West and north of Benninghoff were the farms of John and R. Stevenson. On the former, extending south to Oil Creek, Reuben Painter, a live operator, drilled a well in 1863. The contractor reporting it dry, Painter moved the machinery and surrendered the lease. He and his brothers operated profitably in Butler and McKean counties, Reuben dying at Olean in 1892. In November of 1864 the Ocean Oil-Company of Philadelphia bought John Stevenson’s lands. The Ocean well began flowing at a six-hundred-barrel pace on September first, 1865, with the Arctic a good second. Fifty others varied from fifty to two-hundred barrels. Thomas McCool built a refinery and the farm paid the company about two-thousand per cent! The principal wells on both Stevenson tracts clustered far above the flats, the derricks and buildings resembling “a city set on a hill.” Major Mills, justly proud of his King of the Hills, an elegant producer, delighted to visit it with his wife and two young daughters, one of them now Mrs. John D. Archbold, of New York. Painter’s supposed dry-hole, drilled seventeen feet deeper, gushed furiously, proving to be the best well in the collection! Said the Ocean manager, as he watched the oily stream ascend “higher ’n a steeple”: “A million dollars wouldn’t touch one side of this property!” Sinking a four-inch hole seventeen feet farther would have given Reuben Painter this splendid return two years earlier! He missed a million dollars by only seventeen feet! A Gettysburg soldier, from whose nose a rifle-ball shaved a piece of cuticle the size of a pin-head, wittily observed: “That shot came mighty near missing me!” Inverting this remark, Painter had cause to exclaim: “That million came mighty near hitting me!” “A miss is as good as a mile.” Various companies bored three-hundred wells on Cherrytree Run and its tiny branches without jarring the trade particularly. Prolific strikes on the Niagara tract, in the rear of the Benninghoff lands, added to the wealth of Phillips Brothers. Kane City, two miles north of Rynd, raised Cain in mild style, “wearing like leather.” Farther back D. W. Kenney’s wells, lively as the Kilkenny cats, stirred a current that wafted in Alemagooselum City. Its unique name, the biggest feature of the “City,” was worked out by Kenney, a fun-loving genius, known far and wide as “Mayor of Alemagooselum.” He and his wells and town have long been “out of sight.” Kane City casts an attenuated shadow. [Illustration: ELLS ON THE NIAGARA TRACT, CHERRYTREE RUN.]