On the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, 1863, everything was ready. “Start her slowly,” Noble shouted from the derrick to Fertig, who stood beside the engine and turned on the steam. The rods moved up and down with steady stroke, bringing a stream of fresh water, which it was hoped a day’s pumping might exhaust. Then it would be known whether two of the owners—Noble and Delamater—had acted wisely on May fifteenth in rejecting one-hundred-thousand dollars for one-half of the well. Noble went to an eating-house near by for a lunch. He was munching a sandwich when a boy at the door bawled: “Golly! Ain’t that well spittin’ oil?” Turning around, he saw a column of oil and water rising a hundred feet, enveloping the trees and the derrick in dense spray! The gas roared, the ground fairly shook and the workmen hastened to extinguish the fire beneath the boiler. The “Noble well,” destined to be the most profitable ever known, had begun its dazzling career at the dizzy figure of three-thousand barrels a day! Crude was four dollars a barrel, rose to six, to ten, to thirteen! Compute the receipts from the Noble well at these quotations—twelve-thousand, eighteen-thousand, thirty-thousand, thirty-nine-thousand dollars a day! Sinbad’s fabled Valley of Diamonds was a ten-cent side-show in comparison with the actual realities of the valley of Oil Creek. Soon the foaming volume filled the hollow close to the well and ran into the creek. What was to be done? In the forcible jargon of a driller: “The divil wuz to pay an’ no pitch hot!” For two-hundred dollars three men crawled through the blinding shower and contrived to attach a stop-cock device to the pipe. By sunset a seven-hundred-barrel tank was overflowing. Boatmen down the creek, notified to come at once for all they wanted at two dollars a barrel, by midnight took the oil directly from the well. Next morning the stream was turned into a three-thousand-barrel tank, filling it in twenty-one hours! Sixty-two-thousand barrels were shipped and fifteen-thousand tanked, exclusive of leakage and waste, in thirty days. Week after week the flow continued, declining to six-hundred barrels a day in eighteen months. The superintendent of the Noble & Delamater Oil Company—organized in 1864 with a million capital—in February of 1865 recommended pulling out the tubing and cleaning the well. Learning of this intention, Noble and Delamater unloaded their stock at or above par. The tubing was drawn, the well pumped fifteen barrels in two days, came to a full stop and was abandoned as a dry-hole!