“Even that will serve for a sort of background. Now, people in general think of striking oil as they might think of finding money on the sidewalk or of lightning striking a particular spire—as a matter of purest chance. To some extent that idea is correct enough, but the brains of oil production are less haphazard. In the office of a few gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas hangs a map drawn by the intelligence department of their general staff. On that map are traced lines not unlike those showing ocean currents, but their arrows point instead to currents far under ground, where runs the crude petroleum, discovered—and undiscovered.”
“Undiscovered?” Spurrier’s brows were lifted in polite incredulity, but his companion nodded decisively.
“Discovered and undiscovered,” he repeated. “Geological surveys told the mapmakers how certain lines and structures ran in tendency. Where went a particular formation of Nature’s masonry, there in probability would go oil. The method was not absolute, I grant you, but neither was it haphazard. Sitting in an office in Pittsburgh a certain man drew on his chart what has since been recognized as the line of the forty-second degree, running definitely from the Pennsylvania fields down through Ohio and into the Appalachian hills of Kentucky—thence west and south. Study your fields in Oklahoma, in old Mexico, and you will find that, widely separated as they are, each of them is marked by a cross on that map, and that each of them lies along the current trend which the Pittsburgh man traced before many of them were touched by a drill.”
“That, surely,” argued Spurrier, “testifies for the highly skilled technician, doesn’t it?”
“So far. I now come to the chance of the opportunity hound. The present fields are spots of production here and there. Between them lie others, virgin to pump or rig. Much of that ground is, of course, barren territory, for even on an acre of proven location dry holes may lie close to gushers; one man’s farm may be a ‘duster’ while his neighbor’s spouts black wealth. But along that charted line run the probabilities.”
Into Spurrier’s eyes stole the gleam of the adventuring spirit that was strong in him.
“It sounds like Robert Louis Stevenson and buried treasure,” he declared with unconcealed enthusiasm, but Snowdon only smiled.
“Remember,” he cautioned, “I’m illustrating—nothing more. Now in the foothills of the Kentucky Cumberlands, for example, some years ago men began finding oil. It lay for the most part in a country where the roads were creek beds—remote from railway facilities. It was an expensive sort of proposition to develop, but the cry of ‘Oil! Oil!’ has never failed to set the pack a-running, and it ran.”
“I don’t remember hearing of that rush,” admitted Spurrier.