“I’m solvent, anyway.” Hall shrugged. “But we won’t make our fortunes unless that first lease turns out to have the largest field in San Juan County. Of course, if this one pays off, too....” His voice trailed away.
“I don’t know about that, John.” Donovan bit his thin lips. “We’re finding some underground anomalies, but, confound it, I don’t feel right about the situation. For one thing, the plants that usually grow in the neighborhood of a deposit just aren’t in evidence. We’ve found an anticline, all right, but I have a hunch there’s mighty little oil in it.”
“Excuse me,” Sandy interrupted from his seat at the end of the map table, “but if you find a dome, or anticline, doesn’t it just have to hold oil?”
“Not at all,” the geologist answered with a wave of his pipe. “The oil might have escaped before the bulge was formed by movements of the earth’s crust. Or perhaps the top of the anticline had a crack, or fault, through which the oil seeped to the surface ages ago.”
“You are going to run a seismic survey, aren’t you?” Hall asked.
“Yes, we’ll start tomorrow if the weather holds out. The radio says thunderstorms are brewing, though.”
“Do the best you can.” Hall rose and stretched. “I’m going to turn in now. I feel lousy.”
Sandy didn’t sleep well, although he, too, was so tired that his bones ached. He was up at sunrise—except that there was no sunrise. The sky looked like a bowl of brass and the heat was the worst he had met with since his arrival in the Southwest.
After a hurried breakfast they drove the portable drill rig, instrument truck and shooting truck to the anticline which lay, circled by tall yellow buttes, about three miles from the camp site.
Once there, Ralph used a small diamond drill to make a hole through surface dirt and rubble. The rest of the crew dug a line of shallow pits with their spades. These were evenly spaced from “ground zero” near the hole Ralph had drilled to a distance from it of about 2,000 feet. While two men tamped a dynamite charge into the “shot hole,” other crew members buried small electronic detectors called geophones in the pits, and connected them, with long insulated wires, to the seismograph in the instrument truck.