The Mopper-Up (Short Story)

On through the dusk and into the night they worked. Their clothes were splattered with grease and their ears and lips were purple, for winter was on and the weather was two above. The bluest norther of the year had been brewed in a devil's cauldron in the Rockies and it boiled out and came rolling down through Raton Pass to roar across the flats of the Panhandle and lash and sting and freeze.
The crew of Excelsior No. 1 was gaunt and tired and half-frozen, for they worked in a field that was squarely in front of the great slot through which the northers slid, but they cursed loud and kept on.
“Let's go with the bit, you—! The land's crazy with oil!”
Black gold down below.
A sixth of ninety days' production split eleven ways for the crew.
The rainbow's end for a roughneck who's slaved his life away.
Parties and liquor and sweet times for a hairy-handed tool dresser.
A warm apartment and a soft bed for a rig-man who's used to cots.
“Keep that steam up, you—! The land's crazy with oil!”
Nobody believed in them because the livestock was freezing to death and a man had to hump himself to keep alive.
But the geologist told the chief operator it was a cinch and the chief operator believed him. He told the crew there was a lake of oil under there a mile wide, a mile deep and five miles long and that it was on a perfect anticline and would flow for years with never a chance for anybody to suck it out from under them.
He was a plunger and he had faith and he pleaded and threatened and cursed and kept his crew working through the coldest winter the plains country had known in twenty years. Night and day they tugged and heaved under gasoline flares in a mighty race with time for it was the discovery well that got the cream of production.