Of course she could not help but be drawn to people like Hank, people with their own fire, but no matter how much they thought they loved you or their family or their country, no matter how they pledged their allegiance, that fire always burned for them alone.

DESPITE THE DISAPPEARANCE of the last of the original Mexican families (many of whom have been here five or ten generations—longer than any white), a new crop has arrived to fill their places.

but I have always been a keen student of that emotion.

The settlers had pushed far beyond Belknap, Chadbourne, and Phantom Hill, a hundred miles past where the army could protect them.

It had become clear to me that the lives of the rich and famous were not so different from the lives of the Comanches: you did what you pleased and answered to no one.

realized I had come on the remains of some ancient tribe that had lived in towns or cities, a tribe so long extinct no one remembered they had ever lived.

Still the shadow has not appeared. Have begun to look in all the dark places, out of the corner of my eye, but . . . nothing.

J.A. McCullough

Oil was what mattered. The Allies had burned seven billion barrels during the war; 90 percent of that had come from America, mostly from Texas. The Big Inch and Little Big Inch: they could not have invaded Normandy without them. The Allies had sailed to victory on a sea of Texas oil.