Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 11

Max Williams made the decision to stay with oil exploration. The eight wells he and Irv Deal had found in Palo Pinto activated a mechanism in his brain that he figured was not unlike that of a high-stakes black jack player betting his life and most of his fortune on the next turn of the card, which might well be his last. Oil had seeped into his blood. It occupied his every waking hour.

Oil triggered good money, but it was slow money. He needed revenue to move forward. He could not wait on those royalty checks from his last wells before financing the drilling operation of his next well, provided, of course, either he or Irv Deal was able to track down the right lease on the right acreage that enclosed the right reservoir of crude.

Max Williams had sold a third of U.S. Operating to Dick and Alan Gold for a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars. The funds gave him the working capital he so desperately needed. The Gold brothers owned a woman’s clothing manufacturing company called Nardis of Dallas, and both admitted they knew absolutely nothing about the oil business. Dick Gold, however, wanted to be like Max Williams. He had invested in real estate with Williams. He wore cowboy boots, western shirts, and denim jeans similar to those Williams wore. And he played tennis with Max Williams every chance he got. The Gold brothers did not know whether oil was a good or a bad investment. They just wanted to be in business with Max Williams, and, in their minds, they were simply doing their friend a favor.

Williams needed some money. They happened to have some money. Deal done. No questions asked. Besides, they were also intrigued with the idea of being involved in the search for raw crude. It put them in the middle of a mythical Texas that had been built on cattle and oil. It may not ever be as good as the movie Giant, but it was close. And in the oil game, close sometimes counts.

Max Williams had known Edwin L. Cox for years. Cox was on the board at Southern Methodist University and had admired Williams’ exploits on the basketball court and in the tenuous, ever-changing world of business. Several years earlier, while working as a real estate broker, Williams had sold him the sixty-seven-hundred-acre La Reata Ranch in the heart of the East Texas piney woods. They were more than casual acquaintances. The rumors of oil brought them closer together.

By all accounts, by all who knew him, Edwin Cox was an honest man but a hard trader, a long-time oilman, whose father had been a partner with Jake Hamon in the oil exploration business throughout Texas and Oklahoma. Oil was his birthright.

The storied career of Hamon’s father had been cut short when a gunshot in an Ardmore, Oklahoma, hotel room took his life in 1920. Was it an accident, a suicide, or had he been murdered by his stenographer at the dastardly end of a scandalous love affair? Whispers, as always, were far more plentiful than the facts.

Jake Hamon, the second, dropped out of law school after his father’s funeral and trekked to the oilfields around Ranger, Texas. A roustabout’s life was no good at all, so a year later, he returned to Oklahoma, drilled his first well, partnered up with Edwin B. Cox, and had a bad run with dry stripper wells before hitting it big. The Hamon legacy in oil had been handed down from father to son just as it would be in the Cox family.

Edwin Cox, the son, had built a celebrated career in oil and gas production. He had made millions of dollars and invested them in oil, politics, and, above all, Southern Methodist University. But Max Williams did not want his investment dollars. Nor did he ask for them. Max Williams was far more interested in the knowledge that Cox possessed about the oil business. When the two men finally sat down, held together by their close bond at SMU, Williams told him succinctly enough, “I’d like to get more involved in the oil business.”

“Been in it yet?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Drill a few wells?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Had any luck?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Think you can do it again?”

“I’m willing to take that chance.”

Cox laughed, then leaned back in his chair and said, “Oil can make you a rich man, Max. But it can whittle you away to nothing. Oil is a tough business. Not every hole has oil at the bottom of it.”

Williams quietly and openly placed his cards on the table. He and Cox would be honest with each other if nothing else. “I’ve drilled a few wells in the Fort Worth Basin, out in Palo Pinto County to be more exact,” he said. “My partner and I made some money from production, then sold the field to a German company. But I’m still just small time. I’d like to be an operator, and there’s an awful lot I haven’t learned yet.” Williams paused, then asked softly, “Do you really think that somebody like me can be successful in the oil business?” The question was simple, heartfelt, and to the point.

“It’s a good business,” Cox replied. “Might even get better. You’ve got to be tough, but you know that. There are a lot of disappointments along the way, but I bet you’ve figured that out as well. If you find a good field, stick with it, hang in there even when everything looks like it might be falling apart around you, the amount of money you can make is staggering.”

“Do you have any idea where I should go from here?”

“Do you have any acreage?”

“No, sir.”

“Leases?”

“No, sir.”

Cox thought it over, then suggested that Max Williams and his partner consider moving their operation down south, down into the Austin Chalk of Pearsall, Texas, where a new play had just gotten underway. The field had made more than a few good wells and had experienced a fair amount of success.

No one doubted that the chalk could be tricky, Cox said, but the fractures had oil in them, and his plan was to cut through the faults at an angle in order to encounter as many fractures as possible. It was vital for an operator to have a geologist smart enough to read the seismic log and cagey enough to find the crude, but, yes, he thought, Pearsall just might be as good a place as any for Williams to get a solid education about the hard knocks, hard luck, and hard cash of the oilfield.

“We have twenty-two locations in Frio County,” Cox said. “They’re all clustered together, and we don’t plan to drill anywhere outside of the leases we already have. I have a feeling that you can pick up as much acreage in the Pearsall chalk as you want.”

Edwin Cox may well have been plotting to explore and maybe even drill on locations far removed from Pearsall. If so, however, he did not bother to mention any of them. He pulled a map of the Pearsall field out of his desk, stretched it flat, and marked dots on those twenty-two key locations where he owned his leases. Max Williams was certainly welcome to wander around Pearsall and pick up as much acreage as he wanted. Frio County had other operators running around, probing the ground, but the field was wide open, and there was a lot of land that farmers hadn’t yet turned loose. Good price. Good leases. Good luck. Godspeed.

Max Williams had met with a man he trusted. Irv Deal immediately went to see his Patron Saint of the oil business, Frank West. Like Williams, he was looking for advice. He wanted answers. He knew Frank West had them. Frank West always did.

“We drilled eight wells,” Irv Deal said.

“Hit any oil?”

“They were all productive.”

West grinned and shrugged. “Then what do you need from me?” he asked.

“What do I do now?”

“You need a good petroleum engineer,” West said. “You need somebody to look over your shoulder and help guide your exploration efforts. If you have the right leases, you need somebody who knows how to find oil.”

“Where do I find I good petroleum engineer?”

“Go meet John LaRue,” West replied. “His firm is LaRue, Moore, and Schafer. It’s located here in Dallas, and they have the best group of petroleum engineers and finest bunch of geologists you can find.”

“Does John need a new client?”

“John’s always looking for somebody who’s looking for oil.”

Max Williams and Irv Deal sat down in the well-appointed and prestigious Dallas office of John LaRue, Joe Moore, and Bob Schafer. Yes, the petroleum engineers said, they knew all about the historical incongruities of the Austin Chalk. They had heard the horror stories, most if not all of them. Certainly, it was their business to study the earth and understand the nuances of its anomalies.

John LaRue, however, was blunt and frank with them both, pointing out that his firm did not recommend any kind of oil venture down in the cursed Pearsall region. He possessed an unpublished and unprinted engineering study of the chalk and, in essence, it concluded: Get the hell out of Pearsall. And that’s what he told them: “Stay the hell out of Pearsall.”

Irv Deal and Max Williams, however, were determined to move forward in spite of the foreboding reputation hovering around the Pearsall field like a dark cloud devoid of any silver linings. The chalk might indeed be capricious. LaRue might be right in his assessment. But Edwin Cox was a respected oilman. He had operations in the chalk. He had recommended for them to buy leases in the chalk. And their minds were made up. At least, Max Williams was convinced that he could meet the chalk on its own terms and win. For him, it was Pearsall or bust. The odds weighed heavily on bust.

John LaRue had dealt with stubborn men before. He leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll work with you although I want you to understand the risk involved. We’ll take only a small amount of upfront money. We’ll charge you twenty-five dollars an hour to handle any geological and engineering work we do. We normally charge fifty. And we’ll ask for a two and a half percent override in case you beat the odds. You’ll receive a discount on our hourly rate, but, otherwise, it’s pretty much our standard deal.”

Max Williams and Irv Deal looked at each other, then nodded. It sounded like a reasonable proposal.

“I assume you’ll have a geologist assigned to us,” Williams said.

“I will.”

“He have a name?”

“Ray Holifield.”

“Tell me about Holifield,” Deal said.

“He’s got an awful good resume,” LaRue said. “He’s young. He’s energetic. He’s a brilliant geologist who’s worked in oilfields all over the world, especially in fractured reservoirs in the Middle East. He’s about as you good as you can get.”

The men all shook hands. They signed an agreement. John LaRue placed a call to Ray Holifield’s office.

It was once written that “if you see a man walking down the street with oil on his shoes where it shouldn’t be, no oil on his hair where it should be, that’s an oilman. If he has a faraway look in his eyes and seems to be contemplating the depths of the Jurassic sandstone in Persia, that’s a geologist. Have pity on him. He’s just as lonesome as he looks … (A geologist) draws on his total knowledge, experience, and the facts he has, says a prayer if he is a religious man, and then gives his best judgment. But the proof of whether he is right or wrong comes only when oil is found or not found.”

As one old oilman said, “Little boys who pick up rocks either go to prison or become geologists.” Ray Holifield had been picking up rocks for a long time, and he always had that faraway look in his eyes. Mostly, he studied and worked the oilfields alone. He was just as lonesome as he looked.

Ray Holifield had gone to college in 1955 with the sole intention of becoming a lawyer. It was a difficult task from day one. He had grown up as the inquisitive son of an Arkansas sharecropper in a ramshackle home tucked back in the Ozarks, not too far from Rector and a little closer to Piggott. About all his mother was ever able to give him was a strong work ethic. It would be enough, she said, to get him through life no matter what he chose to do. Determined to work his way through the University of Missouri in pursuit of a career in law, Holifield accepted a part-time job in the geology department. He recalled, “All of the professors had begun teaching during the Great Depression, and they understood the financial hardship I was facing. They sort of adopted me.” Holifield could easily identify with his professors, who became his mentors, and they could empathize with him.

He often worked fifty hours a week, mostly at night, late at night, and earned a dollar an hour when the going rate for student employment generally topped out around fifty cents an hour. Somewhere between his duties of cleaning slides and pinpointing the dates for odd collections of rocks, Ray Holifield lost all interest in becoming a lawyer. The earth, he decided afforded him more complexities and enigmas than a courtroom.

By 1964, he had earned his Master’s Degree in geology, sold a little insurance to keep his wife and three children fed, and was offered a job with Texaco. He worked for a time as a micro paleontologist, studying the age of rocks and identifying fossils, then was moved on to New Orleans where he began mapping the sands of the Gulf Coast, serving as a stratigrapher. He was walking across sands on the beach, he said, and was struck by the sudden realization that their appearance had not changed in the last ten million years. The old earth beneath his feet might shift around some from time to time. But, in reality, it never really changed. It simply grew older. That’s all.

Holifield studied the currents flowing west to east at the mouth of rivers, both large and small, washing sediment far out to the deep. He was involved in finding sweet spots for offshore drilling beyond the coastline of Louisiana. In the late hours, he sat alone, looking closely at seismic readings, learning to recognize those distinct substrata characters that indicated a strong potential for oil. He was dispatched into the field to track down and buy oil leases, and Holifield collected the data that Texaco needed to make a major sale in 1967, earning the company hundreds of millions of dollars, not bad at all for a young, gangling geologist who wore thick, black sideburns, large, dark, horn-rimmed glasses, and earned $575 a month.

By 1970, Ray Holifield had walked away from Texaco and journeyed again to Texas, accepting a position with D. R. McCord & Associates in Dallas. Within weeks, he had been shipped out to foreign shores and assigned to conduct the geological evaluation of the vast oilfields being drilled in North Africa, Australia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He buckled down – it was the chance of a lifetime, he said – working as many as eighty hours a week. Out in the field. On the desert. In the bars. Day and night.

Oil and water might not mix. But oil and whiskey certainly did. “I wasn’t really an expert,” Holifield said with a grin, “but I certainly made myself appear to be one, and nobody ever knew the difference.”

The stern-faced Minister of Petroleum in Algeria came marching unannounced into Holifield’s office one morning and dropped a map on his desk. He had marked the site of each well drilled in the country, and he asked a simple question that had occupied the minds of oilmen for generations. “Why are some of these good wells?” he asked. “And why are some of them bad?”

Ray Holifield did not have a ready answer. Wished he did. But he didn’t. And it was not the time to bluff. He would spend the rest of his life searching for an answer to the riddle, even though, he knew, the geology of each field was hardly ever the same and almost always had to be interpreted differently. For decades, the industry had understood the basic strategy of drilling on and around salt domes or in traditional oil-bearing sands. The Middle East, however, remained an enigma. Holifield uncovered the fact that the old faults had been cemented together with limestone crystals. Oil might well be plentiful far below the sands, but it lay trapped inside the storage chambers of ancient rock. Calcite plugged the fissures. The oil couldn’t get out. It couldn’t be pumped. It defied anyone who tried to find it. The oil was a fortune encased and entombed in compressed stone

Holifield made a fascinating discovery, and, to him, it generated a revolutionary concept. Eons ago, the pressure deep inside the earth had been so strong that the faults had a tendency to bend sharply at the edges of the desert, breaking the rocks and creating a fractured reservoir where the oil had been collected. Without those fractures, the field would have appeared to be barren. What an oil exploration company needed to do was frac the well and create its own fractures down in the faults. Special fluids were forced into the wellbore by a powerful hydraulic pump, shattering the limestone and opening up the fissures so hydrocarbons could flow more freely into the shaft of the bore. Otherwise, the fortune went to waste. Ray Holifield took the knowledge he learned and the data he had compiled from the hard rock, limestone formations beneath the desert floor and filed them away.

Holifield’s geologic work and track record during his years in the Middle East oilfields were sterling. Some of the wells drilled on locations he had chosen were flowing a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. He had a knack for reading the seismic data of the formations correctly. When he selected a location, it was usually a good one, even though some wells were better than others. He was in the field with the crew, a permanent fixture on the rigs. He survived massive blow-outs, including one that burned up forty thousand barrels of oil a day for six months before the famed Red Adair arrived from Houston and killed the flames by pumping cement down the hole. Those in high places kept a watchful eye on his successes in the field. Other geologists simply searched for oil, they whispered among themselves. Ray Holifield had a knack for knowing where it was buried.

The Minister of Petroleum in Saudi Arabia made him a quiet and private offer. If Holifield would agree to stay in the Middle East and direct the geology of the country’s oil exploration efforts, he would be allowed to live in a small palace, have a special driver for his car, be given enough money to place his children in one of Europe’s best schools, and earn a salary of $250,000 a year. Holifield accepted the proposal without hesitation. There really wasn’t anything for him to consider. Back home, not even the presidents of major oil companies made that kind of money. Ray Holifield smiled to himself. He may not be king. But he was certainly close to one. Oil had a way of making a lot of people in power happy throughout Saudi Arabia, and, if nothing else, he could find oil.

Holifield promptly flew home, apologetically resigned his position at D. R. McCord, sold his Dallas home, took all of the shots necessary for living overseas, applied for his visa, and made sure that his passport was up to date. He was leaving nothing to chance. He viewed himself as an expatriate extraordinaire.

The phone rang. He wasn’t expecting a call. It was the Minister of Petroleum on the other end of the line. He was speaking in hushed tones. “There appears to have been a slight problem,” he said.

“What kind of problem?”

“Word has leaked out about how much money I offered you. Word has come down that it is far too much.”

“We can certainly negotiate the money,” Holifield said. “What’s the new offer?”

“There isn’t one. Everything has changed. The agreement we signed with you has been cancelled.”

Silence. The phone went dead.

When he had crawled out of bed early that morning, Ray Holifield thought he would soon be living in a palace among royalty, working as the head geologist in one of the greatest oilfields in the world. Oil had made a lot of people wealthy. He had a chance to get rich as well.

Then the phone rang, and, within the space of a dozen well-chosen words, his new world had not only crumbled and fallen apart, it had been rudely and ruthlessly yanked out from beneath him. Holifield suddenly realized that he had absolutely nothing. No job. No salary. No home. Saved a little money. Not much. Tucked it away in a bank. For all practical purposes, however, he and his family were out on the streets. His tenuous and circuitous life had gone from rags to riches to rags again. What a difference those dozen little words could make.

He sighed, squared his shoulders, and accepted the grim fact that he would have to begin again. Some company out there must need a good geologist with his experience. Who knows? He might even wind up in the Middle East for another tour of duty.

Holifield was right, and he was wrong. Someone did need a good geologist. The Middle East was out of the question. He had served his time and left his imprint on the desert for others who would follow.

Ray Holifield went to work for the geology firm of Larue, Moore & Schafer in Dallas, developing oil and gas prospects with an increased emphasis on low permeability sands and carbonates. The pay wasn’t particularly good. He even heard that a couple of businessmen involved with some kind of oil fund was providing part of the money necessary to hire him. By now, Holifield had learned that the Middle East had made the decision to cut off much of the oil supplied to the United States, and he had a much better understanding of why the Minister of Petroleum had succinctly told him that everything had changed. It had indeed changed. Maybe even for the better.

The demand for domestic oil was rising, and so was the price for crude, inching up near eight dollars a barrel. It still took a good well delivering a high volume of oil on a consistent basis to make a decent payday, especially for the major companies. For independent operators, the sudden real estate slump had made a lot of investors nervous. If they still had any money, most did not want to give it up, no matter how glamorous an oilfield prospectus might sound. Holifield knew he wouldn’t have any problem staying busy, but he wondered just how productive he could be when it seemed that all of the easy fields had already been discovered. The only temptation beckoned from those out-of-the-way sections of empty acreage that had been passed over time and again. A few parcels of the land were even dotted with dry holes. Rig sites were overgrown with brush and weeds. Hopes had been dashed. Dreams had turned sour. Old truck roads had been swept away by the winds. Even the ruts had filled in.

If an investor did happen to be straying into the oil business, where would Ray Holifield find a deal that he could recommend with a clear conscience? He had no idea. He was about to find out.

The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up and heard John LaRue say, “I need you to come on down to my office. I have a couple of men I want you to meet. They’re oilmen and relatively new in the game. They have some acreage leased and say they can raise the money to drill the wells. They need a geologist. I told them you were available.”

A few minutes later, Ray Holifield walked down the hall and shook hands for the first time with Max Williams and Irv Deal. Holifield was a chain smoker, dressed with all the aplomb of an absent-minded professor, and had holes in his shoes. If he had made any money at all, it was obvious that Ray Holifield had not wasted it on the finer things of life. He began putting two and two together in a hurry. Max Williams and Irv Deal both had companies, which were little more than one-man operations. One was a basketball player turned real estate broker, and the other happened to be one of the largest builders of apartments in the country. He often wondered if either of them understood the oil business well enough to really know the difference between logging and fracking a well and whether or not either of them had ever figured the intangible costs involved with sinking a hole.

They had obviously made a lot of money, and their shoes had stepped in a puddle or two of oil, but those intangible costs had jumped up unexpectedly and far too often. They broke a lot of men. A genuine novice in the oil game was always one decision away from potential disaster. Holifield was staring at two genuine novices.

The geologist looked at Max Williams and Irv Deal with unwavering eyes and asked simply, “Where do you have the leases?”

“Frio County,” Williams replied. “Down in Pearsall.”

“That’s in the Austin Chalk.”

“It is.”

Ray Holifield shrugged. “You’d be better off to get yourselves some leases down on the coast or out in the Permian Basin of West Texas,” he said. “The chalk’s not where it’s at. Never has been. Certainly isn’t now. They don’t call that worthless chalk the field of broken hearts for nothing.”

Max Williams had no idea what to say. For a moment, he just stared at Holifield. Here he was, standing face to face with a man who had been hired to find him an oilfield in the Austin Chalk, and already Williams was being told that he had made a mistake, maybe even a grave mistake. A wiser man might have decided to cut and run. But Max Williams had never seen a game he didn’t think he could win. Basketball. Raw land. Oil. It was all the same. Play it out, play as hard as you can, and let the scoreboard sort out the haves from the have nots. Irv Deal’s mind was in a quandary. Had he and Williams made a mistake? Had Edwin Cox led them astray? Did they have the wrong leases? On the wrong land? Or were they merely saddled with the wrong geologist?

Max Williams and Irv Deal decided to make their first tenuous foray into the Frio County brush country to confront the Austin Chalk. Williams was constantly on the road between Dallas and Pearsall and wherever the next investor might be. Deal remained in Dallas, his eyes riveted on the business end of the venture. He would never go to the trouble of embarking on those long seven-hour trek to the field, never see exactly where the oil leases had been located, preferred the slick pavement of city life to a harsh dust always blowing in the oil patch, and, somewhere along the way, neglected to raise great sums of money.

Irv Deal did have a couple of major deals working. Up north, he said. Up in Chicago. He wasn’t interested in collecting small sums of money. Why bother with living on the telephone, dialing number after number, knocking on doors, chasing down one investor after another for a few thousand dollars here, a few thousand more there, when he could finance the whole operation with an investment from one high-dollar source?

Irv Deal was quite content to remain in his Dallas office, hire the right crew, make sure that Windsor/U.S. had good, hard-working drilling experts on the rigs, oversee the spiraling costs of production, keep an eye on the numbers, manage the money, and run the operation. He was not an oilman, Deal said. He was a businessman. He just happened to be in the oil business.

Besides, Max Williams was a good salesman. He knew how to promote the wells. He loved escorting potential investors across the brush lands around Pearsall, scuffing the top of the ground with his boots, and explaining how the ground far below held fractures filled with oil. Max Williams was a good fundraiser. Williams could bring in the quick money. Deal would make the companies run smoothly. In his mind, Irv Deal had it all worked out.

Those who invested with Max Williams knew absolutely nothing about the oil business, other than it was a precious and valuable commodity. But they all knew him, and, if they bought at all, they were buying Max Williams. There was W. O. Bankston, one of the largest automobile dealers in Dallas. As the years passed by, he would always be ready to provide Williams with investment funds, as well as a list of new names when those last, few dollars for drilling a well still needed to be raised.

Mary Kay Ash and her son, Richard Rogers, came on board, she driving her pink Cadillac in a lifelong quest to make women more beautiful. A little oil could pay for manufacturing a lot of cosmetics. And Don Carter was not afraid of any investment as long as it didn’t interfere with his Rolls Royce dealership or his trucking firms, cattle ranches, and hotels. He would one day sell Home Interiors & Gift, which his mother had founded, for $470 million and bring the Dallas Mavericks into the NBA. Harold Clark had firmly cemented his reputation and made his first fortune in the home development business.

D. Harold Byrd’s father had married Mattie Carruth, whose family owned most of the land sprawling across North Dallas. When Dallas grew, their riches followed suit. D. H. Byrd, the father, had romanced the oil business once before. He journeyed to Overton in 1931 when Dad Joiner’s Daisy Bradford No. 3 well ushered in the great East Texas boom because the crippled, old wildcatter had promised to sell him some of his land holdings. Byrd found Joiner asleep in his tent. He waited. He was too late. H. L. Hunt wound up with the leases and the fortune. Not to be outsmarted by the likes of Dad Joiner, D. H. Byrd went ahead and drilled twenty-nine oil wells of his own. Twenty-eight of them had nothing at the bottom of the hole but more rocks. He became known far and wide as Dry Hole Byrd. But he married well. In North Dallas, dry dirt was about as valuable as oil.

To his eclectic collection of investors, Max Williams added Don and Corky Furr, who had made their considerable amount of money with Furr’s Cafeteria, as well as Ben and June Collier, who had flown to Dallas from Montgomery Alabama, to determine how much it would cost them to play a game that paid off in oil. To them, a drilling rig was little more than a toy with a hefty price tag. June Collier was an entrepreneur who would ultimately be named as one of the country’s top ten businesswomen.

When Ford began developing its Mustang in 1964, she and Ben submitted the winning bid to build the wire harness for the snappy little sports car even though they did not own or have access to a manufacturing plant. Ben Collier, who had been a weight lifter at The University of Texas, weighed more than four hundred pounds, was extremely athletic in spite of his size, sold an assortment of auto parts, and was regarded as a great salesman. Ford was moving swiftly and ordered twenty thousand wire harnesses in case the Mustang was a success. Collier hastily built a plant and, before the year ended, had manufactured wire harnesses for more than three hundred thousand automobiles.

Max Williams had met Ben Collier while playing tennis in a Dallas tournament. He and June seemed to be quite impressed that Williams had dared venture into the oil business.

“That’s what I want to do,” Ben Collier said,

“What’s that?”

“Run an oil company.”

Max Williams grinned. “You can’t run mine, he said, but I’ll let you put some money in it.”

Ben Collier nodded. That was close enough. He and June would be the first to step up and invest a million dollars in the oil exploration ventures of Max Williams, Irv Deal, and Windsor/U.S.