The Tycoon (4 page)

Silas Morgan, who had lived in the ranch’s bunkhouse most of his adult life, met him at the horse barn. Silas had never been married and had no family as far as anyone knew. That was how it was with several of the ranch hands. They rode for the brand, loyal to the bone. The Double-Barrel was their home, the Lockharts their family and the Lockharts respected that.

Drake swung out of the saddle, feeling a deep ache in muscles he hadn’t used since he had been down from Fort Worth for the fall round-up.

“How you like ol’ Mouse?” Silas asked, taking hold of the bridle.

Drake untied his rifle scabbard and set it against a stall. “Pretty damned amazing. Took a shot at a hog. He didn’t even pitch my ass to the dirt.”

“The hell,” Silas said, loosening the saddle cinch. “What happened with the hog?”

“Missed him.” Drake patted the horse’s neck and told him again what a good boy he was.

“That’s not like you, Son.”

Silas had always called him “Son.” Indeed, Drake saw him as a second father. Years back, Drake had spent a year and a half living in the bunkhouse himself, alongside the ranch hands. Silas had mentored him, taught him to be a real cowboy. And he had gone a long way toward teaching him to be a man. To this day, Drake lived by something Silas had told him:
Don’t never give up ’til you just have to. And if it turns out you have to, pick your own place and do it on your own terms.

“I couldn’t see that well through the fog,” Drake said absently, more interested in his mount. He no longer owned a horse, but there had been a time when a good horse had been a big part of his life. “I miss the horses,” he said, dragging the saddle off Mouse’s back.

“You were always good with ’em,” Silas said, removing Mouse’s bridle. “This been a good birthday for you?”

Drake regarded his thirty-fifth birthday as a landmark. This year, it had landed on the day

after Thanksgiving Day. The annual holiday feast had included a huge birthday cake and champagne. “The best,” Drake answered. He carried the saddle into the tack room and placed it on its tree.

The whole family, including Drake’s ninety-year-old paternal grandmother, who now lived in town, and Pic’s girlfriend, Mandy, had been present. Mom had come down from Fort Worth. Even some of the older ranch hands had been there. The gathering had been almost genial for a change. Mom hadn’t nagged him about getting married and having kids. Dad had been on his best behavior, so Mom hadn’t picked a fight with him.

He removed his chinks and spurs and hung them on a peg, then returned to where Silas was brushing Mouse. “Everybody but your mama’s folks turned out, didn’t they?” Silas said.

Drake had hoped his maternal grandparents might come for his birthday, but they had not. His mom said they were in Indiana. As fulltime RVers, they were rarely in Texas these days, thus, Drake and his siblings saw little of them. “Yeah, they did,” he said.

“With that big-deal horse show going on up in Fort Worth, I couldn’t believe it when Kate and Troy showed up.”

The “horse show” Silas referred to
was
a big deal. The American Cutting Horse Association World Championship Futurity was the be-all, end-all cutting competition in the country. The three-week event started the last part of November every year. Both Drake’s little sister and his half brother participated. Kate as a breeder and competitor and Troy as a trainer as well as a competitor. Drake chuckled. “Me either. I wasn’t expecting them.”

“Just goes to show how much folks miss you around here and how much they think of you,” Silas said. “Think you’ll ever come back to the ranch?”

The question startled Drake, but the answer startled him more. These days he never thought of returning to the Double-Barrel for anything other than a short visit. He couldn’t put his finger on when his attitude about that had changed. “Nah. Not any time soon.”

Just then, Drake’s phone warbled. He plucked it off his belt and saw the name of one of the associates in his Fort Worth company. “Hey, Gabe, what’s up?”

“Hey, Drake. How was Thanksgiving?”

Phone pressed to his ear, he mouthed to Silas, “I’m going to the house.”

He picked up his saddle scabbard, gave Silas a two-fingered salute and walked toward the ranch house. “Good, Gabe, good. You have a good visit with your family?”

“Ate like a horse, as usual. Listen, sorry to bother you when you’re on a holiday, but I didn’t want to let this wait.”

Gabe Mathison paid little attention to holidays and weekends. He was the youngest broker in Drake’s organization of forty-five real estate brokers and was still more or less in training. He was also one of the most ambitious. When it came to sniffing out a good deal for the company or a customer/investor, Gabe turned over every stone. In some ways, he reminded Drake of himself.

“You know that corner piece of land on the Fort Worth Highway just out of Camden?” he continued. “The one with the big oak trees? It’s across the highway from that new grocery store and strip mall Lincoln Properties built.”

Drake traveled through Camden every time he drove to the Double-Barrel. He had watched the small town’s rapid growth with only distant interest. His playing field was the Dallas/Fort

Worth Metroplex. “Vaguely. What’s up?”

“It’s for sale. We got a flyer from Emmet Hunt in Dallas.”

Drake’s interest piqued. Bare ground for sale in a hot growth area like Camden always had good potential. “How much land?”

“A little over five acres. Not a big chunk, but all the ground around it’s unimproved except for one old house that looks like it might fall down. I’m going to do some research to see who owns it. Could be a deal for the right buyer. It’s a perfect spot for a C-store. A Race Trac maybe.”

Drake involved himself in his agents’ deals only peripherally. He often didn’t even know the names of buyers and sellers. His primary concern was that his people performed ethically and legally. Otherwise, he left them to their own creative ventures. “Do some work on it,” he replied. “I’ll be back up there tomorrow and we can go over it.”

“Shouldn’t we go ahead and make an offer?”

“I don’t think anybody will snatch it out from under us before tomorrow. It’s the holidays. And knowing Emmet, it’s overpriced anyway.”

Gabe laughed. “Gotcha. See ya tomorrow.”

Chapter 4

Drake entered the Double-Barrel’s log and native rock ranch house through the back door and the large utility room where at one time long ago, game and beef were butchered and packaged for freezing. The sprawling house had been built in 1902 by a Lockhart grandfather. It had been added on to and remodeled more than once. In many ways, it remained outdated. Still, it had an elegance about it.

The aroma of lunch preparation set his taste buds to dancing. He laid his Stetson on the long stainless steel counter and hung his coat to the side of the door on a coat rack made of steer horns. A shudder passed over his shoulders as warmth seeped into his body.

He found his dad and brother enjoying a blazing fire in the den’s fireplace. With the day being gloomy, the glow from two artfully-welded horseshoe lamps flanking a long cowhide sofa cast the room in an amber light. Heavy western-style furniture, a large TV, brown wood-paneled walls, a massive tan limestone fireplace and a few hunting trophies made the room’s ambience decidedly masculine.

Two eight-foot sliding doors opened out onto a large concrete patio, but the roof that covered the patio never allowed bright light into the den, even on a sunny day. When Mom lived here, she had declared this room “a dark and depressing boar’s nest.” She had tried to change its appearance by adding flowers and candles, which the men in the family had barely tolerated. They liked the room as it was. Pic called it a man cave. Drake thought it one of the most relaxing places he had ever been.

“You’ve been out there a long time,” Pic said, grinning from a massive leather recliner. “Thought we were gonna have to send out a search party. You’re gonna have a sore butt tomorrow, Brother.”

Drake carried his gun scabbard to a built-in cabinet in an out-of-the-way corner, pulled out his rifle and began to unload it.

Seated on the end of one of the sofa, his dad looked up from behind a newspaper. “How’d the new fence look?”

Drake closed his rifle into the cabinet. “Didn’t see any breaks. Saw a little bit of grass peeking through.”

“We need more rain,” his dad said, folding the newspaper. “I just hope this weather keeps  on coming.”

Weather. A never-ending grievance of a rancher in Texas,
Drake thought.

His brother rose, walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of the blaze, his hands behind his back. “How many hogs did you shoot?”

“Missed one,” Drake answered.

“We’ve hunted hell out of those hogs,” Pic said, shaking his head. “Every hand’s taking a rifle every time they go out.”

Feral hogs had become a scourge to stockmen and farmers all over rural Texas. They tore up fences, destroyed crops and attacked livestock. They were so prolific, the state had declared open season on them.

“I’ll tell you this much,” Dad groused. “We can’t afford to lose even one more calf to rustlers and hogs. Damn rustling is at an all-time high and sheep raisers southwest of here? The paper says those bastard hogs are putting them clear out of business. Lambs are a hundred percent defenseless.”

Drake and Pic traded looks, both knowing that repeating conversation about the financial

loss the ranch had taken and continued to take was unnecessary. Dad was endlessly vocal in his belief that the fires and the hogs had cut the spring calf crop in half.

Just then, Johnnie Sue stuck her head through the doorway. “You boys come eat ’fore it gets cold.”

Dad stood. “Let’s eat dinner. Johnnie Sue’s fried up that mess of birds we shot.”

Drake and his family were lifelong hunters. His father had taught him and his siblings gun care and shooting as children. They had grown up eating game meat. Bird hunting was one of Drake’s favorite activities. On this visit, he, Pic, and his dad had hunted quail every morning. With him going back tomorrow, today was the day for a quail feed.

They filed into the breakfast room off one end of the kitchen and sat down at the round oak table. The table in the formal dining room seated twelve, but they rarely ate there. All three of them liked the intimacy of dining in the breakfast room.

Johnnie Sue served them fried quail, mashed potatoes and cream gravy and homemade biscuits. After the meal, she cleared the table and they sat talking. “When you going to Lubbock?” Dad asked.

The Lockhart family owned fourteen thousand acres of cotton farms and grazing land between Lubbock and Amarillo. Seven years ago, Drake had negotiated leases on a third of the land with an energy provider. Completed wind turbines stood in neat rows on part of the cotton fields and some were still under construction.

“Before the end of the year,” he answered.

“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about,” Dad said. “About getting involved in building those windmills. I’m dubious, Son. Lockharts have never gone out on a venture capital limb. I don’t think I need to tell you this isn’t a good year for gambling.”

His father spoke of Pennington Engineering, the company erecting wind turbines on the Lockhart cotton farms. Robert Pennington, the company’s owner had approached Drake a couple of years ago about partnering in a manufacturing operation and was now bringing the plan to a head. Drake hadn’t committed, but he hadn’t said no either.

In recent years, the ranch had come to be more dependent on its investments outside the cattle business. And the responsibility to make that successful had fallen on Drake. Shepherding the family’s wealth was different from risking his own. He’d had to learn to juggle between it and the edgier business his own company engaged in. Ironically, at this point in the Lockharts’ long history in Texas agriculture, it might very well be Drake’s business acumen and honed negotiating skills that saved the ranch.