The strain I had seen in Jean’s face was stamped on the face of everyone I on the rig. They all crowded round me, wanting to hear the news from Calgary, eagerly scanning the papers I had brought and searching the bundle of mail for their own letters. The atmosphere was electric with fatigue and the desperate hope that was driving them.
“Did you see Winnick?” Garry asked me. His voice was hard and terse.
“Yes. He’s been over the seismograms again. He thinks we’ll strike it around seven thousand or not at all.”
“We’ll he at seven thousand the day after tomorrow.”
“Have you taken a core sample since you got clear of the sill?”
“Yes. I don’t know much about geology, I guess, but it looked like I Devonian, all right, to me.”
“We’ll just have to make it,” I said.
“Oh, sure. We’ll make it.” But his voice didn’t carry conviction. He looked dead heat.
“Seen anything of Trevedian?”
“No.” He turned and stared toward the dam. His battered face looked crumpled and old in the hard sunlight. “I wish we’d got a geologist up here. If we do strike it, as like as not it’ll be gas and we’ll blow the rig to hell.”
“If you do strike it,” I said, “you won’t need to worry about the rig.”
“It’s not the rig I’m worrying about,” he snapped, “It’s the drilling crew.” He gave a quick, nervous laugh. “I’ve never drilled a well without knowing what was going on under the surface.”
His manner as much as his appearance warned me that his nerves were strung taut. It was not surprising, for there were only nine of them to keep the rig going the twenty-four hours, and it needed four men on each shift. Pretty soon both I and Steve Strachan were doing our stint. I did the shift from eight to twelve, and by the time I had been called at four to go on duty again, I began to understand the strain they had been working under. I came off duty at eight, had some breakfast and turned in.
I hadn’t been asleep more than an hour before I was wakened with the news that Trevedian had arrived and wanted to see me.
He was in the main room of the ranch house and he had an officer of the Provincial Police with him, Garry was there, too, and he held a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Trevedian’s just served us with notice to quit,” he said, handing me the paper.
It was a warning that flooding of the Kingdom under the provisions of the Provincial Government Act of 1939 might be expected any time after August eighteenth.
“The dam’s complete, is it?” I asked.
Trevedian nodded. “Just about.”
“When are you closing the sluice gates?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. As soon as we’re ready.” He turned to the policeman. “Well, Eddie, you’ve seen the note delivered. Anything you want to say?”
The officer shook his head. “You’ve read the notice, Mr. Wetheral. I’d just remind you that as from ten o’clock tomorrow morning the Larsen Company is entitled to flood this area, and that from that time they cannot be held responsible for any loss of movable equipment.”
“Meaning the rig?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, fellows, but there it is.”
One or two of the drilling crew had drifted in. Trevedian shifted his feet nervously. He knew enough about men to know that it only needed a word to touch off the violence in the atmosphere.
“Well, I guess we’d better get going,” he said.
The policeman nodded. In silence they turned and went out through the door. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. At length Garry said, “Better get some sleep, boys. We’re on again in an hour and a half.”
“Any chance of bringing in a well between now and ten o’clock tomorrow?” Steve Strachan asked.
Garry rounded on him with a snarl. “If I knew that, do you think we’d be standing around looking like a bunch of steers waiting for the slaughterhouse?” And he flung out of the room, back to his bunk.
When I went on shift at midday the drill was down to six thousand, six hundred and twenty-two feet. When we came off again at four, we had added another forty-three feet. It was blazing hot and the sweat streamed off me, for we had just had the grief stem out and added another length of pipe. I stood for a while, staring across to the dam. The silence there was uncanny. Not a soul moved. I mopped my forehead with a sweat-damp handkerchief. There wasn’t a breath of air. The whole Kingdom seemed silent and watching, as though waiting for something. A glint of sun on glasses showed from the rock buttress. They were still keeping us under observation.
“I don’t like it,” a voice said at my elbow.
I turned to find Boy standing beside me. “What don’t you like?” I asked, and already I noticed my voice possessed that same sharpness of strain that the others had.
“Just nerves, I guess,” he said. “But it’s crazy sort of weather, this, with no thunderheads and the mountains burning up under this sudden wave of heat. It’s as though—” He paused there, and then turned away with a shrug of his shoulders.
That night at dinner a brooding silence reigned over the table. It had the stillness of weather before a storm. It was in tune with the sultry heat of the night. The faces of the men gathered round the table were thin and tired and shiny with sweat. They sat around till eight, waiting for the change of shift. Every now and then one of them would go to the door and listen, his head cocked on one side, listening for some change in the rhythm of the rig, waiting for the news that they’d brought in a well.
But the shift changed and the drilling went steadily on, the bit grinding into the rock six thousand, seven hundred and thirteen feet below the surface, at the rate of ten and a half feet per hour. I got some Bleep and went on shift again at midnight. Jean was still up, standing by the stable, looking at the moon. She didn’t say anything, but her hand found mine and gripped it.
Boy passed us, going to the rig. “There’s a storm brewing,” he said.
There was a ring round the moon and though it was still as sultry as an oven, there was a dampness in the air.
“Something must break soon,” Jean whispered. “I can’t stand this suspense any longer.”
“It’ll all be over tomorrow when they flood the place,” I said.
She sighed and pressed my arm and turned away. I watched her go back into the ranch house. Then slowly I walked down to the rig. Garry was driller on this shift and Don was acting as derrick man. We sat on the bench beside the draw works, smoking and feeling the drill vibrating along our spines.
“What’s that over there, beyond Solomon’s Judgment? Looks like a cloud,” Garry said.
A breath of wind touched our faces. There were no stars. It looked pitch-black and strangely solid. The wind was suddenly chill.
“It’s the storm that’s been brewing,” Boy said.
I don’t know who noticed it first — the change in the note of the drawworks Diesel. It penetrated to my mind as something different, a slowing up, a stickiness that deepened the note of the engine.
Boy shouted something, and then Garry’s voice thundered out, “The mud pump, quick!” His big body was across the platform in a flash, Don and I had jumped to our feet, but we stood there, dazed, not knowing what was happening or what had to be done. “Get off that platform!” Garry shouted up to us. “Run, you fools! Run for your lives!”
I heard Boy say, “We’ve struck it!” And then we collided in a mad scramble for the ladder. As I reached it I caught a glimpse of the traveling block out of the tail of my eye. The wire hawsers that held it suspended from the crown block were slack and the grief stem was slowly rising, pushing it upward. Then I was down the ladder and jumping for the ground, running blindly, not knowing what to expect, following the flying figures of my companions. The ground became boggy. It squelched under my feet. Then water splashed in my face and I stopped, thinking we’d reached the stream. The others had stopped too. They were standing, staring back at the rig.