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the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.
    He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflecting off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up-or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.
    Drilling a well represented different things to different people. Even for Waters, who had pored over countless maps and miles of logs, who had mapped the hidden sands, it meant different things. First was the science. There was oil seven thousand feet below this land, but there was no easy way to find out exactly where. Not even with the priceless technology available to Exxon or Oxy Petroleum. In the end, someone still had to punch a hole through numberless layers of earth, sand, shale, limestone, and lignite, down to the soft sands that sometimes trapped the migrating oil that sixty million years ago was the surface life of the planet. And knowing where to punch that hole…well, that was a life’s work.
    In the 1940s and ’50s, it hadn’t been so hard. Oil was abundant in Adams County, and quite a few fellows with more balls than brains had simply put together some money, drilled in a spot they “had a feeling about,” and hit the jackpot. But those days were gone. Adams County now had more holes in it than a grandmother’s pincushion, and the big fields had all been found as surely as they were now playing out—or so went the conventional wisdom. Waters and a few others believed there were one or two significant fields left. Not big by Saudi standards, or even by offshore U.S. standards, but still containing enough reserves to make a Mississippi boy more money than he could ever spend in one lifetime. Enough to take care of one’s heirs and assigns into perpetuity, as the lawyers said. But those fields, if they existed, would not be easy to find. No rank wildcatter was going to park his F-150 to take a leak in a soybean field, suddenly yell, This here’s the spot! with near-religious zeal, and hit the big one. It would take a scientist like Waters, and that was one of the things that kept him going.
    Another motivator was simpler but a little embarrassing to admit: the boyhood thrill of the treasure hunt. Because at some point the science ended and you went with your gut; you slapped an X on a paper map and you by God went out to dig up something that had been waiting for you since dinosaurs roamed the planet. Other guys were trying to find the same treasure, with the same tools, and some of those guys were all right and some were pirates as surely as the ones who roamed the Spanish Main.
    Waters’s Land Cruiser jounced over a couple of broken two-by-fours, and then he turned into the open area of the location. Parking some distance from the other vehicles, he got out with his briefcase and map tube and began walking toward the silver Lincoln parked beside the Schlumberger logging truck. The car’s interior light illuminated three figures: two in the front seat, one in back. Cole Smith sat behind the wheel. Once he spotted Waters, the Continental’s doors would burst open with an exhalation of beer and whiskey, and the circus would begin. As Waters walked, he breathed in the conflicting odors of river water, mud, kudzu, pipe dope, and diesel fuel. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, but it fired the senses if you knew what it added up to.
    Suddenly,