Michener, James A. (166 page)

With scouts from nine large companies watching every move Dewey Kimbro made, Floyd Rusk drilled a second dry hole at three thousand one hundred feet, and now his money began to run out He had invested most of his ready cash in hiring the drilling crew, and a good portion of his savings in buying up leases.

But when the crunch came, Dewey Kimbro, like a true wildcatter, wanted to risk more money: 'Mr. Rusk, so help me God, what we must do is acquire more leases. If you have to pawn your wife's wedding ring, do it and get those leases. They'll be dirt cheap now. People are laughing at us. But they don't know what we know.'

'And what's that?'

'More signs of oil, I saw them myself when I took the samples at twenty-nine hundred feet.'

'Was that significant 7 '

'Significant? My God, don't you realize what I'm saying? On Rusk Number One we found indications at twenty-three hundred feet. Now, over here, at Rusk Number Two, we find it at both twenty-three hundred and twenty-nine hundred. Means that oil is down there somewhere. My judgment is our next well has got to hit. I know the field must lie between Number One and Number Two, and we've got to get those leases.'

'You find the money. I don't have any more.'

So Dewey Kimbro set out to con the entire state of Texas into supporting his wild dream of an oil field north of Larkin, in an area which had never produced a cup of oil. He hectored his friends from his student days at A&M, and young men who specialized in the practical courses offered there often did well, so they had money, but they refused to risk it. He badgered his oil acquaintances from the eastern fields, but they knew from their own studies that Larkin held no promise. And he buttonholed any gambler who had ever taken a chance on Texas oil, traveling as far as Nevada and Alabama to trace them.

He was, of course, only one of several hundred visionaries who were flogging the Texas dream that year. Some crazies were trying to convince their friends that there had to be oil in unlikely places

like Longview, Borger and Mentone. Others claimed that the area north of Fort Stockton had to have oil, and a hundred others lobbied for places of their choice, where oil would never be found. It was a time of oil fever, and no one had the malady more virulently than Dewey Kimbro.

Except, perhaps, Floyd Rusk, for when the fat man realized that all his savings and even his ranch were committed to this adventure, he became monomaniacal about bringing in the field that Dewey kept assuring him existed under the leases which he already controlled. He was determined to see this exploration through, for he had convinced himself that he could recognize the formations when Kimbro pointed them out. Millions upon millions of years ago a lake of oil had been trapped down there among the sandstone and the limestone tilts, and he wanted it.

But he had no money. Digging the two dry holes had exhausted his funds, and with Kimbro finding little success in borrowing replacements, he did not know where to turn, but one morning when the drillers said they wanted to haul their rig back east to more promising sites, and would do so unless paid promptly, he went to the one person in whom he did not wish to confide.

Emma Larkin Rusk, the onetime prisoner of the Comanche, was sixty-six that year, a frail shadow weighing not much over a hundred pounds. The stubs of her ears showed beneath the wisps of hair that no longer masked her deformity, and her balsa-wood nose seemed to fit less properly, now that she had lost so much weight. But she was alert and already knew that her difficult son was in trouble.

'My first two wells were dry,' he said.

i know.'

'But we're sure the next one will hit.'

'Why don't you drill it?'

'No money.'

'None?'

'Not a dime.'

'And you want me to lend you some?'

'Yes.'

She sat with her hands folded, staring at her unlovely son, this glutton who had never done anything right. When she had hoped to make a man of him, through R. J. Poteet, he had fumbled the opportunity, and when in 1901 after her husband's death she had turned over the operation of the ranch to him, he had bungled it so badly that she had to step back in and save it. Now he wanted to borrow her life savings, the funds which allowed her to live in her own house rather than impose on him and Molly.

There was no sensible reason why she should lend this grotesque man the money he wanted, but there was an overpowering sentimental one. He had carved the nose she wore and which had made such a difference in her life, and although their relationship had been a miserable one, she loved hun for that one gesture She had known great terror in her life, and little love apart from that which her daydreaming husband had given so freely, so she cherished every manifestation made in her behalf. Floyd was her son, and at one accidental point in his miserable life he had loved her. She would lend him the money.

But life had made her a wily woman, so before she relinquished her funds she drove a bargain. When he asked her 'What interest 7 ' she said 'None,' and he thanked her. Then she added: 'But I do want five thousand more acres for my Longhorns,' and since he was in the perilous position of having to accept any terms in order to get his gambling money, he said: 'Promised,' and she asked: 'Fenced in?' and he had to reply: 'Yes.'

However, when they went out to inspect the land she had thus acquired for her chosen animals, she saw that the proposed rig was going to stand very close to the statue commemorating the two lovers, and Floyd expected her to raise the devil. Instead she stood quietly and looked at the unassembled derrick. 'How appropriate,' she said. 'They lived in turbulence. Better than most, they'll adjust to an oil boom ... if we get one. I'm sure they hope you hit, Flovd. I do.'

And so with his mother's money Rusk kept his gamble alive.

Then began the days of anxiety. Even with Emma's contribution the partnership lacked enough funds to start drilling its third well, the one that seemed likely to produce, and this meant that the ill-assorted team—gross, surly Floyd and tenacious, ratlike Dewey—faced double disasters. The leases on the very promising land, which they had taken for only one year, were about to run out, and the drilling crew was eager to move east. The partners knew they had less than two months to resolve these problems. The nature of a Texas oil lease was this: if a lease expired on 30 June 1923, as these did, the holder had a right to start drilling at his choice of time up to one minute before midnight on the thirtieth. If he did not or could not start, the lease lapsed and could be resold to some other wildcatter. But if the holder did start his drilling within his time allowance, the full provisions of the lease came into effect and prevailed for centuries to come. So each of the partners, in his own way, began to scrounge around for additional funds.

Rusk stayed in Larkin, badgering everyone, begging them to lend him money, and he was embittered when his Ku Klux Klan compatriots turned him down. Some did so out of conviction, because they felt it was his greed that had brought the ten oil-field roughnecks, with their devil-driven ways, into Larkin. But most rejected him because they saw him to be a burly, aggressive, overbearing man who deserved to get his comeuppance.

Kimbro, on the other hand, traveled widely, still hoping to find the speculator who would grubstake him for the big attack on the hidden field. He would go anywhere, consult with anyone, and offer almost any kind of inducement: 'Let me have the money, less than a year, ten-percent interest, and I'll give you one-thirty-second of my participation.' He offered one-sixteenth, even one-eighth, but found no takers.

When he returned to Larkin in April 1923, he was almost a defeated man, but because he was a born wildcatter he could not let anyone see his despair. Each morning when he was in town he repaired to the greasy cafe where the oilmen who had begun to infiltrate the area assembled to make their big boasts, and he knew it was essential that they see him at the height of his confidence: 'We expect to start Number Three any day now. Big investors from Tulsa, you know.' But each day that passed brought the partnership closer to collapse.

Now the serious gambling started, the reckless dealing away of percentages. One morning Floyd rushed to the cafe, took Dewey into the men's room, and almost wept: The drilling crew is hauling their rig back to Jacksboro.'

'We can't let them do that. Once they get off our land, we'll never get them back,' so the partners, smiling broadly as if they had concluded some big deal in the toilet, walked casually through the cafe, nodding to the oilmen, then dashed out to the rig.

Rusk had been right, the men were starting to dismantle it prior to mounting it on trucks, but when Dewey cried: 'Wait! We'll give you one-sixteenth of our seven-eighths,' they agreed to take the chance, for they, too, had seen the Strawn signs.

Later Rusk asked: 'Could we afford to give so much?' and Dewey explained the wildcatter's philosophy: 'If the well proves dry, who gives a damn what percentage they have? And if it comes in big, like I know it will, who cares if they have their share?'

A week before the termination of the leases the partners still had insufficient funds to drill their well, but now Kimbro heard from two of his A&M gamblers who wanted to get in on the action, but to get their money he had to give away one-eighth of his share to the first friend, one-sixteenth to the other—and the final owner-

ship of the well became so fractionized that the partners could scarcely untangle the proportions.

Three days before the leases expired, scandal struck the operation, for the two A&M men, always a canny lot, heard the rumor that their old buddy Dewey Kimbro had pulled an oil-field sting on them, and they rode into town ready to tear him apart: 'He sold two hundred percent of his well. Peddled it all over East Texas.'

'What's that mean?' the Larkin men asked.

'Don't you see? If he drills dry, and he's already done so twice, he owes us nothing. He's collected twice, spends about one-quarter of the total, and goes off laughing with our dough.'

They drove out to the proposed drilling site at the tank to challenge Kimbro, but when they found him hiking back and forth over the rolling terrain, trying to settle upon the exact spot for his final well, they found him honestly engaged in trying to find oil. He had not sold two hundred percent of what he knew was going to be a dry well; he was gambling his entire resources upon one lucky strike, and as Texas gamblers, they were satisfied to be sharing in his risk.

Two days before the lapse of their leases, Rusk and Kimbro finally got a break. An Oklahoma wildcatting outfit had figured that if Dewey Kimbro, once of Humble and Gulf, thought there was oil in the Larkin area, it was a good location in which to take a flier. They had drilled a well just to the east of Rusk #1, gambling that the suspected oil lay in that direction and not toward the tank. These men, of course, could not know that Dewey had struck indications to the west, so down they went to five thousand feet, missing the field entirely and producing nothing but a very dry well, whose failure they announced on June 28.

This helped Kimbro in two ways: it verified his hunch that the field did not lie to the east of Rusk # 1, and it so disheartened the Larkin landowners—three test holes, three buckets of dust—that they became determined to offload their worthless leases throughout the entire area. In a paroxysm of energy, Dewey shouted at Rusk and his two A&M buddies: 'Now's the time to pick up every damned lease in the district. My God, won't somebody lend me ten thousand dollars?' Faced by total disaster if his Rusk # 3 did not come in, he spent two days committing his last penny to his belief that he would strike it rich this time. By dint of telegrams, telephone calls and the most ardent personal appeals to speculators in the Larkin-Jacksboro-Fort Griffin area, he put together a substantial kitty, which he spent on leases that encapsulated the field.

At six in the morning of 30 June 1923, Dewey Kimbro appeared at the oilmen's cafe with a smile so confident and casual that a

stranger might think he was about to start a well with the full weight of Gulf Oil behind him, and when Floyd Rusk came in, sweating like a pig, Dewey caught him by the wrist and whispered: 'Dry your face,' for he, Dewey, had been in such perilous situations before; Rusk had not.

When they rode out to the field, with Dewey commenting on the brightness of this summer's day, Rusk was vaguely aware that if Rusk # 3 did strike oil profits would be divided in this typically Texan way, the intricate details of which had been worked out by lawyers and filed in long legal documents:

205078

1 000001

Thus the second A&M investor was entitled to 7
s X 15
i6 x Va X V\ b of the whole, or ,o y 8 i<*2 (012817). which meant that every time the well produced $100,000, he received S12H! "4 for as long as the well operated

On an August afternoon in 1923 a hanger-on who had watched the drilling of Rusk # 3 as he would a baseball game, came riding back to Larkin in his Ford, screaming: They got oil!'

The citizens, hoping to see a great gusher sprouting from the plains, sped out to the tank, where, on its flank, hardened men were dancing and crying and slapping each other with oil-splattered hands. They did not have a gusher; the famous field at Larkin did not contain either the magnitude or the subterranean pressure to provide that kind of spectacular exhibition, but Dewey Kimbro. seeing the oil appear and making such guesses as he could or

fragmentary evidence, said: 'Could be a hundred and ten barrels a day, for years to come.'

He was right. The Larkin Field, as it came to be known, was going to be a slow, steady producer. Spacious in extent but not very deep, it was the kind of field that would allow wells to be dug almost anywhere inside its limits with the sober assurance that at around three thousand feet in the Strawn Sand a modest amount of oil would be forthcoming, year after year after year.

'And the glory of it is,' Kimbro told Rusk when they were back home at midnight, 'we know pretty well the definition of the field. Our first dry well to the east plus the dry Oklahoma wildcatter showed us where it ends in that direction. Our dry Number Two proved where it ends in the west. What we don't know is how far north and south.'