“I thought I saw his big toe wiggle just a minute ago.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cavanaugh Shows His Colors
Long before sunup, the screaming of a siren on the rig brought off-duty crewmen pouring out of their bunks in all stages of undress. When Sandy arrived at the brightly lighted well, the night foreman was already halfway through his report to Hall, Salmon and Donovan.
“She started rumblin’ an’ kickin’ at the drillpipe just like she did yesterday.” The fat, oil-smeared man was puffing. “I stepped up the mud pressure an’ pulled the siren. She’s calmed down now, but the blowout preventers are having all they can do to hold her.”
“Good boy,” said Hall. “If you had pulled the siren and waited for orders we might have a gusher on our hands and pieces of derrick flying in all directions. How far down are we?”
“Little over 5,500 feet, last time I checked.”
“That’s the Gallup Pay.” Donovan was dancing with excitement. “I knew we’d hit it. Let’s take a sample and see what we’ve got.”
The big old diesel roared for a moment. It dragged a bar of iron called a “kelly” out of the square hole in the turntable until the top of the first section of drillpipe appeared.
After the pipe had been securely locked in the turntable so that it could neither fall back into the well nor shoot upward if the underground pressure increased suddenly, two floormen clamped their six-foot-long tongs, or monkey wrenches, around the kelly and unscrewed it from the pipe with great care.
They had eased it off only two or three turns when a frothy mixture with the foul odor of rotten eggs began to squirt from between kelly and pipe.