“And what did that vision show that brought you to Texas, Mr. Rockefeller?”
“Same thing that brought me to Titusville, Ranger: ambition. My company, Standard Oil, has been digging wells wherever we have a notion oil is located. And I’m here to tell you that your state is sitting on an ocean of it.” Rockefeller kicked his chair back enough to cross his legs, holding court, steaming coffee cup in hand. “My scouts tell me that Indian reservation has stores of oil so vast that it actually leaks up to the surface when there’s enough storm runoff.”
“Well, sir, that’s all well and good,” Steeldust Jack told him. “Except for one little problem.”
“What’s that, Ranger?”
“You don’t own the land, and unless the Comanche tribe in question so permits, you can’t so much as touch it.”
John D. Rockefeller pushed his chair in as far as it would go. Something changed in his expression. Jack Strong recognized it from the faces of the most violent and dangerous men he’d ever encountered. Rockefeller’s skin reddened, the flesh of his face seeming pumped up with air, to the point that it all but swallowed his mustache.
“You and me,” Rockefeller said, his voice sounding like the words had scraped over icicles, “we’re talking about Indians here. The heathen masses the Texas Rangers have done more to eradicate from these parts than any other force.” Rockefeller sat straight up in his chair. “And maybe you’re forgetting about the man in my employ who was murdered. You should be arresting the lot of those savages instead of wasting your time here. Because I think your governor, and your legislature, know that what I bring is in the best interests of your state and that riling me isn’t in the best interests of anyone.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”
“You do that, Ranger. You do that,” Rockefeller said, the hesitation in his tone rooted in the uncertainty about whether he’d made his point at all. “Progress stops for no man.”
“Neither does a bullet, Mr. Rockefeller.”
36
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“John D. Rockefeller?” Whatley asked, shaking his head when Caitlin had finished. “Are you serious, Ranger?”
“I’m surprised you never heard the story.”
“Well, I suppose I wouldn’t believe half of what I’ve heard about you, if I didn’t know it to be true myself.”
“Runs in the family, Doc.”
“That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one. God’s honest truth, I didn’t know oil drilling, even in this state, went back that far.”
“It did for sure,” Caitlin told him, recalling pictures her grandfather had showed her to supplement the tale. Grainy black-and-white photographs from that era featured landscape images of raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy, exhausted men staring blankly into the camera. Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles along rutted roadways, hauling pipe and supplies. Other pictures of the early oil fields showed scars, scrapes, roads, trenches, and blast holes in the land, which looked more like the refuse of the Civil War. Right from the start, during those post–Civil War years, the boomtowns filled with men who worked, slept, ate, drank. Then they celebrated, waited for mail, prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally resorted to crime and violence that it took the Texas Rangers to put a clamp on.
Whatley looked at Caitlin for a time, as if reading her mind. Then he drew in a deep breath and turned his gaze briefly out the window.
“There’s something else about that body, Ranger. Two things, actually.” He turned his eyes back toward her. “I was involved in a similar case before myself, way back at the beginning of my career. Guess I’ve done my best to put it out of my mind.”
“Why’s that, Doc?”
“Because it didn’t make any more sense then than this killing does now.” He started to take another deep breath but got only halfway through. “How well do you know the city of Weatherford?”
“I know it’s near Fort Worth and is the county seat for Parker County. Beyond that, not much.”
“They got an old legend up there about something called the Weatherford Monster.”
“I’ve heard about that, too, but chose not to mention it.”
“With good reason, I’m sure. I was called to the area back when I was doing my residency in pathology. A young couple had been found murdered, their wounds a decent match for the condition of the body lying on my slab right now. Unprecedented amount of blood and tissue loss, with little even left to identify them as having been human. Initial thinking was animals had gotten to them after they were already dead, but my examination revealed otherwise. They’d decided to camp at the foot of some hills rich with caves, in spite of the warning signs and rumored sightings in the past.”