Hawaii - James Michener [362]
He set up a pyramidal wooden derrick about twelve feet high, at the bottom of which were dung two large iron wheels connected by an axle upon which rope could be Wound when the wheels were turned by hand. This rope went from the axle and up to the top of the derrick, where it crossed on a pulley and dropped down to be lashed to the end of a heavy iron drill. Laboriously Overpeck cranked the heavy wheels until the iron drill was hauled to the top of the derrick. Then he tripped a catch and jumped back as the drill plunged downward, biting its way through sand and rock. Laboriously he turned the wheels and lifted the drill back into position; then a swift whirrrrr, and the next bite was taken.
"How long will this take?" Hoxworth asked, amazed at the effort required.
"A long time."
"Have you the strength?"
"I'm boring for a million dollars," the wiry little man replied. "I got the strength."
Days passed and weeks, and the determined engineer kept hoisting his drills, breaking their points on almost impenetrable hard pan, sharpening them by hand, and hoisting them once more. "You ought to have an engine," Whip growled as the work made slow progress.
"When I get some money, I'll get an engine," Overpeck snapped.
Now Whip saw the little fighter in a new light. "All your life you've been broke, haven't you?"
"Yep. All my life I was waiting for a man like you."
"Are we going to hit water?"
"Yep."
At two hundred feet the drills were hammering their way through cap rock, once soft ocean mud but now, millions of years later, rock as hard as diamonds. Whip grew despondent and was afraid to pass through the streets of Honolulu, where people already hated him for the way he had treated his former wife, Iliki Janders, and where they now laughed at him for his folly in trying to raise cattle on his barren acres. At first, when those who had sold additional land saw Overpeck's drilling rig, there had been consternation: "Has Whip bamboozled us? Did he know there was water below that rubble? Such fears relaxed when it was apparent that no water existed. "He's down to two hundred and fifty feet and is running out of rope," spies reported.
And then on the fourteenth of September, 1881, Milton Over-peck's plunging drill crashed through the last two inches of cap rock, and up past the iron, past the rope, gushed cold sweet water at the rate of one million three hundred thousand gallons a day. When it gurgled to the top of the well it kept rising until it reached the apex of the twelve-foot derrick and stood a steady fourteen feet in the air, hour after hour, month after month.
When Whip saw the glorious sight he became agitated and cried, "We must save that water!" But little Mr. Overpeck assured him, "Son, it'll run forever." They scooped out a large depression in which the water was impounded and then pumped to wherever it was needed. They drilled additional wells, all by hand, and Whip said, "Overpeck, it's ridiculous for you to do so much work. Let's buy an engine that'll do it for you," but the determined little man replied, "I finish these wells, I'm never going to work again. I'm going to get a hotel room, lease my land to you, and live easy."
He did all these things, but he had failed to anticipate the natural future of a man like Overpeck in Hawaii. One of the unmarried Janders girls smelled him out, checked the land records to be sure he owned the land he said he did, and married him. Thus his thousand acres was brought safely back into the grand alliance of Hoxworth-Whipple-Hale-Janders-Hewlett.
Whip worked like a maniac organizing his own acres, now six thousand, plus the thousand he leased from Overpeck, and by means of pumps and ditches brought water to all of it. He bought out the old Malama Sugar Plantation and transferred its name and operation to his new lands. Then, with the touch