Anyhow, there was your “twist-off”; which meant that you had to lift out every inch of your two thousand feet of pipe. You pulled it up, and unscrewed it, four joints at a time—“breaking out,” the men called that operation; each four joints, a “stand,” were stood up in the derrick, and the weary work went on. You couldn’t tell where the break was, until you got to it; then you screwed off the broken piece, and threw it away, and went to your real job, “fishing” for the remainder of your drill-stem, down in the hole. For this job you had a device called an “overshot,” which you let down with a cable; it was big and heavy, and went over the pipe, and caught on a joint when you pulled it up—something like an ice-man’s tongs. But maybe you got it over, and maybe you didn’t; you spent a lot of time jiggling it up and down—until at last she caught fast, and up came the rest of your stem! Then you unscrewed the broken piece, and put in a sound piece, and let it all back into the hole, one stand at a time, until you were ready to start again. But this time you went at the rate Dan Rossiger considered safe, and you didn’t nag at him for any more “twist-offs!” Meantime Dad would be spending the day at his little office down in the business part of the town. There he had a stenographer and a bookkeeper, and all the records of his various wells. There came people who wanted to offer him new leases, and hustling young salesmen to show him a wonderful new device in the way of an “under-reamer,” or to persuade him that wrought casing lasts longer than cast steel, or to explain the model of a new bit, that was making marvelous records in the Palomar field. Dad would see them all, for they might “have something,” you never could be sure. But woe to the young man who hadn’t got his figures just right; for Dad had copies of the “logs” of every one of his wells, and he would pull out the book, and show the embarrassed young man exactly what he had done over at Lobos River with a Stubbs Fishtail number seven.