“The axle grease seep.” Hermann said in response to his cousin’s question.
“Hermann, there isn’t that much of it. Besides, the village has the right to harvest anything that comes up. You know that every bit as well as well as I do.”
Hermann smiled a smile that forced his ears further apart. “Exactly!”
“What do you mean by that?” Hanns asked.
“They can harvest what seeps to the surface. The family still owns anything deeper than a plough can turn.”
“So?”
“Oil, Hannsi, it is all about the oil. The family is sitting on a gold mine and you own it.”
“Oil?”
“That’s right! Oil! We will sink a well over the grease seep.”
“Hermann, the village is not going to let us drill a well and pump out oil without making a fuss.”
“Hannsi? How are they going to stop us? We own the land. We own what is on it and what is under it. The tenants hold a lease. They have leave to farm the land and build in the village. Someone else owns the rents. But the family still owns the land,” Hermann smiled. He knew there was something a bit odd about the terms of the Lehen the family held.
When their ancestor was given the fief ages ago, in return for his knightly service at arms, he thought there might be something worth mining on the land. So he asked for and got the right to mine. The family figured the Herzog gave it to him because the then “His Grace, the duke” knew there was nothing there. They owned the mineral rights free and clear in the face of any custom to the contrary and they could prove it. Hermann’s grandfather staggered out of the burning manor house with his arms wrapped around an iron-bound chest to die a slow painful death from horrible burns. The chest held the family papers. Some were so old the parchment was brittle. “I told you, you’re sitting on a gold mine.”
“So, maybe I have a right to the oil? But the tenants have the use of the land.” Hanns was skeptical.
“Hannsi, they have never cropped that portion. They have never run stock on it to graze. They don’t harvest the grease anymore.” Hermann was sure of this because they always checked anytime they hunted through the area. If they were harvesting the grease a toll was due the family. “They are not using it, they haven’t ever used it other than years ago to collect any grease that came to the surface and they can still do that. It is like the wood lot next to it, if it isn’t technically part of the wood lot anyway. They do not have the use of the land other than the limited right to harvest the grease, just like there is a set portion of the trees they can take.”
“Still, Hermann, we don’t have one of those things that goes hiss and thump.”
“You mean a steam driver?”
“Whatever you call it. We don’t have one and we can’t afford to hire one. We couldn’t even get one to the seep if we did. There is no road back there, only a path and the only bridge is a log across the creek.”
“Don’t need one. All a steam driver does is push enough steam under the hammer so the weight goes up then the steam escapes and the weight comes down. Ten men with a rope can do the same thing.”
“Hermann, you’re not listening to me. We don’t have the money. We can’t afford to hire ten men.”
A stranger turned from the next table turned to face them and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to intrude. And I wasn’t meaning to eavesdrop on your conversation. But you weren’t being particularly quiet about it. Do I understand correctly that the only thing between you and an oil well is capital to hire labor and buy materials?”
“No,” said Hanns.
“Yes,” said Hermann.
“Let me introduce myself,” the short, blond, blue-eyed stranger said, pulling his chair up to their table. “My name is Adolph Holz.” He faced Hanns. “You have a grease seep?”
Hanns looked at the short man with ice blue eyes and blond hair that was almost white from the summer sun and formed an opinion. He was probably a small-time merchant or a younger son of a larger merchant house. His clothes were not rich, but he was not a laborer by a long spell. Hanns decided he could trust the man to be reasonably honest as long as he kept an eye on him and counted the change. “Yes. But there isn’t that much of it and the tenants have a right to what there is,” Hanns said.
Herr Holz turned to Hermann. “You are convinced that you can get oil out of it?”
“Absolutely! I work on a drilling crew and we’ve sunk three wells in or next to seeps just like it. I can do the same on family land. All Hanns has to do is turn loose of the money and I can make the family rich again!” Hermann glared at his cousin.
“Hermann, you’re crazy. Besides I haven’t got enough money to do it. And anyway, I wouldn’t let you throw it away even if I had it.” Hanns glared right back.
“My good fellows, please, there is absolutely no cause for family to turn against family here. Now, Hanns, I gather it is not the idea of trying for an oil well that you dislike but the thought of spending the money?”
“I don’t have the money!” Hanns replied.
“Yes he does! He just won’t turn loose of it!”
“And if Hermann could do this without you having to invest any money in it, then would it be all right for him to try?”
“I guess so. Yes, if the tenants don’t object and if the rent holder doesn’t object, and I don’t really see how they can do anything other than grumble, I can let him drive a well on the land, it should be all right. After all, it is our land. Yes, as long as he pays for it and it doesn’t cost me anything then he can drill his well.”
Hermann sneered. “You know I can’t raise that kind of cash.”
Holz smiled. “But if you had the cash you are sure you can bring in an oil well?”
“Sure I can!”
“Then the solution is simple.” He looked at Hanns again, “I will put up the money, Hermann will organize and run the project, you will provide the land and we will split the income three ways.”
“Fine,” said Hanns.
“No way!” said Hermann.
“What?” Hanns was truly shocked.
“That oil is ours. I’m not giving away one third of it just because you are too cheap to pay for the drilling.”
“Hermann, I really don’t have the money!”
“Then we will find it somewhere else.”
* * *
Adolph Holz saw his chance at a life-changing dream slipping away. “One quarter?” He offered, while waving to a bar maid and making the hand down circular motion that the Wild Cat patrons had learn meant another round. The patrons and staff now accepted it as a way of saying, “Bring another of whatever anyone in the group is drinking.”
In the end, they agreed it was a loan and Adolph would get one half of the output until the loan was paid back, then, a hard-bargained seven percent of the profits after that.
“Why are you doing this?” Hanns asked the stranger.
“I have the money.” Which was true. Even if it wasn’t his money, he did indeed have it. “I like to gamble.” This too was true. “This sounds like a better bet than a game of cards.” This, though, was a cold blooded lie.
* * *
“Hermann, why didn’t you hire a steam hammer?” The brawny fellow, who was sweating away, stripped to the waist, in the August heat, asked his friend.
“Johannes, we’ve been over that before. It would have been too much trouble to get it here and it cost too much! We would have had to build a road and a bridge just to get it across the creek. This way all we had to do was build a derrick and the trees for the lumber were already here.”
“If we have to go very deep this is going to take forever.”
“When I was child the crude was practically bubbling up out of the ground. It looked just like that last seep we sank a well in before we quit to come here,” Hermann said for the fourteenth time.
“Quit your grousing and pull,” was all Adolph Holz had to say on the topic. Once he put up the money, Holz wanted to be invol
ved in every step of the project. On the first day, when he tried to sit and watch, work ground to a halt. It wasn’t like his name was von Holz or something. So he was bending his well-dressed if scrawny back to the rope along with Hermann and the hired help. Hanns, of course, claimed he could not free up the time to work on the project. “Hey, I’m providing the land and the lumber you want to cut for the scaffolding. Don’t ask me to waste my time on top of that.” There had been an argument about the lumber until it was pointed out that it would still be there when they were done and it would be cut and ready to be dragged out.
Once the derrick was up they started driving. They had been at the actual process of picking up and dropping the hammer for four days. Late in the day they took a rest from the backbreaking labor. Hermann, as always, dropped a lead weight on line down the pipe. When he pulled it up the last two feet were dark, slimy and stinky. Hermann’s shout of sheer joy brought the tired crew up from the ground on the bounce.
“Well, we still have to build a road and a bridge to get the crude oil to the river,” Johannes said, “unless you want to wait until winter and move it on sleds.”
Adolph heard him and quickly snapped, “No.” Then in a calmer voice he said, “Oh, we’ll need the road and the bridge but not for the crude. We’ll refine it here and only ship out what we sell. The rest can go to surfacing the road.”
“We can’t get a cracking tower in here, even if you are willing to pay for one. It will have the same trouble we would have had trying to bring in a steam hammer. It is just too big and too heavy,” was Hermann’s comment.
“The cracking towers are new, aren’t they? Do we really need one?” Adolph asked. No one wondered why or how Adolph knew so much theory and history of the oil fields while having little or no actual experience. Watching and talking about the up-timers, and what they were doing, was a major pastime in the Wietze community.
“Hermann,” Johannes said, “you didn’t start working in the oil fields as early as I did. I helped sink the very first well. You don’t need a cracking tower to get started. You need a still.”
“You mean like they use to make brandy?”
“Yes, but bigger. And you can make it out of iron, not copper. Because after the first still, which, I think, they actually did get from a brandy distiller, they built the next one out of iron. Instead of a coil it fed into a forty-foot-tall cooling tower.”
“The cracking towers aren’t that tall,” Adolph objected.
“No, they’re not,” Johannes said. “But they’re all metal and they operate under pressure. This was just two layers of ironbound wood with catch basins at different points. You see, the heavier oils won’t go as high when they’re vapors. So the gasoline is collected near the top of the tower, there is only one basin higher, and the asphalt collects at the bottom. What gets cleaned out of the boiling pot any time the system goes down is good for road work too.”
“Iron bound wood? You mean like a barrel? Can we get the cooper in the village to make it for us?” Hermann asked.
“Why not?” Johannes answered. “That’s who they got to make the first one at Wietze; the local cooper built it for them.”
“We’re going to need a steady supply of barrels anyway,” Hermann said, “We might as well hire the cooper full-time if we can. His son should be able to handle their farm.” The cooper and his family were half farmers. They did not have the right to cultivate enough land to make a living so they made barrels when they weren’t working the land.
“Yes, but even if he can build us a barrel that tall, we would have to know where to tell him to put the catch basins, and we would need valve cocks to drain what is caught,” Adolph objected.
“Herr Holz, the latter are just oversized barrel spigots,” Johannes tapped the side of his head, “and where to put the basins is all right up here.” He was part of the crew that put the first one together and he could reproduce the gaps between the basins in terms of how many body lengths it was between taps and where the taps fell on his body when he was standing next to it. In other words he could place them within a few inches of where they needed to be.
“If it was that easy, why did they go to the all metal high pressure cracking towers?” a skeptical Adolph asked.
“They could get more of what they wanted out of the crude that way. But we can sell the gasoline and the kerosene and the fuel oil to whoever wants it, what comes out under the fuel oil and over the asphalt base we can sell to the refinery at Wietze and they can crack it.”
Adolph looked at Johannes. “If you know so much about it, why don’t we just build a cracking tower?”
Johannes laughed softly. “Because the first cracking tower took forever to build; then it took even longer for them to get it to work right. It kept springing leaks. When they got it tight they had to install bimetallic strip temperature gauges and a lot of other claptrap I never had anything to do with, don’t understand and can’t do. But I can build a condensing tower, if you can get a blacksmith to set up a forge out here and a cooper to work on site, then a week from now we can be hauling refined oil off to Wietze.”
Adolph look at Johannes and smiled. “Let’s go talk to the smith and the cooper and see if we can get ’er done,” he said, using a fashionable up-time phrase.
“Herr Holz, are you sure you want to do this? We can sell the crude to the refinery in Wietze. Right now all you’ve got tied up is a week’s labor for the crew, some tools, the drilling head, pipe and the metal parts for a walking beam to pump it out of the ground. We can turn a clean profit in short order.”
“Yes, but we can make a lot more selling to the end user instead of a middleman.” Holz gave Hermann an explanation that made sense, even if it was far from the whole reason. “I’ve got the money, and shouldn’t we get a steam engine in here to run the pump?”
“I suppose we should so the well can pump around the clock and not just when someone is walking the beam. It’s okay with me, if you want to spend the money. I’ll get the crew started on the bridge across the creek,” Hermann said. “That’s just labor and lumber and Hanns can scream all he wants to about us cutting trees.”
“Why don’t you start by rough splitting forty-foot barrel staves out of one of those big old oaks?” Adolph asked, pointing to the stand of oaks on the ridge overlooking the seep. Some of the trees were well over a hundred years old and the oldest were over a hundred feet high. Each and every one of them was accounted for. If one fell in storm then the tenants had the right to cut it up for firewood. If they wanted structural lumber it would have to be paid for.
“I can hear Hannsi screaming now.” Hermann grinned from ear to ear.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Aldoph asked.
“No, we’ll go ahead and get started on it.” Herman replied. “Hannsi will okay it when he figures out it means more money in the long run. You tell the cooper the rough staves are waiting for him. Then after you are through in the village, go see Hanns and tell him he needs to settle up with the tenants and the rent holder for widening the path into a road. You can mention that we are building a cracking tower. I’ll deal with him over cutting the tree when he comes out to see what a cracking tower is.”
Johannes was a bit overly optimistic in his estimate. It took two weeks before the first run came pouring out of the tower and into barrels. It was three and a half weeks before the oxen pulled the first stout tanker cart the cooper and wheelwright put together, full of heavy oil, over the new bridge across the creek to start its journey to Wietze. It took that long to get the paperwork settled with the tenants and the rent holder for the road across the leased land.
* * *
Hanns, Hermann, Johannes and Adolph walked into the field office and told the receptionist they wanted to talk to Jerry Trainer.
“Can I ask what you wish to see him about?” the clerk asked.
“Yes,” Hanns said. “We need to know if he wants to buy our full output or just our heavy oil for cracking?”
> “What are you talking about? All of that is settled before they send in a drilling crew.”
“Well, they didn’t send in a crew, we drilled it ourselves. We’ve got fourteen barrels of heavy oil in a tanker cart outside. You can pretty much dictate the price on it, but if he wants the gasoline, the kerosene and the fuel oil, then he’s going to have to give us the full market price on it or we’ll sell it ourselves.”
Jerry Trainer walked through the open door of his office. He looked over the four men standing there, made eye contact with one of them and said, “Johannes? I heard you went wildcatting. We were wondering whether you had any luck or not. You’ve got a cart of crude outside?”
“No, Herr Trainer, we have a cart of heavy oil. We cannot crack it so we thought to sell it to you. Of course, if you do not want to buy it we can burn it to distill the next run.”
They would have to use part of the last run to boil the next one anyway. Hanns made it clear that he was not about to let them cut any more firewood without paying for it. Fortunately the trimmings off the trees that went to build the derrick more than met their needs so far. But that was it. Hanns was adamant. Even the trimmings from the timber cut for the bridge and what the cooper didn’t use was now set aside to wait for an itinerant charcoal burner to come through. The charcoal burners preferred to work with well-seasoned small branches. The firewood was corded up and shortly would be on its way to the manor house now that a bridge spanned the creek. Until the charcoal burner came, the brush pile encouraged rabbits and other small game, which Hanns thoroughly approved of and the farmers truly hated. Even with the prospects of the oil money coming in, the habit of being tight with the resources was deeply ingrained.
“Well, let’s go take a look at what you have, shall we?” Jerry said.
Outside, Jerry cracked the wooden valve open just a hair and caught a tablespoon full of oil in the palm of his hand. He looked at the color and rubbed a bit of it between the thumb and forefingers of his right hand. “Yeah, you’re right, it’s heavy oil. You can sell it for lubricant or we can crack it for gas and oil. Let’s see, if you’ve got fourteen barrels of heavy oil then you should have about—” Jerry ran off a very accurate list, measured in barrels at fifty-five gallons to the barrel, of how much of each type of petroleum they had. “If you don’t match those numbers then you’ve not condensed it correctly. And of course we will do a quality control check on every cart you bring in, but assuming it’s okay, then let’s see—” Jerry did some quick math and spun off totals and named prices per barrel which were indeed not far below what he was getting for it. Since he ran the only refinery in the world, until now, at least, it would seem he had an effective monopoly on petroleum sales, other than what found its way onto the black market, of course. He would just as soon keep it that way for as long as possible so it made sense to buy their entire output. “How does that sound, Johannes?”