Aug. 16--Bob Richmond's 505 acres slope away from his back porch, then crest and dive back into each other. They sprawl before the foot of the house that Col. John Fairfax built in 1818.

It's all Richmond's now: the four stately walls of gray stone block, the garden (which the rabbits won't vacate even as you approach) and the green, rolling hills of Preston County, a couple miles east of Kingwood.

"Look at the turkeys out in the field," Richmond says, pointing 700 yards off to a grassy hilltop. Five or six of them strut about, blurred by distance.

Beyond them, a taller, tree-covered ridge conceals the Cheat River Valley. Richmond owns a portion of the bank, but "only a mile and a half," he says with a sarcastic grin, as if to say: "How much beautiful riverbank do you own ?"

It would take a lot to convince Richmond to let an energy company bulldoze part of it and suck the natural gas out of that land. He didn't allow it for $50 an acre. And when they offered him $100 an acre, he still refused.

Of course he refused, he says. They gave him a raw deal because they thought they could get away with it.

"I told them, I said, 'I'm just a simple hillbilly,' " Richmond says with that same sarcastic grin. " 'I don't understand these things.' "

The landmen who came to him in late 2007 couldn't have known that he's anything but a simple hillbilly.

As a diplomat for the State Department, Richmond maneuvered economic development in Vietnam during the war. He helped Mobil (it hadn't yet merged with Exxon) get the rights to a still-producing well off the coast of Southeast Asia.

He worked with Haitians to arrange a lease with a Colorado energy company that "drilled five wells dry as a bone."

For 30 years he did that sort of thing.

Then he started getting letters from landmen, people hired by oil and gas companies to negotiate leases on mineral rights.

Landmen from Mason Dixon Energy Inc., on behalf of Marathon Oil, wanted to lease his mineral rights for a price Richmond didn't think was fair. He says his land is worth more like $3,000 an acre and that he should get at least 20 percent of all the profits for selling the gas underneath it, not the state minimum 12.5 percent royalties they wanted to give him.

"I knew they were trying to screw me," he says.

One woman in Star City, who didn't want her name published to protect her privacy, says she inherited 121 acres of mineral rights in Monongalia County. Soon a landman representing Dominion Energy came to her door and told her not to pass up a $5-an-acre lease and 12.5 percent royalties.

She signed the contract, collected the few hundred dollars for the lease and waited to get rich. That was five years ago, and no one's drilled a single well. The lease didn't say they had to, and with gas prices so low, it hasn't been profitable to drill.

Dominion Energy renewed the five-year lease on her mineral rights once it expired. The language in the lease allows them to continue renewing as many times as they want.

There are stories like that all over the Marcellus Shale target area: north-central West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania. The friend down the road who got $5. The guy who took a subpar contract because he owed the hospital. The landman who told the neighbors Bob Richmond had signed his lease (Richmond has never signed a lease), and you should, too.

It's all just hearsay. But then there's a lot of hearsay -- and misinformation -- floating around these hills.

All eyes on Appalachia

Four hundred million years ago, a fish died and sank to the bottom of the ocean.

It decayed and left its carbon in the earth. As Europe and Africa collided with the Eastern Seaboard, creating the Appalachian Mountains, the carbon from that fish was bonding with hydrogen, creating methane and other hydrocarbons, the chief ingredients of natural gas.

Those hydrocarbons stuck in the sediments that were being packed together under tremendous pressure a mile and a half underground. That layer of sedimentary rock became the Marcellus Shale, and the fuel from that fish is still trapped in its pores.