Dan Hughes was in no mood to negotiate.
“It was probably an outrageous demand,” Irv Deal would recall. “But at the time, I didn’t care about the terms. I just wanted the acreage.”
He would send Randy Stewart down to clear the titles, lease all of the acreage he could, hammer out the details, and close the agreement. Irv Deal slid behind the steering wheel of his rent car and headed back to Corpus Christi. Long drive. Open road. He silently cursed Beeville for not having an airport that would accommodate the jet.
Randy Stewart walked into the Beeville office of Hughes and Hughes. The lobby was a small room. It had no windows. The light was dim, and a simple bare table sat in the room with a telephone perched on top. The sign on the phone said: Pick me up.
Stewart did, and he waited to meet Dan Hughes. No one was expecting a lot, no one except Randy Stewart, who was working for expenses and maybe a small override, depending on whether he secured the leases and if the acreage held oil. The wild goose had settled in Beeville. The wild goose wasn’t so difficult to pluck this time.
Stewart drove back to Dallas, sat down with Max Williams, and said, “I have the acreage you wanted.”
“How much?”
“Eight thousand acres.”
Max Williams did not know whether to be elated or concerned. “What kind of deal did you get?”
“Hughes is pretty tough. Worked me over pretty good.”
“He has that reputation.” Williams leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and asked calmly, “Tell me, what are the leases gonna cost me?”
“Hughes wants you to take a farm out. You don’t put any money up front, but you have to drill three wells during the next ninety days. If you don’t get them all drilled, you lose the deal and the leases. Hughes will take his normal percentage.”
“Which means he’s taking a lot.”
Randy Stewart shrugged. “It’s always a lot,” he said. “What he wants is a quarter interest on the back end. That’s the deal Irv promised him.”
“What options do I have?”
“Two. Take it, or leave it.”
Williams nodded. “Where are the leases located?” he asked.
Stewart was as precise as he could be. “They cover an area shaped like a half moon, lying from the city well north, south, and west of Giddings,” he said.
Stewart unfolded a land map and handed it to Williams. On it, Dan Hughes had created a checkerboard for his total acreage in Lee County, eight thousand acres shaded in black and the remaining eight thousand acres left white.
“Dan says you can have your pick,” the young attorney said. “Black or white. Doesn’t make any difference to him.”
Max Williams stared at the back wall, trying to determine if he were in the middle of a dilemma or an opportunity. Houston Oil and Minerals had originally brought a rig into the chalk and drilled the Knox Number One. The bit never made it through the chalk. It broke off. It was throttled by in the rock. Williams couldn’t remember exactly what happened, but he knew that the well had blown out before anybody cashed a dollar’s worth of oil. It might be risky, Williams thought.
Then again, Ray Holifield, who disliked the chalk as much or more than anyone, would tell him, “The field’s full of faults, and some of those faults have fractured the chalk. Where the chalk is fractured, there’s oil, and the fractures allow it to travel to the wellbore. That, you can bet on.”
The problem was, the seismic was almost impossible to read. Looked like a bunch of hieroglyphics to most geologists. What should make sense didn’t. And what didn’t make sense was even more confusing. It could be that Houston Oil and Minerals, just like Hughes and Hughes, simply missed the fault beneath the well, provided, of course, any faults did actually exist down below the Knox Number One. “If there was,” Holifield said, “he just might be the only man on earth who could find them.”
Williams leaned over the desk and studied the map again. A checkerboard of squares. Some shaded black, and some left white. His pick. He sighed, looked up at Randy Stewart, and said, “We’ll take the black.”
Chapter 11
It did not take Ray Holifield long to realize that Max Williams and Irv Deal were both serious and focused. They had a game plan. Williams had access to money. He had done his homework. He was on a frantic pace, driving back and forth from his Dallas office to the chalk. Irv Deal, on the other hand, was methodically setting up the business operation as Windsor/U.S.
He watched the men pull up stakes in Pearsall and move northward to another chalk trend of broken hearts and empty bank accounts. It marked the beginning of a venture that would force the two companies to invest more than four million in the production of their first seven wells. They were all drilled, it seemed, within spitting distance of those dry holes that bore the last hopes and fortunes of good men, dry holes that had already been buried, if not forgotten, beneath a stack of rusting scrap metal.
Deal sent Charles Holbrook to the field to organize his venture into the well-lamented Austin Chalk. Holbrook had been in charge of construction for his apartment development, and Deal was convinced that supervising a team to drill for oil beneath the earth was little different from overseeing a crew hired to nail together buildings on top of it. Holbrook had been successful at one. Deal had no doubt that Holbrook, with his work ethic and organizational skills, would prove just as valuable in Giddings.
A veteran of the oil patch, Clarence Cheatham, came on board to handle the day-to-day field operation of each rig, and Red Livingston signed on to direct the drilling of the wells. Back in the Fort Worth Basin, he seldom ever had to go farther down than four thousand feet to discover a positive show of oil. In the Giddings field, he would have to cut through as many as nine thousand feet to even reach the chalk.
Giddings was a brand new game.
Irv Deal thought big and sometimes bigger. That’s what Ray Holifield liked about him. Shoot for the moon, and you might just hit it. In the oil business, go for broke, he said, and if you get there, you’ve made more money than either you or your ex-wives can spend. The conservative Max Williams kept his eyes steady on the details, always on the go, promoting and looking for investors, making sure the puzzle wasn’t completed until all of the missing pieces were in place, trying to patch up any possible mistake before it occurred. Max Williams and Irv Deal would get a well. No doubt about it. But the chase for oil would be a wild ride, and both men hoped it wasn’t a long ride and oil wells kept pumping money.
Deal had the assets banked, but he preferred to keep his assets for himself, and he kept alluding to the fact that he had some investors squirreled away up in Chicago. When the timing was right, the money would be right. Max Williams kept patching together the financial end of the package with many of the Dallas connections he had made during his days at SMU and with the Chaparrals. He was a man who would not be denied, and, as in basketball, he would never give up until the final shot had been taken.
The Fort Worth Basin had been all right for the tenuous, frayed partnership of Max Williams and Irv Deal. Nothing spectacular. But all right. Pearsall had given them some oil. Not a lot. But it hadn’t given anyone a lot either. Now Holifield was seated at a desk in the Sands Motel on the edge of Giddings, hovered over an old land map, barely visible or legible beneath the dim glow of a single naked light bulb, trying to pinpoint a drilling location on that confounded line between the Knox well, a failure, and the City of Giddings No. 1, still flushing out as many as three hundred barrels of oil a day.
Ray Holifield placed a worn land map of Lee County on his desk and carefully smoothed out the folds and wrinkles. He took a pen and drew a straight line across the acreage that Randy Stewart had been