Texas by the Tail

overcoats, and she still would have been wearing nothing, and she would have known it and liked it. Because she was built that way, too.

She was a bitch with her tail up. She came toward him bitchily, the svelte hips swaying with promise, the extravagant breasts bobbling and jiggling. And the heat welled out of her from fifty feet away.

He tore his gaze away from her, the thrusting lewdness of her body. He rubbed his eyes, as though rubbing the sun out of them, and then her boot heels clicked on the packed earth, and he at last looked into her face.

Looked and was almost sick.

For what he had thought was a girl was a woman. An old woman. Which meant that she had to be Gidge (Agatha) Lord.

Her hair was not blonde but a dirty gray. The face beneath it was burned to a deep brown; withered and shrunken as though by some savage headhunter's rite. Her eyes were so pale that they seemed colorless, all milky whites. He could hardly see her mouth until she opened it- -only a brown wrinkle in the deeper brownness of her flesh.

She held out her hand. Mitch started to extend his, and she viciously slapped it away.

'The checks, Corley! Let's have them!'

'I'll be glad to,' Mitch said. 'In exchange for thirty-three thousand dollars.'

'Give! '

The cowhands had lounged up to her sides and a little past, forming the ends of a half-circle. They stood with their thumbs looped in their belts, their jaws chewing lazily as they held him in a cold, unwinking stare.

Mitch shrugged lightly, managing a surprisingly cheerful grin. 'Well…' He passed over the checks. 'As long as you insist…'

Taking out his cigarettes, he made a gesture of passing them around. He beamed confidence and good-nature at the two men, trying to bring them under the sway of his personality, fighting with the only weapons he had. The men remained exactly as they were, thumbs looped in their belts, eyes staring unblinkingly, acknowledging his existence only as something potentially interesting but thoroughly unimportant.

Mrs. Lord examined the checks, one by one.

Then she ripped them to pieces, and hurled the pieces into Mitch's face.

'You filthy prick! You know what we do to pricks around here?'

'I'll bet you're going to tell me,' Mitch said.

'I'm going to show you! What do we do with pricks, Al?' There was a low chuckle from behind Mitch. 'Put 'em in a hole, ma'am.'

Mitch whirled, but he wasn't fast enough. Nothing would have been fast enough. There was no running from a spot like this. The rope sang and dropped over him. It jerked and he flew off his feet. His head banged down hard on the stony dirt, and a million skyrockets went off at once and he passed out.

When he came to, he was being hoisted up on the floor of the stub derrick. His feet were firmly tied now, although his hands and arms were free. He pushed himself up, rubbing the dirt out of his eyes.

A couple of men were prying up a square of planks in the middle of the floor. Two others were stringing a block and cable in the derrick. Another, a very young man, was standing with his arm around Mrs. Lord, his hand patting one of her flaring buttocks.

They saw Mitch looking at them, and laughed. But they moved a little apart.

Mitch massaged his aching head, and glanced up into the rig. As he did so, one of the men there swung out and down, riding a cable. He came down, and Mitch suddenly went up. Shot up feet first into the derrick.

He went up about thirty feet. Then he came gently down, until he hung poised over the gaping hole in the derrick floor.

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