Ted Clifford would now be responsible for underwriting those costs. Williams never liked to lose control of a well, but Clifford’s proposal was fair enough, he guessed. Under the circumstances, it might be the best deal he would it get.
Max Williams pocketed his forty dollar-an-acre profit for Windsor/U.S. on the twenty-two hundred lease acres, almost ninety thousand dollars, and took the road north toward Dallas. He was still wondering what the notorious Austin Chalk had in store for him. As far as he was concerned, Ted Clifford could fight it out in Pearsall on his own with nobody looking over his shoulder. Good luck, and God bless. At the moment, Max Williams had the big chalk well on his mind.
Chapter 10
Back in Dallas, Max Williams spent the morning, reading through various and assorted production reports in an effort to better determine his position in the Pearsall chalk. Found a little oil. Made a little money. Not much. But a little. Could have been better. He stood and stared out the window toward the Dallas skyline. The next time in the next field, he vowed to himself, it would be.
At Preston Trails that afternoon, he ran into Jack Stroube. Nothing unusual about the chance encounter. Both men occupied offices in the Addison State Bank Building, and they saw each other virtually every day either at work or the country club.
Jack Stroube and his brother Bill were independent oil producers themselves, and they were well aware that Williams had been in Pearsall, tackling the chalk. Their father, H. R., had gained notoriety as a key figure behind the further development of the famed Corsicana Oilfield during the 1920s.
H. R. Stroube had broken into the oil business as a boll weevil roughneck in the Burkburnett Field, but, by 1921, he was broke, and, as his son recalled, was turning handsprings for hamburgers and hook slides for chili. All he had to his name was a junk pile, baling wire rig and a string of drill pipe. He hocked the pipe for money to ship his rig to the next promise of oil, a transaction that brought him to Corsicana. He hired his water, fuel, rig building, pit digging, and tool pushing people by giving them 1/256th interest in the wells he was drilling. He did not have any loose cash to pay them. His son Jack recalled, it was so dead in Corsicana you could hear your hair grow on Main Street.
H. R. Stroube drilled the first of four wells on a two and a half acre lease. It came in, Jack Stroube said, flowing something that looked more like red barn paint than oil. It would, however, make a hundred and seventy-five barrels of oil a day. Between 1924 and 1971, those four wells produced nine million barrels of oil.
Jack Stroube once wrote: After well number two had averaged twenty thousand barrels per day for four days, daddy and Cornie found themselves oil poor – potentially rich but short on cash. They didn’t know how long it takes to get titles cleared, division orders signed, and how pipeline companies love to ride on your money. They called Humble in Houston and told them they would like to draw a little on account, on account of they needed a little walkin’ around money. The Humble people said sure, to meet their pipeline superintendent, Ralph Hanrahan, in Houston, and he would hand them a partial payment. Daddy caught the train to Houston, still in is oilfield clothes, lace top boots, and all. He toted up the bills on the ride down, figuring if Humble would advance them around $20,000, they could pay off most of their debts. When Hanrahan handed him the check, on first glance he thought it was $10,400. He told Hanrahan he was hoping for at least $20,000 and that $10,400 just wouldn’t do it. Hanrahan told him to take another look at the check. It was for $104,000.
When Jack and Bill Stroube settled into the oil business, they were only carrying on a family tradition. It was said of the two brothers: Jack can spend more money at a funeral than Bill can at the State Fair. Jack Stroube would always be fascinated with the search for oil. He sat down with Max Williams over lunch and said, “I hear you’ve been doing some operating of your own down in South Texas. We’ve drilled a few wells in and around Pearsall. The chalk’s a bitch.”
Max Williams grinned. He wouldn’t disagree.
Stroube paused a moment, searched back through his memory, then asked, “Do you know anything about that big chalk well down near the airport in Giddings?”
“If you’ve been in the chalk at least a day or two, you’ve heard about it,” Williams said. “That’s about all anybody ever talks about. But no one I’ve met has ever mentioned it being in Giddings before. Maybe that’s the well I’ve been looking for.”
“From what folks who’ve been there keep telling me,” Jack Stroube said, “it’s the damnedest thing you ever saw. Makes at little more than three hundred 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