NINE

It’s a source of amusement to me how religious bigotry goes by the wayside when a boom is on and there’s money to be made. Before the Coby Smith well blew in, Andy Wolfe’s prospects had been dim indeed. But now his proximity to the abstract company meant that his services were in constant demand by oilmen and speculators who were more interested in making fortunes than they were in snubbing an Israelite. He found himself called upon countless times each day to examine titles and help with tricky leases, and finally as a matter of convenience he moved his office next door. The landlord, who owned both buildings, agreed to build a passageway between the two. Workmen were sent over who cut through the plaster on both sides and then sledgehammered a crude opening through the brickwork. But such is the nature of an oil boom, and so great was the demand for carpenters and craftsmen by that time, that it was months before they came back to frame in the doorway and install a door. No one cared.

*   *   *

Within a few days of the second gusher Della was getting her fifty dollars an hour for use of the records, and the office was pandemonium from dawn to dusk. There were few complaints about the price. If a man was reluctant to pay, there were a dozen standing behind him who weren’t. Besides, they always had the option of going to the courthouse to check their titles, and a few did. But this was a very time-consuming process. An abstract company has a listing of every transaction ever made on a piece of property going back to the earliest days of the Spanish land grants. These lists are either in card files or in large bound volumes, depending on the system that particular office uses. In this fashion a title can be run quickly, but at the courthouse it can only be followed by searching out each instrument, page by page.

But Della even dreamed up a way to make money off the public records in the courthouse. She identified five surveys in the basin where the leasing action was becoming the hottest, each of which was represented by one huge, thick volume in the record room of the county clerk’s office. Then she made a phone call to a business college in Fort Worth. The next day she left the office under Mona’s capable supervision and took the car and drove northward. I’ve always suspected that some money changed hands between her and the dean of the college, because three days later when the Texas & Pacific passenger train pulled into town, five of his most competent graduating stenographers stepped off the day coach. That night Della gave them detailed instructions, and the next morning they were waiting when the courthouse opened. Within minutes all five volumes were tied up for the day by a squad of brisk, no-nonsense young women who were preclearing titles. From that moment on practically every lease in the basin went through hands controlled by Della.

At first there was a great cry of misery from the assembled lease hounds. But since speed is everything in an oil boom, both they and the operators they worked for soon saw the wisdom of paying Della the premium price of several hundred dollars for a precleared and certified title rather than wasting valuable hours rooting it out of the records themselves. By then the irreplaceable Mona was making the queenly salary of three hundred dollars a month, and Andy was rolling in the money. It finally dawned on the two of them that their long-postponed marriage could take place, and Della and I attended their wedding at the synagogue in Odessa. Their honeymoon, a gift from us, was a three-day weekend in the Bridal Suite of the Weilbach. Monday morning they were both back at work.

Wallace Reed was as good as his word. Four days after I signed the note at the bank, he called the office to tell me that I needed to see an oilman named Layton Osborne from Tyler. Osborne and I met the next afternoon in the Weilbach’s Longhorn Bar. He was a boisterous, heavy-bodied old wildcatter who had made untold millions in the great East Texas boom of 1930. He’d already been out to look over the lease and he liked it. After giving my papers a cursory examination, he took at face value Andy’s written opinion that Havel’s title to the place was sound.

“So what you want from me is drilling costs and fifty-five thousand to pay off your note, and for that I get an undivided half of all the royalties.… Is that right?”

“That’s the deal.”

He held out a thick, meaty hand that seemed as big as a slab of bacon. “Have your lawyer draw up the papers. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“That’s fine with me,” I answered. “Where are you headed?”

“Hell, I’m going back to East Texas to find us a drilling rig. There aren’t any available in this whole country out here. Don’t you worry, though. We’ll be making hole within a week.” He quickly drained his beer. “Ain’t this fun?” he asked, giving me a parting wink.

He was back in two days at the head of a convoy of trucks from Mustang Drilling Company out of Tyler. Before closing time that day our papers were signed and my note was paid off at the bank. Within twenty-four hours the rig was up and the well spudded in. It was a good well, and by the time it came in three weeks later the whole east end of the basin was leasing for a thousand dollars an acre. Frequently fistfights broke out in farmers’ yards as lease hounds beat one another senseless over small tracts of land that a month before would have sold outright for twenty dollars an acre, mineral rights included.

Della got her library card, but she didn’t have the time to read. She did manage to get by to see the eye doctor and he confirmed that she needed glasses. It took a week to get them from the optical lab in Dallas, but when they arrived I gave them my immediate stamp of approval. They were rimless with gold earpieces, and they looked especially fetching when she wore them and nothing else.