Titans

by Leila Meacham

  “Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t,” Millie May said. “Of course you may use it. Sue Ann is on the switchboard today. She’ll get you through quickly, since the call is from here.” Millie May smiled, showing a broken tooth acquired when she got in the way of a male fist launched during a protest of a women’s freedom march. “Sue Ann has a crush on Sloan.”

  What woman doesn’t? Samantha thought.

  Within a relatively short time, the operator located a telephone number for Waverling Tools, and with relief Samantha heard Todd say, “Todd Baker speaking.” One of his boasts was that his office possessed its own telephone while some of his colleagues had to answer their calls at the receptionist’s desk. Conscious of listening ears on the party line, Samantha resisted the urge to explain the nature of her call, and merely informed the geologist that she must see him as soon as possible about a matter that required his expertise. If she told him she’d found what she believed to be the partial skull of a dinosaur, who knew but that the news would get out and thrill seekers might show up at Las Tres Lomas to see the phenomenon and destroy the dig site. Todd caught the anxiety in her voice and without further conversation said that he wouldn’t be able to get away until Saturday. He could take the 7:40 morning train to Fort Worth. Would Samantha meet him at the station, and… was Grizzly still serving up his sausage pancakes for Saturday breakfast?

  As Samantha hung up the receiver, Billie June came flying through the swinging door from the kitchen into the hall where the telephone was located, her face flushed the color of her coral cameo. “You saw him, didn’t you?” she demanded of Samantha.

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  Millie May had come to the doorway of the great room off the hall. “He took a chance coming here, sister.”

  “I know, but it couldn’t be helped,” Billie June said. “He’s going down to Beaumont for a while on an assignment for Waverling Tools and wanted to see me before he left.” She looked beseechingly at Samantha. “You won’t tell Sloan about us, will you, Sam?”

  “Of course not,” Samantha said. “Your brother and I don’t speak much nowadays, anyway.”

  “I wish you did,” Millie May said, her tone sorrowful. “Then maybe we’d know what in the Sam Hill has come between him and Miss Holier-Than-Thou. Can you stay for coffee?”

  Samantha removed her hat and pulled off her riding gloves, feeling a tingle of elation. So Anne wasn’t imaging things, after all. “Of course I can,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Dammit to hell!” Daniel Lane swore as he rode away from the main compound of the Triple S opposite the direction where he knew the ranch hands, overlorded by Sloan Singleton, were working cattle. The Gordon girl had seen him in the clutch with Billie June. She wasn’t likely to say anything to her brother, but the fewer people who knew about their continuing affair, the better. At least for now. Before Samantha Gordon had shown up, only Millie May had been aware that he and Billie June were still seeing each other. Millie May did not approve, but she’d keep her mouth shut out of love for her sister, who might do something crazy if she were prevented from being with him. Billie June was no one to fool with when her dander got up.

  It was one of the things he liked about her, that made it easier to meet her twice a month on Saturday at a depot between Fort Worth and Dallas. The place had a little café with a yard and benches out back where they could take their coffee and hold hands and kiss now and then. It was the best they could arrange until they found a better meeting place. There was so much more Billie June wanted to do if only they could find a private place to do it, but he would wait on that until he judged the moment ripe.

  Today was the first time he had chanced coming to the ranch. If caught, the three of them had concocted a story. Millie May would swear that Daniel Lane had come in a purely professional capacity. She’d known no one else to restore her father’s favorite pair of spurs that she’d promised to donate to the museum erected in Fort Worth to honor the contributions local ranchers had made to the cattle industry. As a matter of fact, Millie May was in charge of acquiring the exhibits.

  The set of spurs was still lying on a back porch table, untouched, and Daniel was making clean his getaway. He’d thought of taking them with him, fixing ’em up for irony’s sake in preparation for the day when he’d wear the old man’s spurs as a sneer in Sloan Singleton’s face, but then he’d thought: Hell, it wasn’t the father’s strap of spiked wheels he wanted to wear, but the son’s. And he would, too. He didn’t know how as yet, but he was working on it, and so far everything was going according to plan.

  The truth of it was that he might have continued seeing Billie June for her own sake if her little brother had stayed out of it and allowed their relationship to run its inevitable course. Daniel hadn’t been after his sister’s money or a stake in the ranch like Mr. High-and-Mighty Big Britches had naturally assumed. Hell no. Billie June was plain as a sack of beans and five years older than he. In time her novelty would have worn off, and he would have moved on. The day Sloan Singleton rode up on his Thoroughbred with his gun arms at the picnic grounds and made him look like a sawed-off whip handle, Daniel hadn’t been after anything from his sister but social relief from the grind of his daily life.

  He’d started out by feeling sorry for Billie June. She’d popped into Chandler’s one day, breathless, worried, a quick and chirpy little sparrow of a woman. Her favorite horse had thrown a shoe, and she was afraid he’d cracked a hoof or worse. “Oh, Mr. Chandler, please help Bo,” she’d cried. “He’s gone and—”

  That was when Billie June’s eye had fallen on him, shirtless, chest muscles glistening, biceps bulging as he worked over the anvil, and stopped in midspeech. Mr. Chandler had caught her pop-eyed stare. “Maybe you better have a look at what Miss Singleton’s talking about, Daniel,” he’d said with a wink.

  Daniel was no farrier by trade. He generally did not shoe horses. He was an ironmonger and a miracle worker with metals, but he’d looked over her stallion’s hoof, removed a stone, and replaced its shoe. The next day Billie June was back. “I believe I dropped my glove here,” she said. “Have you by any chance found it?”

  “No, miss, I haven’t,” Daniel said and called to his boss. “Have you seen Miss Singleton’s glove, Mr. Chandler?”

  His boss had shaken his head, an amused glint in his eye. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Oh,” Billie June had said, pressing her cheek thoughtfully. “Perhaps I dropped it somewhere else.” Daniel had asked after Bo. Billie June was driving a two-seater trap pulled by another horse. “Well… he still seems to favor that foot,” she’d answered and looked at him with wide-eyed hope. “Do you think… I hate to impose… but do you think you… could come by the ranch and take another look at that hoof?”

  “Will Sunday afternoon do? I’m off then.”

  Her homely face had lit up like the first flare of a candle flame. “That would be perfect,” she’d said.

  Daniel later learned that Sloan Singleton spent Sunday afternoons and evenings in town calling upon a society do-gooder named Anne Rutherford. That first Sunday afternoon when he arrived, Billie June was dressed fit to kill and smelling like a rose garden. Lemonade and freshly baked cookies awaited him on the screened back porch. After inspecting Bo’s hoof, which was perfectly all right, they had sat at the porch table and talked. After her brief shyness was overcome by a natural animation, Daniel found to his surprise that she was the most engaging person he’d ever met. He completely forgot to pay attention to her little off-centered nose, brow too strong for her small face, and a somewhat lopsided jaw. He was spellbound by the way she used her shapely hands, as if conducting a chorus, and he loved the sound of her laughter, like musical bells, but most of all, he appreciated her intelligence. They were both readers—when he could get hold of books—and discussed their favorites; many of hers he’d never heard of. “Oh, but you must read them!” she declared. “I’d be happy to let you borr
ow mine.”

  She’d sent him home with a saddlebag of books, and he’d asked, “How will I get these back to you?”

  “Let’s meet again here, same time, in two weeks,” she’d suggested. “Then we can discuss them together.”

  Thus their friendship began, at least that was what Daniel called it. He knew full well that Billie June hoped for something more, but he wasn’t about to oblige her. He was lonely. Billie June was lonely. That was it. They had many things to talk about. She was interested in how he created objects out of iron and steel—works of art! she declared—and he enjoyed hearing her views on every subject from social issues to town gossip. He looked forward to their stimulating Sundays together that offered a distraction from the forge and gave him a reason to clean up. And he had to admit it was flattering as all get-out to be in the company of a lady in a fine home rather than in bed with a floozy in an upstairs saloon room.

  So he’d meant their relationship to continue as such until that Fourth of July picnic, when he’d felt his insides explode like a box of firecrackers. Daniel Lane might be nothing but a sweaty smithy’s helper in the eyes of the boss of the Triple S, but no man treated him like a horseshoe spike. He would make Sloan Singleton pay for his public humiliation of him. He would get even. Billie June was used to making a spectacle of herself, what with her radical ideas about the rights of animals and women, but they would no more take her down in the eyes of the town than a gnat could topple an oak tree. She was a Singleton, a member of the landed gentry, and Daniel Lane was a nobody. All he had was the modest reputation he had built up as a man who could create anything out of metals—and his dignity, and Sloan Singleton had stripped him of it. Daniel would not hang around at Chandler’s Blacksmith Shop like a whipped dog. He’d read and applied to a HELP WANTED ad posted by Waverling Tools in Dallas calling for a man skilled in ironwork. His boss had given him a sterling reference, and within days he was hired. Off he went to Dallas, leaving Billie June with the promise that he was not out of the picture yet. At Waverling Tools, he found his nirvana.

  The company was going places, and Daniel Lane was going with it, but not as a simple metalworker. When Trevor Waverling found out what he could forge from a piece of iron with a hammer and chisel, he put him in his department for designing oil drilling tools. Within weeks, he came up with an improved lathe chuck for drilling pipe. He was now working on the development of a stronger steel casing to prevent the wall of the borehole from caving in during the drilling process, one of the oilman’s worst nightmares. His boss had applied for patents in his name, which the company paid for, the only stipulation being that Waverling Tools would receive 90 percent of all sales resulting from his inventions for five years, and then their deal would be renegotiated. Fair enough, Daniel had thought, as long as ownership of the patents was returned to him.

  While the company had begun manufacturing derricks and oil drilling tools, it was not yet ready to move into the actual business of leasing mineral rights and drilling for petroleum, but it was headed in that direction. Trevor Waverling was taking his time, but he wasn’t wasting it. He was learning and preparing, an approach Daniel liked because it mirrored his own style of maneuvering. Since the oil strike in 1897 in Corsicana fifty-five miles up the pike, his boss had seen too many investors jump into the oil game only to come up with dry holes and empty pockets. To prospect oil sites, he had hired a razor-sharp geologist, Todd Baker, and was training his son, Nathan Holloway, as a landman. The two made a competent team, as Daniel had discovered when he finagled an invitation to go with them on a trip to East Texas to investigate a “land disturbance” that a farmer believed was a sure sign of the presence of oil. Turned out the farmer was dreaming. Todd Baker analyzed the fissure as nothing more than a split in the earth caused by drought and not an indicator of an oil reservoir beneath the fracture zone. Given the frenzy going on among oil and gas speculators, some geologists would have jumped first and looked later at a possible find, and some landmen would have slapped a contract before the farmer at first glance at the fissure, but not Todd and Nathan. Those two were not about to risk their boss’s time and money on a pig in a poke like so many others were doing.

  Yessir, Daniel had hooked up with a company he could trust to stay in business. It was with Waverling Tools he intended to make his mark—become somebody—because he planned to learn everything available about the oil business and move out from the drafting table into the operation of the company. He could see it in the works plain as day. This mission the boss was sending him on Monday to the lumber town of Beaumont in southeast Texas gave proof of that. He was to meet with a man named Anthony Lucas, who had blazed a crazy trail around Texas and up east to the large oil companies to convince investors and wildcatters that oil was under a salt dome the locals called Spindletop Hill. The man’s convictions had caught Trevor Waverling’s attention, which had led to Daniel’s assignment. He was to go to Beaumont to assess whether the man was trying to sell a pipe dream. He would investigate Lucas’s background, if possible talk to the investors Lucas had approached, and check out the dome itself for evidence to support the man’s stubborn belief it held something besides salt.

  Daniel had dared to ask his boss why he was interested, explaining that the information might help him with the focus of his investigation.

  “I might want to offer Waverling Tools’ drilling equipment at no cost in exchange for a share in the well if it comes in,” he’d replied. “In that case, you’ll be taking periodic trips to the site for maintenance checks and to fix problems with the equipment should they arise, but I also want you to keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground and report back to me what you see and hear. You understand what I’m asking you to do?”

  “Yessir, I understand,” Daniel had said. He was to be troubleshooter and spy. He liked the titles. They expanded his position and importance within the company.

  “Take the full week and we’ll hear what you have to say in Monday’s conference meeting,” Trevor Waverling had said. “I’ll depend on your report to determine if it’s worth my going to Beaumont to offer Lucas a deal.”

  “You have my word that I’ll look at every tooth in that horse’s mouth,” Daniel had assured him. “I won’t let you down.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” his boss had said.

  To get even with a man, you had to beat him at his game. Sloan Singleton’s game was wealth and power. Somehow, someway, Daniel Lane meant to take him down from those pinnacles. And like the oil business that he intended to learn through association with those who could advance his ambition, he would learn the business of Sloan Singleton through his sister, Billie June.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Early Saturday morning, Todd Baker boarded the Texas Pacific for the two-hour rail trip to Fort Worth from Dallas and saw Samantha waiting for him on the station platform as the train pulled in. The first glimpse of her through the compartment window told him that something was up. She was pacing as if constant movement might hurry the train along. His bride, Ginny, who loved and missed Samantha, had begged to come and spend the day with the three of them, but Todd had gently refused her pleas. (Ginny did not like sausage pancakes anyway.) “Sam said she needed my expertise, hon. She sounded pretty urgent about it. I’m guessing she’s found something she’d like me to analyze—something like a rock formation or a sea relic—out on Las Tres Lomas. You’d be stuck alone in that cavern of a ranch house for hours unless you’d like to ride along with us, and”—a smile and quick kiss—“I’m thinking you wouldn’t.”

  He was absolutely right about that, Ginny had said. She’d hoped that after a brief consultation over a little rock or fossil fragment, the three of them would lunch together and catch up on all the town gossip.

  Todd was dressed for the possibility of a long ride in the saddle to some remote spot on the ranch, and from the train window he saw that Samantha was, too. What in the world had she found? He was a prospecting geologist. Would Samantha hav
e called him—a good friend, yes, but not a confidant—with an urgent request to see him if she hadn’t discovered something that would interest him professionally? It couldn’t be something like an oil seep or a gas-leaking fracture, although he believed, along with Trevor Waverling, that the Central Plains was rich in petroleum and natural gas deposits, as evidenced by telltale signs of oil found on land surfaces and the area’s number of sulfur springs. If Samantha had discovered something of the sort on Las Tres Lomas, she’d have kept quiet about it. She was keenly opposed to oil drilling on crop and grazing lands.

  He had a few minutes before leaving his seat to observe his friend through the window. What would happen to Samantha Gordon now that she’d decided to walk the path her leather-bound father had chosen for her? Was she doomed to spend her life at Las Tres Lomas fulfilling a misguided obligation as a cattleman’s daughter? What a tragic waste! Samantha possessed the purest scientific mind he’d so far encountered. The scientific mind called for a continual openness to new ideas, concepts, and theories that challenged the established point of view. Samantha had been notorious for that stubbornness at Simmons Preparatory School. Her reluctance to embrace a preferred conclusion was based not on obstinacy but on a sincere desire to learn the truth. Unlike some scientists Todd knew, Samantha could let go of preconceptions and old beliefs and accept new explanations when the evidence supported them. Todd would never forget the day when a lab experiment had led her to question the accepted theory that oil originates from the fossilized remains of animals and plants buried in ancient rock layers. Her microscope and beaker had revealed the possibility that while oil contains chemical elements found in living matter, the viscous liquid itself did not evolve from once-living material. Therefore, she’d hypothesized, petroleum might come from another source not yet identified. Their professor had scoffed. Could Samantha then explain why petroleum deposits were often found on or near remains of prehistoric life?