Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/188

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ELLO, Sheriff—Warner of Arko Pipe Line Company, speaking. Want you to come out to our tank farm at once. Found seven bodies when we cleaned out one of our big storage tanks to-day. Bring the coroner with you."

Four years as sheriff in one of the toughest oil fields the country has ever seen will harden a man to almost anything. I hung up the receiver and turned to one of my deputies.

"Look after the office till I get back, Bob. Found a bunch of stiffs in a tank at Smackover. Reckon I've got to go."

I climbed into my old flivver and started out to hunt up Doc Smith. He had been called to the south part of the field, so, leaving word for him to follow, I drove out from the county seat and headed toward Smackover.

The Arko Tank farm was just on the edge of the field. Twenty big, black steel tanks squatted in accurately spaced rows. Each held fifty-five thousand barrels of crude. They were used to store this oil until it could be pumped to the refineries at Shreveport and New Orleans. Two corrugated iron engine houses and a small field office completed the equipment.

Warner met me as I drove up. He was timekeeper for the Arko and was temporarily in charge until the superintendent returned from Shreveport.

"Come over to the west engine house," he said, leading the way. "We had to move them. Seven men, and not a mark of violence on a one. No papers or means of identification, not even a pocket knife. It looks like robbery, but how in tarnation did they get in that tank in that shape? When?

Contains one of the most imaginative stories ever written.

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