The Sandy Steele Mystery MEGAPACK®: 6 Young Adult Novels (Complete Series). Roger Barlow
boys watched, spellbound, while dripping lengths of pipe were snaked out of the ground by a cable which ran through a block at the top of the tall derrick and was connected to a powerful diesel engine. As every three lengths arrived at the surface, two brawny men wielding big iron tongs leaped forward and disconnected them from the pipe remaining in the well. Then the go-foot “stand” was gently maneuvered, with the help of another man, wearing a safety belt, who stood on a platform high up on the derrick. When a stand had been neatly propped out of the way, the next one was ready to be pulled out of the well.
The crew worked at top speed without saying a word until the mud-covered drill finally came in sight. They unscrewed the bit from the end of the last stand of pipe, and replaced it with a sharp one. Then the process was reversed. Stand after stand of pipe was reconnected and lowered until all were back in the well. Then the engine began to roar steadily. A huge turntable under the derrick started spinning the pipe at high speed. Down at the bottom of the hole the bit resumed chewing into the rock.
“Nice teamwork, Ralph,” said Hall. “You certainly have trained as good a crew as can be found in the Regions.”
“Nice team to work with,” answered the driller as he looked proudly at his men, who were about equally divided between Indians and whites. “Now let’s see if there’s any work for our two tenderfeet before it’s time to knock off for supper. Come on, fellows. The mud pit is slurping for you.”
Two hours later, when the cook began hammering on his iron triangle, Sandy and Quiz looked like mud puppies.
“You’re a howling fright,” said the tall boy as he climbed out of the big pit where a new batch of goo was swirling and settling. He plastered down his unruly cowlick with a slimy hand. For once the hair stayed in place.
“And you look like a dirty little green man from the swamps of the planet Venus.” Quiz spat out a bit of mud and roared with laughter. “Lucky thing we don’t have to get this muck off with compressed air. Come on. I’ll race you to the showers.”
Dinner was eaten in the same dogged quiet that they had noted at the motel. It was a good dinner, too, although it came mostly out of cans.
The boys were introduced all around after the apple pie had been consumed to the last crumb, but they were too tired and sleepy to sort out names and faces. They did gather that four-man shifts—or “towers,” as they seemed to be called—kept the drill turning day and night until the drill struck oil or the well had to be abandoned as a “duster.”
The only person present who made a real impression was Harry Donovan, Hall’s geologist. He was an intense, bald, wiry fellow in his thirties who kept biting his lips, as though he was just about to impart a deep secret. But all he seemed to talk about were mysterious things like electronic log readings, core analyses, and the distance still to be drilled before something called the “Gallup Pay” would be reached.
Hall and Salmon were intensely interested in Donovan’s report. Try as they would to follow it, Sandy and Quiz soon found themselves nodding. Finally they leaned their elbows on the oilcloth-covered dinner table and snored gently.
Ralph shook them partially awake and showed them their beds in a battered trailer. They slept like logs despite the fact that, bathed in brilliant white light provided by a portable electric generator, the rig roared and clanked steadily throughout the night as its bit “made hole” more than a thousand feet underground.
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning the Ropes
Sandy and Quiz spent the next two weeks picking up a working knowledge of drilling, getting acquainted with Hall’s outfit, and learning to keep out from under the feet of the crew. Ralph saw to it that their jobs varied from day to day as they grew lean and brown under the desert sun.
“Used to have a lot of trouble keeping fellows on the job out here next to nowhere,” he explained with a grin. “The boys would get fed up after a few weeks. Then they’d quit, head for town, and I’d have to spend valuable time rounding up replacements. Now I switch their work around so they don’t have so much chance to become bored. Let’s see…you mixed mud yesterday, didn’t you? Well, today I want you to help Jack Boyd keep his diesel running.” Whereupon the boys would spend a “tower” cleaning the engine room, or oiling and polishing the powerful but over-age motor that Boyd nursed like a sick child to make it keep the bit turning steadily.
On other days they were assigned to drive to Shiprock or Farmington for supplies, to help Ching Chao in the cookhouse, or to learn the ABCs of oil geology from Donovan. Sandy preferred to do chores around the derrick and was very proud when he finally was allowed to handle one of the huge tongs used to grip the stands of pipe so that they could be removed from the well or returned to it.
Quiz, on the other hand, never tired of studying the wavering lines marked on strips of paper by the electric log that Donovan lowered into the well at regular intervals. He soon got so that he could identify the different kinds of rock layers through which the bit was drilling, by the slight changes in the shapes of those lines. Or he would train a microscope on thin slices of sandstone sawed from the yard-long cores that were hauled out of the well from time to time. With his usual curiosity, he had read up enough about geology to recognize the different marine fossils that the cores contained. He would become as excited as Donovan did when the geologist pointed to a group of minute shells in a slice of core and whispered, “Those are Foraminifera, boys! We must be getting close to the oil.” And he would become as discouraged as his teacher when careful study of another core showed no indication of ancient sea creatures.
“I don’t get it,” Sandy would mutter on such occasions. “How come those shells got thousands of feet underground in the first place? And what have they got to do with finding oil?”
Then the geologist would mop his bald head with a bandanna handkerchief, take off his thick horn-rimmed glasses and use them as a pointer while he lectured the boys on his beloved science.
“All of this country has been deep under water several times during the last few million years,” he would explain patiently. “In fact, most of the center of the North American continent has been submerged at one time or another. When the Four Corners region was a sea bottom back in the Carboniferous era, untold generations of marine plants and animals died in the water and sank to the bottom.
“As the ages passed, those life forms were buried by mud and silt brought down from surrounding mountains by the raging rivers of those days. The weight of the silt caused it to turn into sandstone or limestone layers hundreds of feet thick. This pressure generated a great deal of heat. Geologists think that pressure and heat compressed the dead marine creatures into particles of oil and gas.
“Every time the land rose to the surface and sank again, another layer or stratum of dead fish and plants would form. All this heaving and twisting of the earth formed traps or domes, called anticlines, into which the oil and gas moved. That’s why we find oil today at different depths beneath the surface.”
“I understand that water and gas pressure keeps pushing oil toward the surface,” Sandy said on one occasion, “but then why doesn’t it escape?”
“Usually it gets caught under anticlines where the rock is too thick and hard for it to move any farther,” Quiz cut in, eager to show off his new knowledge of geology. “But it does escape in some places, Sandy. You’ve heard of oil springs. George Washington owned one of them. And the Indians used to sop crude petroleum from such springs with their blankets and use it as a medicine or to waterproof their canoes. Sometimes the springs catch fire. Some of those still exist in parts of Iran. I read an article once which said that Jason really was looking for a cargo of oil when he sailed the Argo to the Caucasus Mountains in search of the Golden Fleece. The fleece was just a flowery Greek term for a burning spring, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Donovan agreed as he stoked his pipe and sent clouds of smoke billowing through the laboratory. “There’s also a theory that Job was an oilman. The Bible has him saying that ‘the rock poured me forth rivers of oil,’ you remember. If you read the Book of Job carefully, it almost sounds as if the poor fellow’s troubles