[Johnny] Russell was in his late thirties, with a soft, round face and the slight extra girth that comes form too many years of eating bad food in faraway places. He had dark-blue eyes, but everything else was red: hair, moustache, jumpsuit, windbreaker. His home and family were in Nacogdoches, but during the drilling of Johnston No. 3, a well-side mobile trailer was his residence 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

...Growing up in Nacogdoches, Russell had imagined his future to be in ranching. "I bought me some cows when I was nineteen," he said. "I only had 'em three months before the price hit bottom." To feed his cows, Russell joined a cousin who worked on a rig. "I sold out as soon as the price went up. I've hated cows ever since."

Oil was different from ranching. It wasn't at the mercy of the weather or- so it seemed in those innocent days of 1973- of irresistible market forces. To Russell, the joy of working in the oil fields was that a man's fate depended only on two things: "How much sense he has and how hard he works." In five years he worked his way up to driller, the top position on a drilling crew. The rig count was in full thrust then, and company men were in short supply. Exxon hired him off the rigs, gave him a month of training, and sent him into the field as a company man making $30,000 a year. He was 24 years old.

In 1982, when the rig count began to fall, Russell left Exxon for Tenneco. Four years later he was supervising a well in New Mexico when the price of ail plunged to $10 a barrel. The bad news came over the telephone: "When you get through with this hole, shut her down and go to the house." Russell decide to set up a consulting business as a company man for hire. He got enough jobs to see him through, one of which was a successful horizontal well in Oklahoma. When the Pearsall boom hit, he had experience in the technique. ...