Stewart nodded, but he had a look of concern in his eyes. “Frankly, I don’t even know what an oil and gas lease looks like,” he said.
“Don’t worry.” Williams grinned. “They print them, and they’re all alike.” He pulled a blank form from his desk drawer and handed it to the young attorney. “Welcome to the oil business,” he said.
Randy Stewart headed west. He said, “I learned early that if you wanted to find some land to lease, you simply walked into the courthouse and threw yourself at the mercy of the oldest lady you could find. Chances were, she had worked there for a long time and knew which chunks of land were available and which had already been tied up by some other oil company.”
The land across Young County had been heavily drilled, and only a few patches of scattered acreage remained. Stewart was growing desperate. He had to find land. He had to keep his job. The money wasn’t much, but it was better than going home broke at the end of the day.
Armed with all the pieces of information he had gleaned from the oldest lady he could find in the courthouse, Randy Stewart drove down a narrow country road until he came to a farm that no one had bothered to lease. In the heat of the day, he saw the farmer astride his tractor down in a pecan tree bottom. Since Stewart was driving a four-wheel- drive pickup truck, he cut across a corner of land and drove up to the farmer.
The old man idled his tractor, leaned across the steering wheel, frowned, pushed his hat back on his head and asked, “What do you think I’m doing down here?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m shaking the pecans out of the trees.”
“That’s pretty damn clever,” Stewart said.
The farmer’s frown deepened. “Do you know how many pecans you just ran over coming out here with that damned truck?” he asked.
Stewart shuddered inside. It was not a good beginning. The farmer laughed. The beginning just got a little better. Stewart drove back to Dallas with the lease, and the farmer was richer by two dollars an acre. Max Williams and Irv Deal had a place to drill.
It did not take long for the financial package to be pieced together, and it took even less time for the drilling bit, under the guidance of Red Livingston, to cut its way into oil bearing sands. Williams and Deal earned a little money on the front end for raising the funds and took a quarter interest in the well.
The investors all got their money back, made a little profit, tasted the potential riches of oil, and lined up to participate in the drilling of another seven wells. Each came in as profitable as the first. The number of dollars spilling wildly across an oil patch was staggering, and, if an oilfield gambler were smart, diligent, and spent his money wisely, he could beat the odds or at least stand a better than average chance of winning as many dollars as he threw away. In the oil game, breaking even was for losers. Red Livingston drilled eight wells for Windsor Energy and U.S. Operating. Clayton Childress had chosen eight good locations. Williams and Deal banked eight winners.
Natural gas had become as prevalent as the oil. It was blowing wide open, and Irv Deal realized that he and Williams were losing a small fortune to the flares that were burning escaping gas throughout the days and nights. A pipeline had not yet come to the forlorn backcountry of Palo Pinto County. It did not matter. Deal recalled, “At an oil supply house in the area, I saw miles of red pipe just lying stacked up on the ground. It wasn’t doing anybody any good. It was just gathering rust. I talked it over with Max, and we bought as much of the pipe as anybody could locate and had it delivered out to the ranch. We strung red pipe on top of the ground, tied our wells together, gathered our own natural gas, sold it, and immediately had revenue.”
The money in oil and gas was as good as in real estate, maybe even better. But, in the midst of those harsh, unforgiving days while Red Livingston was battling the good earth for oil, the relationship between Irv Deal and Max Williams was already beginning to show faint signs of unraveling. There were no confrontations. No accusations. No open conflict. But, privately, each man had his own concerns.
As far as Max Williams was concerned, Irv Deal had not brought as much money to the table as he should have. And Deal was angry to learn that he and his partner were not on equal footing. He believed that Williams had gone behind his back and secretly made a separate deal with their driller. It seemed to Irv Deal that, until the well reached a certain depth, both men were responsible for paying the drilling costs. If Livingston had to go any deeper to find oil, Windsor and Windsor alone paid the bill. At least, that was his fear. Williams, for the life of him, couldn’t figure out how his partner could come with such outlandish ideas.
Irv Deal didn’t like the arrangement. He knew he should split the blanket with Max Williams, but he didn’t. Williams was more than ready to dissolve his business deal with Windsor Energy. If he raised the most money, he reasoned, he deserved a bigger share of the earnings. But he didn’t walk away. The trust between both men was rapidly withering away. But they had known each other too long. They may not have liked each other during the heat of searching for oil. But they respected each other. They would keep their personal and their business relationship patched together until the patches finally burst at the seams and flew apart. In the meantime, they worked together and grew rich together. They sold their field of eight wells on the ranchlands of Palo Pinto to a German Company, and it would be a long time before either man would ever again be tempted by real estate. A lot of bitterness between them dissolved away with money in the bank. Now they were only interested in raw land that had oil beneath it.
Chapter 7
Pat Holloway was well versed in the practice of being disliked. Didn’t bother him. Never had. He was, after all, a lawyer, who handled and repackaged truths as deftly as a sleight-of-hand magician. Now you see it. Now you don’t. He was not afraid to break old rules or invent new ones. Holloway was tall, slender, had blue eyes, strawberry blond hair, and was considered quite handsome within the inner circles of Dallas society. Well, if not handsome, he was at least debonair and supremely confident. He was sure of who he was and where he was going, although it was not unusual for him to keep changing directions at the oddest of times.
Attorneys, especially those who had the misfortune of opposing him, regarded Holloway as arrogant and abrasive. He could charm a man as easily as cut his heart out with some dusty law or precedent that the innocent had never heard about and the guilty didn’t know was on the books. Holloway was a schemer – both brash and brilliant.
Some feared him. Others damned him. A few had threatened him. He worked hard and drank even harder, but said he never let an overabundance of alcohol cloud his good judgment. He passed off any bad judgment as bad luck. Holloway punctuated his sentences with intermittent explosions of profanity as though curse words, when cleverly pieced together, were the stuff of poetry. He almost always looked as if he had just walked off the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly, and he was recognized as one of the more flamboyant figures – lawyer or otherwise – to swagger down the hallways of the Dallas courthouse.
Pat Holloway loved the law. It was a chess game of the mind, a matching of wits, played out with briefs and pleadings, and it was his belief that whenever a legal matter was being discussed, debated, defended, disputed, denied, or negotiated, the best team always won. The facts be damned. He was slick. He was smooth. He was tenacious. He had a deep aversion to losing. Did not like it. Never accepted it. Did not believe it had any place in his life or his profession.
No. It didn’t bother him at all to be disliked. He expected it, even reveled in the rock-hard reputation that he had carved for himself. Holloway had long ago decided that angered accusations or condemnations – the wilder the better – merely came with