Salvation Road

“So how end up here?” Jak asked, his piercing red eyes trained on the baron.

Baron Silas met his stare with an equally piercing gaze. “My daddy was convinced that he could find a well to work and get rich, mebbe become his own baron. If Angus wasn’t going to let him look for one in Dallas, then mebbe he’d just have to get out and find his own. He knew this land like his own skin, and so he knew that if he came here he had a chance of getting a well. There were some people here then, but it was so small that they didn’t even have a baron as such.”

“Well, it took a long time to build a reasonable place for my ma and me, and then get the trust of the locals enough to start the search. They had some machinery and stuff that they’d salvaged, and they used wag parts for trade and also used their knowledge of how wags worked to barter their way with passing trade convoys. So they had some time when they wasn’t doing so much work that they couldn’t help. I guess my daddy had a vision of what he wanted to find, and what he wanted to make of it. And I guess the folks of Salvation were stupe enough to believe him and greedy enough to work at it.”

“Stupe enough?” Mildred broke in.

“Yeah, mebbe they were at that. After all, there was no real proof that any of the wells were actually capable of being worked. Shit, even if you found one with oil, how the hell were you supposed to get that refinery and plant working to get it out and make it into fuel…liquid jack?”

“Workable enough given their mechanical skills,” J.B. mused.

“Guess that was it.” Baron Silas nodded. “Anyways, it took years. I grew up, and my daddy taught me all he knew, and showed me the old documents he used to piece together the knowledge he had for finding and testing the old wells. Shit, they’re big enough to find, all right, if you’ve got a map reference, but actually seeing if they had anything left… That can sometimes be a dangerous business. You try and get the damn things to gush and if they do, then you run the risk of firing the bastards. That’s what happened to Daddy. He was caught in the back-draft at a well and fried.” He fell into a thoughtful silence.

“And that’s the well you’re working?” Mildred asked in the sudden pause.

Baron Silas shook himself out of his reverie. “Hell, no. That’s the irony of it all. It was another dry one, with just enough to fire up, then fizzle out. It burned for about ten minutes, long enough to chill any poor bastard near enough, and fuck all else.”

“So you took over the search?” Ryan prompted.

“That’s about the size of it,” Baron Silas nodded. “I had the know-how, and I had the people behind me. When he died, my daddy wasn’t baron—there still wasn’t one. But I made sure everyone knew that if the search was gonna continue, then I had to be baron and had to have the whip hand. It’d need a strong man to handle what would happen if we actually found a well.

“So they made me the baron, and after a little more searching I finally found the motherlode. By this time we were a lot richer in Salvation anyway, ’cause word gets around and there’s too many folks who’d want to be on that train when it starts rollin’. They don’t wanna get left behind, and so they’re all too willing to start paying you favors.”

“But they always want payback,” Ryan pointed out.

“Oh yeah, and they know they’ll get it,” the baron agreed. “And finally I hit paydirt, about two years back. Found a well, found it was still capable of a good yield and got it capped. But that’s when the real work begins. You see, in order to get a well like that working, and to get that raw shit refined into usable wag fuel, that takes a lot of machinery. And to get that all built and working takes jack and manpower. Now that’s something we didn’t have enough of in Salvation. Y’all probably saw how small we were…still are.”