Black Treasure Sandy Steele Adventures #1

High jinks were in order as the Regional Science Fair drew to a close in the big auditorium at Poplar City, California. A board of judges had selected prize-winning exhibits entered by high-school students from Valley View, Poplar City and other nearby communities. Now the winners were blowing off steam while teachers who had supervised the fair sat in quiet corners and fanned themselves wearily.

“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen,” Pepper March whooped like a circus barker as he strutted in front of his First Prize winner, a glittering maze of electronic equipment. “Broadcast your voice over my beam of light. The very newest thing in science. Built through the co-operation of Valley View’s own Cavanaugh Laboratories. Step right up.... Yes, miss?” A girl had approached the exhibit, wide-eyed. “Please speak into this microphone.”

“What do I say?” As she spoke, a quivering pencil of light leaped from a black box in the booth and her words thundered from a loudspeaker in the balcony.

“Oh, recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’” suggested the big blond boy, and grinned.

“‘Mary,’” boomed the girl’s voice from the rear of the hall as Pepper twiddled a mirror that deflected the light beam to a second loud-speaker, “‘had a little lamb.’” (Those words seemed to come out of the floor.) “‘Its fleece was white as snow.’” (The last phrase blared from a chandelier.)

“Good old Pepper! Grandstanding again!” muttered Sandy Steele as the crowd cheered. Sandy stared glumly at a small sign reading Honorable Mention that perched on the exhibit which he and his pal Quiz Taylor had entered in the fair. It wasn’t fancy-looking like Pepper’s, he had to admit. It was just a mound of wet cardboard sheets stuck full of pins, plus a homemade control panel and some batteries. “Ours was better,” he added.

“I agree,” Quiz sighed. “After all the work we put into this thing! Molding sheets of cardboard to the shape of underground rock layers. Soaking them with salt water so they’ll carry electric currents that imitate the direction in which oil deposits flow.” He hooked a wire to one of the pins and pressed a button. A flashlight bulb on the control panel winked at him mockingly. “We sure deserve something better than a Mention!”

“Step this way, folks,” Quiz called halfheartedly to the passers-by. “Learn how petroleum can be located, thousands of feet beneath the earth.”

Nobody paid any attention except one Valley View boy who was pushing his way toward Pepper’s booth, a phonograph record under one skinny arm.

“Sour grapes,” jeered the boy. “You and Sandy better forget that mess. Come over and watch Pepper play this stereo record over his beam. It’ll be something!”

“Shall we?” Sandy looked at his friend miserably.

“Unh-uh,” answered the short, round-faced boy. “Here comes a customer—I think.”

A suntanned little man in faded blue shirt and jeans had ambled up to their booth and was studying the exhibit with his gray head tilted to one side.

“A reservoir behavior analyzer, huh?” he said. “Represents the Four Corners area. Right?”

“Why ... yes, sir.” Sandy stared at him, openmouthed. “We built it to represent the geological structure of the country where the boundaries of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. This map and card explain—”

“I know the Four Corners,” grunted the little man as he sized up the tall, sandy-haired youngster. “Is your gadget accurate?”

“As accurate as we could make it with the survey maps we could find.”

“Hmmm.” Their visitor’s sharp eyes studied the gray mound. “What happens if I should drill an oil well here, in the northwest corner of the Navajo Indian reservation?” He pointed with a lean finger.

Sandy moved a pin to the spot he indicated, connected it to the control panel with a length of wire, and pressed a switch.

Nothing happened!

Quiz groaned. Why couldn’t the thing show off when they wanted it to?

“If you drilled there, sir, you’d just have a dry hole,” Sandy said with more confidence than he felt. “That location must be on the far fringe of the oil pool.”

“Right!” The little man grinned from ear to ear, showing a fine white set of false teeth. “I did drill a wildcat well there. She was dry as a bone. My ninth duster in a row.... Now what happens if I drill here, near the bed of the San Juan River?”

This time a bulb glowed brightly when they stuck their pin into the cardboard.

“We can’t be sure, sir,” Sandy hesitated. “We don’t know too much about geology. Besides, oil is like gold. It’s where you find it, and the only way you find it is by drilling for it. But I’d guess that, in the neighborhood you indicated, you’d stand a chance of hitting a thousand barrels per day.”

“Eight hundred and fifty barrels,” corrected the man in the blue jeans. “The well I drilled on the San Juan was the only thing that kept me out of bankruptcy.”

A blare of jazz from Pepper’s loud-speakers, now working in unison, cut off further conversation and gave the boys a chance to study their strange acquaintance.

“Why don’t you go over and take in that beam-of-light exhibit?” Sandy said when Pepper had brought the sound down to bearable levels. “It won first prize.”

“That pile of expensive junk?” sniffed the little man. “All the kid did was to borrow some apparatus from Red Cavanaugh’s Valley View Laboratory. If I know Red—and I do know the big fourflusher well—he didn’t make the boy do a lick of real research on it.... Oh!” Again that wide grin. “You think I’m crazy and want to get rid of me, don’t you? Here.”

He dug into his jeans and came up with a greasy card which read:

The Four Corners Drilling Company John Hall, President Farmington, N. M.

“Guess I should have got dressed up for this shindig,” Hall apologized, “but I just got in from Farmington. I read about your analyzer in the Valley View News when you won first prize at your high-school science fair last month. Used to live there. That’s why I still get the paper. Your dingus should have received first prize here too, instead of that voice-cast thing.”

“Say! You came all this way just to see our exhibit? Thanks!” was all Sandy could think of to say.

As the auditorium lights blinked to indicate that the fair was closing, Hall added, “Got time for a bite? I have a proposition I’d like to sound you out on.”

At a nearby diner, the oilman ordered full meals for all of them.

“Here’s my proposition,” he said when the boys couldn’t eat another mouthful. “I’m a small wildcat operator. That means I hunt for oil in places that are so wild and woolly that only wildcats can live there. Once or twice I’ve struck it rich. Should have retired then, but there’s something about oil exploration that gets in a feller’s blood. So I went out, drilled some dry holes, and lost my shirt.

“Right now I’m strapped until my new field pays off—if it does. But I think I’m onto something big in the Four Corners and I need help. You boys must have a working knowledge of geology to build an analyzer as good as that. How about working for me this summer?”

“Sandy’s the rock hound,” Quiz said and hesitated. “I ... I’ve only read up on it in books.”

“All I know is what Dad has told me,” Sandy remarked. “I couldn’t have built the exhibit without Quiz’s help.”

“Forget the mutual-admiration-society stuff,” said Hall. “Would you both like to spend your vacations in the Four Corners, working as roustabouts and helping me out wherever else you can? It won’t be easy. But when you get through you’ll know a lot about oil, geology, how to get along with Indians, and I don’t know what all.