Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(14)

Caitlin turned, ignoring Dylan while fixing her gaze on her. “Let me handle this please.” She turned again toward the foreman. “I’d ask, sir, that you and your people take a few steps back while we get this all sorted out. Nobody wants trouble, but if it comes, it’ll be sure to delay the work you came to do even longer. I don’t think that’s in anyone’s best interests. We on the same page here?”

The foreman scowled but then nodded slowly. “You’ve got your chance, Ranger. It doesn’t work, don’t blame me for what happens next.”

Then he backpedaled, along with the rest of his men, dispersing into smaller groups to continue waiting out the situation.

Caitlin turned back around to face Dylan. “Let’s talk.”

*

“I’m taking some time off from school,” Dylan started, after they’d moved into a shady grove off to the side of the entrance to the reservation.

“Like a few days? A week?”

Dylan hedged. “More like a semester.”

“I don’t recall your dad mentioning anything about that.”

“That’s because I didn’t tell him.”

Caitlin gazed back toward the line of protesters.

“Her name’s Ela Nocona,” Dylan resumed. “We met in Native American studies class back at Brown.”

“Then I guess this would qualify as primary research.”

“I’m trying to do something important here.”

“Let’s hope your father sees it that way,” Caitlin told him, as Ela Nocona joined them in the grove.

She was grinning wide enough to dapple her cheeks. “I didn’t think Dylan was telling the truth,” she said to Caitlin, clearly impressed, her tone suggesting they were old friends.

“About what, Ela?”

“About you. I told him I had to see it with my own eyes.” She continued to smile, seemingly in admiration. “And now I have.”

“Peta Nocona was a great Comanche chief who fathered an even greater one in Quanah Parker. Any relation?”

Ela Nocona tried hard not to look impressed. “I believe I’m Quanah Parker’s grandniece,” she said.

“And you go to Brown, too.”

“I’m a senior,” she told Caitlin. “Summa cum laude.”

“So are you taking some time off from school too, Ela?”

“The tribal school was short a teacher,” she said, without hesitation.

“She works with disabled kids,” Dylan chimed in.

“Far too many here, unfortunately. Ten times the number found among Caucasian children,” Ela explained, not bothering to elaborate.

“A noble pursuit for sure,” Caitlin nodded, “as long as those construction workers don’t plow you over with backhoes and front loaders.”

“I didn’t come back here to man a protest line, Ranger,” Ela said, her broad shoulders stiffening noticeably. “But this is our land. No one has a right to spoil it.”

“Including your tribal elders, who sold off the mineral rights?”

“That shouldn’t have been their decision. They should’ve put it to a vote.”

“I heard they did,” Caitlin noted, “and that an overwhelming majority supported opening up these lands to drilling.”

Ela stiffened. “That vote wasn’t legitimate. I made the elders let me address the crowd at the meeting, but they wouldn’t let me introduce all of my research on the Bakken field up in North Dakota and what oil did to the Indian lands there.”

“Sounds like their call, to me.”

“Dylan told me you were there when his mother was killed,” Ela said suddenly. “He said you shot it out with the man who did it.”

“Close enough, I suppose,” Caitlin said, looking at Dylan again. “Did I mention your dad’s on the way?”

Dylan swallowed hard. “You told him?”

“Left him a message as soon as I got word myself, via an anonymous phone call to my cell number. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, ma’am?” she asked Ela.

“Me?”

“Because the caller specifically mentioned Dylan Torres being on the scene. Not something a random person would make note of. Like they were doing me a favor. Or maybe that person wanted me involved in whatever’s going on here.”

Some of Ela Nocona’s long black hair strayed into her face and she whisked it off, only to have the breeze blow it back. “There’s a story my people tell about their first encounter with a Texas Ranger on this land.”

“That Ranger was my great-great-grandfather,” Caitlin started. “His name was Steeldust Jack Strong, and he was also a hero in the Civil War.”

“The stories passed down through the years speak well of him, but the truth about what happened the day he rode onto the reservation’s become muddled. Might you know it?”

Caitlin cocked her gaze across the road to where the workmen had broken out the lunch boxes and coolers they’d intended to open at a break in their labors. That had yet to commence, though things had simmered down for now.

“As a matter of fact,” Caitlin told Ela, as a sliver of sunlight broke through the tree line above, “I do.”