Somehow Steeldust Jack was certain he felt, actually felt, the hot gush of air blowing past his ear an instant before the flames erupted. He wasn’t sure where the fire actually started—everywhere at once, it seemed. One minute the dusk air was cool and crisp, and the next it was superheated amid the blinding glow of an inferno that swept across the land like a blanket being draped on a body. It was dark and then it was bright, with seemingly no transition, as if he’d blinked the flames to life between breaths.
The smell he’d detected on the air before blew into him with a force that nearly toppled Jack Strong from his feet. The noxious scent of oil, he realized, now aflame with burned pine, grass, and oak added to the mixture. Steeldust Jack wasn’t thinking right then about how the Comanche had managed to light the whole of the oil nearest the ground on fire. Most likely, they’d figured out some way to force it up to the surface, if it wasn’t there already, and then let it spread in pools, following the natural grade of the land. But Steeldust Jack wasn’t thinking of that.
He was thinking of the screams. Just a few to start with, but increasing by the second as the flame burst fed by the oil captured more and more of Rockefeller’s men in its grasp. The worst of the screams came when those who escaped the initial burst realized they were trapped by walls of flames on all sides of them. Jack Strong thought he saw men, some with their clothes flaming, tearing out for the stream that supplied the reservation with its water. And when they got close, a fresh wall of flames spurted upward, yet another trap sprung.
The screams only got worse from there.
And kept coming.
Steeldust Jack thought he’d never lose sleep over anything but memories of the Civil War again, only he was wrong. The awful screaming and stench of burning flesh and hair, pushing through the oil-rich air, was worse than any battle he’d fought in or any carnage he’d seen.
Nature takes care of its own, Isa-tai had told him.
He’d been a fool not to listen, not to realize that damn kid had something deadly up his sleeve—carried out in concert, no doubt, with the tribal elders holding his leash. Steeldust Jack had tried to warn off John D. Rockefeller, but the man wasn’t hearing it, convinced that his wealth and power, rising behind the guise of Standard Oil, insulated him from the kind of violent opposition he was hardly averse to dispensing himself. The Comanche likely would have accepted the men killed in the hotel as trade for the three boys dragged to death the day before, but once Rockefeller wouldn’t back down, all bets were off.
Jack Strong cursed himself for not recognizing the pungent scent of oil on the air, for not figuring the reservation’s abandonment had to have some deadly plan behind it. Now dozens of men were being roasted alive, their plight worsened by the secondary explosions that came when the oily flames found boxes of dynamite loaded onto wagons. Huge curtains of flame exploded both out and up; the hot gush of wind blown into him was comparable to a cannon’s backdraft.
Steeldust Jack made himself stay on the hilltop until the echoes of the final screams had faded into the descending night. He’d never get that sound from his ears, or the smell from his nostrils. Nor had he ever felt more helpless. The Indians may have prevailed in this battle, but the war against the likes of John D. Rockefeller was one they were destined to lose.
The flames were still raging when Jack Strong finally walked his horse down the hillside. He wasn’t sure if Rockefeller was among the survivors who’d managed to flee. But before he could give the matter more thought, his eyes settled on one of the strangest sights he’d ever seen.
The flames had all spread downwind from the Comanche corn crops, miraculously sparing them. Stalks blew in the smoke-rich air, seeming to dodge the floating embers that disappeared into the fall of night before Steeldust Jack’s eyes.
91
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Opinions vary as to how many of Rockefeller’s men died that day,” D.W. Tepper finished. “I’ve heard as many as fifty to as few as a dozen. You won’t find any of that written up in any Texas history book, but it’s supposed to be the God’s honest truth of what happened.”
“But you don’t think so,” said Caitlin.
“In spite of all the money he spread around, I think there were plenty in Austin back then who wanted John D. Rockefeller, and everything he represented, out of the state. He was a Northerner, and I doubt the folks in Austin fancied him any more than the Comanche did. Who knows, maybe they were in it together, since where else did the money come from to help the Indians rebuild the reservation? They reclaimed the land sometime in the next decade, led by a leader who called himself White Eagle.”
“You’re kidding.”