The ground of Lee County did indeed possess a lot of secrets. Maybe a reservoir of oil was one of them. At least, that’s what the farmers thought during those harsh and unforgiving days of the 1930s. The promise was so bright that Texas Osage, founded as a cooperative royalty pool when the stock market crashed in 1929, came hard into Lee County and began buying up mineral tracts, as many as they could acquire, from the landowners. Bad times loomed on the horizon, and most farmers were willing to sell almost anything they owned for a few extra dollars. They wanted to keep their land if possible. Mineral rights on acreage that had never yielded any minerals were worthless.
Rigs were brought in. Holes were drilled, and this was not an easy drill. A little oil splashed here and there among the crop rows. But most of the holes were dry or soon dry. Wildcatters had come face to face with the Austin Chalk, and they left with a little more wisdom and a lot less money in the bank than when they rode into town to outwit the land. Hard ground. Hard times. Hard luck.
It was shortly after two o’clock in the early afternoon when Max Williams pulled into an Exxon service station. He was looking for oil, low on gas, and lost. Well, he knew where he was. He wasn’t quite sure he knew where he was going. And that’s how he met Walter Schneider. “I understand there’s a big chalk well around here,” Williams said.
Schneider nodded. “I don’t just pump gas here at the station,” he said. “I also go out and pump that big well for Chuck Alcorn.”
“I hear it’s pretty good.”
“It’s the best well we’ve got around here,” Schneider said. “Of course, it’s about the only one we have, too. Others went dry, but that old City of Giddings Well, it just keeps right on flowing and hasn’t shown any slack yet.”
“Can you tell me where it is?”
“South of town.” Schneider paused a moment, grinned, and said, “If you can wait awhile, I’ll go out there with you. Show you where it’s at.”
“How long?”
“Won’t be but a minute or two.”
Max Williams, guided by the directions of Walter Schneider, bounced across the potholes and down the old, narrow country road that led past the rusting, rotting remains of the airport. The terminal had already been torn down. The runway was latticed with dirt and scattered patches of grass, mostly weeds. Planes were landing somewhere else now, coming into a newer airport that had not been sprayed or speckled with old oil.
Through the windshield of his Blazer, Max Williams gazed for the first time at the big chalk well. He could barely hide the excitement boiling up inside of him, but he kept his feelings to himself. The well, the one-in-a-million well, wasn’t a myth after all. It was pretty much where the rumors said it would be. The scene before him was far different from the one he had imagined. Something wasn’t quite right.
Chuck Alcorn had left the tanks overturned and lying on their sides. The rusting rods and old pipes had fallen next to the pumping unit. They remained untouched and undisturbed. Chuck Alcorn had been a superstitious man. He found a fortune at the bottom of an old clunker, and he refused to tempt fate. Nothing had been removed. The well site remained unchanged on a blistered landscape, surrounded with brittle brush stands and strewn with broken collections of rock.
Walter Schneider folded his arms and leaned back in the Blazer. “I hear that she’s already made three hundred thousand barrels,” he said. “Maybe more. I have no idea how deep or wide the pool is, but that old string of pipe just keeps sitting there and bringing the oil back up. Don’t look like she’s ever gonna quit.”
“Why do you think there aren’t any more wells like it around here?” Williams wanted to know.
“It’s the chalk.” Walter Schneider laughed. “There may be a dozen or so holes in the ground, and some have been here a long time. Nothing worthwhile in any of them. If a well had as much as a thimble full of oil, it’s long gone by now.”
Max Williams frowned. The field did not make sense to him. “What makes this well so good?” Williams asked.
“Chuck Alcorn – he’s the man who figured out how it to make it work – is one lucky sonuvabitch,” Schneider said. “This field’s probably got one good well, and he’s found it. Made him a rich man, too. Well, maybe not rich, but he hasn’t been worrying about his next meal for some time.”
Walter Schneider laughed again. He felt a close and sometimes reverent kinship with the well, too. He kept it pumping, rain or shine, and it kept right on producing, night or day. The City of Giddings No. 1 had not made him a rich man either, but, on payday, it certainly helped ease the pain.
“What’s the chance of a man buying up a little lease acreage around here?” Williams asked.
“There’s plenty of it available.”
“Cheap?”
The grin on Schneider’s face broadened. “I doubt if it would cost you a lot,” he said. “I just hope you’ve got a lot of money.”
“Why?”
“The chalk’s gonna take ever last bit of it,” he said.
Chapter 4
Max Williams had always felt a strong kinship with the great open stretches of unspoiled land that bore few footprints and even fewer traces of civilization. That was an integral part of his West Texas birthright.
He had grown to manhood in the Humble Oil Camp of Avoca, Texas, his face blistered by the sand that dust devils, whirling dervishes, and windstorms raked across the empty, troubled wastelands far below the Caprock. It had been a great time for the oil business, and hard-working families attached their hopes and daily livelihood to a company town that was destined to survive only as long as the pump jacks continued to pull great amounts of crude out of the ground. For a time the Williams family lived in Guthrie where the high school occupied one room, and Max’s sister single-handedly formed the entire fifth grade. No restrooms. No running water. No cafeteria. No gym. Williams always said that if his family had remained in Guthrie, he would probably have been a roper. Two years later, the family moved back to Avoca, a town too small even to field a six-man football team.
Williams would never forget the small community where drifters were treated as neighbors and neighbors like family. Avoca was nestled back amidst a rough-hewn, hard-rock, and mesquite-thorn landscape of scarred beauty and enduring serenity. It was, he said, a place where common decency and honesty prevailed, where neighbors stuck together whether times were tough or prosperous, where a man’s full worth was judged by his character, not by how much money he had or didn’t have in the bank.
Max Williams had something of an idyllic childhood. Hard work. Few problems. Didn’t have a lot of money, but neither did any other family in the camp or the town. When you don’t know anybody who’s rich, you don’t have any idea who might be poor. During his thirteenth year, however, the carefree world as he had known it suddenly crumbled around him. His father Claude died after a struggle with cancer, and the pleasantries of childhood scattered with the winds across the prairie. His father had been the family anchor, a good man who never bowed nor bent under the weight of hard work, and now he was gone.
The boy, who would become a man long before his allotted time, stood alone in the backyard of his home wearing a T-shirt, faded jeans, and the best $12.95 cowboy boots that money could buy. There was a scarred, leather basketball