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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. C. C. Gustafson.”
“Craig Gustafson,” said the publisher, thrusting out his good hand.
“Isaac Bell. Congratulations on being alive.”
C. C. Gustafson proved to be as philosophical on the subject of getting shot as any Bell had met. “My little newspaper is just a fly nipping at the hide of Standard Oil. Fact is, I’m flattered they bothered to swat me.”
Bell asked, “Do we have reason to believe that’s who shot you?”
“I don’t know for sure this is true, but I have a vague memory forming in my mind that I was told that a Standard Oil Refinery Police chief arrived on the train the day before. That would have been Tuesday. I got shot on Wednesday.”
“Can you recall any local enemies here in town you might have provoked?”
“I haven’t stolen any horses and I haven’t burned any churches, and I can also eliminate angry husbands, since I don’t run around on my wife.”
Isaac Bell glanced at the barbed-wire-lean, hawk-nosed Texas Walt for confirmation.
The normally laconic former Ranger surprised him by drawling the longest sentence Bell had ever heard him speak: “Ah had the pleasure of meeting Janet Sue—that is to say, Mrs. C. C. Gustafson—at the hospital, and Ah can report that there ain’t a man in Texas who would entertain notions of running around on such a lady.”
“I have irritated Standard Oil for years,” said Gustafson, “and currently can claim some part of the effort in the Texas State House to ban the monopolistic vultures from doing business in our state.”
Bell asked, “What do you remember of the shooting?”
“Not a heck of a lot, as I was just telling Walt. It’s coming back, but slow.”
“Mr. Gustafson only woke up yesterday morning,” Hatfield told Bell.
“I’m surprised they let you out of the hospital so soon.”
“My wife has a theory that hospitals kill people, being full of sick people with infections. She marched me home the second I could walk.”
Bell turned to Hatfield. “Who’s the dead suspect the sheriff cleared?”
“Found facedown on top of a Springfield ’03 with his neck busted.”
“As if he fell while running to escape?”
“Until friends remarked that he was near blind without his glasses, which had got busted that morning in a poker table dispute.”
