HE’D HEARD they tried something like this in Louisiana once, Darren thought as he stood on Margaret Goodfellow’s front porch, hoping she was home and not still at the hospital. He’d texted Greg to ask about any change in Mr. Page’s condition and got back a terse Holding steady. On the drive into Hopetown, Darren had tried to remember the details of the scandal that erupted when the tiny Jena band of Choctaw Indians attempted to establish a reservation in Louisiana for the purposes of applying for a gaming license from the National Indian Gaming Commission; their reservation had to be recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington before they would be granted a license. The infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff pushed senators and congressmen to whom he and his firm had made generous campaign donations to write letters to the Department of the Interior accusing the tiny group of Choctaw Indians of “reservation shopping,” trying to set up shop miles from their actual homeland. It turned out that the real reason for Abramoff’s push to end their gaming bid was that his lobbying firm already represented rival Indian casinos in the area. The only Indian casino in the state of Texas that had slots and table games was the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino, all the way down in the border town of Eagle Pass, where you could sneeze and your DNA would land in Mexico. But if Sandler Gaines established one in Jefferson, he’d have a monopoly on casino gambling across the entire eastern part of the state.