Oil! by Upton Sinclair

The new road was done, and the bunk-house was done, and occupied; Dad's boss-carpenter had gone up there, and Paul was working with him on the derrick. Then came the fleet of motortrucks, with the drilling tools, and they were rigging up, and Paul was helping with that. Bunny was in school, and missing all the fun, but Dad got a report almost every day from his foreman, and passed it on to Bunny at suppertime. They were behind in their race with Excelsior Pete, which had already spudded in, having had the advantage of a road from the start; but Dad said not to worry, it would be a long way to the bottom of those wells.

Bunny's great hour came; it happened to be a Friday, and he begged off from school -- it wasn't often that a boy had such an excuse, that he had a "wildcat" named after him, and had to go to press a lever and start the drilling machinery! They set out early in the morning, and arrived in mid-afternoon; and rolling over that new road, hard and smooth and grey, how proud they felt! They came to the Watkins arroyo, and the new road leading into it -- their own private road, so marked! There was no one at the Watkins place, everyone had gone up to the well; you could see a crowd gathered about the derrick -- the nice new shiny derrick of yellow pine, built on a little shelf, halfway up the slope -- the Ross Junior-Paradise Number One!