The Widow and the Wildcatter

Fran Baker

Prologue

April 1935

The oil witch stood motionless in the cornfield, waiting for the spirit to move him.

His face, eyes closed, was turned to the endless sky. The wind threatened to blow his battered felt hat into the next county, but his arms remained glued to his sides, the palms of his hands parallel with the ground.

For his five-year-old daughter, watching from the edge of the field with her newfound friends, this was an everyday occurrence. The way Pa kept food in her belly and a little jingle in his pocket. But for the hardscrabble farmer and his pregnant wife, this was a last-ditch effort to change their luck.

The warm day gradually grew chilly as a wall of dirt—black mostly, but purple and tan and ocher too—advanced across the plains. Spindly redbuds and sturdy cottonwoods alike bowed to the will of the wind. A jackrabbit, light in the front legs but strong in the rear, took a far hill in a few bounds. Heading for a promised land of sunshine and oranges, like thousands of other Okies.

Suddenly the oil witch began to move.

His entire frame swayed to some intrinsic rhythm. Then round and round he turned in an ever-widening spiral, mumbling some kind of chant under his breath. At times his prancing became violent as he hovered over a certain spot, and then it subsided as he continued to spin.

Grit filled his eyes and mouth. Birds flew wildly over the field, some falling dead in midflight when dust clogged their lungs. Static electricity played over the farmer’s old tin lizzie. No one even noticed.

At long last the oil witch stopped dancing and started shaking. His feet seemed stuck to one particular spot. Three, maybe four minutes passed while he stood there with sweat running down his face and the farmer and his wife both hoping and praying for the best.

He leaned forward then and lowered his palms toward the ground, moving them in a half circle as if he were groping for something in the dark. The upstart wind snatched his hat and sent it sailing. Spasms racked his body, growing more and more frenzied until he collapsed all in a heap.

The farmer thought surely the oil witch was dead.

His wife pulled a stub of a pencil from her apron pocket and made a crude map on the back of a recipe for buttermilk pie.

The little girl broke a branch off a nearby bush and stuck it into the ground at her father’s feet, then turned to the anxious young couple and an­nounced, “There's your oil.”

Chapter 1

“Mr. McCoy?”

“Up here!”

Joni looked up and saw the wildcatter frowning down at her from a narrow scaffold that had just been hoisted high above the rig floor.

“You don’t know me,” she yelled, “but—”

He crooked a hand to his ear and shook his head to indicate he couldn’t hear over the inces­sant din of men and machinery.

Dizziness assailed her as she considered her other option, and a sudden gust of wind intensi­fied her dread. Then she remembered her reason for coming and, cupping both hands to her mouth like a megaphone, shouted at the top of her lungs. “How do I get up there?”

“You don’t!” he hollered down, and emphasized his edict with a dismissive jerk of his thumb.

Joni realized he’d just ordered one of the half-dozen roughnecks working on the rig to “get rid of her,” but she’d come too farto back down now.

Her fear of heights notwithstanding she marched toward a second scaffold that held a couple of lengths of pipe, one of which had a fishtail-shaped tool attached to the end of it.

“Sorry, ma’am.” A rawboned man with a drawl as thick as January molasses grabbed her by the elbow before she could hop aboard. “The rig is off limits to outsiders.”

“But—”

“No exceptions, ma’am.”

Joni watched, secretly relieved as the scaffold started skyward without her. Top gun she wasn’t. But neither was she giving up without a fight.

“You don’t understand.” She tried to reason with the roughneck first. “I’ve got to talk to Mr. McCoy. Today!”

Her escort kept a firm grip on her elbow as he steered her toward a long flight of steps that led to ground level. “Call him from home and leave a message on his answering machine.”

“I’ve left messages—at least a dozen in the last two weeks alone,” she argued to no avail. “He’s never called me back.”

“Mr. McCoy is a busy man.” The roughneck didn’t say “as any fool can see,” but the sentiment was plastered all over his mud-spattered face. “Besides”—he skimmed her slender figure from the corner of his eye without breaking stride— “he’s not much for mixing business with pleasure.”

“But that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you!” At the bottom of the steps Joni stopped abruptly and pulled free of his hold. “This is business.”

The man skidded to a halt and pushed his hard hat back off his forehead, revealing a receding hairline. “Well now, that’s a horse of a different color.”

“I should hope so!” she said.

His expression turned thoughtful. “In that case, leave the message with me and I’ll give it to him when we’re finished changing the drill bit.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too personal,” she admitted reluctantly.

He looked at her as if she’d gone soft in the head. “Lady, make up your mind!”

Flushing, she said tensely, “It’s business of a personal nature.”

“Hey, Tex!” One of the workers on the rig cap­tured his attention before he could form a reply. “Can you give me a hand with the draw works?”

“Be right there!” he assured the other rough­neck, eyeing his excess baggage uncertainly.

Joni saw her opportunity and seized it. “I’ll wait here...cross my heart.”

He threw his gloved hands into the air as if to say “Women!” Then, muttering an impatient curse under his breath, he turned and clomped back up the steps. At the top he stopped and tossed her one of the hard hats he’d plucked from a stack on the rig floor, shouting, “If you’re gonna wait there, you’ve gotta wear this.”

She caught the hard hat, put it on over her ponytail, and snapped him a crisp salute. "Thanks, Tex.”

He shook his head and turned away, but not before she saw the ghost of a grin cross his lips.

Joni did as she’d promised and stayed put. While she waited for the wildcatter to change the bit and come back to earth, she compared this drill­ing site with the others she’d visited of late.

With very few exceptions, they all looked the same. An office trailer sat across the way, with a number of dirty pickup trucks—hers included—parked in front of it. Sunshine glanced off stacks of pipe that somehow resembled a great organ. The rig reached for the heavens, and thick red mud coated everything, even...

“My best jeans,” she groused when she noticed the sticky substance clinging to her denim-covered legs with the tenacity of glue. Giving silent thanks that she’d decided to wear her waffle stompers instead of her tennis shoes, she craned her neck for a better view of the action.

Two more workers stood on the scaffold now, but Joni readily identified the wildcatter as the one in the middle. Like the rest of his crew he was dressed in steel-toed boots, mud-caked jeans, and a T-shirt that might have been white at one time. But there the resemblance ended.

Lithe and sinewy as a panther, he moved with the confidence of a man totally at ease with him­self and with leading other men. And while he wore his hard hat tilted at a rakish angle, it was obvious to even the most casual observer that he ran a tight ship.

He stepped to the edge of the scaffold and picked up one of the pipes that Tex had helped hoist up to him. All eyes were riveted on his commanding figure, testifying to both the importance of what he was doing and the danger involved. Watching his men watch him with such open admiration, Joni could see why he was considered one of the best in the business.

The wind seemed to have hands as it shook the rig so relentlessly, and Joni’s stomach crawled into her throat when she realized that the wild­catter was the only one up there who wasn’t wear­ing a safety line. She wanted to look away but found she couldn’t. It was as if she were hypno­tized by the sheer horror of it.

He leaned out over the scaffold and began low­ering the drill bit toward the square hole in the rig floor. Her fear for him mounted by leaps and bounds when the roughneck to his right fit a second pipe atop the first one, causing them to swing like an elongated pendulum. And when the third man reached out with a blowtorch to weld them together, she decided she’d seen enough and closed her eyes.

“Let ‘er rip!” someone ordered a small eternity later.

Joni jumped when the diesel engine that pow­ered the drill bit roared to life, and her eyes opened wide watching the scaffold safely return the three men to the rig floor.

When the wildcatter stepped off the plank, his crew closed ranks around him, laughing and slap­ping his back with beer-commercial heartiness.

The mud pump throbbed; steel clashed on steel; and all was right with the rig again.

Standing off to the side, Joni felt totally ex­cluded until Tex caught sight of her and pointed her out.

The wildcatter’s jaw went hard as granite when he glanced her way, as if he saw something not to his liking.

As indeed he did.

Having just spent half the night and most of the morning on tour, the last thing he wanted to look at was some skinny female decked out like one of the boys. In fact, all he really wanted right now was a hot shower, a cold beer, and eight straight hours of shut-eye.

Joni kept her small face passive, though her skin paled under the country-girl freckles that were sprinkled across her nose and cheeks. Granted, she wouldn’t win any beauty contests in this getup, but he wasn’t exactly dressed to the nines himself.

She stood her ground, planning her approach.

He scowled down at her, plotting his escape.

She tipped her chin defiantly, and he found himself admiring the way she returned a man’s direct gaze.

Their eyes remained locked as he sauntered down the steps, but she was keenly conscious of the raw power concealed behind his loose-limbed stride. He pointed in the direction of the office trailer and, without a backward glance, headed that way.

Following suit, she was so tickled to think she’d finally found him that it was all she could do not to kick up her heels. But this was business, pure and simple, and recalling Tex’s statement as he escorted her off the rig helped her to keep things in their proper perspective.

The wildcatter sloshed heedlessly through the mud puddle that had formed directly beneath the narrow metal step that led up to the trailer door, but Joni hesitated, hating to get her jeans any dirtier than they already were.

Unfortunately, she either had to go through the mud or jump over it. Judging the puddle to be about the length of a yardstick, she put her left foot forward, reared back on her right, and jumped.

She made it, but the step was slippery as oil and there was nothing for her to grab hold of. Nothing but...

At the same time the wildcatter extended a help­ing hand, Joni got a death grip on the front of his T-shirt. His patronizing grin drooped into a pained grimace when she seized a fistful of his chest hair in the process.

“Hey, lady, let go!”

“I’m afraid I’ll fall!”

The fingers encircling her upper arm tightened, but the fierce expression on his face warned her she was pushing her luck. As did his ominously soft tone. “Let...go.”

Joni got his message loud and clear. Either she let go or he did. She relaxed her grip and tried to collect her scattered wits while he rubbed that rock-solid chest with his free hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked. When he wasn’t yelling, his voice was deep and just a shade raspy.

“Yes.” She looked everywhere but into those eyes of April green, feeling like a big fool. “Thank you.”

He released her arm. “So what do you want?”

She blinked, taken aback by his blunt demand. “I want to talk to you."

“I’m all ears,” he said. But his muscular body said he was all man, and the step suddenly seemed half again as narrow as it had only moments before.

Swallowing nervously, she reached for the door­knob. But strong brown fingers beat her to the draw. She nodded her thanks and preceded him into the trailer, preparing to beard the lion in his den. Boar’s nest would have been a better description.

Joni came to a halt not three feet beyond the threshold and stared around her in disbelief. In all her born days she’d never seen such disorder.

Blobs of red mud had been tracked across the linoleum floor and left to dry. Empty beer bottles and ashtrays filled to overflowing littered every available surface. A pinup girl wearing nothing but an Indian-style headband and a smile decor­ated an out-of-date wall calendar. The top of the desk looked fairly neat, but the sunlight that trick­led in through the dusty blinds illuminated sev­eral nicks and one deep cigarette burn.

The wildcatter closed the door, shutting out most of the drilling noise, then pulled off his hard hat and hooked it on a wall peg. Combing his fingers through hair as black as Oklahoma crude, he crossed to the mini refrigerator in the corner and took out a beer.

“Beer for breakfast?” she asked, resenting his silence.

He turned to her then, his gaze raking over her with insulting thoroughness. “You got something better to offer?”

Joni was a little slow on the uptake, but when his words finally did sink in, her jaw dropped open in fury.

She yanked off her hard hat, aiming to give him a piece of her mind. The metal brim hit her pony­tail holder, knocking it out of her hair and onto the floor. She turned to hang up her hat, think­ing things couldn’t get any worse, and found out how wrong she was when she accidentally kicked the barrette under the junk heap of a sofa that sat just a few feet away.

Her hair raining down her back like flames, she knelt beside the sofa and began rooting around underneath it.

“Get a move on, lady.” The wildcatter’s caustic tone made it clear that he had better things to do than to watch her imitate a demented anteater. “I happen to be busy.”

“So I’ve heard,” she muttered facetiously as she reached a mite farther and snagged the hair clip.

“You heard right," he retorted even as he eyed the captivating rear view she’d presented him. As a rule, he preferred bodies by Venus. But that tight little tush and those American beauty legs more than compensated for what she lacked in voluptuous curves.

Suddenly seeing the wedding band on her fin­ger, he set his still full beer bottle on the desk and spun away to retrieve the well log. He wasn’t long on scruples, but he was loyal to one. Never with a married woman.

“Listen, lady,” he needled her, dropping the drill­ing record on his desktop for emphasis, “I’ve got a lot of work to do and I’d really like to catch some Z’s before I go back on tour..."

For just a fraction of a second Joni entertained the notion of telling him exactly where he could go. But she needed him. And though he didn’t know it yet, he needed her.

She killed the notion and came to her feet, fac­ing him squarely across the desk. “I’ve got a prop­osition for you.”

He scanned her summarily, his eyes a wintry green. If she had the seven-year itch, she could damn well scratch it with someone else.

“A business proposition,” she clarified, glean­ing his thought.

He assumed an impatient stance. “Look—”

“No,” she interrupted him, reaching into the pocket of the man’s shirt she wore and pulling a rectangular card out for his inspection. “You look.”

He gave her a lazy, amused smile. “A recipe card?”

She bridled at his mocking tone. “A map.”

Intrigued in spite of himself, he looked a little closer at the fading pencil lines and saw that it was, indeed, a map.

“My grandmother drew it over fifty years ago,” she explained, laying the card atop the open drill­ing log on the desk.

He cocked a cynical eyebrow. “Okay, lady, I give. What’sthis got to do with me?”

As briefly as possible then, Joni told him about that long-ago day when his grandfather had vis­ited her grandfather’s farm.

Chance McCoy stood perfectly motionless, but he felt a dizzying sense of déjà vu. His grandfa­ther, for whom he was named, had told him this very same story....

Like old soldiers and others who have walked the razor edge of danger, the oil witch had loved to reminisce. Many’s the night he’d gotten into his cups and brought out choice fragments of memory, ornamenting them with imaginative de­tails for his audience of one.

Black gold gushing a barrel a minute from the earth, boomtowns springing up overnight, oil rigs growing like sunflowers across the Oklahoma red beds—young Chance had seen it all through his grandfather’s eyes.

Just when it seemed that the sky was the limit, decreasing gas pressure and declining crude prices had brought on the bust. Debts piled up like dust, and the Great Depression that followed made pan­handlers of millionaires and laughingstocks of oil spiritualists.

Those yarns—true in all the essentials but pret­tied up for the spinning—had fueled a burning ambition in the boy. Driven by the knowledge that the world is mainly dependent on exhausti­ble energy resources, and determined to redeem his grandfather’s good name, he enrolled at Okla­homa University and earned a degree in geology.

Unfortunately, the oil witch died two weeks be­fore commencement. Cirrhosis of the liver, his death certificate read. The night Chance graduated he got roaring drunk; the next morning he so­bered up and signed on with an independent oil producer. If he wanted to be a wildcatter, he had to learn the business from the ground up.

He’d roughnecked for a while, working at every job from stabber to supervisor. Men who’d been riding the derricks down for more years than Chance was alive respected his degree but came to rely on his nose for oil. He could smell the stuff, they said, and that wasn’t a skill that could be booklearned.

At the height of the oil and gas boom, he’d rounded up some investors and struck out on his own. He hit pay dirt his first time out, and there’d been few dry holes since.

Oil royalties rushed in like the tide, but the money was more the means to an end than an end in itself. Everywhere he drilled, from the Andarko basin to the Sandstone hills, he was following his elusive dream.

“How did you find me?” Chance demanded now.

“Believe me,” Joni answered, “it wasn’t easy.”

As she explained how she’d tracked him down, driving from one drilling site to the next and pump­ing strangers for information, he shook his head in amazement.

“Remember,” she said in summary, “all I had to work with was your grandfather’s name and my grandfather’s memories.”

“That wasn’t much to go on, considering the amount of time that’s passed.” He really had to admire her gumption. Given his erratic schedule the last few months, it was a wonder she hadn’t thrown in the towel.

“I was ready to call it quits, when fate led me here.”

“What do you mean?” His green eyes focused on her hands, and he wondered what kind of a sorry s.o.b. would let his wife work her fingers to the bone like that.

Not knowing what she’d done to earn his dis­dain, she looked down at her broken nails and skinned knuckles. All right, so she could use a manicure and a bottle of Jergens. But did he have to rub it in?

The silence lengthened, and Joni rushed to fill it. “After the banker rejected our application for a drilling loan, he said a man he didn’t know from Adam had stopped by a couple of weeks before and told him our exact same story. Needless to say, you could’ve knocked me over with a tooth­pick when he showed us your business card. And when he told us you were drilling right here in Redemption County...as I said, fate led me here.”

“Whatever’s fair.” Chance didn’t believe in fate. Which was why he’d spent so much of his free time the last few years talking to small-town bank­ers and other old-timers who might have known his grandfather in his heyday. If he wanted to drill where the oil witch had dropped, he had to spread the word.

Clouds scudded through the blue skies of her eyes as she glanced at the telephone on his desk. “I called the number on your business card nearly every day for two weeks, but I couldn’t get past your answering machine.”

“We’ve been working round the clock since we made hole.” He recognized her husky twang from the tape, and he’d planned to call her back as soon as he got the time.

“This morning I climbed in my truck and told Grandpa I was going to find you or die trying.” Her freckle-dusted nose wrinkled as she smiled triumphantly.

But he frowned, bothered by something she’d mentioned earlier. “Would you mind telling me why you were making application for a drilling loan?”

“To pay for casing and...such.” She bit her lip, debating whether or not to elaborate, then left it at that.

“But the driller buys those things.”

“That’s what Jesse James said.”

He stared at her with utter bemusement. “Jesse James?”

“One of Grandpa’s nicer names for the banker.” She felt ridiculously breathless when he returned her smile.

“What else did the robber baron tell you?” Chance’s play on words reminded her of the prob­lem at hand.

“That you’d pay us a landowner’s royalty for drilling rights.” Joni saw that she was going to break her barrette if she didn’t quit playing with it, and stuck it into her jeans pocket.

“Three dollars an acre,” he confirmed.

Her spirits dropped as she mentally multiplied their hundred and sixty acres by three. “But that’s only four hundred and eighty dollars!”

“You also receive an overriding interest in the proceeds if the well is a producer,” he pointed out.

She eyed him speculatively, thinking this was more like it. “What’s an overriding interest worth?”

“One-eighth of the—”

“Moneywise, I mean.”

“Mercenary one, aren’t you?” His retort wounded her pride.

“I didn’t drive all the way out here just to have you poke fun at me, Mr. McCoy.” She reached for the recipe card. “If you won’t take me seriously, I’ll simply take my business elsewhere.”

“Like hell you will.” With the speed of summer lightning his hand lashed out and caught her wrist before she could grab the card. She had him over a barrel, and he knew she knew it. “What do you want from me, lady?”

“My name is Fletcher,” she supplied with chilly dignity. “And I want a landowner’s royalty of twenty thousand dollars.”

“Twenty thousand dollars?!” His roar of disbe­lief thundered off the trailer walls.

She tried to pull her arm free; failing that, she went for broke. “I also want half the proceeds if our well is a producer.”

His mouth tilted into another one of those sar­donic smiles. “Our well, Mrs. Fletcher?”

She gave him tit for tat. “From where I’m standing, Mr. McCoy, my map and your money make it exactly that.”

Furious to think she’d beaten him at his own game, he released her as suddenly as he’d grabbed her. “What do you think I am—a walking wallet?”

Fearing she’d pushed him too far, she decided to make a clean breast of it. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but with our farm going under and Grand­pa’s medical bills piling up—"

His eyes sliced to her left hand, and her throat sealed over like a tomb. “What’s the matter with your husband that he can’t provide for his family?”

An anger that she hadn’t even realized she har­bored suddenly raged inside her. But she shut the barn door on the forest fire of her emotions and dredged up her voice. “My husband is dead.”