Titans (27 page)

O
n Monday after his daughter's midmorning return to the ranch, Neal listened patiently at his desk in the library to Samantha's happy recount of the weekend in Fort Worth, during which her mother and bridesmaids ironed out the details of her forthcoming wedding. The date had been set for August fourth, one month after Samantha and Sloan's announcement of their engagement at the Independence Day party scheduled to celebrate Sloan's twenty-fourth birthday in two days' time. Neal would have been caught up in his daughter's happiness and his own if he did not have information to tell her that was sure to dampen her spirits and threaten their reconstructed harmony. He held little hope that the possibility of her dinosaur field becoming an oil drilling site would be less repellent to her seen through the daze of her euphoria.

Samantha halted her excited flow of the weekend events. “Daddy, you seem distracted,” she said.

“I am, but that doesn't mean your mother and I are not the happiest parents alive over your coming marriage, honey.”

“What's wrong? You look as if you're about to punch a hole in my wedding cake.”

It was an apt description. Neal grunted in appreciation of it. “In a way you're right,” he said. “I have something to tell you, so take a seat and let's talk about it. While you were in Fort Worth, I had two visitors. One of them was a young man named Nathan Waverling who says you two met last spring at some sort of science lecture. He's a landman for Waverling Tools, works for his father.”

“I remember him,” Samantha said as she warily took a seat before his desk. “A tall, muscular boy with an unusual shade of blue eyes. He was with his father. Todd Baker introduced us. What was he doing here?”

“He came with Todd to make an offer to lease some of our land.”

“For what purpose?”

“To drill an oil well.”

A mutinous look came over Samantha's face. She'd taken the news as Neal expected. “Why would Nathan Waverling think there's oil on Las Tres Lomas?”

“Todd Baker told him.”

“Todd? How on earth could he possibly…” Samantha paused, and Neal could tell that she was recalling Todd's ride and fall off her steer, his nosedive into the dirt.

Neal said, “He told me you'd asked him to come out to examine some kind of dried critter's head and how he concluded there's a good chance a gusher is under that marine sand around Windy Bluff.”

True to form, Samantha bristled. “That critter's head is what he and I believe to be the partial skull of a sauropod, a species of dinosaur that might indicate a seabed of the creatures is buried in that location,” she said. “Did Todd mention that?”

“Yes, he did, and that it's disappeared.”

“It doesn't matter. The skull's not necessary to prove it was there. I snapped pictures of it. Todd took my Kodak with him to mail to New York. I should receive the photographs back any day now. He didn't suggest drilling where he believes an archeological treasure trove might be found, did he?”

“Actually, he did.”

Samantha uttered a cry of disbelief. “No! He couldn't have!”

Neal held up a hand. “Now don't go getting mad at Todd Baker for doing his job. Remember he's a geologist first, not a paleontologist. He has to make a living, and he's hired to find petroleum deposits. He was dutybound to report to his boss that he suspects—no, is
convinced
—there's oil under the ground at Windy Bluff.”

Samantha said slowly, horror dawning in her stare, “Daddy… you can't let them dig there. It would destroy what could be the educational find of the century. I know you think there is no value in ancient fossils. They're just old bones to you, no more important than the skeletons of cattle left to bleach in the sun, but to the scientific community, to the study of our world, they are invaluable. The fossils of dinosaurs can tell us about the age of the Earth, evolution, geological and climatic changes, the breakup of the continents…” She looked at him helplessly. “I could go on and on about what scientists can learn from them.” She laid her arms on his desk and fixed him with a pointed stare. “Daddy, you can't let them drill at Windy Bluff.”

Neal turned his head aside, away from the penetration of his daughter's lovely gray eyes. He fought the feeling that had come over him when he'd discovered Eleanor Brewster's letter. Her first loyalty should be to Las Tres Lomas. Todd had warned him to expect this argument from Samantha, and in another round of sleepless nights since the boys' visit, he'd tried to understand her passion for old bones and detritus from the long-ago past. Why should anybody care about the age of the Earth? It was what it was. And then he'd understood that her passion to protect prehistoric relics was little different from his to preserve the ranch of Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad his ancestors had founded, not only for the future, but because of the past. Nonetheless, that comparison noted, the land of his fathers must take precedence.

Neal said, “You know what the income from oil would do for the ranch, don't you?”

“
If
oil is found,” Samantha said. “Otherwise, we just have a big hole in the ground.”

“The same could be true of an archeological dig,” Neal countered.

“True, but I'm convinced my hole will not be in vain.”

“So is Todd convinced of his.”

Samantha sat back and crossed her arms. Impasse, Neal thought. Still, his daughter knew who would win. Her father would have the final say. It was his land, after all, but he could not live through another family crisis like the one just past. Sloan would support his argument, diplomatically, of course, but Neal would not put a strain on the marriage before it even began. He leaned forward and clasped his hands together on his desk. “Here's the best I can do, Sam,” he said. “It's a reasonable assumption that if Todd is sure oil is present at Windy Bluff, then why wouldn't the black stuff exist elsewhere on Las Tres Lomas and at a distance far enough away to cause no destruction to your fossil site? I'll hold off leasing that area to Waverling Tools until you get those pictures back. If they validate your claim, we won't drill there, but if they don't, we will. There will be no digging around for further evidence to support your theory, understood? Your photographs will be your only roll of the dice. That's as fair as I can be.”

Samantha let out a relieved, “Oh, thank you, Daddy!” and ran around the desk to throw her arms around his neck. “That's fair enough,” she said.

“All right then,” Neal said, pleased. “I'll ride over to the Triple S and put in a call to Waverling Tools to give Todd my decision.”

Todd took the call on an empty stomach. It was the first morning in his short married life that his wife had not prepared his lunch bucket (she was suffering female difficulties), and he had not dared leave the premises to satisfy his hunger in case Neal Gordon telephoned. His stomach was rumbling by the time he jumped at the ring of the instrument on his desk, a special perk—save for Trevor Waverling's, the other offices did not boast one—and put the receiver to his ear. “Yes?” he said, and heard Neal Gordon state the code arranged to throw off eavesdroppers on the party line. “What!” he exclaimed to
Sorry, the bird won't fly.
“Why not?”

An acute silence filled the line while the rancher apparently tried to whip up an explanation without giving away the nature of the call. Finally, Neal said, “The site doesn't sit well with sister.”

Holy Christ! Todd thought, incredulous. Samantha had won out! Against all expectations, that leather-skinned old rancher had sided with his daughter. If he had bet his house on Neal agreeing to the lease, he and Ginny would be living on the street. “Is that it?” Todd cried. “You mean we have to look somewhere else?”

“Not necessarily. We're awaiting the results of a package you mailed to New York. If said item shows the site unfavorable to sister, we will definitely plant there. If favorable to her, there must be other places on the property to plant your trees.”

If anyone was listening in and was aware of the nature of Waverling Tools' business, they'd figure out what the old fool was talking about, Todd thought, his heart in his mouth. How big was the Gordon ranch? Ten thousand acres or more? Whatever the number, it was huge, and the boss would never agree to the overwhelming task of taking soil samples and testing them from such a large area when they could prove worthless. He'd want to move on to another site of greater possibility.

The “package” was in his bottom desk drawer, locked.

“Would you mind if we went ahead and completed our record search of sister's site, just in case?” Todd asked.

“It's your time,” the rancher drawled.

“I mailed the package Monday, June eighteenth,” Todd lied. “It is now July second, two weeks later. You should be receiving the results by the end of the week, then we'll know.”

“I'll keep you informed,” Neal said and rang off.

Todd remained seated to think and calm his galloping heart. He'd hesitated about destroying the Kodak, but he must now get rid of it. A locked desk drawer invited a hairpin. It was past the lunch break, and everyone had returned to their desks and their duties in the plant. No one should be on the grounds between the building and the river. He must find something to conceal the camera, then he'd take a stroll down to the Trinity, ostensibly to smoke his pipe and to take a break from his desk. If only he had his lunch bucket!

Eventually, he decided to remove the dirt from a large planter containing a spathiphyllum, a peace lily, that his wife had given him for his low-light office when he'd been hired by Waverling Tools. Todd set the camera in the container and plopped the plant on top.

“Just going down to the river to water my plant,” he sang out to Jeanne as he sailed past her open door on the way out the back of the building, peace lily wobbling. Jeanne looked up in surprise. Todd usually doused his plant from a basin pitcher in his office.

The planter was of iron, and heavy, and Todd was puffing by the time he reached the end of the pier, obscured from office and factory windows. After a hasty reconnoiter of the immediate area, he dumped the camera into the water, returned the plant to the pot, and trudged back up the slight incline to the office building. No one took notice of him as he entered.

Had he waited a little longer, he would have smelled cigarette smoke. Daniel Lane stood hidden among flora in the cool shade of a cypress tree where he often stole away for a cigarette because smoking was forbidden in the factory. He had observed the surreptitious water burial of whatever Todd Baker had dumped into the river, and when he was sure the geologist could not glance back and see him, he hurried to identify it.

He saw at once that it was a camera, caught by its strap on a little isle of seaweed, but the mild current was moving it slowly away from the pier. Quickly, Daniel waded into the shallows, grabbed the paddle from the boat tied there, and redirected the course of the seaweed patch near enough for him to pluck the camera from its watery grave. Taking out his handkerchief, he quickly wiped off the moisture and examined it. It was a Kodak, the kind that advertised itself as “You press the button—we do the rest,” and it did not seem to be waterlogged. Could the film be rescued? he wondered. He sure as hell intended to find out.

B
ack in his office, sweating, Todd lifted the newspaper on which he'd emptied out the dirt and funneled it back into the pot, reset the plant, watered it from his lavatory pitcher, and washed his hands in the basin. All was not lost, just delayed. He figured another two weeks, and when “the results” did not arrive, he'd apply a little arm pressure. He'd tell the rancher that Waverling Tools could not commit time and effort to gather soil samples over such a vast expanse of land as his ranch. It had found another site—not as promising, but the company was ready to drill and could afford to set up only one rig. Which was it to be, Mr. Gordon?

For the moment, Todd had to report the rancher's call to his boss. What would he say? It was not entirely untrue that the company was interested in another location to drill. When Trevor Waverling learned of the reason for the delay, he would not wish to chance the Kodak proving Samantha's claim and her father siding with her. His boss wouldn't want to wait and risk losing an opportunity to lease another oil prospect that had caught his attention on the Gulf Coast. Once other investors got a whiff of the area, they'd be snapping up leases as fast as they could borrow the money. Only trust in his geologist's certainty of oil on Las Tres Lomas had held Trevor back from sending him and Nathan to investigate possibilities of strikes in West Texas. Todd must make sure that Trevor Waverling did not take his sights off the oil bonanza waiting under that outcropping of rock his geologist had already named the Windy Bluff Field.

Todd's heart missed a beat when he entered his employer's office and saw Nathan sitting before his desk. Earlier, he'd seen him hurry by his office door looking upset. His father had given him a good licking, Todd had thought gleefully, but there he sat, a little red-eyed, but with no appearance of his tail between his legs. There was something unexpected about his boss, too. Todd could read it in his posture. Privately, to Ginny, he referred to Trevor Waverling as “the cougar,” the tag inspired by the man's hard-muscled body and supple grace that made Todd think that, provoked, he could spring for the jugular like a great cat. Today the cougar positively lolled in his chair with the loose and relaxed ease of someone in familiar and intimate company.

These observations Todd processed immediately as presenting difficulties for him. Nathan Holloway was no longer simply an employee of Waverling Tools. He was the son of the owner of the company. Boss and farm-boy son had bonded.

The light in Nathan's uniquely blue eyes faded at the sight of him, the eyes that had rested disturbingly on him as they'd sat across from each other in the train compartment on the return trip to Dallas Friday afternoon. Todd's stomach muscles had knotted, and he'd wondered if the hayseed would tattle on him to his father for concealing the detail of Samantha's camera. It appeared he hadn't, for it would have been his boss who would have brought up the subject in the conference meeting.

“I've heard from Neal Gordon,” Todd said.

“Well, let's hear what he had to say,” Trevor said.

Nathan drawled from a side of his mouth, “
All
of it this time.”

Todd said with a defensive sniff, “A fellow can't remember everything.”

“He should when it's his job to remember.”

Trevor frowned. “What are you boys talking about?”

“Past history, Dad,” Nathan said. “At least this time.”

Dad?
Todd noted, as well as Nathan's warning. He was glad to get off his feet. His legs still trembled from the exertion of carrying the heavy pot to the river, but more so from shaky nerves. He felt caught in an undertow with no strength to fight the current. Nathan knew how much drilling on Windy Bluff meant to him, and now, cozy with his father, the boss's son was aware that the company's geologist wasn't above withholding certain information to achieve that aim. Keeping quiet at the beginning about Samantha taking pictures of her relic and “entrusting” him to mail her camera had been a mistake. When it wasn't returned, it would take a miracle for Trevor Waverling not to believe the worst of him. Suspecting was as good as knowing to Trevor Waverling, and he'd fire him before Todd could get out a word of self-defense. Land-lease contracts between lessee and grantor were required by law to state specifically every physical feature of the tract of land the owner agreed to lease. To keep something like a possible archeological find from him would make Waverling Tools liable to a lawsuit, because it deprived the landowner of geologic information that might have prevented him from allowing the company to drill. Well, at this point, Todd thought, what was done was done. Samantha's camera was at the bottom of the Trinity River, or soon would be, and nobody could prove he hadn't mailed off her Kodak.

“Well?” Trevor demanded. “What did Neal Gordon have to say?”

“We must hold for the present. Neal Gordon is waiting for his daughter's photographs to be returned from New York. The film will show whether the Windy Bluff area becomes an oil field or an archeological dig.”

“And how long will that be?”

“At the longest, two more weeks.”

“About those photographs, Todd,” Trevor said. “At the start, why didn't you mention that Miss Gordon had taken them of the skull as further evidence of her claim?”

Todd hoped his bony Adam's apple did not betray his nervous swallow. “Well, as I said in the meeting, sir, in my professional opinion, there is no merit to them. That skull is not the partial head of a dinosaur, no matter how much Samantha wants to believe it is. I didn't think the photographs were important to mention because they won't prove anything, and… I was under the impression you believed time of the essence to begin drilling.”

“Then your impression was wrong, Todd. To me, time is never of the essence to do anything without proper investigation, and those photographs were important to mention because they'll either support your professional opinion or refute it,” Trevor said, his sea-green gaze going cold. “Since that's the case, we could have already arranged a contingent deal for another site if we learn we've been sitting on an empty nest. I understand Miss Gordon has studied fossils and the like, and her opinion may be as credible as yours. Apparently, you boys misjudged the weight of Mr. Gordon's affection for his daughter.”

Nathan said, “I don't think so, Dad. There's no doubt Mr. Gordon loves his daughter, but he also loves his ranch. He struck me as the kind of man who wants to have his cake and eat it, too. It's just an impression, but I feel he's the sort to figure a way to satisfy both.”
Especially if we can preserve that archeological site
, his look said to Trevor.

Trevor spoke to Todd. “Tell me again how long before those photographs are due to arrive?”

“No more than two weeks is my guess, maybe sooner, but they'll be worth the wait, Mr. Waverling, I can almost promise you,” Todd said eagerly, grateful that Nathan had stepped up to his defense. Passion warmed his neck. “Please don't withdraw your offer to Mr. Gordon. If the photographs don't back up Samantha—and they won't—he'll lease to us, and you will never know a moment's regret.”

Trevor regarded Todd with a thoughtful purse of his lips. “All right, Todd, I'm reluctant to argue against a man's convictions if he's totally convinced he's right,” he said. “I'll hold off putting my money on another site, but two weeks is my limit. If we don't have the results of those photographs by then, we'll look elsewhere.”

“Thank you, sir,” Todd said, rising, the muscles of his legs as weak as fruit pulp.

Trevor nodded in dismissal, and as Todd left, he heard him say, “All right, son, ready to go eat now?” suggesting that Nathan had returned to his father's office at his invitation to join him for lunch. Todd thought his feelings should be nicked at his boss putting the question to the hayseed before he was out the door, carelessly excluding him, but they weren't. As rib-gnawing as his hunger was, his stomach turned at the thought of food. The boss had never invited him to lunch anyway, and he must go back to his office and pray for a miracle.

July fourth arrived, hot and sultry. Hand fans waved before perspiring faces, and smiles beamed when Sloan drew Samantha to his side, raised a glass of champagne to his guests in double celebration of Independence Day and his twenty-fourth birthday (which was really July second), and announced that Samantha Gordon had agreed to be his wife—“Sam to you,” he added, to get a laugh. Applause and a few lewd remarks from male celebrants already tipsy on the punch greeted the couple's kiss. Neal and Estelle looked on with the glowing happiness of parents whose lifelong dream for their daughter had come true. Questions of in whose house the couple would reside, how their time would be divided between households, who would be in charge of the sprawling hacienda of the Triple S, and the role Samantha would play in helping Neal manage Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad had been discussed, and some surprising information had come to light.

Billie June disclosed that she'd like to take a room at a women's boardinghouse in Dallas to study music at the Sarah B. Morrison Academy, and Millie May said that in the fall she'd like to enroll for classes at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to learn how to paint in oils. Both were more than happy to yield their position as joint mistresses of the house to Samantha. Neal agreed with Estelle that it was only fitting that a bride live in the house of her husband, though he declared he'd “wander around the main house like a walrus out of water”—not that Neal had ever seen a walrus, his wife reminded him.

During a prenuptial breakfast Estelle had arranged at the town house to honor the two families, Samantha discovered she'd had a change of heart about a matter she'd expected to nettle the hound out of her. Neal announced he'd like to take Estelle to Galveston to stay at the Tremont House, the finest hotel in Texas where the likes of Sam Houston, Ulysses S. Grant, Clara Barton, and Buffalo Bill had stayed.

Estelle asked, a spark of hope in her eye, “By train?”

“By coach,” Neal said and peered down the table at Sloan to say, “I'm hoping you'll help Wayne run the ranch while I'm gone, Sloan.”

It was as Samantha had foreseen. She would be edged out of the running operation of Las Tres Lomas. She was heir to the ranch, but as she would be a woman married to someone as capable as Sloan, her father would expect her to step aside and let her husband into the driver's seat. The high-handed presumption of it should have made her blood flame. She had sacrificed her private dream of becoming a paleontologist for the sake of Las Tres Lomas. Now that her father was to have Sloan by his side, her services would no longer be needed. The choice of whether to hand over the reins to her husband should be hers, but Samantha found she no longer cared. She had no desire to incite another conflict between herself and her father, and he had been more than fair in respecting her argument against drilling. She would continue to see after the books, but she would not mind retiring her boots and chaps for drawing room clothes, to enjoy life as a married woman and eventually—within a year, she hoped—as a mother. In the meantime, with Sloan sharing the responsibilities of running both ranches with her father, Samantha would have leisure to pursue the excavation of the archeological site she was sure was present beneath the ground at Windy Bluff.