Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(42)
Rockefeller pushed back his suit coat and tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his vest, his face framed by the steam rising off his coffee, which made him look as much like a ghost as a man.
“You accusing me of being a good and fortunate businessman, Ranger?” he asked.
Steeldust Jack wiped his mouth with a napkin. “No, sir. I’m accusing you of getting rich off the blood spilled by other men. You packed your warehouses with salt, clover seed, pork, and other supplies to support the war efforts. Then you created artificial shortages and delays to drive up prices while men starved to death before a bullet could take them.”
Unruffled, Rockefeller lifted his mug and sipped his coffee, studying Steeldust Jack through the curtain of steam. “Know what I did with all those profits, Ranger?”
“No, sir, I do not, though I suspect you got richer still.”
“I did indeed. As luck would have it, headquartering my operation in Cleveland put me a hundred miles from one of the most revolutionary developments in human history: the discovery of oil in the town of Titusville. A risky venture, for sure, but where else was I going to put all that cash? There’ve been times in my life where I’ve been short on money, but I’ve never been short on vision.”
Steeldust Jack still had plenty of food on his plate, but he’d lost his appetite. While looking straight across the table at John D. Rockefeller, he also followed the hands of each and every gunman flirting with their holstered pistols. All but the kid Jimmy Miller, that is.
“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?”