Читать книгу The Sandy Steele Mystery MEGAPACK®: 6 Young Adult Novels (Complete Series) - Roger Barlow - Страница 15

CHAPTER TEN

Pepper Makes a Play

A huge truck carrying a light folding drill rig and motor rumbled into camp from Farmington two days after the Elbow Rock episode. Donovan then set about organizing an exploration crew. Since the need for secrecy had lessened, only five of the older men were selected to act as a token guard for the property. Ten others, who had had experience in survey work, were directed to take tarpaulins off the long-unused instrument and “shooting” trucks, tune up their motors, and get the trailers set for travel. After Ralph had checked every item on the rented truck and Donovan had made sure that his seismograph, magnetometer, gravimeter and other scientific apparatus were all in perfect working order, the little caravan rolled westward toward Hall’s other San Juan River lease.

“We may be going on a wild-goose chase,” the geologist told Sandy, who was riding with him in the jeep that now had the laboratory in tow. “I had an aerial survey run on the property last fall. It shows one anticline that may contain oil, but I’ll have to do a lot of surface work before I recommend that John spends money on a wildcat well.”

“How do you make an aerial survey, Mr. Donovan?”

“I’d like you to call me Don, if you will, Sandy,” the geologist said. “And you ought to call John by his first name, too. Oilmen don’t go in for formality after they get acquainted.”

“Yes, sir… Mr.—Don, I mean.” Sandy felt a warm glow at this mark of friendship.

“One method of making an aerial survey is by means of photographs taken from a plane or helicopter,” the geologist explained. “A stereoscopic color camera is used to provide a true three-dimensional picture of the area in which you are interested. Such photographs show the pitch and strike of surface rock strata and give you some idea of what formations lie beneath them. In addition, prospectors use an airborne magnetometer. You know what a magnetometer is, don’t you?”

“It measures small differences in the earth’s magnetic field.”

“Right! I see that you listened when your dad talked about geology. Well, you fly a magnetometer back and forth in a checkerboard pattern over any area where photographs have shown rock formations favorable for oil deposits. Heavy basement strata are more magnetic than the sedimentary rocks that cover them. So, when those igneous basement rocks bulge toward the surface of the earth, your magnetometer reading goes up. That gives you a double check because, if the basement bulges, the sedimentary rocks that may contain oil have to bulge too. And such a bulge, or anticline, may trap that oil in big enough quantities to make it worth your while to drill for it.

“Then, if your money holds out—aerial surveys cost a young fortune—you may run a triple check with a scintillation counter to see whether there’s a radiation halo around the anticline. One complication with that is that you have to remove the radium dials from the instrument panel of your plane to keep leakage from interfering with your scintillation readings.”

A loud honking from the rear of the column caused Donovan to stop the jeep. Going back, they found that the new drill truck had slipped into a ditch and was teetering dangerously.

Although they had been traveling through such wild and arid country that it seemed impossible that even prairie dogs could live there, quite a crowd collected while they struggled and sweated for half an hour to get the machine back on what passed for a road. First came a wagon pulled by two scrawny horses and carrying a whole Navajo family—father, mother, two children and a goat. An ancient truck with three more Indians aboard pulled up in a cloud of dust. Then came two Navajos on horseback.

Ralph recognized one of the riders and gravely offered him a cigarette which he held crosswise between his first and second fingers.

“Hosteen Buray, we need your help,” said the driller after his gift had been accepted.

The rider said a few words to the other bystanders and things began to happen. The riders galloped away and came back dragging a small tree trunk that could be used to raise the truck axle. The children gathered sagebrush to stuff under the wheels. The woman milked her goat into a pan and presented the steaming drink to the thirsty oilmen. Finally, everyone got behind the machine and pushed with many shouts and grunts.

With Ralph’s expert hand at the wheel, the truck struggled back onto the trail.

After receiving “thank yous” from all concerned, the Navajos stood aside and waved in silence as the column drove away.

This time, Sandy asked to ride with the driller because, as he explained, “I’ve got a lot of questions about things.”

“Shoot,” said Ralph.

“Why didn’t anyone offer to pay those people for helping us?”

“They would have been insulted. That’s how Cavanaugh got in bad with them in the first place—by insisting that they take money for everything. Navajos are proud. Next question.”

“Why did you hand out cigarettes in that funny way, instead of just offering your pack?”

“You never point anything at an Indian. It might be a gun.”

“Oh…”

“Anything else on your mind, Sandy?”

“Are all Navajos named Hosteen something-or-other?”

“Hosteen means ‘Mister.’ Most white men don’t use the term. The Navajos resent that, too.”

“I guess I’ve got a lot to learn,” the boy sighed.

“You’re doing all right.” Ralph slapped him on the knee.

* * * *

They made camp in a forest of pines not far from a dry wash that ran into the San Juan River gorge, and started work at once. Donovan split the party into two groups. One, which he headed, loaded the heavy magnetometer and gravimeter equipment into a truck and set out to check formations revealed by the aerial studies. Ralph and Sam Stack, a burly surveyor who had arrived with the portable drill rig, took charge of a transit, plane table and Brunton compass. They named Sandy and three others to carry stadia rods and help them make a careful surface survey of the vicinity where the oil anticline was believed to be.

Then began one of the hardest weeks of grinding labor that Sandy had ever put in. All day long he climbed over rocks and fought briary thickets while moving his rod to spots where it could be seen from the various transit positions. His experience on Boy Scout geology field trips kept him from getting lost and enabled him to chip a number of rock formations for analysis. But it was only after he returned to camp at night and propped his tired eyes open with his fingers while watching Don, Ralph and Stack plot lines on a topographical map of the region, that he could form any idea of what was being done.

Hall joined them on the third evening and watched without comment as the work went on. He looked gray and tired.

“You seem bushed, John,” said Donovan after they had added the day’s data to the map. “Any trouble?”

“Plenty, Don. At the last minute the bank refused a loan. It said that two wells didn’t make a profitable field, out here in the middle of nowhere. I had to trade a two-thirds interest in the other lease to Midray before I got my money.”

“That’s the way the oil squirts,” Ralph said philosophically. “So we’re in partnership with a big company.”

“I’m solvent, anyway.” Hall shrugged. “But we won’t make our fortunes unless that first lease turns out to have the largest field in San Juan County. Of course, if this one pays off, too…” His voice trailed away.

“I don’t know about that, John.” Donovan bit his thin lips. “We’re finding some underground anomalies, but, confound it, I don’t feel right about the situation. For one thing, the plants that usually grow in the neighborhood of a deposit just aren’t in evidence. We’ve found an anticline, all right, but I have a hunch there’s mighty little oil in it.”

“Excuse me,” Sandy interrupted from his seat at the end of the map table, “but if you find a dome, or anticline, doesn’t it just have to hold oil?”

“Not at all,” the geologist answered with a wave of his pipe. “The oil might have escaped before the bulge was formed by movements of the earth’s crust. Or perhaps the top of the anticline had a crack, or fault, through which the oil seeped to the surface ages ago.”

“You are going to run a seismic survey, aren’t you?” Hall asked.

“Yes, we’ll start tomorrow if the weather holds out. The radio says thunderstorms are brewing, though.”

“Do the best you can.” Hall rose and stretched. “I’m going to turn in now. I feel lousy.”

* * * *

Sandy didn’t sleep well, although he, too, was so tired that his bones ached. He was up at sunrise—except that there was no sunrise. The sky looked like a bowl of brass and the heat was the worst he had met with since his arrival in the Southwest.

After a hurried breakfast they drove the portable drill rig, instrument truck and shooting truck to the anticline which lay, circled by tall yellow buttes, about three miles from the camp site.

Once there, Ralph used a small diamond drill to make a hole through surface dirt and rubble. The rest of the crew dug a line of shallow pits with their spades. These were evenly spaced from “ground zero” near the hole Ralph had drilled to a distance from it of about 2,000 feet. While two men tamped a dynamite charge into the “shot hole,” other crew members buried small electronic detectors called geophones in the pits, and connected them, with long insulated wires, to the seismograph in the instrument truck.

Just as the job was finished, a roaring squall sent everyone dashing for cover.

“We’re going to set off a man-made earthquake in a moment, Sandy,” Donovan said when the dripping boy climbed into the instrument truck. “Watch carefully. When I give the word, Ralph will explode the dynamite. The shock will send vibrations down to the rock layers beneath us. Those vibrations will bounce back to the line of geophones and be relayed to the seismograph here. Since shock waves travel through the ground at different speeds and on different paths, depending on the strata that they strike, they will trace different kinds of lines on this strip of sensitized paper. I can interpret those lines and get a pretty good picture of what the situation is down below.”

“You mean you can make an earthquake with dynamite?” Sandy cried.

“A mighty little one. But it will be big enough for our purposes. This seismograph measures changes of one millionth of an inch in the position of the earth’s surface.” He started the wide tape rolling, and picked up a field telephone that connected the three trucks.

“All ready, Ralph?” he asked. “Fine! I’ll give you a ten-second countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Shoot!”

There was a subdued roar deep underground. A geyser of earth and splintered rock spouted from the shot hole. The seismograph pens, which had been tracing steady parallel lines on the paper, began tracing jagged lines instead.

“All right, Ralph,” Donovan spoke into the phone. “If the rain lets up, have the boys string another line of geophones and we’ll cross-check.”

They got in one more shot before the increasing thunderstorm made further work impossible. Then Ralph and Hall sprinted over from the shooting truck and spent the next hour listening while Donovan explained the squiggles on the graph.

“So you’re not too happy about the situation, Don?” the producer asked at last.

“I hate to say so, John,” the geologist answered, “but things don’t look too good. We’ve found a dome, all right, but I’m afraid it has a crack in its top. Look at this.” He put away his magnifying glass, lighted up, and pointed his pipe stem at a sharp break in the inked lines. “I can’t take the responsibility for telling you to spend a hundred thousand dollars or so drilling five thousand feet into a cockeyed formation like that.”

“Once a poor boy, always a poor boy, I guess.” Hall shrugged.

“Oh, I haven’t given up yet,” said Donovan grimly. “The aerial survey shows another possible anomaly about, three miles west of here. I’ll do some work on that before we call it quits.”

“Take your time,” said his employer.

“Hey!” Ralph, who had been standing at the trailer window, staring glumly into the sheets of rain that swept toward them across the San Juan gorge, spoke up sharply. “Take a look at that river, will you?”

They joined him at the window and found that the stream had doubled in size since the rain had started. Now it was a raging yellow torrent that filled the gorge from border to border.

“It beats me,” said Hall, “how it can rain cats and dogs in this country one day and flood everything, but be dry as dust the next. When the government finishes building its series of dams around here and all this water is impounded for irrigation, you’ll see the desert blossom like the rose, I’ll bet.”

“The rain all runs off and does no good now, that’s a sure thing,” Donovan agreed.

“Look,” Ralph interrupted. “There’s a boat or barge or something coming down the river.”

“You’re crazy,” said Donovan. “Nothing could live in that—Say!” He rubbed mist off the window and peered out into the downpour. “Something is coming down. You’re right!” They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared in horror. Around a bend in the stream a heavily laden homemade barge had plunged into view. A vivid flash of lightning showed one man standing upright in the stern. Blond hair flying, he was struggling to steer the bucking craft with a long sweep.

“That’s Pepper March!” Sandy shouted as another flash spotlighted the craft. “He must be trying to prove that the San Juan is navigable.”

“He won’t last five miles,” Ralph snapped. “I’ve got to go after the young fool. Grab some rope, Sandy, and come along.”

There was no rope in the truck, so Sandy snatched up a coil of heavy wire cable used to lower electric logs into test wells. With it over his shoulder, he tore out into the storm after the driller.

They got the jeep going after considerable cranking and headed downstream. It was a nip and tuck race since there was no trail along the gorge. But Ralph put the car in four-wheel drive and tore along over rocks and through flooded washes while Sandy hung onto the windshield frame for dear life. Finally they managed to pull ahead of the tossing barge.

“There’s a rapids about five miles downstream,” Ralph shouted above the thunder that rolled back and forth like cannon shots among the buttes and cliffs. “He’ll never go farther than that. The only thing I can do is to stand by there and try to throw him a line. It’s a long chance. Thank heaven and the water spirits that I learned to rope horses when I was a kid.”

They reached the rapids with only seconds to spare. The Indian fastened one end of the cable to the power takeoff at the rear of the jeep and coiled the rest of it with great care at the edge of the gorge. Then he stood, braced against the howling wind, swinging the heavy log in his right hand.

“Here he comes,” Ralph said. “What a shame that damned fools often look like heroes. Your friend is probably thinking he’s Lewis, Clark and Paul Revere rolled into one. Stand by to start the takeoff and reel him in if I hook him, Sandy… There he goes. There he goes! Stand by!”

Pepper was fighting the rapids now, like some yellow-haired Viking out of the past. It was no use. Halfway through, the awkward barge hit a submerged rock. Slowly its bow reared into the air. The heavy pipe with which it had been loaded started cascading into the boiling water.

Pepper had enough presence of mind to drop the useless sweep, and scramble out of the path of the lengths of pipe as they flew like jackstraws. As he managed to grab the uptilting rail, Ralph’s mighty arm swung back and forward. The end of the cable carrying the log paid out smoothly. Out and down it sped in a long arc.

It struck the boat and slid slowly along the rapidly sinking rail. After one wild look upward, Pepper understood what had happened. He snatched the wire as it went by and looped it twice around his waist.

“Haul away,” Ralph whooped to Sandy. “We’ve caught our fish.”

As the jeep’s motor roared and the takeoff spun, Pepper was snatched from his perch and dragged helter-skelter through the wild waters. Minutes later Ralph dragged him over the edge of the cliff, choking and half drowned.

“No real damage except a few nasty bruises,” the driller grunted after he had applied artificial respiration with more vigor than was really needed. “How do you feel, bud?”

“Awful!” Pepper groaned. Then he amazed them by sitting up and glaring at them.

“That was…a stinking trick,” he croaked after he had spat out a mouthful of dirty water. “Stringing cable…capsizing my barge… I’d have made it.”

“Whaaat?” Sandy hardly believed his ears.

“I’d have made it, I tell you! I would have!” Pepper wailed hysterically. “Then you…then you…” He retched miserably.

“Listen, kid,” Ralph snapped as he half-carried the boy to the jeep. “Your Red Cavanaugh ought to be strung up for egging you on to try a stunt like that.”

“No!” Tears dripped down Pepper’s dirty cheeks. “My idea. He didn’t know.”

“Bunk! You mean he didn’t know you had built a barge and loaded it with pipe? Don’t lie! Your boss is a stinking, no-good, lowdown louse.”

“Oh, no!” Pepper tried to pull free, then leaned against the side of the car and clung there like a half-drowned monkey. “Red’s best boss a man ever had. He’s…he’s wonderful… Likes good music…dogs…Indians. I’d die for Red.”

“That’s the point.” Ralph rummaged in the back of the jeep, found Maisie’s mangy hide, and wrapped it around the shivering boy. “You almost did die. Cavanaugh’s next door to a murderer.”

Pepper stared at them as if he were waking from a dream.

“You really believe that, Sandy?” he gulped weakly.

“I know it, Pepper.” Torn between pity and anger, Sandy gripped the blond boy’s arm. “Cavanaugh’s a crook!”

“Crook?” Pepper babbled. “No, no!” His knees sagged and they just managed to catch him as he fell.

“A strange boy,” said Ralph as they drove back to camp with the would-be Viking sleeping the sleep of exhaustion between them. “He’s in trouble, some way. Maybe he was trying to prove himself, like young Indians once did before they could become braves.”