Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(76)

“They aren’t your concern, Ranger.”

“I’d prefer you let me be the judge of that, all the same.”

“Matters are under control,” Isa-tai assured him.

“Is that what you call having three boys strung from horses and dragged to death?”

“They were only boys in age. Their spirits have already been reborn many times in our history, and now they will be reborn again.”

“What about the need to hold their funerals first, or doesn’t that count for anything?”

“Everything is under control,” Isa-tai said, as quiet and sure as the first time. “We take care of our own. And when you cross us, you cross nature itself.”

“Like you took care of those boys, you mean. Rockefeller’s hired guns must’ve been laying in wait when they ventured out to fish, or hunt maybe. This has got ambush and cold-blooded murder written all over it. Why don’t you just cooperate and help me take this John D. Rockefeller down?”

Isa-tai looked into the sun without squinting. Braves, their faces colored with war paint, flanked him on both sides like statues. The only trace of movement was the wind whipping their long, coal-black hair about. Steeldust Jack didn’t think they were blinking.

“They’ll be back,” Steeldust Jack told Isa-tai. “This won’t stop ’til Rockefeller gets what he wants. Right now, that’s the oil on your land, and he’s not about to back off until his pumps are lifting it out of the ground.”

“So we should make a deal with him, Ranger? That’s what you’re saying?”

“I could go to him on your behalf, see if we can come to terms, to be secured by the Texas Rangers. He’s a businessman, and a fight like this is bad for business.”

Isa-tai held his eyes closed for a long moment, then opened them again, the cadence of his breathing unchanged. “They must’ve gone fishing before the sun. I heard their screams, felt their pain, in my sleep. I’ve been feeling it ever since. Only one thing can stop me from feeling it.”

“You don’t wanna do this, son.”

“Do what?”

“Rockefeller isn’t a man you cross, unless you got an army backing you up.”

“We don’t need an army. We have the land.”

“What the hell does that mean?’

“He would violate nature. So I will call upon nature to be our army.”

“You mean, like you did for that gunman who was found torn apart?”

“Nature takes care of its own, Ranger,” Isa-tai droned, the words sounding as flat as memorized stage lines. “And we are its own.”

“I might still be able to make this right,” Jack Strong told him, “’fore anybody else gets hurt.”

“Ride off, Ranger. You don’t want to be here for what’s coming next.”

Which, Steeldust would later reflect, turned out to be ever so true.

*

He found John D. Rockefeller again in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he’d pretty much appropriated for his own use, including a back portion where he’d based his offices. Twenty years earlier, a man named George J. Durham had shot William Cleveland to death right outside the entrance, after the younger man had attacked him with a walking stick, in a case later ruled by a judge to be justifiable homicide. Steeldust Jack didn’t think it a coincidence that the Northerner had headquartered there, being of the firm belief that places soured by violence tended to attract men with a penchant for it themselves.

Rockefeller greeted his presence with a wide grin, pulling at his mustache, first one side and then the other. “You know what it means to walk into a lion’s den, Ranger?”

“Mr. Rockefeller, I spent time in the Civil War getting shot at from as little as five feet away,” Jack Strong told him. “Compared to that, a lion’s den is a church picnic.”

“I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Rockefeller said, sizing up Steeldust Jack as if he were an animal in a cage. “I hear you fancy yourself a hero, a gunfighter. Maybe you are. But did you really think that little stunt of yours would make me pull up stakes and run?”

“Well, I was hoping it might make you come to your senses about sitting down with the Comanche instead of trampling on their sovereign land.”

“Negotiate with them, you mean. And what do you expect the result of that would’ve been?”

“I imagine they would’ve told you to stuff hot tar up your rear. Which doesn’t change the fact it’s their land.”

“So it is, and so it will stay. But, unless you’ve forgotten about that letter from the governor, duly authorized by the United States Congress, you know that I have the rights to mine the oil beneath their land.”

“I don’t believe I follow you, sir.”

John D. Rockefeller got the look of a gunman who knows he’s got his target centered. “The Comanche were deeded that land all right, but they don’t control what’s beneath it. Call it a technicality.”

“I call it bullshit.”

“All the same, Ranger, neither you nor anyone else has the authority to stand between me and that oil—or to come in here accusing me of being complicit in the tragic murder of three Indians when the Texas Rangers have killed thousands.”