“After my people lost our land to your kind. Forced to fight for what is ours, then presented with tiny patches like this, only to have it threatened, too.”
Steeldust Jack mopped the heat from his brow with a sleeve already mired in perspiration, swabbing it under the brim of his hat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did that man whose body got chopped up like a side of beef threaten you?”
Isa-tai’s spine relaxed. “Time for you to go.”
“What was he doing here, in these parts?”
“Ask him.”
“He’s in no condition to tell me.”
“His spirit then. And have that spirit take a message back to whoever sent him, that the same fate awaits whoever follows.” White Eagle turned his gaze on the sky. “But hurry. Night is coming.”
And that was when Steeldust Jack heard the scream.
11
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
What sounded like a gunshot ended Caitlin’s tale midthought, and the next moments unfolded in what felt like slow motion. First the police officers manning the line separating the two camps whipped out their guns. Then the construction workers mounted a fresh charge, with the young protesters not giving an inch.
Caitlin resisted the temptation to draw her own pistol. The blast sounded more like a car or truck backfiring, in retrospect, but it was enough to push already frayed nerves over the edge. She planted herself before Dylan and Ela so they couldn’t rush back to the entrance. She spotted Cort Wesley Masters storming across the scene, heading straight for them, red-faced and breathing so hard she could see his big chest contracting under his shirt. His focus was entirely on Dylan, as if Caitlin and Ela Nocona weren’t even there.
“When did you plan on telling me you dropped out of school, son?”
“I didn’t drop out,” Dylan said, looking up at Cort Wesley and trying to return his glare. “I’m just taking a semester off.”
“Well, I got a call from the registrar. Apparently, there were a bunch of forms you neglected to fill out, to the point where Brown isn’t sure you’re returning at all.”
Cort Wesley’s face was so red it seemed sunburned, and his breath was so hot it looked like smoke when it hit the moisture-soaked air. Caitlin could see the tension in the muscles beneath his shirt, his traps so pronounced they stretched the fabric of the T-shirt she’d bought him for his last birthday. Sweat dappled the fabric in splotches, and Caitlin figured that even the truck’s air-conditioning hadn’t been able to cool him off on the drive down here from Houston, where he’d been meeting with the principal of his younger son’s school.
Dylan slid closer to Ela Nocona. “We’re doing something important here.”
“We,” Cort Wesley repeated, seeming to notice Ela Nocona for the first time and, no doubt, coming to the same conclusion Caitlin already had. “So is it important enough to give up your future for?”
“Have you even heard what’s going on in North Dakota, on that Bakken oil field that straddles Indian land?” Dylan asked him.
“No, son, I haven’t.”
“It’s a repeat of how the nineteenth century went down for them. And now it’s happening here in Texas. Somebody’s got to do something.”
“That somebody being you,” Cort Wesley said. “Maybe I should haul you out of here. Tie you to the bed of my truck and drive you all the way back to Providence.”
Dylan shook his head and blew the hair from his face, then swiped at it again with a hand. Caitlin felt the air thicken between father and son. Dylan was still nearly half a foot shorter than Cort Wesley, at five foot nine, but he was not about to give an inch, no more than he did while playing running back for the Brown University football team, under famed coach Phil Estes. Caitlin let her gaze stray off them and found it fixing on an area where the press and spectators had been cordoned, toward a rail-thin figure who didn’t look much older than Dylan. Caitlin couldn’t place the kid, but something about him looked familiar enough to unsettle her in what her grandfather Earl Strong had called the “quiet parts.” She knew the kid from someplace, and wherever that was, clearly it wasn’t good, given her response to his presence.
“So you and the rest of these kids are trying to save the tribe from itself,” she heard Cort Wesley saying to Dylan, and she turned back toward them. “Is that it?”
“The elders are lying to them, Dad.”
“That’s none of your business.”