The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  “Why is all this land around the Smith well already under lease?” I asked. “I thought nobody had ever believed that there was oil in this area.”

  “Oh, they think it’s here, all right,” she said. “But until today they thought it was too deep to drill for it at current prices. Humble Oil Company has been doodling around with the east end of the basin for years. Back in 1939 they drilled one well, and it turned out to be a dry hole. But it was out of the basin and a mile and a half east of Coby Smith’s well.”

  “How did you find out all this stuff so quickly?” I asked.

  “A lot of it is in the records, and I know who to ask.”

  “Well, how much an acre should I offer?” I asked.

  “Humble got all this for ten an acre, but it’s going to be higher since the strike came in. Start at twenty and give him a two-week draft. But get it no matter what you have to do.”

  One of the few things I knew about the oil business was that drafts were the normal way of paying for leases. By giving a draft rather than a check, the landman had ten days or two weeks to research the title and make sure it was good before the draft was paid by the bank. “What time do you want me to be out there tomorrow?” I asked.

  “He’s a farmer, so that means he’s an early riser. Try six A.M.”

  “It can’t be that early. I don’t have any draft forms.”

  She gave me a quick smile. “I’m ahead of you,” she said as she opened her purse. “I went by the bank. And I had Andy go ahead and draw up the lease. All you have to do is cut the deal and get him to sign.”

  “Andy who?”

  “Andy Wolfe. The young attorney,” she replied.

  “Where in the world did you find that guy?”

  “Like I said, three doors down. I just asked Mr. Bobbet where I could find the nearest lawyer.”

  “And you got a secretary thrown in on the deal.” I laughed.

  “Did I ever. And she’s going to be worth her weight in gold. The girl has a natural instinct for running a chain of title.”

  “I wonder why she hasn’t been working,” I said.

  “She was helping Andy for a while, but he couldn’t pay her, and then she couldn’t find another job. They’ve been desperately trying to get enough money together to get married.”

  “A marriage license is only a couple of bucks,” I pointed out.

  She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “A girl her age wants a real wedding, silly. Especially in Jewish culture. It’s all very traditional. I’m going to help her plan it.”

  I could have told her that her long-thwarted maternal instincts were obviously at work. I could have told her that, but wisely I didn’t. “By the way,” I said instead, “that was a slick move you pulled down at the bank today, putting me in a position where I’d have to guarantee your check.”

  She gave me a cold little laugh. “If you ever had notions of getting rid of me you should have made me take that mad money that night up in Vicksburg, because as it stands now you’re stuck with me.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “When that check clears I’ll have less than a hundred dollars left in the bank in Memphis.”

  I shook my head in wonder. “When you plunge, you plunge deep, don’t you?”

  “Damn right I do. By the way, I went ahead and advanced Mona a hundred dollars against her salary. She works like a plow mule. I did myself a real favor when I hired her.”

  “Why tell me?” I asked.

  “We’re partners and I think you need to know what I’m doing. Now let’s find someplace to have some dinner before this whole town closes up for the night, and then get to bed early. We’ve both got a big day tomorrow.”

  SEVEN

  In retrospect it was one of the most important days of my life. I was getting sidetracked from my original purpose for being in town, but I reasoned that I would have plenty of time during the week to attend to my oil interests and still pursue the poker game on the weekends. After all, the poker game was intended to be a long-term project from the beginning. Besides, if a man isn’t willing to get sidetracked long enough to get rich along the way, then he doesn’t have much business being here in the first place.

  Adolph Havel turned out to be an old Czech cotton farmer. He was about seventy and balding, with a thick, hard body, shaggy eyebrows and an iron ball of a head. Hospitable, he had a Mexican serving girl bring us coffee out on the porch of his house, a two-story sandstone structure with hand-hewn rafters and thick walls that must have dated back to frontier days. He also had an iron will to match his head.

  “Already today has been one man out from the oil companies, but I won’t deal with them,” he said in a thick accent.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “They vant to screw me.”

  “In what way?”

  “They only offer to give me one-eighth of production royalty. I vant one-sixth and vill get it or vill never lease. In Loosanna dey give one-sixth.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said firmly.

  He eyed me suspiciously for a moment. “And a fifty-dollar-each-acre lease price, too.”

  I calculated quickly in my head. According to his deeds he had 887 acres. That came to almost $55,000. I only had $30,000, and none of it was mine. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and remembered that moment in the car the day before when I told Della I’d trust her with my life. I reached into my briefcase. “It will have to be a fourteen-day draft,” I told him. “That’s customary in the oil business.”

  Havel pounded his big fist down on the porch rail and said, “Vie haf deal. I vill get schnapps to toast. Or maybe you like beer?”

  I should have taken beer. The schnapps was some kind of clear liquor that tasted like kerosene and kicked like a mule. I left Havel happy that day, but a week later he could have gotten ten times that amount. Yet I never heard a word of complaint from him. After the lease was drilled he realized so much from royalties that the original lease price seemed meaningless.

  On the way back to town I passed the Smith well. Cars were still lined up along Route 9, but there wasn’t much left to see. A half dozen trucks from a well service company out of Midland were clustered around a site, and the wellhead had been capped sometime during the night. Another company had brought in two truckloads of casing, and crews were standing by to cement the well in, all of it on the tab.

  That was something I came to admire about oil people. The day before, Coby Smith didn’t have enough credit to get an RC Cola and a Moon Pie at the little crossroads store a half mile from his drill site, but the minute the Midland company heard of the blowout they were on their way. They arrived about sunset and went to work capping the well without so much as a handshake. They knew better than anybody else that the strike might be a fluke, a small pocket of oil under great pressure that would play out in just a few days. But that’s the way the oil business works. When a well is brought in, certain things have to be done now, things that won’t wait until next week or next month after some gang of jokers has met and hashed it all out in a boardroom a thousand miles away.

  * * *

  I stopped for a late breakfast at a little café on the outskirts of the city. By the time I got to the office there were a half dozen landmen working away in the records room, and one guy stood pounding on the counter and yelling at Mona. He was having no more effect on her than the tide would have bursting against a granite cliff. She was utterly implacable. Maybe in a thousand years, but he wasn’t moving this young woman today.

  “Hey, fellow.” I laughed, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Calm down.”

  He wheeled around and started to say something, then noticed my size and bit it off. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Do you know how much these people are charging to use their files?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Fifty bucks a day! Old man Bobbet used to get five dollars.”

  He was a soft-looking man, about five t
en, dressed in a nice suit with a diamond tie pin and alligator loafers.

  “Yes,” Della said as she came out of the back. “And Mr. Bobbet wore moth-eaten sweaters and drove a beat-up old car. We bought this business to make money. So come up with the fifty dollars, or get out of here and quit wasting my stenographer’s time.”

  He growled once more, hauled his wallet out of his pants and slammed a fifty down on the counter. “And I want a receipt,” he said.

  “Why certainly, sir,” Mona said sweetly.

  I followed Della into the back. “You’ve sure got things stirred up around here,” I told her.

  “You haven’t seen anything yet. After this boom takes off I’ll be getting fifty an hour, not a day.”

  “Della, for heaven’s sake!”

  “You keep quiet and let me handle this. Did you get the lease?”

  I told her what I’d done and she looked at me in wonder. “But you don’t have that much money, do you?” she asked.

  “You said for me to lease it no matter what. I figure that if this turns out to be as good as you think, in a few days we’ll be able to sell part of it for enough to cover the whole draft.”

  “But did you do that because…”

  “I did it because when I said I trusted you, I meant it. All the way.”

  Her eyes got soft and misty. She turned away from me and dabbed at them with the sleeve of her blouse.

  “Della,” I said, putting her hand on her shoulder.

  “Oh, hush!” she told me without turning around. “Go get me another hamburger.”

  * * *

  We didn’t have long to wait to find out the extent of the field. Three days later the second well came in and it was even bigger than the Coby Smith strike. The blowout completely destroyed the derrick and put one roughneck in the hospital with a broken back. Meanwhile a drill-stem test had been run on the Smith well, and it was flowing at the rate of more than three hundred barrels an hour through a three-inch choke valve. Had it been allowed to flow freely under its own pressure, it would have made more than twenty thousand barrels a day. The race was on.

  EIGHT

  “You don’t know me very well,” I told Manlow Rhodes.

  “You’re right about that, son,” he replied. “In fact I don’t know you at all.”

  It had been ten days since I’d given Adolph Havel the draft and I was in the Farmers and Merchants Bank trying to borrow money. I showed Rhodes my lease and my plats.

  “Paying the draft is really not a problem,” I told him. “I can get the money to do that on a few hours’ notice. I’ve already had several offers from substantial men who want to front the money in exchange for a portion of the minerals I have here. But that’s the best deal I can get so far.”

  “Then why do you come to the bank?” he asked.

  “Because even if I sell … oh, let’s say half interest in our holdings in the Havel tract for fifty-five thousand dollars, I still have to either sublease my remaining interest to another operator or pay part of the drilling costs to get it into production. And I can’t afford to pay part of the drilling costs.”

  “I understand. What exactly are you proposing to me?”

  “I want you to cover my draft and give me thirty days to find a better offer. Hopefully, I can come up with an operator who will bail me out and cover the drilling costs for half interest in the lease.”

  “Which would mean you want to borrow how much?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  He nodded. “I see. Well, I took your friend’s advice and hired me a young petroleum man named Wallace Reed. Let’s let him take a look at this.”

  Reed was a brash, thirtyish fellow with crew-cut brown hair and intelligent eyes. He examined the plat, then skimmed over my lease, and muttered, “Damn!”

  “Please, Wallace,” Rhodes said with an indulgent smile.

  “Do you know what this guy has here?” Reed asked.

  “Of course not,” Rhodes answered. “That’s why I called you in.”

  “Millions, that’s what. This is the largest single tract anywhere around either one of those two wells that wasn’t already under lease when this thing started. It’s a gold mine. And he wants to borrow how much against this?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Rhodes said.

  “If it’s that good, then let me have thirty,” I said.

  “Why the extra?” Rhodes asked.

  I grinned. “I haven’t had time to get in the poker game yet. I need a little money to play with.”

  “Poker,” Rhodes said, and shook his head. He looked up at Reed and raised his eyebrows. “So you recommend that we lend him the money?”

  “Of course we want to lend it to him,” Reed replied. “Ten times that if he needs it.”

  “No thank you,” I said quickly.

  “Very well,” Rhodes said. “Draw up the papers and put the funds in his account. Use the mineral rights as security.” He turned to me. “How long did you say you need the money?” he asked.

  “Thirty days.”

  “Give yourself three months,” he cautioned.

  “Just exactly what are you trying to do with this lease, anyway?” Reed asked me.

  “I want to find an operator who will pay off my note and cover all the drilling costs for half of our interest in this tract.”

  “I can help you there,” Reed said. “Let me make a phone call or two back to Tyler and I’ll have somebody who’ll do all that in no time. Are you planning to lease any more tracts out in the basin?”

  “Della has picked up a few small parcels here and there. Some of these speculators are running on such tight budgets that they can’t afford her fifty dollars an hour. So she lets them use her records for a percentage.”

  “Della?…” Reed asked.

  “She’s the young lady who is doing so well with the old abstract company,” Rhodes said serenely. “She’s been making some very nice deposits here lately.”

  “We’re partners,” I explained. “She was the one who sent me out to Havel’s to get this lease in the first place. I’m new to the oil business.”

  “Mr. Rhodes, we need to talk about setting these people up a line of credit,” Reed said.

  “We will, Wallace. We will.” Rhodes looked across his desk at me. “Are you a college man by any chance?” he asked. “You sound educated.”

  “Yes sir, I am. Harvard, class of 1925.”

  Rhodes beamed. “I was Princeton, class of ’03.”

  “I thought so,” I replied with a smile.

  “Thought what?”

  “You’re a Presbyterian.”

  “My goodness,” he murmured. “Does it show that badly?”

  Reed scooped the plat and my lease off Rhodes’s desk. “I’m SMU business school on the GI bill and I don’t know a damn thing about theology,” he said. “So I’ll go have one of the steno girls make up these papers.”

  “I like that young man,” Rhodes remarked as Reed left the room. While we waited for my note to be drawn up, Rhodes and I had another nice visit. We talked about rowing and lacrosse and Harvard/Princeton games on snowy Saturday afternoons so far in the past that only an archeologist could have unearthed the records of them. His office was the perfect place for it—sedate and clubby with its walnut paneling and leather and brass. Who would have ever thought that in just a few days I’d be hauled in and manhandled by one of the most vicious sheriffs in Texas?

  NINE

  It’s a source of amusement to me how religious bigotry goes by the wayside when a boom is on and there’s money to be made. Before the Coby Smith well blew in, Andy Wolfe’s prospects had been dim indeed. But now his proximity to the abstract company meant that his services were in constant demand by oilmen and speculators who were more interested in making fortunes than they were in snubbing an Israelite. He found himself called upon countless times each day to examine titles and help with tricky leases, and finally as a matter of convenience he moved his offi
ce next door. The landlord, who owned both buildings, agreed to build a passageway between the two. Workmen were sent over who cut through the plaster on both sides and then sledgehammered a crude opening through the brickwork. But such is the nature of an oil boom, and so great was the demand for carpenters and craftsmen by that time, that it was months before they came back to frame in the doorway and install a door. No one cared.

  * * *

  Within a few days of the second gusher Della was getting her fifty dollars an hour for use of the records, and the office was pandemonium from dawn to dusk. There were few complaints about the price. If a man was reluctant to pay, there were a dozen standing behind him who weren’t. Besides, they always had the option of going to the courthouse to check their titles, and a few did. But this was a very time-consuming process. An abstract company has a listing of every transaction ever made on a piece of property going back to the earliest days of the Spanish land grants. These lists are either in card files or in large bound volumes, depending on the system that particular office uses. In this fashion a title can be run quickly, but at the courthouse it can only be followed by searching out each instrument, page by page.

  But Della even dreamed up a way to make money off the public records in the courthouse. She identified five surveys in the basin where the leasing action was becoming the hottest, each of which was represented by one huge, thick volume in the record room of the county clerk’s office. Then she made a phone call to a business college in Fort Worth. The next day she left the office under Mona’s capable supervision and took the car and drove northward. I’ve always suspected that some money changed hands between her and the dean of the college, because three days later when the Texas & Pacific passenger train pulled into town, five of his most competent graduating stenographers stepped off the day coach. That night Della gave them detailed instructions, and the next morning they were waiting when the courthouse opened. Within minutes all five volumes were tied up for the day by a squad of brisk, no-nonsense young women who were preclearing titles. From that moment on practically every lease in the basin went through hands controlled by Della.