ck and thick as molasses, but water nevertheless.

Buddy Briskow was running the rig, and the dexterity with which he
handled brake and control rod gave him pride. He had seated his sister
on a bench out of the way, where she was protected from the drizzle,
and he felt her eyes upon him. It gave him a sense of importance to
have Allie watching him at such a crisis; he wished his parents were
with her. If this well blew in big, as it seemed bound to do, it would
be a personal triumph, for not many cub drillers could boast of
bringing in a gusher the first time. It was, in fact, no mean
accomplishment to make any sort of a well; to pierce the earth with an
absolutely vertical shaft a half mile deep and line it with tons upon
tons of heavy casing joined air-tight and fitted to a hair's breadth
was an engineering feat in itself. It was something that only an oil
man could appreciate. And he was an oil man; a darn good one, too, so
Buddy told himself.

He eased the brake and the massive bailer slid into the casing as a
heavy shell slips into the breech of a cannon. As he further released
his pressure, the cable began to pour serpentlike from the drum. Buddy
turned his wet, grimy face and flashed a grin at Allie. She smiled back
at him faintly. Some lightninglike change in her expression, or perhaps
some occult sense of the untoward warned him that all was not as it
should be, and he jerked his head back to attention.

There are moments of catastrophe when for a brief interval nature
slows, time stops, and we are carried in suspense. Such an instant
Buddy Briskow experienced now. He knew at first glance what had
happened, and a frightened cry burst from his throat, but it was a cry
too short, too hoarse, to serve as a warning.

During that moment of inattention the bailer had stuck. Perhaps five
hundred feet below, friction had checked its plunge, and meanwhile the
velvet-running drum, spinning at its maximum velocity by reason of the
whirling bull wheel, was unreeling its cable down upon the derrick
platform. Down it poured in giant loops, and within those coils, either
unconscious of his danger or paralyzed by its suddenness, stood Calvin
Gray.

Men schooled in hazardous enterprises carry subconscious mental
photographs of the perils with which their callings are invested and
they react involuntarily to them. Buddy had heard of drillers
decapitated by flying cables, of human bodies caught within those wire
loops and c