Gidge grabbed him by the hair, thrust her hag's face close to his. "Want to guess what you're going to get now? Think you can guess, hmm?"
But Mitch didn't need to guess. He knew.
Practically all modern oil wells are sunk with rotary rigs, which drill with bits attached to pipe. As the well deepens, more lengths of pipe are added, thus making a hole-a relatively small one-which is the same size from top to bottom. Old oil wells, however, any well drilled, say, before 1930, were drilled with cable tools, which made a hole by dropping a bit from a string of cable. This method required the frequent setting of casing (pipe), to protect the drilling tools from caveins. Naturally, each string of casing had to be smaller than the preceding one. This also meant, of course, that where a deep well was contemplated, the hole at the top had to be very large.
The hole Mitch was dangling over was old and huge; the so-called "big hole" of a deep test. But no well had been drilled. Two hundred feet down the bit had struck an unexpected vein of granite, and there was nothing to do but pull out and try another location.
The Lords had left the hold unplugged, planning just such use for it as it was now being put to. Their reputation being what it was, however, they had not had an opportunity to use it for a long time.
Mitch went down through the hole in the floor, and into the hole in the ground. He did not struggle. It was useless. His one hope was to make it as simple and painless as possible.
He held out his hands in front of him, like a diver, keeping his body stiff and straight. Going down crooked or twisted could result in serious injury. He sank into the yawing darkness smoothly, brushing but not scraping the sides of the hole. The blood rushed to his head and his brain roared with it. But he kept a firm hold on his nerves.
This was going to be damned bad. But nothing more than that. He wasn't going to die. They weren't going to kill him.
He held onto that thought as he went deeper and deeper into the hole. Repeating it over and over, They won't kill me, they won't kill me…
And he was wrong.
They were going to kill him.
Unintentionally.
Water had seeped into the hole since its last usage. No one knew it, it couldn't be seen from the surface. But it now stood more than half full of water.
Mitch went into it headfirst, and it closed over him.
22
Frank Downing, the gambler, had never been a sound sleeper. Too many of his years, particularly the early ones, had been lived in a world where sound sleepers suffered fatal accidents. He was a considerable distance removed from that world now, of course, but habit was strong in him, and he still slept in starts and snatches; feeling no impelling urge to sleep until it was too late, and he had to get up.
He liked to have a minimum of six cups of coffee before breakfast. With and after the meal, he would have a minimum of six more cups, by which time he was prepared to be reasonably affable to people-in his own way, of course, providing he felt them deserving of affability.
He had never felt that Frankie and Johnnie were deserving of it. He had to use them, yes (or at least he thought he had to), but what they deserved, in his opinion, was what they were so fond of dishing out. And he had secretly yearned for an excuse to give it to them for a very long time.
Since his evenings and nights were extremely busy, they had not been able to report back to him on the day of their visit to Teddy. Oh, they could have, if they had tried. But they had wanted to make the job look harder and more time-consuming than it was, so they had delayed until the following morning.
It was the morning after one of Downing's most sleepless nights. Moreover, being anxious to make a good impression, they arrived early for their appointment, thus finding him several cups of coffee short of his absolutely essential dozen. Then, they told him what they had done, giggling and snickering, very pleased with themselves. And his hand jerked at the news, and he slopped an overflowing cup of coffee on himself.
He caught their smirks and winks, as he tried to mop up with a napkin. But no one would have guessed that he did. He seemed wonderfully good-humored, as though losing a night's sleep and having his sacred waking-up schedule disrupted and spilling coffee all over three hundred bucks worth of clothes and having his strict orders disastrously emended by a couple of punks-as though all these had been delightful and heart-warming experiences.
Goddammit, he thought. That blows it for Mitch! It could have been a cinch, and these stupes have to act smart!
He smiled genially at them, and complimented them on their astuteness.
"Smart," he said. "Yes, sir, that was plenty smart. Funny I didn't think of it myself."
"Oh well"-Johnnie excused him patronizingly. "A man can't think of everything."
"Mmm-hmm," Downing murmured. "A man can't think of everything. That's pretty shrewd, Johnnie, I'll have to remember it."
"Anyway," Frankie cut in, "you didn't know that she had all that loot. I guess you would have, if you'd stopped to think about it, but- "
But there you were, Downing said. A man couldn't think of everything. "Guess I'll have to hire you boys to help me do my thinking," he added. "Excuse me a minute, will you?"
He left them briefly. Returning, he sat down in front of them on the edge of his desk. His hands were thrust in the pockets of his coat. Each hand gripped a roll of quarters.
"By the way," he said. "How did you boys happen to know Mitch's address?"
"Oh, she knew. Teddy knew where to take the dough," Johnnie smirked. "Keeping tabs on Mitch was kind of her business."
"But she's in a new business from now on," Frankie snickered.
Downing jerked his head at them confidentially, drawing them in close. "Got something funny to tell you guys. You'll get a bang out of it…" He grinned widely, his hands tightening on the rolls of quarters. "Mitch is away from Houston for a couple of days. Anyone that called on him would see the gal he lives with, a real hot-tempered babe who doesn't know that he-"
Frankie and Johnnie didn't wait to have it spelled out for them. They flung themselves backward, trying to make a break for it. Downing's loaded fists lashed out.
He got them both in their pretty pans, with a lightning swift one-two. Then, as they spun, he swung with a double-armed backhand, again connecting with such force that they crashed against opposite walls of the room.
They were still out to the world some ten minutes later when Ace came in. He gave them a raised-brow look, shook his head deprecatingly at Downing.
"You shouldn't let guys sleep in here, boss. It don't look good."
"There's something in the atmosphere, I guess," Downing said. "They dozed off right while I was talking to 'em."
"Well, that was kind of rude," Ace said, frowning at the recumbent youths. "How's your hearing these days, boss?"
"Not so good. The last guys you bounced around in the alley, I couldn't hardly hear it at all."
Ace expressed alarm. After all, he pointed out, the alley was only a hundred yards away. "You suppose we ought to run another test?"