Gunsmoke over Texas

by Bradford Scott

  “Funny, is it?” he barked. “Well, I don’t see a darn thing funny about it.”

  Slade tried hard to look serious and concerned, and failed. Captain Jim continued to glare and mutter. Slade decided to risk a comment. “Grass spoiled by oil the only trouble?” he asked.

  “Oh, there have been a few shootings and some robberies and a lot of cows widelooped, according to this danged thing,” replied Captain Jim, slapping the letter on the table. “And it’s claimed somebody set fire to a well and pretty near burned up that infernal town of Weirton — pity they didn’t. The cattlemen blame the oil workers for everything that’s happened and the oil workers say the cattlemen fired their well. There’s a taking of sides and trouble a-poppin’ generally.”

  “You say a well was fired?” Slade remarked, looking serious.

  “That’s what’s claimed,” said Captain Jim.

  “Sort of like what happened at Batson, when a gas well ran wild and killed a lot of cattle and horses and hogs and three men. The cowmen set fire to that well, I believe.”

  Captain Jim nodded. “You’re right, but there was no organized trouble at Batson. Captain Brooks handled that situation all right, without any help from anybody else.”

  “Reckon one man should be able to take care of this trouble, without any help,” was Slade’s laconic comment.

  “Okay, you asked for it!” growled Captain Jim, “but if you come running back here with your tail on fire, don’t blame me.”

  “I won’t,” Slade promised, his eyes dancing. “Well, guess I’d better get going, it’s a long ride.”

  As Slade’s tall form passed out the door, Captain McNelty had the look of a man whose burden has been considerably lightened.

  “No, he won’t come running back,” he muttered to himself, “but before everything is finished, the seat of somebody else’s pants will ring like a bell, and you can bet on that.”

  Still chuckling over his recollection of Captain Jim’s tantrums, Slade rolled a cigarette and sat gazing at the dim glow in the sky that marked the site of the oil town ten miles to the south.

  Without any preliminary warning the glow changed. An angry flare ran up the long slant of the sky. Flickering and pulsing, it blazed red against the smoke pall, paling the stars and even the silvery sheen of the moonlight. Slade leaned forward, staring at the ominous glare. His pulse quickened and his forgotten cigarette burned toward his fingers. There could be but one explanation of that leaping glow; another well was on fire.

  He thought of saddling up and riding to the scene of the disturbance, but decided not to. He could hardly leave the house and get his horse out of the stable without arousing somebody and he figured the Walking M had had enough excitement for one night. He’d learn about what happened the next day.

  For some time he watched the red flare throb against the sky, then he went to bed and was almost instantly asleep.

  • • •

  Young Clate Mawson was conscious the following morning. He was weak and in some pain but was evidently already on the mend. Slade thought it safe to question him as to how he came by his hurt.

  “I hardly know what happened,” he told Slade and his father. “I was coming back from Yardley on the other side of the hills after attending to that chore, Dad, when I heard a bunch riding fast behind me. As they came up I pulled aside to let them pass. Didn’t think anything of it, figured it was just some of the boys from one of the spreads. When they got opposite me I whooped to them. Somebody swore, then about a dozen guns seemed to let go at once. Something that felt like a sledge hammer slammed me and I knew I was hit. I managed to get my gun out and pulled trigger once. Then I didn’t know anything more till I found this feller bending over me and asking me what happened.”

  “You didn’t get a good look at any of them?” Slade asked.

  Clate shook his head. “No, I didn’t have time. The feller riding in front appeared to be a big gent but I didn’t notice his face. Brush on both sides of the trail there and it was rather dark. Thanks, feller, for everything; Dad told me about it.”

  Slade smiled and patted his hand. “Just take it easy now and you’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to you again later.”

  After a late breakfast, Slade got the rig on Shadow. As he was shaking hands with Tom Mawson, a wizened old cowboy appeared mounted on a sturdy bay. It was Curly Nevins, the range boss.

  “I’m heading for town, too,” he told Slade. “We’ll ride together. The boss wants some stuff from down there.”

  “They got better shops in the stinkin’ hole than up at Proctor and you can get things you can’t get there,” old Tom explained defensively.

  Slade nodded, the dancing lights of laughter in the back of his eyes, but did not otherwise comment. He and Nevins headed south on the Chihuahua.

  For several miles they passed over rolling rangeland dotted with fine fat beefs. Slade commented on the excellence of the range.

  “Uh-huh, it’s this way clear to the hills, twenty miles to the east and forty miles to the north,” Nevins replied. “After that to the north it’s a regular badland. That’s what makes the drive to McCarney and the railroad such a tough chore.”

  Slade was studying the contours of the hills walling in the wide valley on the east and west. He turned in his saddle and gazed north toward the misty blue of more hills.

  “This valley was once a great lake or inland sea,” he remarked to his companion.

  Curly Nevins shot him a quick glance. “Funny for you to say that,” he commented. “That’s just what young Bob Kent who drilled the first well said. He said the rimrock up there was once the shoreline and covered with all sorts of big growth, and that conditions were perfect for the makin’ of oil pools.”

  “He was right,” Slade replied.

  “The way things turned out, sort of looks like he was,” Nevins admitted. “Most folks and even some of his drillers, after they’d dug down better’n a thousand feet and hadn’t hit anything, said he was loco, but he sure fooled ‘em. I’ll never forget the day that well came in and what happened afterward. I was right there when she began spoutin’ and hung around the section quite a bit afterward. Was plumb interesting. Like to hear about it?”

  “I would,” Slade replied.

  Curly Nevins was an unlettered cowhand, but he had a gift of narration and a remarkable memory for details. Walt Slade’s quick imagination reconstructed the story as it fell from the old cowboy’s lips until he felt he was a spectator of the stirring events.

  FOUR

  “ALL I’VE GOT TO SAY is that it’s the locoest deal I ever got mixed up in,” declared Ayers, the head driller. “Here we are down one thousand, one hundred and sixty feet — that’s the last reading — and sloggin’ through a sand bank. About as much oil under this section as you’d find in a grindstone. Bob Kent is plumb off his mental reservation, if you ask me.”

  “His dad was one of the smartest oil men in the business and he just about raised young Bob in oil,” objected Quales, the rigger.

  “Uh-huh, and he ended up busted,” replied Ayers.

  “Sure, because he got into things he didn’t know anything about,” said Quales. “After all, Jasper Kent was just a driller who got on top. He didn’t have no book learnin’ to speak of. He got mixed up in business deals and got skun, naturally. Young Bob is different. He’s educated some. Don’t forget, he finished high school and had a year in college.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” Ayers declared. “Uh-huh, he goes plasterin’ those hifalutin’ college notions on the drilling business. Calls it scientific analysis of natural conditions, or some such durn foolishness. And what’s he got to go on? Nothing but those danged hills up there he claims were the banks of a big sea once, and a salt spring he found in a cave. Nothing here to indicate an oil pool. No domes, no shale, no seepage. Scientific analysis! Blooey!”

  “Suppose you’d prefer a witchin’ stick,” chuckled Quales.

  “Don’t go throwing off
on witchin’ sticks,” Ayers returned seriously. “Remember old Rice Haggard down in the Neuces country? Haggard was ambling around with his forked stick one day, witchin’ for water, and the stick dipped and dipped. Haggard said there was oil or something like it under the section. Folks laughed at him and said he was loco, but quite a few years later Haggard got Dunn of the Gladwell Company interested. They drilled right down where Haggard had done the witchin’. And what happened? One of the biggest production fields in Texas.”

  “Just happened,” replied Quales. “And I’m willing to bet that Dunn saw indications there before he set a bit to the soil. Nothing much Dunn don’t know about the oil business. He’s smart. And so is young Bob. You wait and see.”

  Ayers snorted and glared at the great walking beam of the rig doing its slow and ponderous dance as it drew the suspending rope back and forth across the pulley at the top of the tall derrick, churning the heavy bit into the ground far beneath the surface. From the bore came a soft and muffled sound as the drill pounded its way through the yielding sand.

  “After all, Bill, it was you who was first to agree to Bob’s proposition that we go into this thing on shares, receiving a percentage of any strike for our work instead of wages,” Quales remarked.

  Ayers grinned a trifle sheepishly. “I can’t help but like the young devil,” he said, almost apologetically. “And I don’t forget that it was his dad who risked his life to get me out from under that walking beam when the well blew and caught fire up north of Beaumont. Jasper Kent had the burn scars he got that day on his face when he died.

  “But just the same I still think Bob’s plumb loco,” he added.

  Quales winked at Curly Nevins who lounged comfortably in his saddle near the door of the cook shack, smoking a cigarette.

  “Old Tom still on the prod?” he asked.

  “Oh, he’s still sort of ringey, but he’s feeling better lately, seeing as you fellers ‘pear to be sinking a dry hole,” Nevins replied. “He figures you’ll pull out soon and leave this section like it was.”

  “He may get a surprise,” said a slender, pleasant-faced young man who stepped out of the cock shanty in time to hear Nevins’ remarks. “Anyhow, there’s no sense in him pawing sand like he has been just because I bought this little strip down here from the state. He doesn’t need it for his cows.”

  “The Old Man is open range,” Nevins replied. “This section down here south of the crik has always been open range and, he figures it should stay that way. And anyhow, he don’t want to see oil wells cluttering up the grassland. He says they mean ditches and pipe lines and bad smells and cows poisoned by gas. He figures it’ll be the ruination of this section if you jiggers do happen to strike oil.”

  “He’s all wrong,” Kent said earnestly. “When we strike it’ll be the best thing ever happened to the section. It’ll bring folks in and money, too, plenty of it.”

  “That’s just what the old man is scairt of,” Nevins explained. “He ‘lows all sorts of unsavory jiggers will be troopin’ in. He says Proctor up to the north of here is a nice cowtown and he don’t want it spoiled.”

  “He needn’t worry about that,” Kent chuckled. “When we strike there’ll be a town down here in no time.”

  “Uh-huh, when we strike,” grunted Ayers.

  Bob Kent chuckled again and did not directly answer his pessimistic driller.

  “But we’ll have to make good mighty soon or Mawson won’t have anything to worry about,” he told Nevins. “I’ve just about scraped the bottom of the barrel; no money to buy more casing, and the bank won’t let me have any more. They say at Proctor that they’ve gone as far as they can with the land here for security. I’ve a notion if Mawson hadn’t been swearing he’s going to get title to the whole section as quick as he can they wouldn’t have gone as far as they have.”

  “He’s talking about it but he ain’t done anything about it,” observed Nevins.

  “He’s being foolish if he really wants the land down here,” said Kent. “When we strike there’ll be a quick grab for every foot between here and the desert and Mawson will find himself out of luck.”

  “I tried to tell him that myself, and young Clate agreed with me,” admitted Nevins, “but he’s bull-headed as an old shorthorn and says he’ll get title to everything as soon as you fellers pull out.”

  Ayers suddenly cocked his head in an attitude of listening. The sound coming from the bore had changed. The silky chuffing had been replaced by a heavy thudding. The suspending rope danced and quivered.

  “Rock!” grunted Ayers. “We got through that sand bank and hit rock again. Now we’ll jiggle along forever and get nowhere.”

  Bob Kent rose from squatting on his heels. “Shut her down,” he ordered. “We’ll change the bit and sink new casing. Might as well eat first; chuck’s about ready. Let’s go wash up. Come on, Curly, and have a bite with us.”

  The engineer closed his throttle; the jiggling of the rope ceased, the walking beam hung motionless. The silence that followed could be felt. Curly Nevins dismounted and joined the drillers moving toward the cook shanty. They had almost reached the door when without warning there was a deafening roar.

  “Look out!” yelled Kent and dived for the shelter of the shack.

  The roar was followed by a terrific rattling and crashing. Tons of pipe were projected through the rig floor, up and out of the hole and high into the air. The derrick went to pieces in a rain of falling iron and timbers. Then there was a black geyser that spouted two hundred feet in a wind-frayed, greasy plume. Crude oil sprayed the vicinity.

  “She’s in!” howled Ayers, dancing in the door of the shack. “Boys, she’s in! I knew it all the time! Look at her spout! That’s a gusher what is a gusher!”

  The driller’s excitement was contagious. The crew members howled and bellowed. Curly Nevins jerked his six-shooter and sent bullets splitting the air in every direction.

  No tanks had been built for storage, Kent lacking the money for their construction, but he had shrewdly set his rig on the edge of a wide and deep hollow. Now oil was flowing a river into the depression, a natural reservoir.

  While the crew cursed and toiled at the gigantic task of capping the gusher, Kent saddled his horse, which was tethered under a lean-to back to the shanty, and went racing to Proctor, the cowtown twenty miles to the north.

  Two days of wild excitement followed before the gusher was brought under control by a firmly anchored valve. The great hollow was brimful of “black gold.”

  Meanwhile the activity around the well was nothing to what was taking place on the flats west of the drilling. At dawn of the day following the strike a grader was cutting streets through the mesquite and greasewood. A stream of material wagons was rolling down from Proctor and from McCarney, the railroad town seventy miles to the north. The Proctor bank that had refused Kent further loans had literally handed him the key to its vault. Businessmen from Proctor and McCarney vied with one another offering Kent high rentals for plots of land on which to erect buildings. Kent rented the first lot with the stipulation that a building be started within one hour. The renter had carpenters at work within thirty minutes on a saloon!

  Kent was right in his prediction relative to the land south of the creek. Before old Tom Mawson knew what was happening the whole section was grabbed off under his very nose. A forest of derricks began to rise. Kent was preparing to drill three more wells on his holdings. He was building storage tanks and pouring in material and equipment.

  The saloon, as usual, was first to open for business, but other buildings were erected in mad haste. People poured in and above the trails hung an ever-present cloud of choking white dust. Huge wagons lumbered in with drilling supplies, foodstuffs, furnishings and liquid refreshment.

  Came, too, the hangers-on of every new oil field to ply their questionable trades. The gamblers, the ladies of easy virtue, the dance hall characters opened up for business in tents and shacks, and did plenty.

  Old Tom Maw
son rode down and shook his fist under Bob Kent’s unimpressed nose. “Dang you, you’ve ruined this country!” he roared. “I ought to shoot you! I oughta have shot you when you first showed up here! You’ve spoiled everything!”

  “You’re wrong, Mr. Mawson,” Kent told him. “The time will come when you’ll thank me.”

  Old Tom raised clenched fists and swore himself breathless. Still cursing he stormed back to his big ranchhouse to rumble and fume and glare south toward the smoke cloud that stained the clean blue of the Texas sky.

  “And that’s how she went,” concluded Curly Nevins, twinkling his faded blue eyes at his absorbed listener.

  FIVE

  THEY HAD ROUNDED A BEND and before them in the distance lay the town of Weirton, a wide straggle of shacks, tents, false-fronts and somewhat more substantial buildings to the north.

  One thing Slade instantly noted with interest. The land south of the flash and glitter of the wide creek running west to east boasted an elevation considerably above that of the land north of the stream. It was in the nature of a small mesa running from the creek to the desert five miles farther south. Again Slade turned in his saddle to gaze at the hills walling the valley.

  “Up here must have experienced a subsidiary subsidence,” he remarked to himself rather than to his companion. Nevins favored him with a blank look but Slade did not see fit to amplify the observation that was cryptic so far as old Curly was concerned.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed, “look at the smoke boilin’ up down there to the south! Danged if I don’t believe there’s another well on fire!”

  “There is,” Slade replied. “I was sitting in my window last night when it caught. Lit up the whole sky.”

  Nevins shook his head. “And they’ll blame the cowmen for setting it, sure as blazes,” he predicted.

  “Not improbable,” Slade conceded, “judging from the things I’ve heard.”

  When they first sighted the town it was about three miles distant. They spoke to their horses and the pace quickened. They had covered the better part of a mile when Nevins gestured toward the grassland flanking the trail.