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.
They spudded her in on a Monday night and by Wednesday they were down three hundred and fifty feet. Thursday they set in three hundred and fifty feet of eighteen-inch casing and cemented it with a hundred and fifty sacks of Trinity Portland. Friday they hooked up the storage tanks and by Saturday the cement was hard enough to drill through.
The wind swirled about their legs and ate through their cotton gloves and flurries of snow flecked their faces but they didn't mind because they were getting close to home.
The following Monday they made their water shut-off three feet below the last water and got ready to blow. At noon the chief yelled: “Swab 'er!” and they let the swab go down to two thousand feet. It came out with a rush. Everybody yelled. A hell of a kick under there. The tank man moved over to the big valve in the well-head and they sent the swab down again.
It wrenched free of the tubing, rode high-wide-and-handsome in the rigging and a deluge erupted from the hole.
The deluge was black and soft as velvet and blew over the top of the derrick.
They shouted and pounded one another in the back. The tank man forgot about the valve and jumped out and did a war dance crying over and over again: “Hot damn! Hot damn.” He was thinking about his wife and three kids in Abilene who were up against it hard but stringing along on his gamble. A roughneck had to run over to the valve to close it. The deluge was trapped in twin flow pipes and gushed into the storage tanks with a soft squishy sound that was sweet music to their ears.
Excelsior No. 1 was running five thousand barrels a day.