Titans (20 page)

L
ate in the afternoon, by a rope tied loosely around his neck and his horn tips a bright red, Samantha led Saved back to his preferred grazing area at Windy Bluff. The steer, almost the size of Pony, followed along docilely as a lamb. The trek gave her time and solitude to think. What had come over Sloan? She would not flatter herself by thinking Anne's cause for concern had to do with their quarrel. They'd had many quarrels in the past, but none that had called their brother-sister relationship into question. Could Sloan indeed have had a change of heart toward Anne? “Once my brother gets a few more years on him, he'll see through Anne's artifice,” Millie May had predicted. “I hope she won't snag him before that day comes.”

Had that day come? In a few weeks, Sloan would turn twenty-four. Were those enough years to make his sister's prediction come true?

Samantha thought back to their quarrel that she now acknowledged had taken on a much darker, deeper cast than a mere tiff.
You're not my brother, Sloan.
She would never forget his jolt of surprise at hearing those words, then something else had swum into his eyes, another brand of surprise. But then she'd added:
You're my friend. No more, no less.
Like an idiot.

She still believed that for all Anne's “experience” with men, which Samantha doubted, the girl could be imagining the chill between her and Sloan. Ranchers' worries were never-ending, but some came like a swarm of bees, blocking the sun. Sloan may have gone through a period like that these past months. The Triple S was not as financially solid as Las Tres Lomas. Sloan had invested heavily in breeding stock to increase future production of his herds. A strange blight had attacked his hay fields. Come winter, he would have the expense of buying fodder for his cattle beyond what the Gordons could spare. Also, unlike the Gordon ranch, the Singleton ranch carried a loan against it held by the Rutherford City Bank. Samantha assumed that when Sloan and Anne married, the debt would be forgiven.

And Sloan was still disturbed by the rift between her and her father. He had left her room deeply upset that day in April, and his concern had not abated.
Sam, I told myself I'd butt out of what you've made clear is none of my business, but I can't help myself
, he'd said in an urgent whisper at Todd and Ginny's wedding reception, the first and only time they'd conversed since that fateful afternoon.
I saw Neal in town the other day, and he looks awful. I'm worried about him. Whatever is going on between you two has got to be resolved. It's clear that you two have not patched things up.

Not clear to everybody, Samantha had thought, but then everybody wasn't looking. Not even her mother had as yet suspected anything at odds between her husband and daughter.
You're exaggerating
, she'd said, looking around to see if they'd been overheard.

Not from where I'm standing
, he'd said.

Before she could answer, Anne had drawn to his side and taken his arm, and Samantha had excused herself to go to the punch table, unable to stomach Anne's adoring gaze up into Sloan's face and the return of her smile.

In the vastness of the silence around her, broken by the occasional sounds of milling cattle and the high overhead screech of hawks, Samantha allowed her imagination to fly. She would scold herself later, but right now, with the breeze pleasant on her face and the saddle warm under her and her throat tight from a permeating sadness, she imagined what it would be like for Sloan to love her, not as a brother or friend or his surrogate father's daughter, but as a woman. For a long time now, she'd thought of them together in ways that had never entered her mind when they had romped together as children. When had her memories of their innocent play as boy and girl given way to a woman's sexual fantasies of a man? They were so right for each other in every way. Even their differences complemented the other. She'd once heard a friend of her mother's complain that she wished she hadn't married a man she'd known all her life. There was nothing left to learn about the other.
We're as dull together as a pair of old boots
, she'd said. The couple was dull to begin with, Samantha had thought, but not she and Sloan. They were familiar territory to the other, but there were still peaks and valleys to be discovered, unknown terrain that made her skin tingle to imagine exploring.

Across the flat distance, the twin boulders of Windy Bluff rose up to meet them. Samantha had never understood why they were called bluffs, since they were really peaks, but so the name had been recorded in the grant document giving her great-great-grandfather ownership of the ranch. Saved tossed his heavy-horned head, recognizing home. Samantha sighed and allowed her daydream to drift away. “Okay, buddy, we're here,” she said. She dismounted and slipped the rope from around the steer's neck, then released Pony's reins to amble with him to the nearby underground spring for a drink.

There had been a wind storm in the night that had resculpted the sandy bed of skimpy grass found only on this particular strip of the ranch. It was marine sand, surviving proof of the large body of water that had covered Las Tres Lomas millions of years ago. In its recession, it had left this swath of beach sand good only for producing sprigs of grass as sparse as hair on a balding head.

Her foot struck something, and Samantha looked down, expecting to have stepped on a small outcropping of caliche rock. She looked closer, then bent down for another, longer inspection. A chill swept her flesh. She knelt and carefully brushed away more of the sand and sediment. There was no doubting the impression. Exposed by last night's wind—unmistakably—was what appeared to be the petrified form of a prehistoric animal head recognizable only from pictures in newspaper articles and from drawings in her paleontology texts. Excitement mounting, holding her breath, Samantha gently scraped further. The rest of the skull, if it was there, appeared deeply imbedded, mortared to its burial site, and she dared not dig further for fear of disturbing the bed. If her preliminary inspection was accurate, she was looking at the full forehead, blunt nose, and intact jawbone of a dinosaur.

Trembling from the shock of her discovery, Samantha got to her feet and walked carefully toward Pony with an eye on the ground for other remains. Todd Baker must see this. She must contact him to come out here immediately to assess her find. If her guess was correct, Todd, with his geological background, would know what to do, who to approach for further analysis. Windy Bluff could be the site of a huge field of dinosaur skeletons like the kind discovered in the Garden Park area in Colorado and at Camp Bluff, Wyoming, in the late 1870s.

Exhilarated by her treasure, Samantha unhooked the gate separating Las Tres Lomas and the Triple S and urged Pony to a fast pace in the direction of the Singletons' sprawling Spanish-style ranch house. She would use their telephone to contact Todd in Dallas at Waverling Tools. Worrisome thoughts of her father, Sloan, and Anne Rutherford flew out of her mind as she contemplated the possible enormity of the identity of the species she'd found. When she'd been in school, the study of dinosaurs was relatively new to the field of paleontology. The first full skeletal form of the creature that proved its existence and gave an idea of what it looked like had been unearthed in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1859, and the feverish hunt was on for further evidence of its actuality, a search that had ushered in what newspapers called the “golden age” of dinosaur paleontology.

An educated guess suggested the creature's snout and mandible belonged to the genera of the sauropods, the largest animals known to live on land. They possessed huge bodies, tremendously long necks and tails, and tiny heads less than two feet in size. The exciting fact Samantha recalled of the group was that the plant-eating sauropods ran in herds. That suggested the remnant at Windy Bluff could be among hundreds an archeological dig would excavate. The herds had come to drink from the huge body of water that once covered Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad.

The smell of smoke from branding pits and the sounds of raucous male voices and bawling cattle carried across the distance. Samantha drew a breath of relief. The Triple S was working its cattle today—as always, under Sloan's supervision.
Still trying to prove himself
, was Millie May's perception of it, but Samantha knew Sloan to be a hands-on rancher who saw it as his responsibility to oversee every aspect of the Triple S's operation.
That's what trusted foremen are for
, she'd argue, one of their sundry disagreements about ranch management where they did not see eye to eye.

The red-tiled roofline of the main house, set in a dip in the topography and fanned by gardens, outbuildings, and corrals, came into view. The white stucco structure glowed in the light of the late afternoon sun, and as she neared it, Samantha caught sight of a man and a woman emerging from the kitchen side of the house. The couple walked to a horse tethered out of view of the windows, and there the man took the woman's face between his hands and kissed her long and passionately. Samantha slowed Pony. She had been in the man's presence only a few times, but she recognized Daniel Lane and the woman in his arms. She was Billie June Singleton.

The sound of an approaching rider must have carried. The man, tall enough to see over the stucco fence, turned his head to see Samantha on Pony cresting the small rise of land fronting the compound. She nodded at him and kneed Pony to the front of the house, certain the man's face had drained of color beneath his deep tan.

Millie May threw open the door before Samantha had reached the porch. “I heard you ride up,” she said. “Thank God it's you.”

“You were expecting someone you didn't wish to see?” Samantha inquired dryly, having a good idea of who that might be.

Millie May gave her a nervous hug. “Just not right now. Happy to see you, Sam, though surprised. What brings you our way?”

“The telephone, if I may. I have to make a call to Dallas. It's important.”

“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.

D
ammit 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 borrow 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.