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283 pages

English

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In the mid 1970s, a band of men with little expertise in the oilfield defied the hard ground of Giddings, Texas, to search for oil in a barren, poverty-stricken land that was littered with dry holes, shattered hopes, and empty pockets. Max Williams, the former hot-shot basketball player at SMU, and Irv Deal had been in high-dollar real estate until the real estate market collapsed. Both were facing the wrath of hard times. Pat Holloway was a lawyer who operated drilling funds but had never tested the ill-fated Austin Chalk. He drilled the most and earned the most but lost it all in the shady confines of a Dallas courtroom. Jimmy Luecke was a highway patrolman who stopped Holloway for speeding one night and promised not to take him to jail if the lawyer/oilman would agree to drill on his family's land. Bill Shuford was right out of college and more interested in finding the next beer joint than his next job. Jim Dobos was a constable who used his badge to lease land, struck it rich, and was found with a gunshot in his head. Was it murder or suicide? Clayton Williams was the only big-time oilman in the bunch, but in the beginning, he made the mistake of employing the wrong geologist. Only those who used the geologic genius of Ray Holifield found oil. Holifield had cracked the code of the chalk. Gamble in the Devil's Chalk is the true story of their fights, their feuds, their trials, their tribulations, and their triumphs as they discovered the second largest oilfield in the United States during the past half century. Once they came, Giddings would never be the same again.

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	21 février 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781456602925
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Gamble
in The Devil’s Chalk

Caleb Pirtle III

Copyright © 2011 by Caleb Pirtle III and Venture Galleries LLC, 1220 Chateau Lane, Hideaway Texas 75771. 214-564-1493.

Venturegalleries.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise except as may be expressly permitted by the actual copyright statutes or in writing by the publisher.

Published in eBook format by Venture Galleries, LLC
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0292-5

Text: Caleb Pirtle III
Editing/Design: Linda Greer Pirtle
Cover Design: Jutta Medina

Prologue

Reinhardt Richter was a man of the earth. If nothing else, he knew and understood the curious mysteries that lay beneath the Texas farmlands sprawling at his feet. He had studied the good earth and could read the empty landscape as easily as last year’s edition of the Farmer’s Almanac. Every furrow, crop row, creek bottom, bald knob, and ravine was as familiar as the lines in the palm of his hand. Richter had knelt in his pastures on many an early morning and held up a fistful of dirt, watching as the winds slowly and surely separated the sand from the rocks.
The rocks scattered across the undulating pasturelands just north of Giddings and south of Dime Box intrigued him. They were of the ages, as ancient and as common as time itself, and the stories they could tell remained, more or less, untold. The dirt was an old friend indeed. It buried, then nourished, his seed, gave him a harvest and grew the tall grasses that kept his cattle fed, often with sun burnt stalks. Dirt ran shallow above those great folds of Austin Chalk, hiding the complexities of a puzzle that only he and he alone had been able to unravel.
Reinhardt Richter was known by many and understood by few, none of whom ever admitted it. There were those in Lee County who said privately and over a beer or two that Richter was a little different, not quite like the rest of the folks, and not all of them were quite right either. He was not a tall man, standing only about five feet and ten inches, but he was wide, broad-shouldered, and carved with solid muscle, known far and wide for his ungodly strength.
Richter lived on a farm that had been in his family for more than a century, and by the 1970s, he was working on a vacuum truck that generally took at least two and more likely three men to load. Richter would wander on down to the road in the early morning hours and load it by himself. Didn’t ask for any help. Didn’t need to. Didn’t particularly want it. Never complained. Never showed up late or sick. He had already been on the earth for more than seven decades.
Reinhardt Richter might or might not have a lot, depending entirely on who happened to be talking down at the City Meat Market in Giddings, but he had his land, and God had given him enough, probably as much as he deserved, and, what’s more, he possessed a secret so vital, so crucial that others dared not believe it even when he slowly and carefully explained it to them. Why, he said, a bunch of damn good preachers had made a damn good living for a long damn time sermonizing on the fate of mankind that Reinhardt Richter knew was absolute gospel. But preachers did not really know the source of their anguish and admonitions. Reinhardt Richter did.
He had devoted himself to demystifying the strange enigma of those boiling masses of fire and brimstone bristling with fury and damnation far beneath the crust of the earth. He wasn’t interested in the eruptions or the cinder-cone craters left behind when flames and smoke, dust and ash, lava and magma came bursting violently through those fractures and fissures in a great subterranean vault, flowing like molten molasses down the side of a mountain suddenly rising above a crevice on flat ground.
No, he said, others seemed to have a pretty good grasp on whatever geologic explosion happened to be occurring on top of the landscape. Reinhardt Richter was drawn to the underworld. That was his fate. That was the one lingering circumstance of his life. Hard work. German beer. Harder work. More beer. Couldn’t outwork him. Couldn’t out think him. Couldn’t out drink him. The sum of it all gave him, Richter said, a vast wealth of geologic knowledge unknown to lesser men in the field, and he kept his faith and his studies directed toward places he had never seen and certainly never gone – the deep and hidden sanctuaries far below the earth.
Volcanologists believed there was no way to define an active volcano, which could raise its ugly head in a lifespan ranging from several months to several million years. Richter knew better. Volcanoes, he said, never lost their fire, and they were all connected – every last one of them – by an inner linking network of tunnels filled with molten lava that spread throughout the netherworld. They wormed their way like a maze through the hard-rock recesses of the earth, and together they possessed more energy, more radiation, and certainly more heat than the sun. Thousands of volcanoes from every corner of the glob were emptying their assorted magma into one great ocean of fire and brimstone that was near enough to the surface of the ground for mankind to reach down and touch it.
Only Reinhardt Richter knew the location. It’s there, he said, nodding as astutely as any scholar would.
Where?
He grinned, an old man with an old and wizened grin. In the ground beneath my farm, he said. You can hear them rattle sometimes when the day grows dark.
What?
The gates of hell, he said, and the grin lost its bite. The howling of the condemned will sometimes keep your awake at night. His face turned to stone.
Then again, it might have been the beer.

Chapter 1

It was a battle for hard ground, fought in the devil’s chalk by a curious assortment of men who dared to defy those fractured layers of an ancient limestone that impacted the earth far beneath a land that had historically refused to give up its oil, provided any reservoirs of crude did exist in the notorious Austin Chalk.
Major oil companies stayed away. Some had been burned before. Dry holes were a curse of the chalk. Only a small band of independent operators stabbed their drill bits into the vast fields of burnt cotton and brittle peanut vines. They did not have a lot of money. Some said they had even less sense.
Most of them were new to the oil game: Irv Deal, a real estate developer facing the sudden wrath of hard times. Max Williams, a real estate broker watching various and assorted land deals crumble around him. Pat Holloway, a lawyer who operated drilling funds but had never drilled in the devil’s chalk. Jimmy Luecke, a highway patrolman who kept law and sometimes order atop land rich with oil. Bill Shuford, right out of college and more interested in finding the next beer joint than his next job.
They had far more hope than experience and the Austin Chalk would break them or make them rich. They fought the land, dueled before judges, and battled each other in the field of broken hearts. They spilled more money than blood, but the scars ran deep. For some, the scars would last a lifetime. They drilled toward a confluence of volcanic channels, if Reinhardt Richter had been right, and stopped just short of the howling voices from hell. In time, the howling voices sounded a lot like their own.

Max Williams gazed through the dusty windshield of his Chevy Blazer, his eyes scanning the far country as it sprawled defiantly around him. A few rises that passed for hills. Mostly flat. A few trees clustered together here and there, mostly there. Tall grasses burned and wilted by an unforgiving sun. Weathered homesteads, the last known will and testament of stubborn farmers who fought the land, watered the crop rows with their own sweat, were too proud to ever even think about quitting, and considered it a good year if they broke even. Once the fields held cotton, then peanuts, always peanuts, and farmers cursed it and condemned it but could never quite convince themselves to turn it loose.
The land was called worthless by those who plowed it, godforsaken by those who could neither sell it nor live on it, and barren by the few speculators who, with more grit than sense, perhaps, jammed a drill bit down into the ancient layers of Austin Chalk, searching for hidden pools of oil. Then again, Williams thought, maybe the whole bunch of them was wrong. All it would cost him to find out was a little time.
Giddings intrigued him, although, he figured, the town was probably nothing more than some little hole-in-the-wall, dying cluster of decrepit buildings by the side of the road. He had never been there, had never wanted to go, or thought about going.
But Giddings had suddenly become the only place in Texas occupying his every thought. What did Giddings know that no one else in the chalk had learned, he asked himself, and how tightly was the little town holding on to its secret? Could the big chalk well be the gateway to an undiscovered field, or just a one hit wonder.
The Austin Chalk had a lot of those.
The noted geologist Everett DeGolyer had once said, “The greatest single element in all prospecting – past, present, and future – was the man willing to take a chance.” He might as well have been talking about Max Williams.
Williams knew there were a lot of places he should be that spring afternoon, and Lee County probably wasn’t one of them. He had driven south out of Dallas, letting the hours pass by with the long miles, on a quixotic, maybe even foolhardy, search for a mythical oil well, a big chalk well, that he had heard a lot of roughnecks, roustabouts, wildcatters, and geologists talk about, even though they claimed it was a rich orphan in ground that bore the remnants of rusting oil pipe and wounds of dry holes.