Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 103: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Pillar of Flame and this he had to head off by a dirt bank. When done, the oil would be confined in a great pool, and could be pumped out at any time. Studying the lay of the land, he found a place, a little farther along, where a couple of insularities ‘ran out into the valley, leav- ing a matter of but thirty or forty feet be- tween, and here he set to work with pick and shovel. The sod was tough, but he cut it through, and soon had a little bank a couple of inches high or so that held back the oil-flow and spread from one of the little capes to the other. Working with all his might he was just able to-keep ahead of the oil, and soon a pool formed back of his dam, which gradually spread over the land. Then he began to pick up the ground, adding a few inches here, a foot there, and * strengthening it in one place, raising ‘it in another, thickening it somewhere else, as the need arose. Once or twice the foreman came and watched him, grunted a little, but said nothing, and by the time it grew dark a rambling levee, eighteen inches or so in height, stretched across the valley. Back of it lay a pool of oil, steadily growing in size, dirty, slick and treacherous-looking, and — running into every little hollow or cranny of the hills and bottom. Three hundred feet or so away the well spouted, throwing its volume into the air “with a rush and sound like some great water- fall. All the neighboring land was greasy with oil, everything was saturated where it had splashed and the great drops had fallen. And with the sound was mingled the rush of - gas, millions of feet spreading over the val- ley and thickening the air so that it was almost impossible to breathe. Not a trace of wind disturbed it, for even | on the hilltops the air was dead and burned with the heat; no life, no motion, no any- thing, while down in this valley, shut off by the neighboring highlands, it was even worse. And the carbureted hydrogen of the natural gas filled every nook and cranny of the hills and hugged the ground closely. “Got a little brains, you have, bedad!’’ said a voice behind him, and he turned to find the foreman looking at the dam. “Some different to most of the roughnecks round here. You ain’t no farmer, that’s a cinch.” “Machinist,” replied Red. / Io! “Umph! Well, I got a job for you at the same wages for a month or two anyway. Want it?” Red made a quick calculation. He could hire some one to tend his farm for a dollar a day or so. “Y’ll go you for a week, anyway,” he answered. “All right! Show up tomorrow. This pool ain’t going to be a pair of treys in a jack-pot. there somewhere,” and he pointed vaguely down the valley. We got to have another down | “What’s she’ spouting?” Knuckles said. ~ “Twenty or thirty thousand barrels?” “Thirty nothing! Fifty’s more it,” and, turning, the man walked away, while Red wandered home. The girl was much in his thoughts that night, the girl that was waiting for him in Chicago, who might need something more than a five-dollar-a-week job in a depart- ment store, if her father died, and he pon- dered long on what action to take. The farm he was sure would do little for him, while the oil gang—but he hated to admit that he was beaten, and pushed the tempta- tion away and turned into bed. WHEN he reached the dip in the hill next morning a man stopped ‘“Douse that pipe!” he was ordered: **Th’ valley’s full of gas.” It was indeed. Down at the bottom, there seemed no air at all. He breathed gas, and seemingly nothing but gas, and found the prohibition of the pipe was very rational. The foreman set him in charge of a gang of diggers that he had raked up from some- where, roughly indicated; what he wished done, and, except for a moment or two now and then, ‘left him alone all day. His job was to bank up a new pool, a hundred feet or so across, and this time he had to put sides to it, to take care of the overflow from the one he had made last night. This last he strengthened, raising the dam to nearly five feet high, and watch- ed it carefully. As the new one gréw, it took care of the oil that trickled over a low spot, purposely left in the old bank, and the squad of men managed to keep ahead of this trickle, so that, even when it began to come down in a regular stream, there was little or no oil lost. | So, for three days Red went along, his Gomichoo (E <S (El)