Texas Iron by Robert J. Randisi Read Free Book Online

the window now he saw Lincoln Burkett step from the bank. Over the past nine months Burkett had become the most
     powerful man in Vengeance Creek. Just before the deaths of the McCalls he had purchased Joshua McCall’s ranch. Knowing how
     much it meant to the McCalls to keep the ranch so that their sons would have a home to come back to, Dude Miller had been
     suspicious of the sale ever since. He had been unable, however, to wrest the truth from Joshua McCall about the reason for
     the sale. A month later, the McCalls were dead, under what Miller considered suspicious circumstances. The powers that were
     in Vengeance Creek, however, led by Lincoln Burkett, had come to their decision fairly quickly, and there had been no investigation
     into the matter.
    That would change when Sam and his brothers arrived.
    And they would arrive.
    Eventually.
    Lincoln Burkett stepped from the bank and took a moment to slip his wallet into his jacket pocket. As he did so he looked
     across the street and saw Dude Miller watching him from the window of his store. Burkett frowned, staring back at the man,
     but that did not deter Miller, who stared back boldly.
    Dude Miller was one of the few people in VengeanceCreek who resisted what Lincoln Burkett could do for this town. The man
     didn’t realize that the more powerful Burkett became, the more he could do for the town, and the faster the town would grow.
    Burkett knew that Miller was one of those people who worried about how to get there, while Lincoln Burkett merely worried
     about getting there, period. That was why Dude Miller would always be a storekeeper, and why Lincoln Burkett would eventually
     become one of the most powerful people in Texas—and maybe in the whole damned country.
    Burkett stepped down from the boardwalk in front of the bank and started walking toward the saloon, where he was to meet his
     son, John.
    Lincoln Burkett was a big man, still robust enough at sixty-three to give the town whores a ride or two. It was to his everlasting
     consternation that his twenty-two-year-old son seemed to be most interested in those same whores than in following in his
     father’s wake.
    John Burkett was Lincoln Burkett’s only child, a child who came along late in life to Burkett and his wife. The birth had
     been very hard on the forty-year-old Virginia Burkett. She had survived it, but had never been the same after it, and eventually
     died when the boy was four. At that time the Burketts had a ranch in the Dakotas, and Lincoln had too much to do building
     his empire to spend much time with his son. The task of raising the boy had fallen to a governess, and too late Burkett realized
     his error. A boy raised solely by a woman would have a woman’s values. When the boy was fourteen Burkett dismissed the governess
     and took charge of the boy himself. Unfortunately, in his efforts to make up for his earlier error, he rode the boy too hard,
     and ended up with a defiant young man who resisted his father’s ideas of what constituted manhood.
    The Burketts eventually were forced by circumstances to leave the Dakotas’through no fault of their own, of course—and had
     come to Texas. Here, Burkett hoped to build himself a more lasting empire. He also hoped that his son, in this new environment,
     would come around and realize where his future lay.
    So far, all the boy was interested in was what lay between the thighs of the whores in the town cathouse.
    Of late, though, Burkett had decided that he could reverse that by buying the cathouse, and that was the deal he had just
     completed in the bank.
    Of course, the madame, Louise Simon, had resisted his offers to buy, but he had finally made her an offer she found impossible
     to resist: sell, or be burned out.
    Burkett magnanimously allowed the woman to retain ten percent of the business, and was also allowing her to continue to run
     it, on the condition that she turn John Burkett away each time he tried to make use of the