and a half-dozen others aided in the demoralization of prices. Murphy sold eighty acres of lot 619 for fifty-thousand dollars to the McCalmont Oil-Company. The Anchor Oil-Company’s gusher on lot 647 caught fire, without curtailing the flow, and was burning furiously as “Jim” Tennent arrived from Bradford. The scouts had their hands full, with the “white-sand pools” and the keenest masters of “mystery wells” to demand their best licks. Watching Murphy’s dry-hole on lot 633 was Tennent’s initial job. The Whale Oil-Company’s duster on lot 648 next claimed the attention of the scouts. It had been drilled below the sand-level and the tools left at the bottom. On Sunday night, July ninth, 1882, Boyle, Tennent and two companions raised the tools by hand, measured the well with a steel-line and telegraphed their principals that it was dry. This report jumped the market on Monday morning from forty-nine cents to sixty. The Shannon well on the Cooper tract needed constant care and the scouts divided the labor. Tennent and Rathbun one night sought to crawl near the well. A twig snapped off and a guard fired, the ball grazing “Jim’s” ear. In December Boyle and W. C. Edwards drilled Grandin No. 4 below the sand before the owners knew the rock had been reached. Its failure surprised the trade as much as the success of “646.” Boyle actually posted the guards to keep intruders away and they refused to let W. W. Hague, an owner of the well, inside the line until the contractor appeared and permitted him to pass! Boyle and Tennent did fine work north of the Cooper field. At the Shultz well Tennent, in order to make a quick trip of a half-mile to the pipe-line telegraph, clung to the tail of Cappeau’s horse and kept up with the animal’s gallop. Mercury might not have endorsed that style of locomotion, but it served the purpose and got the news to Jones ahead of everybody else. Tennent played the market skillfully, cleared twenty-five-thousand dollars on Macksburg lands and operated with tolerable success in McKean county. Nine years ago he removed to his thousand-acre prairie-farm in Kansas, the land of sockless statesman and nimble grasshoppers.