peter answered with a straight face. “They’re still buzzing around in that hole, mad as hops. Some day a greenhorn like you will come along and let ’em out.”
“Wonder what ever became of Gib,” said Donovan, between puffs on his pipe.
“Last I heard he was up Alaska way,” Ralph said. “Here’s a story about him that you may want to add to your repertoire, Pete. Gib was drilling near Moose Jaw in December when it got so cold the mercury in the thermometer on the derrick started shivering and shaking so hard that it knocked a hole right through the bottom of the tube. During January it got colder yet and the joints on the drill pipe froze so they couldn’t be unscrewed.
“Now Gib had a bet he could finish that well in four months and he wasn’t going to let Jack Frost faze him. He just rigged up a pile driver that drove that frozen pipe on down into the ground as pretty as you please. Soon as one stand of pipe was down, the crew would weld on another and keep driving. Course the pipe got compressed a lot from all that hammering, but Gib couldn’t see any harm in that.
“Time February came around it got real chilly—a hundred or so below zero. He was using a steam engine by that time because the diesel fuel was frozen solid, but no sooner would the smoke from the fire box come out of the chimney than it would freeze and fall back on the snow. Wading through that black stuff was like pushing through cotton wool, and besides, the men tracked it all over the clean bunkhouse floor. So Gib had to get out a bulldozer and shove it into one corner of the clearing where he had his rig set up.
“They were down about four miles on March 15 when an early spring thaw set in. First thing that happened was that the smoke melted and spread all over the place. Couldn’t see your nose on your face. Fire wardens came from miles around thinking the forest was ablaze. Gib was in a tight spot so he did something he had never done before—he looked up his hated rival, Bill McGee, who was in the Yukon selling some refrigerators to the Eskimos. He had to give skinflint McGee a half interest in the well to get him to help out. McGee just borrowed those refrigerators, stuffed the smoke into them, and refroze it.
“No sooner was the smoke under control than all that compressed drill pipe down the well started to thaw out. It began shooting out of the hole like a released coil spring. First it humped up under the derrick and pushed it a hundred feet into the air. Then it toppled over and squirmed about the clearing like a boa constrictor.
“That was where Bill McGee made his big mistake. Gib had told him the drill bit, which had been dragged out of the well by the thrashing pipe, had cuttings on it which showed there was good oil sand only a few feet farther down. But Bill figured that with the derrick a wreck, the well was a frost. So he sold his half interest back to Gib, who didn’t object, for a plug of good chewing tobacco.
“Soon as McGee was out of sight, Gib headed for the nearest U.S. Assay Office. He got the clerk to lend him about a quart of the mercury that assay men use to test the purity of gold nuggets.
“Morgan went back to camp, sat down beside the derrick, lit his pipe and waited for the freeze-up which he knew was bound to come before spring actually set in. It came all right! Puffing his pipe to keep warm Gib watched the new alcohol thermometer he had bought in town go down, down, and down until it hit a hundred and ten below. Right then he dropped his quart of solidified mercury into the well.
“Just as he figured, it acted the way the mercury in the old thermometer had done—went right to the bottom and banged and banged trying to escape from that awful cold. Yes, sir, that hunk of mercury smashed right through to the oil sand. Pretty soon there was a rumble and a roar. Up came a thick black column of oil.”
“Wait a minute,” cried Sandy, thinking he had caught the storyteller out on a limb. “Why didn’t the oil freeze too?”
“It did, Sandy. It did,” Ralph answered blandly. “Soon as it hit the air, it froze solid. But it was slippery enough so it kept sliding out of the ground a foot at a time. Gib got his men together and, until spring really came, they kept busy sawing hunks off that gusher and shipping them out to the States on flatcars!”
“You win, Ralph,” sighed the platform man as he heaved himself to his feet. “I can’t even attempt to top that tall one, so I guess I’d better go to bed. Your story should keep us cool out here for at least a week.”
* * * *
After that mild hazing session, Sandy and Quiz found themselves accepted as full-fledged members of the gang. The crew members, who had kept their distance up to that point, now treated them like equals. Each boy soon was doing a man’s work around the rig and glorying in his hardening muscles.
As the end of June approached, Hall, Donovan and Salmon got ready for their monthly trip to Window Rock, Arizona, to submit bids for several leases in the Navajo reservation.
“There’s room in the jeep, so you might as well go along and learn something more about the oil business,” Hall told the boys. “I’m pretty sure our bids won’t be accepted, but the only thing we can do is try.”
At that point trouble descended on the camp in the form of a Bonanza bearing Red Cavanaugh and Pepper March.
The husky electronics man clambered out of his machine and came forward at a lope. He was dressed only in shorts, and the thick red hair on his brawny chest glinted in the sunlight. Pepper trotted behind him like an adoring puppy.
“Howdy, Mr. Hall. Howdy, Donovan,” Cavanaugh boomed as he reached the rig. “Heard you’d been exploring down in the Hopi butte section. Thought I’d bounce over and sell you some equipment that has seismographs, magnetometers and gravimeters beat three ways from Sunday. The very latest thing. You can’t get along without it.”
“Can’t I?” said Donovan mildly.
“Of course you can’t!” Cavanaugh clapped the little man on the back so hard that he almost dislodged Donovan’s glasses. “This is terrific! The biggest thing that’s happened to me since I ran those three touchdowns for State back in 1930. I developed it in my own lab. You know how a Geiger counter works…?”
“Well, faintly,” answered the geologist, who had three of them in his own laboratory. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Mr. Cavanaugh.”
“Well, don’t get sore, Mr. Donovan.” Cavanaugh bellowed with laughter. “All
