Averell Comstock would of course be a full partner. Matters had braced himself to pretend humble acquiescence and he said, “I would be deeply honored.”
In fact, he was thrilled—not for a junior partnership but for the access he would gain to the president. Comstock may have his doubts, but he also sensed that the pipe line was a bold idea that Rockefeller would seize upon. In which case, Comstock feared the idea would get to the president from someone else unless he moved quickly.
Matters reminded himself not to get cocky. Older Standard Oil directors, who jealously guarded their power, were the smartest in American industry. There were wise men among them who might intuit Matters’ plot, might guess that for Bill Matters the pipe line was only the beginning.
As the assassin had proclaimed after shooting Spike Hopewell, those who get too close will be killed.
—
Bill Matters summoned the assassin to his private rail car.
“Word’s come from Texas that C. C. Gustafson did not die.”
“I’m not surprised. He was quick as lightning. I struck him twice, but neither shot felt right.”
“What happened?”
“Fate intervened,” the assassin said blithely, but, unable to abide a deep sense of failure, added in a voice suddenly dark, “I am mortified . . . I promise you that such a failure will never again occur. Never.”
“Don’t worry about Gustafson. The effect of the attack is the same as if he had died. They’ll blame Standard Oil.”
The assassin’s spirits continued to fall. “I have promised myself on my mother’s grave that I will never miss again. Never.”
Matters said, “I need something new from you. Something quite different.”
The assassin leaned closer, intrigued. “How different?”
“Some old ones must die.”
“Comstock?”
“Yes. He’s bringing my pipe line scheme to Rockefeller. After he does, I need him out of my way.”
“And old Lapham?”
“No, not Lapham.”
“God knows what Clyde Lapham remembers,” the assassin warned darkly. “But whatever he does remember will be too much.”
“Not yet! I need Lapham.”
“O.K. Only Comstock. For the moment. What is different?”
“His death must appear to be natural. No sniping. No suspicion of murder.”
“Miles ahead of you,” the assassin crowed—spirits soaring as suddenly high as a skyrocket—and whipped out of a vest pocket a red vial.
—
From Humble, Texas, Walt Hatfield wired Isaac Bell at the Washington field office.
C. C. GUSTAFSON VEXED STANDARD
WINGED NOT DEAD YET
SHERIFF’S SUSPECT DEAD
Isaac Bell raced to Central Station. The Washington & Southwestern Limited was fully booked, but a pass given him by a prep school classmate’s railroad president father got Bell into a seat reserved for friends of the company. Everyone, the conductor told him, seemed to be going to Texas.
In the smoker, he drank a Manhattan cocktail that was exactly the color of Edna Matters’ fine, wispy hair. And from what he had glimpsed of Nellie, hers too. He ordered another and raised the glass to salute Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which the train passed by in the dying daylight. He ate a grilled rockfish in the dining car, and slept in a Pullman Palace sleeper that the Limited picked up in Danville, Virginia.
Twenty-seven hours later, a Van Dorn apprentice from the New Orleans field office ran into Union Terminal with another wire from Texas Walt.
SHERIFF’S DEAD SUSPECT CLEARED
C. C. GUSTAFSON AWAKE
Isaac Bell swung aboard the westbound Sunset Express.
BOOK TWO
POISON
TEXAS
9
Hummbuuulll, Texas!” bawled the conductor. “Humble, Texas! Next stop, Humble, Texas!”
Isaac Bell was first at the vestibule door, ahead of a crowd of excited speculators jostling behind him. The still-speeding train leaned into a hard bend in the tracks, and he glimpsed something that made him open the corridor window to lean out in the humid heat. He saw hundreds of oil derricks surrounded by giant crude storage tanks. A sprawling boomtown of fresh-built barracks, boardinghouses, hotels, saloons, and a “ragtown” section of tents crowded both sides of the main line tracks. The sidings and railyards were black with rows of tank cars.
But what had caught the Van Dorn detective’s eye was floating in the smoke-stained sky above the town—Nellie Matters’ yellow balloon with the block lettering on the bulge of the gas envelope that read VOTES FOR WOMEN. Where had she come from? Bell wondered. More to the point, had her beautiful sister Edna come with her?
The ground shook suddenly at the very moment the Sunset Express pulled into the makeshift station with clanging bell and hissing air brakes. The tracks trembled and the Pullman cars rattled and everyone on the train ran to the windows. A fountain of oil spewed from the top of a derrick. The fountain rapidly thickened. Thundering out of the earth, the eruption blew the derrick to splinters and projected skyward nearly as high as Nellie Matters’ balloon.
Bell gave the roaring spouter and its greasy brown spray a wide berth, judging the wind by the direction Nellie’s balloon was tugging the rope that tethered it above the fairground. Most of that dusty field had been turned into a “ragtown” taken up by tents. In the small open space that remained, fifty women in white summer dresses were waving EQUAL SUFFRAGE LEAGUES OF HOUSTON AND HUMBLE banners at Nellie’s balloon.
Bell hurried past the fairground and cut down Main Street and into the Toppling Derrick, the boomtown’s biggest saloon. Waiting as promised at the bar was Texas Walt Hatfield, a tall, wiry, sun-blasted man with twin Colt six-shooters holstered in low-slung gun belts and a broad-brimmed J. B. Stetson hat. Beside him stood a feisty-looking gent with his arm in a sling and his neck swathed in bandages. His face wore the pallor of recent shock, but his eyes were bright.
“Howdy, Isaac,” said Hatfield, shaking hands as casually as if they had last worked together yesterday instead of a year ago. “This here’s Mr.
