Vaughn, as always, rode at the front of the group.

He was in a very happy mood.

The geologist was already under his control, and his retinue in the fortress had already made arrangements for him.

As soon as you find oil, hehe......

Thinking of this, he couldn't help but show a smug look on his face.

Roswell is still my Roswell, with these yellow-skinned scumbags, they want to fight me, and they deserve it?

However, as soon as he walked a little way west out of the stone fortress, he suddenly realized that something was wrong.

"Sir, which direction are we going?" The soldier behind Vaughn asked.

Vaughn couldn't answer, and according to his usual experience, he drilled in whichever way the wind blew.

As a result, when shepherds near Roswell drove their sheep to new pastures, they occasionally found their sheep inexplicably stuck in their holes or simply disappeared.

At first they thought it was a good thing to do, until they heard the rumbling of the machine.

The same situation also occurs in different terrain locations such as nearby deserts and mountain bases.

Five years of wasted time and countless useless holes in the ground around Roswell proved his experience wrong.

Holmes and Chen Jianqiu rode their horses and slowly walked in front of him.

When passing by Vaughn's side, Chen Jianqiu didn't forget to glance at him, shook his tongue, and shook his head.

Vaughn was so angry that he almost didn't scold.

What are you talking to me about a little miner? Okay, I think you'll have a few more days to go.

Holmes pulled out his precious notebook from his bag and pulled out a map from it.

The map looks a bit old, but it's still densely marked.

"This was hand-drawn the last time I came." Holmes said to Chen Jianqiu.

He studied the map carefully, then turned his horse's head and pointed in the direction of the small town of Roswell.

"Go there."

This is in the exact opposite direction to what they have just traveled, that is, they need to turn around, and the distance they have just traveled is completely in vain.

It was a troublesome thing for the wagon loaded with the steam rig to turn around, and the soldiers driving the wagon dared not speak out.

"Are you sure?" Vaughn turned to Holmes and asked, "It's a small town, and it's been coming and going for so many years, how can there be crude oil?" ”

"That's because they're blind." Holmes displayed the pride of being an intellectual, and he rode past Vaughn once more.

"You can really delay." Chen Jianqiu added.

Vaughn endured.

The team turned around and headed in the direction of the town.

Holmes did not enter the town with the party, but passed by the edge of the town.

Only then did Chen Jianqiu get a closer look at the specific situation of the town.

There are really not many people in the town. Except for those who live in pastures outside town,

On the edge of town, there were only a handful of Latino faces, sitting in front of their houses, watching their procession pass.

The broken signs hanging on the closed doors of the rooms indicated that someone might have been here.

After passing through the town, they turned in a southeasterly direction.

He didn't go far before Chen Jianqiu saw the pasture that Holmes was talking about.

Compared to the Chihuahua Desert to the west, it is an oasis, but the grass on the ground looks like it has been gnawed, and it seems that it is often frequented by herdsmen.

Holmes had already dismounted, and after checking his map, he began to hammer the stones along the way with a crane-beak hammer, and then observe the traces of the stone sections.

In a few moments they came to the edge of the meadow, near an irregular, vaguely river-like terrain.

With the help of Chen Jianqiu, Holmes was here for more than half an hour.

And Vaughn and his soldiers, too, crossed their waists and pestled there, watched the two of them chisel for half an hour.

After repeated confirmation, Holmes straightened up, pointed to a place around him, and said to Vaughn and his soldiers with a dazed face:

"That's it! Drill here. ”

"Uh, where is it?" Vaughn was still dazed.

"Why are you so stupid?" Holmes scolded, "This one is fine, there is an oil spring down there." ”

Hearing this, Vaughn hurriedly asked the soldiers behind him to unload the things on the carriage.

They had a lot of things to do, they had to build a frame out of that wood, and they had to assemble that bulky real steam turbine to drive the drill bits.

But these things were done by a dozen or so soldiers, and Vaughn watched intently with a pocket in his pocket.

Chen Jianqiu and Holmes stepped aside.

Chen Jianqiu took out two cigars from his saddle bag, lit one of them, shook it twice, and handed it to Holmes.

Holmes put it in his mouth and took a puff, then put the cigar in his hand in front of his eyes and looked at it:

"Huh? Isn't this the same box I bought last time in Lincolnshire? Later, I kept wondering where that box of cigars went. ”

"I was scattered by bullets, and I picked up a few and came back." Chen Jianqiu also ordered one for himself, his face was red and his heart was not beating, and he didn't mention anything about bribing the town police with a cigar.

"Are you sure there's crude oil down there?" Chen Jianqiu took a puff of his cigarette.

"I'm not sure, let's try it." Holmes passed the cigarette in his mouth for a moment and spit it out of his mouth again, "I've found this place before, and if this thing doesn't go down, I'll never know if it exists." ”

"Do you want to hit deep? Will it squirt? Chen Jianqiu searched for memories of the oil fields before the crossing, which he had seen on TV or on the Internet.

His impression of drilling oil is: the drilling rig hits down, hits, and black liquid sprays out.

"No, in my experience, if I can find it, it's all shallow crude oil on the surface, a little deeper than the bare ones in Pennsylvania, not so much pressure, and it won't spew out." Holmes smoked his cigar and shook his head, popularizing the knowledge of oil in this era to Chen Jianqiu.

Vaughn didn't notice the two men smoking cigars on one side, his attention was all on the busy soldiers.

As their commander said, these soldiers were very skilled in their business.

By the evening they had set up the shelves and camp, assembled the steam engine and the rig.

Two strong-looking soldiers, shoveling coal into the boiler, were ready to start the steam turbine and start drilling.

Holmes watched from the sidelines, he didn't know anything about machinery, and Chen Jianqiu, who was the assistant to the geologist, was also pretending to record something.

"How deep?" The soldiers looked at Holmes.

However, the geologist had not yet answered this question, and Vaughn next to him had already preemptively told them the answer.

"Drill for me, drill until crude oil bubbles up!"

Holmes's previous words gave Vaughn full confidence, and he was full of pride at this time, and the five-year wait was finally coming to an end.

So, the rig just started.

In this era, the efficiency conversion of the steam engine was not high, and the efficiency of the drilling rig it drove was even lower.

By midnight on the first day, they had drilled down about fifteen feet (about four and a half meters).

Vaughn and Holmes were ready to go to bed.

But the drills and the soldiers on the night shift could not rest, firstly, after the steam engine was started, there was no reason to stop, and secondly, Vaughn, who was full of enthusiasm, hoped that his soldiers would continue to fight until the crude oil was drilled.

Chen Jianqiu found a tent and slept with his clothes, but the steam turbine outside made a loud noise, which was a disaster for Chen Jianqiu, who would wake up at the slightest movement.

But the good thing is that he doesn't need to rest for long.

The next morning, when he came to the drilling in good spirits, Vaughn and Holmes were already standing there.

Both of them had dark circles around their eyes, but they both looked excited.

The next day, forty feet (about twelve meters), nothing was found.

Early in the morning of the third day, Vaughn and Holmes were still standing on the edge of the well.

The dark circles under the eyes of the two deepened.

When the rig reached a depth of fifty feet, Holmes, who had already begun to get a little distracted, suddenly ran towards the drill like crazy.

"Water! Water! He pointed around the drill hole, and the crowd leaned over to see that liquid was spilling from around the drill pipe.

Vaughn dipped his finger in some liquid and sniffed it in front of his nose, looked at it again, and scolded: "What the fuck is water, what do we want water for?" Keep drilling! ”

But Chen Jianqiu suddenly chuckled in his heart.

Holmes rushed in front of Chen Jianqiu and said excitedly: "I'll just say that there is an aquifer here, thank God, New Mexico has too rich groundwater resources, this is just a surface dive." ”

But for Vaughn, these obviously have little to do with him.

So the rig continued to run.

In the afternoon, for some reason, dark clouds began to gather on the horizon, and the dry place here seemed to be about to receive the same amount of rain as Lincolnshire, which was about to receive its few rains of the year.

At about sixty feet (about eighteen meters) of the drill bit, the rig suddenly stopped.

When Vaughn saw that the machine had stopped, he immediately yelled, "What the fuck are you doing? Why not keep drilling? ”

The soldier who was operating the machine looked nervous, and said to Vaughn with an embarrassed expression: "We, the drill bit, seems to have fallen into a gap. ”

"Are you pigs? Yes? Been doing it for so many years? Can this happen? Vaughn clutched his head in a frenzy.

Since the drill bit has fallen, there is no way to continue, and the soldier who controls the drill rig has to put the drill pipe back.

"Let's rest for a while." Holmes said to the soldiers, and Vaughn crouched in the corner alone, not knowing what to think.

Chen Jianqiu hung a jar from the borehole and went down.

All the water he had brought had gone into the boiler, and he was going to get some water to wash his face.

However, when he had just poured the water from the jar into the basin, he was stunned.

On the water in the basin, there is a viscous, black, liquid floating.

Petroleum!

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(End of chapter)