Horace McCoy - 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.

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.

The news was out at twilight and by dawn the march towards Rondora had started. It hadn't been in the papers yet but there are old-timers who can smell an oil strike five hundred miles off; and in their wake traveled the others: operators, scouts, vagabonds, thieves and women. The country was locked in by winter and everybody knew the going would be hard but there was gold at the end of the road, so they came on.

The ground spawned rigs... and in a little while the town was hemmed in by a palisade of hundred-feet derricks.

Spring.

Geese were going north and the aspen were budding into leaf. The creeks were running high in their banks from the melting snow, red squirrels chattered and blue jays screamed in strident notes. Light breezes came down from Raton Pass to whisper a magic message and the country popped alive. Jack-rabbits sat up lazily, their long ears flopping; the flowers went red and yellow and green; the grass grew tall and the cattle went out to graze. The mesquite and the chaparral stirred themselves and the blue came back to the sage.

Up and down the land had gone the fame of Rondora. Millions were there. All a man had to do was to take a hammer and chisel and bring in a gusher. They came from everywhere for the weather was warm and they could travel light. They settled like locusts and attracted no attention because everybody was thinking of something else... and it wasn't long before the grifters and gangsters and gamblers were running things.

When Tom Bender hopped a train north he was wearing a white hat that had silk lining as red as the alegria stain that saves your face from the sun.

It was big and hadn't been broken in yet and felt like a house sitting on top of his head. He hated to break in a new hat but his old one wasn't fit to wear to a town like Austin after he got through with those vaqueros. One of them had pushed a .44 bullet through the crown and Tom Bender knew it was only by the grace of God it wasn't his skull.

They were as slick a gang of greasers as a man ever clapped an eye on and they fought like wildcats but he brought four of them in alive. They had been running wet hosses, stampeding them off a hacienda in Nuevo Leon and then cutting out a few to swim across the river and sell to shady dealers in Texas. The whole country knew about it and everybody told Tom Bender they were maldito Indios and that if he went after them he was in for a lot of trouble.

He trapped them on the mud flats south of Rinera where the river cuts through wide cottonwood bottoms and called on them to surrender. They wanted to fight, so he accommodated them, killing one and plugging another before the others stuck their hands in the air and quit. It was a hell of a battle and there was no reason for it because he already had his orders to come to Austin.

After he put them in jail he caught a train for the capital. He didn't know why the Adjutant-General had called him and he didn't care because summer was just around the bend in the south and the Rio Grande country in the summertime was hot and cruel. The air was like the devil's own breath and the ground got hard and a man's feet stayed blistered all the time. Any kind of a job anywhere else was a picnic and Tom Bender liked picnics.

He was the issue of a frontier ancestry that had driven the Indians west of the Pecos to clear settlements for log cabins, a civilization of contrasts: hard, kind and tragic. The measure of an aristocrat was the nerve he had and the speed with which he could bark an Injun in his tracks and pitch a buffalo on his head with one ball.

Tom Bender's people were aristocrats and when they died that was all the heritage they left him.

That was enough.

When he hit Austin his body throbbed happily and he had a song in his heart for it was a passionate attraction he felt for the city. He swung along the street with the gait of a man to whom the feel of a pavement is a strange and mysterious thing, and everybody's eye was on him. They could tell by the walk of him that he was a fighting man and they knew by the brown of his face that he was from the south. Women looked at him but he paid no attention because he didn't know women could talk with their eyes...

He went straight to the capitol and entered a dim, musty office in the east wing. Doubled up in a swivel-chair behind a massive desk was the Adjutant-General, lean and limber, and smoking a cigar. He said: “Hello, Tom,” in a preoccupied tone but didn't get up or offer to shake hands.