Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 4

It was a battle for hard ground, fought in the devil’s chalk by a curious assortment of men who dared to defy those fractured layers of an ancient limestone that impacted the earth far beneath a land that had historically refused to give up its oil, provided any reservoirs of crude did exist in the notorious Austin Chalk.

Major oil companies stayed away. Some had been burned before. Dry holes were a curse of the chalk. Only a small band of independent operators stabbed their drill bits into the vast fields of burnt cotton and brittle peanut vines. They did not have a lot of money. Some said they had even less sense.

Most of them were new to the oil game: Irv Deal, a real estate developer facing the sudden wrath of hard times. Max Williams, a real estate broker watching various and assorted land deals crumble around him. Pat Holloway, a lawyer who operated drilling funds but had never drilled in the devil’s chalk. Jimmy Luecke, a highway patrolman who kept law and sometimes order atop land rich with oil. Bill Shuford, right out of college and more interested in finding the next beer joint than his next job.

They had far more hope than experience and the Austin Chalk would break them or make them rich. They fought the land, dueled before judges, and battled each other in the field of broken hearts. They spilled more money than blood, but the scars ran deep. For some, the scars would last a lifetime. They drilled toward a confluence of volcanic channels, if Reinhardt Richter had been right, and stopped just short of the howling voices from hell. In time, the howling voices sounded a lot like their own.

Max Williams gazed through the dusty windshield of his Chevy Blazer, his eyes scanning the far country as it sprawled defiantly around him. A few rises that passed for hills. Mostly flat. A few trees clustered together here and there, mostly there. Tall grasses burned and wilted by an unforgiving sun. Weathered homesteads, the last known will and testament of stubborn farmers who fought the land, watered the crop rows with their own sweat, were too proud to ever even think about quitting, and considered it a good year if they broke even. Once the fields held cotton, then peanuts, always peanuts, and farmers cursed it and condemned it but could never quite convince themselves to turn it loose.

The land was called worthless by those who plowed it, godforsaken by those who could neither sell it nor live on it, and barren by the few speculators who, with more grit than sense, perhaps, jammed a drill bit down into the ancient layers of Austin Chalk, searching for hidden pools of oil. Then again, Williams thought, maybe the whole bunch of them was wrong. All it would cost him to find out was a little time.

Giddings intrigued him, although, he figured, the town was probably nothing more than some little hole-in-the-wall, dying cluster of decrepit buildings by the side of the road. He had never been there, had never wanted to go, or thought about going.

But Giddings had suddenly become the only place in Texas occupying his every thought. What did Giddings know that no one else in the chalk had learned, he asked himself, and how tightly was the little town holding on to its secret? Could the big chalk well be the gateway to an undiscovered field, or just a one hit wonder.

The Austin Chalk had a lot of those.

The noted geologist Everett DeGolyer had once said, “The greatest single element in all prospecting – past, present, and future – was the man willing to take a chance.” He might as well have been talking about Max Williams.

Williams knew there were a lot of places he should be that spring afternoon, and Lee County probably wasn’t one of them. He had driven south out of Dallas, letting the hours pass by with the long miles, on a quixotic, maybe even foolhardy, search for a mythical oil well, a big chalk well, that he had heard a lot of roughnecks, roustabouts, wildcatters, and geologists talk about, even though they claimed it was a rich orphan in ground that bore the remnants of rusting oil pipe and wounds of dry holes.

They all possessed the logs, the production reports, the shared research, but most believed that oil only flowed in great amounts from beneath the mythical well, the big chalk well. The remaining acreage would only take their money and give them back faint traces of oil. It had happened before. It would happen again. They had, from time to time, simply looked over the mythical well, shook their heads, and quietly drove away. A lot of big dreams had been burned in the chalk and blown like ashes with the wind.

The land simply wasn’t worth the trouble, they said. The well was in the chalk, they said. The chalk’s cold-blooded. It’ll tempt you and lie to you. The chalk will take your money, then turn its back on you. If one well was out there running oil, lost, or misplaced somewhere on the fringe of an out-of-the-way town known as Giddings, it was probably running the only oil in the chalk. A one-in-a-million well, they said. That’s all it was. The other scattered holes in the ground were simply holes in the ground. Dry. Empty. Hard enough to break you and your drill bit both. Too deep or too shallow. And there was absolutely no need to regret or worry about the cold cash a man poured into the chalk holes. It wasn’t coming back out. Maybe it would spit a little oil at you from time to time, but that was about all, and it was hardly ever anything to speak of, much less take to the bank.

Williams had heard it all before. The oilfield, wherever it might be, was always rampant and often corrupt with gossip, lies, rumors, and hope. A good oil operator, he knew, was someone who could separate fact from fiction and never believe too much in the fiction, no matter how good it sounded, and it almost always sounded good.

It had not sounded nearly so good when a weary Chuck Alcorn drove through the biting wind and dust of a land as dry as the bones of cattle that had fallen victim to a hard drought settling down upon the barren landscape of Lee County.

Chuck Alcorn had a job to do, and his work was never easy, seldom lucrative, and usually a pain in the ass. His was a face well known throughout the oilfield, and company men always dreaded that singular, self-loathing moment when they knew it was time to pick up the phone and call him. His name officially was C. W., but everyone called him Chuck. He was a junior. But nobody cared from which branch of the family tree he had descended. He made his money, what little of it there was, from a various assortment of failures and misfortunes encountered on a rig site. As he always said, “I managed to build the rough edges of my career on the unromantic side of the oil business.”

Chuck Alcorn, in the shank of another long, unforgiving day, standing up to his ankles in mud, his face splattered with streaks of oil and grease, thought he would kill for the outside chance of being a genuine, authentic, down-home wildcatter who owned his own oil well or maybe a field full of them. He learned about the intricacies and pitfalls of the business during his early years at Gulf Oil. Simple realities: The rich got richer, and the poor boy operations went busted, and so many of the fields wound up as graveyards for rusting pipe, burned out pumps, empty holes, and hopes gone awry.

By 1973, he owned his own oil well salvage company down in Victoria. However, Chuck Alcorn, it appeared, had never been destined to explore new fields, shoot and read seismographs, track down investors, negotiate with bankers, patch together leases and a drilling crew, and finally search down hole for a pool or a river of crude. He had, more or less, been condemned to the task of buying up old wells and attempting to rejuvenate them with a special treatment that the industry referred to as acidizing.

He took the old, the tired, the worn out and tried like hell to make them profitable. A few breathed a little life, but, sooner or later, the dead usually stayed dead.

He was, many believed, the oil business equivalent of a used car dealer.

Sometimes there was a little oil left smoldering in the ground. At a humiliating price of four dollars a barrel, it didn’t amount to much. Often more trouble than it was worth. Breaking even was becoming more difficult all the time.

Mostly he merely salvaged the pipe and equipment left abandoned in the field and sold it for scrap or to some little two-bit oil company trying to scrape by and maybe strike it rich with glorified leftovers from Chuck Alcorn’s personal junkyard.

He was forty years old, had hair turning gray long before its time, and stood six feet, four inches tall. Some of the ladies thought he had a boyish face, and others thought he was downright handsome, and none paid a lot of attention to the oil dirt buried beneath his fingernails. He was a working man. That’s all. A working man with the face of a boy and the hardened eyes of a man who understood the tribulations of disappointment.

Chuck Alcorn could be white collar when he needed to be, even put on a pin-stripe business suit when necessary, but he felt more at home in his khaki shirt, khaki pants, and brown cowboy boots, usually crusted with dried mud. In the field, he wore a battered cowboy hat with a narrow, curled brim and drove a four-door Ford pickup truck. Good on the road, off the road, in cow pastures, from one creek bank to another, and into terrain where only the brave dared to go and only the lucky came back out again with their sanity intact. Pot holes. Chug holes. Post holes. Didn’t matter. Chuck Alcorn, sooner or later, drove across them all.

It was not the best of days, growing dark, and the sun hadn’t even set. Chilly even for October. And the clouds above the narrow Lee County road were gray and beginning to turn black, fringed with shades of purple, and full of wind. He waited for the rains to fall and figured he wouldn’t have to wait long. Chuck Alcorn was the son of an independent drilling contractor, a third generation interloper in the Texas oil patch. He had graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in geology, dutifully paying for his education by working long hours as a roughneck during the summer months.

Chuck Alcorn remained a fixture in the oilfield even when times grew hard and virtually impossible for men who hitched their dreams and borrowed money to a frayed hole in the ground. He watched the world around him become glutted with foreign oil. He saw the price of crude tumble to four dollars a barrel and sensed a serious shift in the economy, for the worst, always the worst, when drilling activity sank to a twenty-year low. Major oil companies were re-thinking their long-range strategies and casting their hopes and a bulk of their dwindling finances on offshore drilling, content to sell their onshore operations for pennies on the dollar and suffer the losses and the consequences.

Work was difficult to find. New and old fields alike were dying for lack of funds, lack of interest, lack of gumption. A man might be willing to gamble, but only as long as he still had a few chips left to wager. The only difference between a wildcatter and a bum was the number of empty beer bottles sitting on the table in front of him. The wildcatter didn’t have any.

Chuck Alcorn was grateful for any scrap of salvage business that came his way. Someone had drilled on promise and potential. Someone had gone broke. Dry hole. Disappointing hole. The money ran short. The money ran out.

The phone call came. The well would be his baby now, provided he wanted it, and Chuck Alcorn hated to ever say he didn’t. Some of the wells he bought outright. Some he bought on credit, hoping to turn a profit before the note came due. Some he bought so low he felt like he had stolen them.

In some, the oil was so scarce he felt as though he had been swindled. No time to fret. No reason to worry. All in a day’s work. Chuck Alcorn understood simple realities. He hadn’t lost the dream. He still wanted an oil well. Any well. Any place. As long as it kept on producing. He wasn’t a greedy man. One good well just might be enough, although enough was never enough in the oil patch where, during tough times, a man could run out of money and friends at about the same time.

That was the reason why Chuck Alcorn was heading in the general direction of Giddings on such a dreary afternoon. He turned on the radio in his pickup truck, and, amongst the static, the news kept spitting out bursts of information about the Israeli and Arab war. Deadly. Brutal. Frightening consequences. Only the Good Lord had any idea about what the conflict might do to the oil business, which was already hanging on with broken fingernails. Chuck Alcorn shook his head. The business had always been a sordid kind of gamble where men bet their lives, their fortunes, their futures on a stacked deck. Now he had begun to wonder if there was anyone left who could afford the ante. A pair of deuces in a game of two-handed poker was no hand at all.

Chuck Alcorn passed the rolling hills, the hardwood timber stands, the grazing cattle, the peanut fields that needed the rain a lot more than he did. The oilfield business was difficult enough dry. Wet, it could be a nightmare unless, of course, it was wet with oil. Early that morning, his tool pusher, Alfred Baros, had called to let him know that the Halliburton crew he had hired was on site and getting ready to pump acid down the gullet of the old City of Giddings No. 1 that afternoon. The well, for better or worse, now belonged to Chuck Alcorn, lock, stock and barrel. He had already spent as much money as the salvage was worth. Good money. Maybe even good money after bad. Did he have any interest in driving up and seeing for himself whether or not a heavy dose of acidized mud could awaken the last, best, and probably only hope in the Giddings field?

“What do you think?” Alcorn asked.

“Might be pretty good.”

“It’s in the chalk.”

“They think it has a little promise.”

“Oil?”

“No, just a little promise.”

Chuck Alcorn laughed and didn’t know why.

“The chalk’s fickle.”

“It blew a lot of oil before.”

“Maybe she spit out all she’s had, and there’s nothing left.”

“I got a good feeling about this one.”

“The chalk will lie to you.”

“Today might be different.”

Chuck Alcorn grinned. In the oil business, every day was always different. Good, maybe. Bad, perhaps. But always different. In recent months, however, the bad days had far outnumbered the good ones, and he had no reason to raise his expectations about the drive to Giddings. So often, the bottom of the hole revealed little more than the bottom of a hole. The task awaiting him was, at best, just another routine salvage job. Another day. Another dollar. Nothing more. Probably less.

The City of Giddings well had been drilled in the dastardly Austin Chalk Trend back in 1960 by Union Producing Company, which in time, would find itself as a branch of Pennzoil. Union Producing had discovered far too quickly that the Austin Chalk was a breaker, the kind that drove sane men mad and mad men to ruin. It broke bits. It broke spirits. It broke men. It broke bank accounts. It broke hearts. Lots of hearts.

The chalk trend was a great underground formation extending up from Mexico, spreading across South Texas, and spilling down toward the gulf coast of Louisiana. For eons, it had remained there untouched, a fine-grained limestone and calcite crystal cast containing fossilized shells of microscopic foraminifers, mollusks, echinoids, and other marine organic debris, some of it, perhaps, even left behind by the great flood. The Upper Cretaceous Austin Chalk sprawling beneath Giddings was renowned and roundly cursed for being a foreboding and demanding formation, at least a hundred feet thick beneath Burleson County and layered more than eight-hundred-feet thick in places below Lee County – a buffer between the peanut farms, the ranch lands, and old Reinhardt Richter’s chambers of hell.

The gardens of chalk confronted and confounded oilmen with a proposition that only the devil could have devised. They knew the trend encased great amounts of oil, but the chalk was a tight formation, the oil trapped in the dense rock. It was a limestone beast interwoven with elusive fractures that if found and penetrated would allow the crude to travel to the wellbore. No fractures. No oil. No production.

When Union Producing Company decided to take a chance with the chalk, its geologists had no magic bullet to pinpoint those cracks. Finding oil was little different from tracking down the proverbial needle in a haystack. How many fractures were there? How far apart were they? How deep did they go? And how large were they? The size of a boxcar or the eye of a needle? The wildcatter going straight down with a vertical well knew he was drilling blind. Far too often, a well had a habit of coming in with a bang and soon going out with a whimper.

On that fateful afternoon in 1960, the City of Giddings No. 1, in fact, had erupted with a hundred barrels of oil a day, indicating that it could make a fair amount of natural gas as well. Union Producing was ecstatic. The company egotistically believed that it had obviously cracked the code of the chalk.

Two other wells, however, were hastily drilled in the southern acreage of Lee County, but their production had been marginal at best. The oil making its way to the top was worth a great deal less than the cost of a drill bit going down.

The cranky City of Giddings well, on the other hand, had all the significant signs of becoming a big winner in a field littered with losses. A hundred barrels a day seemed like the mother lode of the chalk, and, even more intriguing, the oil flowing to the surface had a much different color and consistency from the raw crude that had risen reluctantly from the depths of Union Producing’s Preuss No. 1 and Jenke wells. It wasn’t black and full of tar. Not this oil. Not this time. It was lighter and bore a distinctive hint of gold. It was, the drilling crew agreed without argument, the rich color of honey.

They shook hands, slapped each other on the back, shared a drink or two of hard whiskey in a bar outside of Giddings, and went to sleep that night with visions of riches far greater than any of them had imagined.

Disaster descended upon the cursed gardens of chalk almost immediately. Union Producing killed the flow of the City of Giddings well so that its crew would be able to remove the drilling rig and install the proper production equipment. It was time-honored, and time-approved standard operating procedure. The hole was dutifully plugged with several thousand gallons of drilling mud. Nothing unusual about that. The crew had done the procedure at least a hundred times before, maybe more. Finally, as the day neared an end, the mud pack was punctured, and the crew waited for production to begin.

But something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. The flow was sluggish, with oil reaching the surface at a much slower rate than it had before, falling far short of a hundred barrels a day. The well had barely been born, and already it lay dying.

No gusher. No hole full of riches. Just a hole. In desperation, a pump jack was quickly installed, but the City of Giddings well was only coughing up five barrels a day, ten barrels if the crew got lucky, and luck had always been a stranger in the gardens of chalk. The mother had lost its lode.

The Crew was baffled. Union Producing was devastated. It had looked so good for such a short period of time, then production faded away like a candle’s flame in a wet summer wind. Saner heads searched for an explanation. That’s just the chalk, they said. Promises you the world. Doesn’t give you a doggone thing. Makes your heart race. Then breaks it. The chalk is a lying sonuvabitch. There are more oilmen than rocks busted around here.

It was easy for Union Producing to blame the chalk. Everybody blamed the damnable old chalk. It was tricky. It was fraught with frustrations. Drilling through those tightly laced layers was no different from driving a ten-penny nail through a concrete block.

The Austin Chalk that held the City of Giddings well was eight hundred feet thick, but a crew was forced to drill down somewhere between eight to nine thousand feet to even reach it. And down below, in the great, unknown stratum of cracked and fossilized limestone, near Reinhardt Richter’s personal chambers of hell, the oil was trapped and locked tight inside a maze of faults.

The chalk may have been saturated with oil – everyone knew it was – and the oil had a history of spilling out into fractures both large and small, mostly small, but few had managed to locate enough porosity and permeability in the limestone to pull a big payday’s worth of crude to the surface,

Still, the chalk continued to tempt and taunt those wildcatters who were tough enough, determined enough, or sometimes drunk enough to think they could find their way down to vast and uncharted caverns of oil.

The caverns, the reservoirs, the great pools of oil had never been there, but, in the beginning, no one knew it. They only hoped, which was a precarious, unstable way to do business. Only independent oilmen, the little guys in the business, dared to defy the chalk. They were poor boy operators, drilling on a shoestring, not much to invest. Not much to lose. A few had lost it all before anyway.

The major oil companies had long ago washed their hands of the Austin Chalk fields. Maybe there was oil in the ground. Maybe not. But it was certainly too costly for them to haul a crew out to Giddings and find out.

Wildcatters, searching for unknown and undeveloped fields, had ventured out into the chalk back during the 1930s. They possessed no maps, few, if any, seismographs to read, and attached their hopes to geologists who had never been able to understand the chalk or decipher the fractures. The boom struck South and Central Texas hard, although the term “boom” might be somewhat misleading.

The wells came in with all the fury of a Roman candle and quickly fizzled out. No one, not even the learned scholars of geology and petroleum engineering, could figure out why the wells kept acting in such a strange and mischievous manner. Give a little. Take it back. A few barrels. A few drops. And the wells rapidly lapsed back into a coma.

After battling the sun-baked farmlands for far too many months, the weary and slump-shouldered oilmen all came to the same final and basic conclusion. The Austin Chalk bled a little oil from time to time, but there wasn’t enough crude in the ground to fill a good-sized wheelbarrow. They turned their backs on the good earth surrounding Giddings and drove away. They ignored the field, but none of them ever forgot it.

What Union Producing decided it was willing to sell Chuck Alcorn in 1972, officials said, were “two old chalk dogs,” which was the term they used to describe the Preuss and City of Giddings wells. It was all worthless property to them.

Maybe Alcorn could sell the scrap metal for enough money to make it worth his while. Maybe not. Union Producing did not care one way or another. The company had already invested the last dollar it ever wanted to spend in the chalk, and it was willing to accept a check, cash, or money order for $27,500, an amount they figured just about covered the salvage value of the abandoned production equipment they had left behind.

Let Chuck Alcorn ante up a few dollars, then see if he could somehow manage to turn a profit, even a small one, while inheriting the headaches that went with the territory. Hell, he was used to it.

Chuck Alcorn, however, had a far different idea rattling around in his mind. He had hired a Halliburton crew to pump as much as ten thousand gallons of hydrochloric acid down the holes and shock the wells in an effort to kick-start production. Just maybe the acid would be able to clean out some of the crevices and fractures in the rock, giving the oil more room to push its way to the top. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But, Lord, if he was just able to coax another twenty or thirty barrels of oil a day out of the ground, Chuck Alcorn would indeed be a happy man. Not rich, perhaps. But happy.

He glanced briefly at the four-sided clock tower atop the red brick Lee County Courthouse as he drove through downtown Giddings, heading south on U.S. 77 and leaving behind a little community of twenty-five hundred hard-working, God-fearing, straight-laced souls, most of them German Lutherans.

Before the day came to an end, he would ignite the process that, in time, would change his life and their lives forever. He turned off onto FM 448 and bounced his way steadily toward the old Giddings Airport property. A gravel road finally led him to the well, and he witnessed an odd and curious sight, almost surreal in nature, unfolding before him.

His red trailer, loaded down with a well-worn workover rig, had been backed in alongside the old Union Producing pump jack, still in place, but its silver paint, streaked and fading, was beginning to show the wear and tear of weather and time. The head of the embattled pump jack, for some reason, had been sheared off, and it lay in a clump of weeds like a decapitated old warhorse that had been slain, left unburied, and forgotten. Closer to the rig itself sat Halliburton’s “Big Red” pumping unit truck and transport trailer, both being prepared for another standard light acid job. A lot of mud. A little acid. A little sweat. A short turn around. Wouldn’t take long, and the crew would be back on the road and headed again toward Houston long before darkness descended on the gardens of chalk.

Chuck Alcorn frowned. The hookup at the wellhead bothered him. There wasn’t anything particularly normal about it. The nipple valve did not dangle just as foot or two off the drilling platform floor as it should have. The damn thing was hanging at least ten good feet in the air, and the flexible steel acid hose curled out of it like the long, coiled stem of an ancient Oriental pipe, the kind used to smoke tobacco and sometimes marijuana, if one were so inclined.

Chuck Alcorn opened the door of the pickup truck and stepped out. A cool wind crept across the empty prairie and kicked up dust against his boots. The sudden, ominous sound of metal clanging against each other startled him. He jerked his head around, and his gaze swept swiftly across the well site. Trouble made its own peculiar brand of noise, and he had heard trouble rumbling his way before. That was the oil business, the nature of the beast. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.

The ground-level flow lines that connected the well to the storage tanks were shaking violently, threatening to tear themselves loose at any moment. The cylindrical separator unit was flaring gas, rocking with turbulence back and forth, looking and sounding for all the world like the beginning of a small war.

Chuck Alcorn had no idea what was going through the lines. But he knew it was moving with a powerful force. Hang on, he thought. Don’t let it get away from you. Ride it out. Volcanoes had erupted with less intensity. He watched as his tool pusher leaped from the rig and rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?” Chuck Alcorn asked.

“You ain’t gonna believe it,” Alfred Baros said, his breath coming in short bursts.

“Ain’t gonna believe what?”

“That dadgummed thing is flowing with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure.”

Chuck Alcorn ran to toward the derrick, climbing up the metal arms of the rig so he could read the gauge at the top of the nipple valve, trapped in the air far higher than it should have been. Sure enough, he discovered, the well was flowing with fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, an enormous and extraordinary amount of pressure. Chuck Alcorn held on and prayed the well wouldn’t blow with him still hanging on the rim of the derrick.

If Chuck Alcorn had expected a great plume of oil to burst from the earth and come roaring through the top of the crown, he was sorely disappointed. Instead, the City of Giddings well had merely delivered a massive overdose of crude. It wasn’t sticky. It wasn’t black. It was free of tar. It had less viscosity and possessed a higher gravity than black oil. A spray of oil bathed his hands, and he slowly shook his head, muttering to himself, it’s the honey-colored oil. Damn, if it’s not the honey-colored oil. Just like the crude that Union Producing had found and lost.

If the hole was dry then, it certainly wasn’t now. And the golden oil was almost good enough to pump straight into his Ford Pickup without ever having to go through the rigors of a refinery.

By the time Chuck Alcorn crawled down from the derrick and jumped off the rig floor, the storage tanks had already collected forty barrels of oil, and, as near as anyone could figure, the City of Giddings well would deliver more than three hundred barrels before the day shut down on them. Chuck Alcorn laughed out loud. Sonuvabitch, he thought, it hadn’t been an old chalk dog after all. His wallet didn’t feel nearly as empty as it had been. He had wanted a producing well. Now, from all outward appearances, he had himself one.

“We’ve got a problem,” Alfred Baros told him.

“Doesn’t look like a problem to me.”

“The well came in a whole lot quicker than we thought it would,” Baros said. “And it came in strong, as strong as a straight flush. Nobody expected this to happen. Not in a million years, we didn’t. I’m afraid the crew didn’t have time to remove the acid hose and install our production equipment.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“It looks like we’ll have to kill the well so they’ll be able to go back in and rig up the equipment like it’s supposed to be.”

Chuck Alcorn frowned. His face hardened. He glanced back at the oil flowing wildly into the storage tank. “You’ll have to kill me first,” he said.

Union Producing had made a fatal mistake in shutting down the flow in 1960 and virtually ruining the oil well. Even then, a basic, hand-me-down superstition held by old wildcatters hung heavy over the City of Giddings well. For decades they had said, based on their own experiences, never kill an Austin Chalk well because it’ll never come back.

The chalk is too unpredictable, too treacherous. If you get lucky, leave well enough alone. If you get the oil flowing, don’t mess with it. Chuck Alcorn had no reason to tempt fate. He would not make the same tactical error that Union Producing had made a dozen years earlier. “Leave everything the way it is,” he told Baros.

Chuck Alcorn realized immediately that the valve and hose connection was not right for producing oil. Hell, it probably wasn’t even safe if he left it the way it was for too long. There was even a real danger of the hose suddenly coming loose and spraying a frenzy of uncontrollable oil all over the place, triggering a gusher that could drown them or burn them alive if it caught fire. Chuck Alcorn squared his shoulders and sighed. That, he decided, was a risk well worth taking. He had a well. A damn fine well. He did not want to lose it.

During his two decades in the business, Chuck Alcorn had always been highly skeptical of the Austin Chalk. He had heard tales of untold riches flowing like quicksilver from the depths of the limestone. Hard to grasp. Harder to hold. Gone before you knew it was leaving. Had he beaten the chalk? Or was the chalk merely setting him up for failure at another time and in another place? Chuck Alcorn wasn’t sure exactly what he had or what, if anything, he might find next.

Within days, he gave in to his better judgment, knew he was probably making a serious, perhaps fatal, mistake, and temporarily shut down the City of Giddings well. He didn’t have mud pumped down the hole. Instead, he used a special freezing process to stop the flow, a daring move that gave him the time he needed to gingerly remove the workover rig and hook up production equipment that wasn’t nearly so hazardous.

The nipple valve was still dangling precariously above him, but Chuck Alcorn was far too superstitious to think about lowering it. That’s where it was hanging when the oil came rushing in. That’s where it would remain.

He built a metal tower around the pipe, then implemented steel hose to connect the valve to the flow lines on the ground. Unorthodox, perhaps, but it had not been the first time that Chuck Alcorn had to dredge up the hand-me-down skills of a backyard, shade-tree mechanic in a desperate attempt to resuscitate or rescue a well. There was no blueprint for his plan. Just a gut feeling, and gut feelings didn’t always pay off.

Chuck Alcorn stepped back, squared his shoulders, and waited, as nervous, he said, as a frog in a hot skillet. He nodded. Alfred Baros turned the valve. Nothing at first, then oil began to flow again. He had met the chalk on its own terms, and, at least for the moment, he breathed the rarified air of a survivor.

And there it would sit, an orphan well, nothing around it but parched and empty land, a one-of-a-kind well, producing more than three hundred barrels of oil a day, every day, week after week, year after year, as regular as clockwork. Reliable. Dependable. Old Faithful. For Chuck Alcorn, it seemed to have an endless supply of oil coming out of a bottomless pit, the honey-colored residue, perhaps, from Reinhardt Richter’s chambers of a volcanic hell. Defying the odds. Defying the chalk.

Chuck Alcorn grinned every time he thought about it. Owning the big well was better than owning the bank. The big well. The big chalk well. Just sitting all alone out in the middle of nowhere, hovering over the gates of hell, producing one barrel after another and waiting for Max Williams to find it.