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expense had been spared: even the Spanish moss that naturally adorned the towering oak and pecan trees on the grounds had been sprayed with silver dust, leaving the guests in no doubt that R. D. Lawson wholeheartedly approved of his son's marriage to Barbara Ellen Torrence, the daughter of an old Texas family reputed to have the bluest blood despite the fact that financially they were in the red, victims of the stock market crash of '29; and leaving the guests in no doubt that the Torrences were not too proud to let the nouveau riche R. D. Lawson pay for this lavish and elaborate wedding. As far as R.D. was concerned, no other setting would do but River Bend, restored, virtually rebuilt, to its former glory.
    Located on the Brazos River less than twenty miles southwest of the very center of Houston, River Bend was surrounded on three sides by croplands and rice fields, the flatness of the coastal prairie unbroken except by the occasional farmhouse or tree. But the one hundred acres that remained of River Bend conjured up images of the Old South. Here, the strongest and tallest of the oaks, pecans, and cottonwoods that grew in the thick woods next to the river were left standing, towering giants bearded by the lacy moss and strung with wild grape vines.
    Set back from the main road, nearly hidden by the trees, the main house was a magnificent fourteen-room Victorian mansion. A wide veranda wrapped itself around three sides of the house, outlined by a handsome balustrade repeated as a parapet around a narrow second-floor balcony. A cupola crowned the third story, which contained R.D.'s billiard room, and provided a center balance point for the corner turrets.
    Once this mansion had been the heart of a thousand-acre plantation founded back in the late 1820s by a Southern cotton planter, Bartholomew Lawson, who was drawn to the area, like so many others of his kind, by the rich alluvial soil along the Brazos River bottom. As R.D. liked to remind everyone, there was a River Bend long before there was a Houston. Lawson slaves were in the fields back in 1832 when a pair of land speculators from New York were peddling lots in the tract of land they had bought on Buffalo Bayou.
    River Bend flourished for nearly half a century, but the Civil War and the abolition of slavery changed all that. During the years of Reconstruction, large parcels of the plantation were sold to satisfy old debts and claims for back taxes. When R.D. was born at the turn of the century, only three hundred acres of the original plantation were still in the family; not a trace remained of the slave quarters near the river that had once been home to nearly a hundred blacks; and the mansion was a hayshed, its vast lawn and surrounding pecan grove a pasture land for the cattle and hogs. R.D.—his momma called him Bobby Dean—lived with his parents in the cottage that had been built to house the overseer and his family.
    At the age of fifteen, R.D. went to work in the Texas oil fields. That's where the big money was. It made sense to him that if he was going to dig in the dirt, he might as well get paid for it. He got hired on by a man with the wishful name of "Gusher" Bill Atkins, who owned a rotary drilling rig. His first job was working in the mud pits. Eventually he graduated to a "roughneck," working on the floor of the drilling rig, handling the pipe. Within a few years, he'd tried his hand at nearly every job on the rig.
    Those were the wild, freewheeling years of the oil business. The whole nation was certain the country was on the verge of running out of oil. Dire warnings were regularly issued by the government in the late 1910s and early 1920s, accompanied by statistics that showed production and consumption of oil were increasing at a considerably faster rate than new reserves were being found. The rush to find new fields was on, led by the "wildcatters," the independent oil men. For the most part the major oil companies, who had the pipelines, the