“Top-notch college prep academy, right here in Houston,” she continued, when he failed to acknowledge her point.
“I’ll check with the people I’ve got handling that end of things for me,” Rawls said finally. “Mr. Jackson also mentioned you raised the issue that we aren’t actually drilling for oil on that land.”
“An anomaly showed up in the construction equipment, which caught a few eyes, yes.”
“Another consolation to the tribal elders, Ranger. How much you know about oil drilling?”
“As much as anybody from Texas, I suppose.”
“And a lot more than me, I’m guessing, until a few months back. One of the conditions we agreed to, in order to secure the mineral rights, was that we avoid the typical deep-drilling exploratory operation. Picture jabbing a sword in a dark room until you pop a balloon; that’s essentially what exploratory drilling is. We know the oil’s down there, but not necessarily the best way to reach it. What we agreed to do in the Balcones was to use a pin instead of a sword. Not wise, from a cost, time, or labor perspective, but a lot less intrusive and significantly less destructive to the environment.”
“That didn’t seem to matter much to those protesters, sir. Guess the point of all your efforts was lost on them.”
“Not all, just enough. Those kids schooled themselves on what happened up in North Dakota, on the Fort Berthold reservation, and figured that was what was coming here. A bit overblown, in my mind.”
“Only if you call murder, corruption, and causing a few earthquakes overblown, sir. But it wouldn’t be the first time that reservation in the Balcones came under fire.”
“Oh no?”
“Similar kind of thing happened before. An ancestor of mine was involved back then, going up against a man who, I’m guessing, must’ve sounded a lot like you.”
52
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS; 1874
“We don’t need your help, Ranger,” Isa-tai told Jack Strong, a few hours after Strong had left John D. Rockefeller in his Austin hotel.
“You got it, all the same. On account of the fact that the state of Texas don’t need a range war in these parts.”
“Leaving dead Comanche in their wake is nothing new for the Texas Rangers.”
“Funny, Rockefeller said almost the very same thing to me,” Steeldust Jack said, glancing around at the tribe going about its daily chores. “But I don’t see any of your Comanche marauding over settlers and ranchers and making war on the plains.”
Steeldust Jack noticed a number of Comanche women carrying huge sacks of corn, harvested from the nearby fields, on their backs. One stumbled, lost her balance, and the sack went flying. Ears of corn, wrapped in thick husks, scattered in all directions. Impact with the ground split some of those husks, enough for the Ranger to glimpse moldy spots, as brown and ugly as warts, growing on the kernels.
“I wouldn’t eat those, if I were you,” he advised Isa-tai, stopping short of helping the Indian girl gather up her spilled sack, since none of the other Comanche did, either.
“But you’re not me,” said Isa-tai, “and you’re not us, either, are you, Ranger?”
Isa-tai followed Jack Strong’s lingering gaze to the corn that, at first glance anyway, clearly looked infested by some kind of vegetable rot, or worse.
“A matter of perspective, taibo,” the tribe’s young medicine man told him, using the less-than-friendly Comanche word for a white man. “You see only the ugliness of the fungus, what happens when rain seeps into the cornstalks and rots the kernels. Our Aztec brothers called it cuitlacoche, and we consider it a delicacy.”
“It’s still a fungus to me,” Steeldust Jack said.
“Sometimes our Mother Earth makes ugly what is truly beautiful.”
The Ranger took off his hat and put it right back on. “That’s all well and good. But the fact is, Rockefeller and his men are coming. I’m just advising you of that fact, along with my intention to hold the sumbitch off, even if I have to arrest or shoot him.”
Isa-tai frowned, his smooth complexion furrowing. “I’ve known you for only a day more than this Rockefeller. And we are fully capable of taking care of ourselves.”
“You mean, like you took care of that gunman who trespassed on your land a couple nights back.”
Isa-tai’s spine stiffened, seeming to make him taller.
“What I didn’t have time to tell you yesterday,” Steeldust Jack continued, “was that the man had black mud caked inside his boots. Kind you’ve got all over your land, thanks to the very oil Rockefeller wants to yank out of it. No such mud to be found anywhere else otherwise in these immediate parts. That means the victim was trespassing on this reservation almost for sure. Could be somebody spotted him and followed him off it.”