Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 13

Back in Dallas, Max Williams spent the morning, reading through various and assorted production reports in an effort to better determine his position in the Pearsall chalk. Found a little oil. Made a little money. Not much. But a little. Could have been better. He stood and stared out the window toward the Dallas skyline. The next time in the next field, he vowed to himself, it would be.

At Preston Trails that afternoon, he ran into Jack Stroube. Nothing unusual about the chance encounter. Both men occupied offices in the Addison State Bank Building, and they saw each other virtually every day either at work or the country club.

Jack Stroube and his brother Bill were independent oil producers themselves, and they were well aware that Williams had been in Pearsall, tackling the chalk. Their father, H. R., had gained notoriety as a key figure behind the further development of the famed Corsicana Oilfield during the 1920s.

H. R. Stroube had broken into the oil business as a boll weevil roughneck in the Burkburnett Field, but, by 1921, he was broke, and, as his son recalled, was turning handsprings for hamburgers and hook slides for chili. All he had to his name was a junk pile, baling wire rig and a string of drill pipe. He hocked the pipe for money to ship his rig to the next promise of oil, a transaction that brought him to Corsicana. He hired his water, fuel, rig building, pit digging, and tool pushing people by giving them 1/256^th interest in the wells he was drilling. He did not have any loose cash to pay them. His son Jack recalled, it was so dead in Corsicana you could hear your hair grow on Main Street.

H. R. Stroube drilled the first of four wells on a two and a half acre lease. It came in, Jack Stroube said, flowing something that looked more like red barn paint than oil. It would, however, make a hundred and seventy-five barrels of oil a day. Between 1924 and 1971, those four wells produced nine million barrels of oil.

Jack Stroube once wrote: After well number two had averaged twenty thousand barrels per day for four days, daddy and Cornie found themselves oil poor – potentially rich but short on cash. They didn’t know how long it takes to get titles cleared, division orders signed, and how pipeline companies love to ride on your money. They called Humble in Houston and told them they would like to draw a little on account, on account of they needed a little walkin’ around money. The Humble people said sure, to meet their pipeline superintendent, Ralph Hanrahan, in Houston, and he would hand them a partial payment. Daddy caught the train to Houston, still in is oilfield clothes, lace top boots, and all. He toted up the bills on the ride down, figuring if Humble would advance them around $20,000, they could pay off most of their debts. When Hanrahan handed him the check, on first glance he thought it was $10,400. He told Hanrahan he was hoping for at least $20,000 and that $10,400 just wouldn’t do it. Hanrahan told him to take another look at the check. It was for $104,000.

When Jack and Bill Stroube settled into the oil business, they were only carrying on a family tradition. It was said of the two brothers: Jack can spend more money at a funeral than Bill can at the State Fair. Jack Stroube would always be fascinated with the search for oil. He sat down with Max Williams over lunch and said, “I hear you’ve been doing some operating of your own down in South Texas. We’ve drilled a few wells in and around Pearsall. The chalk’s a bitch.”

Max Williams grinned. He wouldn’t disagree.

Stroube paused a moment, searched back through his memory, then asked, “Do you know anything about that big chalk well down near the airport in Giddings?”

“If you’ve been in the chalk at least a day or two, you’ve heard about it,” Williams said. “That’s about all anybody ever talks about. But no one I’ve met has ever mentioned it being in Giddings before. Maybe that’s the well I’ve been looking for.”

“From what folks who’ve been there keep telling me,” Jack Stroube said, “it’s the damnedest thing you ever saw. Makes at little more than three hundred barrels a day as regular as a ticking clock.”

“Might be worth me taking a look.”

“I don’t know what else is there or how big the field is,” Stroube said. “But that big chalk well is making somebody a lot of money.”

Max Williams frowned, thought it over for a moment, then casually asked, “Where in the world is Giddings?”

“Somewhere east of Austin. Not far from LaGrange. A little west of Brenham.”

Williams nodded and filed the information away in the back of his mind. Somewhere between noon and midnight, his mind was made up. Come morning, he would be on his way to Giddings. The big chalk well, if it were indeed tucked back against the Giddings airport, had waited a long time for someone to stumble across it. He would not keep the well waiting much longer.

Ray Holifield had been asked by Max Williams and Irv Deal to find another oil play even before they drove away from Pearsall. The chalk continued to intrigue them, but the chalk stretched across Texas, through Louisiana, and down to the Mississippi coast. As was his custom, Holifield began most days by diligently thumbing through a stack of information generated and published by the Texas Railroad Commission, the regulators of the oil industry in the state. The commission duly noted each well in Texas, marked its location, and divulged the amount of oil it was producing on a daily basis.

One well, however, intrigued him a great deal. He had originally been aware of its existence because of the rumors drifting from one oil rig to another. The well certainly did not occupy the heart of any great field. It was sitting perched on the edge of Giddings, drilled smack dab in the formidable chalk, and Holifield had always possessed a bad feeling about the chalk. It ground the bones of men into sand, scattered by the winds. It offered paybacks and very few paydays.

The City of Giddings No. 1 was a perplexing conundrum, a lonesome well, an orphan well, situated out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by untold acres of dry farmlands, dry creek beds, and dry holes.

Holifield had already circled the location on a worn Texas land map by the time Max Williams telephoned to say he thought he had tracked down the big chalk well that everyone had been talking about in Pearsall.

“That’s the one,” Holifield said.

“How do you know?”

“I have the data right here in front of me.”

“Can we find another well just like it?”

Holifield sighed. “The odds say we can’t.”

“I’m not betting on the odds,” Williams said. ‘I’m betting on you.”

He was on his way to Giddings, and he wanted Holifield to unearth as much data as he could on the old airport well. Was it any good? Was it worth chasing? Was Giddings, perhaps, the next great hope? Or the next great hoax?

Holifield already knew. But a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. It defied all logic, unexpected and unexplained. Some old boy had dabbled in the chalk and gotten rich, Holifield figured. The City of Giddings No. 1 had been a steady producer for a long time, flowing three hundred barrels of oil a day for at least the last four years. The field wasn’t large, just a single big well next door to an abandoned airport and a handful of dry holes. There may have been only one well, and it was lodged firmly in the chalk, but it was a dandy.

Max Williams had driven down a lonesome highway past rolling farmlands, and only a bare horizon rose up in front of him. He gazed across an unbroken landscape that covered the chalk like the jacket on a book. The big chalk well was the stuff of legends. But not all legends were true. Max Williams grinned. He would find out soon enough.

By the time Williams reached Giddings, picked up Walter Schneider, and turned his Blazer toward the airport, he was convinced that his bare-boned strategy just might work. Find the best chalk well in Texas, which he believed he had. Lease a little land around it. Try to determine which way the faults or fractures ran in the chalk. Move in as close as possible to the City of Giddings No. 1. And drill an off-setting well. The oil was down there. No doubt about it. Trying to locate it with a string of drill pipe, battling through chalk that, at times, appeared to be impenetrable, and probing around ten thousand feet below the surface of the ground had never been an easy task.

One place to hit. An ungodly amount of places to miss.

The oil patch had forever been rife with a lot of odd theories about the locations where oil could be discovered and ways to discern where it might be. For more than a century, poor boy operators had met with mediums and spiritualists, used water witches, divining rods, and doodlebugs, outfitted with an array of electrical wires, dials, and bells.

A doodlebug was placed in a shrouded sedan chair and carried across empty pastures by four men. A wildcatter knew to drill on the spot where the bells caught life and began to ring. Some oilmen only chose to spud in their wells near cemeteries because tombstones always occupied the high ground, which might be a salt dome.

A few, H. L. Hunt among them, drilled near a creek or wouldn’t drill at all. They were constantly searching for a faint trace of oil that might be coating the top of the water and were classified as creekologists. Others were more like H. R. Stroube, known as closeologists. They were adamant about trying their luck as close as they could get to a high-dollar, money-making well, so close, in fact, they could smell the strong aroma of oil coming out of the ground. Max Williams may not have realized it at the time, but he was quickly becoming a self-styled closeologist.

If Williams were right and Ray Holifield was as good a geologist as advertised, Giddings just might be on the threshold of becoming a town – no longer forgotten, no longer ignored or overlooked – that had the potential of changing many lives, not the least of which was his own.

After surveying the rusting carcass of a dead well brought back to life, a well whose pulse had never weakened, Williams drove Walter Schneider back to his service station and talked again to Ray Holifield. He had seen the well. The myth was as real as he had hoped it would be. He needed for Holifield to track down the right locations and Randy Stewart to lease the right acreage. Irv Deal would handle the operation and put the crew together.

Williams would raise the money. His nerves were on edge. He wasn’t for sure whether the gamble in hard ground around Giddings excited him, frightened him, or just made him wary. The difference between riches and financial disaster was often a single step, a single decision, right or wrong.

Ray Holifield, tucked away in his Dallas office, sat down with a lease map and began carefully marking the fault lines where he believed they extended away from the City of Giddings well. He handed the map to Randy Stewart and said, “Get me every available acre of land within those lines.”

Back in the beginning, Stewart said he really had no idea what oil or gas looked like underground. He simply referred to himself as a legal mind getting paid for doing some legal work. While Williams and Deal folded up their real estate businesses and began poking around for oil in Palo Pinto and Pearsall, Stewart suddenly found himself spending more and more time out of the office, on the road, and trying to piece together scraps of acreage that made up those elusive leases. He pored through musty old records hour after hour, day after day, tracking down those who owned the land or the leases, and figuring out who, if anybody, possessed a clear title to the acreage. He assembled it all. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Did the phone still work? Had that sacred patch of ground been abandoned, sold, passed on, settled during probate, or lost to hard times?

For him, it was always something different, but somebody always had a title or at least one that could be cleared up with a few legal dance steps. Family trees often had a few crooked limbs and split branches that the family chose not to speak about, not in public anyway. When Max Williams decided that he wanted land in a certain region, however, Randy Stewart had a knack for finding enough old records to make sure he got it. The search for a title often began like a wild goose chase, but Stewart considered himself to be a pretty decent goose hunter.

Stewart drove immediately to Giddings, booked a room at the Sands Motel, and headed directly to the County Clerk’s office at the courthouse. He carefully checked through the records, which, he said, were poorly organized and kept in a cramped vault. It might not be impossible to find the information he wanted, but, then again, it might take him a lifetime to track down the data he needed.

Stewart quickly glanced through the telephone book and discovered that Lee County was at least large enough to have it own abstract company with records, the yellow pages ad said, that dated “back to the sovereign.” The company might be a godsend, and it was located directly across the street from the courthouse.

Stewart remembered, “That evening I went scouting. Having come up from Pearsall, which had a bustling oil play, I expected to find some activity around Giddings as a result of the City Well. I kept looking for the sight of rigs. Nothing. As darkness fell, I looked for rig lights. Again, nothing. It was after eight o’clock, night lay around the city, and Giddings had gone to bed. I drove past the city well on county road 448 and eased out into the country toward Serbin. A few miles out of town, I turned around and headed back. My car window was down, and suddenly I heard the clanking of iron, the squeal of turning metal. It was a Eureka moment. At last, I thought, someone is drilling just off to the west, just past a tree and brush line.”

Randy Stewart parked, climbed out of his car, cloaked by the darkness of night, and waded into the tall grass. He pushed through the brush, ducked beneath low-hanging tree limbs, and stumbled out onto the open. He expected to find a drilling pad, a rig, maybe even a pump jack. Instead, he found himself standing alongside the railroad right-of-way. And in front of him was a work car with workmen pounding their hammers into metal spikes as they repaired the tracks. To Randy Stewart, it sounded for all the world like a working drilling rig. Without a word, he turned back into the tall grass, walked to his car, and drove sheepishly back into the sleeping town.

The next morning, he walked into the Lee County Land and Abstract Company and met the Knox brothers, identical twins, John and Bob. Stewart introduced himself as a landman for a small oil company and said, “I’m looking for leases in certain areas in and around town.”

The Knox brothers glanced at each other. It was about time. No one had come looking for leases or oil in a long time.

Randy Stewart knew Giddings was small. He knew the town moved at a slow place. He quickly learned that morning business in Giddings took place over coffee, and no one was in a hurry. He sipped coffee for two hours with the Knox brothers, talked about oil, discussed the fortunes and misfortunes of the chalk, and, somewhere between the first and second pot, they all became lifelong friends.

The title plant consisted of land maps that covered the length and breadth of Lee County, as well as copies of all recorded instruments affecting the land. The documents were organized and entered by survey and abstract, which were critical for any landman. The county records, on the other hand, had only been filed by name, and if Stewart did not happen to know the right name, which he didn’t, he would never find the right survey or abstract. The Knox brothers had given him access to a gold mine, provided there was more than a single reservoir of oil beneath Giddings.

John and Bob Knox were petroleum geologists by profession, educated at The University of Texas, and they had prospected for oil, gold, and copper throughout the four corners of the American Southwest. They had returned to Giddings, their hometown, to take over the land and abstract business for their father, John Knox, Sr., who had also served as Lee County surveyor until his death.

On numerous occasions, the brothers had been hired to lease acreage for various oil companies that had tried and failed to find oil in various formations of chalk beneath the town. Their going rate was a dollar an acre, and they always enjoyed seeing another landman walk through their front door. A landman meant the potential for new business.

The Knox brothers may have believed there was indeed oil beneath their town, but they had never bothered to drill for it. They were quite content to lease the surface and let somebody else pour good money down holes that, for the most part, always came up dry. One of their clients happened to be Hughes and Hughes Petroleum down in Beeville, Texas. When news of the City of Giddings well had reached him, Dan Hughes immediately called the Knox brothers and told them to keep leasing acreage on trend until he told them to stop.

The Knox brothers had no problem leasing land. For hardscrabble farmers, it was easy money. They had managed to lease seventeen thousand acres before Dan Hughes called it quits. His company had been led to drill a well on one of the tracts, which was owned, coincidentally, by John and Bob Knox. But it was just an old chalk well. Came in quick. Played out quick. Nothing more.

As John Knox explained to Randy Stewart, “Dan Hughes was left holding a disappointment and seventeen thousand acres of dog ass land.”

Randy Stewart looked at his map. He checked Ray Holifield’s fault lines. They were scrawled across the same land where Dan Hughes had drilled. Holifield’s marks had been scribbled smack dab in the heart of those seventeen thousand acres. Dog ass acreage. That’s all it was. But Randy Stewart had a job to do.

“How well do you know Dan Hughes?” he asked the brothers.

“We’re pretty good friends,” came the reply.

Stewart nodded and asked, “Will you call him and tell him that the company I’m working with would like to discuss a farm out on his Giddings acreage?”

“Sure. No problem.”

Randy Stewart stood to leave.

Bob Knox stopped him. “There’s one more thing to discuss,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“When we did the leasing for Dan,” he said, “we took a one-sixty-fourth override in the acreage instead of our usual dollar per acre. And we think we should get a one-sixty-fourth from you boys as well, provided, of course, you put this deal together.”

“Done, “ Stewart said.

He didn’t even have to think it over. He knew Max Williams and Irv Deal would agree. No money up front. Everybody gambling on the back end. In the oil business, that was simply good business. Before the afternoon ended, Randy Stewart had scheduled an appointment in Beeville with Hughes and Hughes.

The company had drilled a few locations in the Giddings area with hardly any degree of success. Dan Hughes, when he took the call from John Knox, was sitting in his office with the rights to several thousand acres of farmland stuffed back in his files, and he had little if any interest at all in them. It had all been a waste of money, Hughes thought. He might as well have gone down to the bank, borrowed a couple of hundred thousand dollars, gone out to a barrow ditch on the south side of Giddings, and thrown it away among the weeds.

Randy Stewart placed a call to Max Williams back in Dallas. “How much acreage do you want in Giddings?” he asked.

“As much as you can lease.”

“An oil company named Hughes and Hughes has most of it.”

“They willing to lease?”

“As near as I can tell, they’ve given up on it.”

On the surface, it appeared to Max Williams that the town of Giddings just might be the next hot spot. Of course, he knew, a lot of oil operators in the past had believed the same thing, and they had all been beaten and broken by the devil’s chalk. He wasted little time in placing a call to Ray Holifield. “You might as well head south,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re moving the Windsor/U.S. operation to Giddings.”

“It’s still the chalk.”

“I’m not as afraid of the chalk as some people.”

“What are your ideas about Giddings?” Holifield wanted to know.

“Same as it was,” Williams said. “Drill as close to the big chalk well as I can get and see if we can locate the same fault. Maybe it has enough oil for several wells.”

“Can Randy get us some good leases?”

“He says he can.”

“Who has the leases now?”

“Hughes and Hughes,” Williams said. “We probably can’t get all of them, but maybe we can acquire enough acreage to get us started.”

“You think Hughes and Hughes wants to get out from under them?”

“Randy thinks they’re tired of the leases costing them money,” Williams said. “From what I’ve been told, they’ve drilled their last well in Lee County. Didn’t like it when they were there. They have no plans to go back.”

Ray Holifield chuckled sardonically. “So you’re dead set on investing good money in the same old ground that turned good money bad,” he said.

“I’ve got a feeling about this one.”

Oilmen always did. Even the broke ones. Holifield laughed again. “I doubt if Hughes and Hughes is willing to turn loose of more than a couple of hundred acres,” he said. “And Randy’s gonna have to do some hard bargaining to get those.”

“You may be right.”

“Can you drill on as little as two hundred acres?”

“If I have to, I can. If it’s the right acreage, I can drill on forty.”

Irv Deal, like his partner, held a deep fascination for the big chalk well and its consistent production on land that, over the years, had become a graveyard for dry holes. The acreage around it might be tough to negotiate, he thought, and since he ran the operation of the company, Deal strongly believed that he was better suited than anyone to make the right deal on the right patch of real estate. He chartered a Lear Jet and flew to Corpus Christi to meet with Dan Hughes. Hughes wasn’t there. Hughes was never there. His office was in Beeville. Irv Deal had a good idea. He was in the wrong city. Undaunted, he promptly rented a car and drove to Beeville.

He sat before Dan Hughes and told him, “We’re planning to drill a couple of wells in Giddings, and I hear you have some property we can lease.”

Hughes nodded. He studied Deal for a moment, then asked, “Are you an oilman?”

“No.”

“What business are you in?”

“I made my money in real estate.”

“Oil is a different game.”

“Not really,” Deal said.

Dan Hughes raised his eyebrow in surprise. “How do you figure that?” he asked.

“All I have to do is replace a building contractor with a drilling contractor, then use a geologist instead of an architect,” Irv Deal replied. “Business is about people. It’s always about putting the right people in place. I know how to do that.”

“What makes you think you can find oil in Giddings?” Hughes asked.

“I can, and I will,” Deal replied.

“It’s a dead field.”

“Somebody found oil.” Deal shrugged. “I’m betting we can do the same.”

Dan Hughes thought it over. He had no faith in Irv Deal as an oilman. He had little faith in Giddings as an oil field. But who knows? There might still be an acorn left for a blind hog to find. “I’ll lease you some land,” Dan Hughes said, “but I want royalties on the back end in case you hit something.”

“How much?”

“A quarter interest.”

Irv Deal was in no mood to argue.

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.”