“Golly,” said Sandy. “It’s all too deep for me—several thousand feet too deep. I think I’ll go help Chao get dinner ready! I do know how to cook.”
* * * *
The one job around the derrick that the boys never got a chance to handle was that of Peter Sanchez, the platform man who worked on their shift, or “tower.” Whenever the time came to replace a bit, Peter would climb to his perch halfway up the rig, snap on a safety belt, and guide the upper ends of the ninety-foot stands of pipe into their rack. There they would stand upright in a slimy black bunch until it was time to return them to the well.
Peter, who boasted that he had been an oilman for a quarter of a century, worked effortlessly. He never lost his footing on the narrow platform, even when the strongest wind blew. Platform men on the other shifts were equally sure-footed—and very proud of their ability to “walk” strings of pipe weighing several tons. And they took things easy whenever they climbed down from their dizzy perches.
Peter, in particular, was fond of amusing the other crew members by telling them stories about the oil fields in the “good old days.” His favorite character was a driller named Gib Morgan. Gib, he said, had come down originally from the Pennsylvania regions when the first big strikes were being made in Texas and Oklahoma, around 1900.
“You never heard of Gib?” Peter said one night as the off-duty crews were sitting around a roaring campfire after dinner. “Well, I’ll tell you…” He rolled a cigarette with one hand, cowboy fashion, while studying the young greenhorns out of the corner of his eye. “Gib was a little feller with a big mustache but he could put Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan in the shade when he had a mind to. When he first came to Texas he had a run of bad luck. Drilled almost a hundred dry holes without hitting a single gusher. Got down to his last silver dollar. Then do you know what he did to make a stake?”
“No. What?” Quiz leaned forward eagerly.
“He pulled up all those dusters, sawed ’em into four-foot lengths, and sold ’em to the ranchers for postholes. That’s how it happens that all the Texas ranges got fenced in with barbed wire, son.”
When the laughter had died down and Quiz’s ears had returned to their normal color, the platform man went on: “That wasn’t the only time that Gib helped out his fellow man. Back around 1900, just before the big Spindletop gusher came in, oilmen in these parts were having a lot of trouble with whickles—you know what a whickle is, don’t you, Sandy?”
“It’s a cross between a canary bird and a bumblebee, isn’t it?” Sandy was dimly remembering a story that his father 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