Lancer: Reunion pt. 1

CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO. OCTOBER 7, 1869

Two men, alike as brothers. Both had dark hair and pale eyes. Both wore stylish short jackets and polished boots. Silver spurs jangled at their heels. Both wore heavy cartridge belts weighted down with a pair of pistols. One was twenty-five, mustached, pale skin turning pink from the intense sun. The other was still seventeen, smaller, slimmer, his warm, ivory complexion seeming to drink up the sun, not fry in it. Together they pushed aside the heavy woolen blanket that hung over the doorway of the cantina, stepping from the heat and light outside to the cool, dark inside. Tom Pardieu and Johnny Madrid. Pardieu, the mustached one, stepped immediately up to the bar. Madrid stayed near the doorway, his back to the cool adobe of the wall until his eyes adjusted better to the gloom.

"Dos cervesas," Pardieu called in poorly accented Spanish, banging on the bar.

"Lo siento, señor, no tenemos cervesa. Tenemos jugo de manzana que esta muy fresca. Pero no cervesa."

Pardieu looked at the bartender long and slow while asking in English, "Did he call me a dog?"

Behind him, Madrid chuckled. "El jugo esta bien, gracias," he called to the bartender.

"Johnny?"

"The man has no beer, Tom. He offered us apple juice."

"Apple juice? Juice? Not even cider, I suppose?"

"I guess not, he said it was fresh." Madrid moved to a table that kept his back in the corner, still grinning at his companion.

"Hell!" Pardieu slapped a hand on the bar again, causing the bartender to jump, slopping the juice he was pouring from a stone jug over the tops of the glasses and onto the floor. The glasses were brought around the bar to the table and were deposited in front of Madrid, even though it was Pardieu who had made the initial order.

"Gracias," Madrid said, sitting upright. "Tienes comida aquí?"

"Si. Posole."

"No tienes enchiladas?"

"No. Solamente posole."

"Posole por dos, entonces. Y pan. Tienes pan? Tortillas?"

"Pan frito. Veinte-cinco centavos cada uno para la comida."

"Bueno. Traigalo."

The barkeeper vanished through another blanketed doorway to the back. Pardieu slid his right hand gun out of its holster and pointed it at the blanket. "Bang!" he shouted.

Madrid picked up one of the glasses of juice and slouched back into a comfortable position, feet up on the table, smiling.

"Hell of a bar they have in this town! No beer. How do they stay in business?"

"Serving meals and tequila, I suppose," Madrid said, sipping the juice. It was cold from the stone jug and tasted of little sweet-sour apples.

"What did you order us for dinner?" Pardieu asked. He put his gun away and walked over to sit at the table.

"Posole and fried bread."

"Goddamn it! What are we doing down here, Johnny? Seriously, son, what are we doing here? We're wasting our talents in this dump. We could be hitting it big time up in the States."

"We're getting paid good."

"We could be getting paid better. We should demand a cut of the final deal."

"What final deal? These two patrons are going to fight it out, they'll kill a few men, a few sheep. Big deal. When it's all over and done, you know who's going to get most of the land? The Mexican Government. Not you, not me, not the men who are paying us to fight for them."

"Not if we were working in the States." Pardieu said. The bartender arrived with their dinner on a tray: two big earthenware bowls full of a boiled corn soup with mutton fat and neck bones, and a basket of greasy fried bread. Pardieu looked at it and spat.

"Bah! Sheepherder food. You know," his voice changed as he changed the subject. "Up north right now there’s prime hunting for men like you and me."

"Sure there is. That's why we came down here in the first place."

"We came down here in the first place because that one sheriff was getting too pushy. No. Listen. In the southwest, the territories are entirely open land...."

"Except for where there's already people living."

"Right, right. But see, there's a lot of people who don't think the Mexes should be allowed to keep what they should have lost after the war with Mexico, right? And then there's these smart types who came in and laid claim to thousands of acres they got no real right to. So now, especially now with all the soldiers home from the War and looking for something new, there's a lot of settlement going on. People come in to claim their hundred and sixty acres from the government, and there's people already living there, without papers. There's going to be a lot of fighting. People are going to be willing to pay, pay big, for someone to do the killing for them."

Madrid just shook his head, smiling, and ate his dinner.

"What?"

"You're crazy, Tom."

"Why? Cause I admit what we do for a living? You and your damn 'body guard'. Call yourself a 'body guard' if you want, all you are is a hired killer."

"So?" Madrid said.

So... Pardieu had no answer to that. He laughed instead, the way Madrid always laughed at him. He laughed, and Madrid laughed, and he stood up and walked out of the cantina without even giving a thought to paying. He was a pistolero. Pistoleros didn't pay, they took. Besides, he hated posole and fried bread. Madrid, who had finished his meal, stood to follow, but he stopped to leave a small heap of coins on the bar on the way out. The money covered the meals twice over, and the bartender smiled warmly and waved when he left.

On the street, Madrid easily caught up to Pardeiu.

"This place is dead," Pardieu said flatly. "I'm moving out."

"I guess I'll stay."

"Why?" Pardieu demanded.

Madrid shrugged. "Why not?"

"I don't understand you!" Pardieu said with a sudden rush of anger. "I just don't...."

Madrid's hand flew to his gun so fast it was out and speaking before Pardieu's words even trailed to a halt.

My best friend's killed me, Pardieu thought wildly. And even as that thought struck, a white-hot fury engulfed his mind. He would die, but Madrid would die for killing him. His rage was so intense that his hands shook and he clawed at the gun at his side instead of being able to slide it out in one fast, sure move.

"Tom."

The gentle voice cut through his rage instantly, an anchor for him to cling to in the tornado of his fury. That voice had grounded him before many times, speaking softly, drawing him back to reality, convincing him to flee or take other action rather than wallow in his anger. He blinked, became aware that Johnny was nodding. Not nodding, pointing -- in that odd southwestern habit of his -- with his chin. Danger. But what did danger mean when he was dying, dying, and he would take that smug son-of-a-bitch down too...

"Tom."

He looked in the direction Johnny was indicating, seeing nothing at first, thinking, it was a trick to get him to turn his back so Madrid could shoot him again. But then he realized there was a man lying behind him on the street, a man already dead from the massive wounds in his chest, but whose hand was still spasming around the butt of the gun he held. It took a moment for the fury to fade enough for Tom to realize that Johnny had not killed him. He had saved his life. He had not shot Pardieu. He had shot past him, at a man who was threatening both of them.

Shot past him.

"Don't do that again!" Pardieu growled. Those shots had been too close for comfort, even if they hadn't hit him.

"Just doing my job," Madrid said. He ejected the three empty shells and replaced them with fresh cartridges before putting his pistol back in its holster, sliding it back gently without any silly twirling or playing about. Pardieu walked over and looked down at the dead man. There were three neat holes in his chest, close enough together that he could cover all three with a playing card. At least one of them had hit the heart. He glanced up again at Madrid, standing there, smiling softly. Pardieu searched his face, but Madrid's eyes, as always, were in the shadow of his hat brim, shaded and unreadable. Pardieu felt a shiver on the back of his neck, but he stopped it before it could get loose and slide down his spine. He himself liked to kill men for the feeling of power it gave him. He knew men who liked to see blood or suffering, or just plain didn't like people, any people. They made good killers. This boy was different though. He didn't like it, wouldn't talk about it, and did it with a cold-blooded efficiency Pardieu could not begin to match. And the thing was, he knew that if he could believe Madrid would shoot him point blank like that, it was because -- even after four years together, not to mention that they had just sat down to a meal together – he could.

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA: JULY 10, 1890

It was well before dawn when Murdoch Lancer gave up any pretense of sleeping and rolled out of bed. Though it was mid-summer, the thin, dry mountain air held a bite to it that made him shiver as he splashed cold water on his face and pulled on clean clothes. To avoid waking anyone else, he slipped quietly through the silent house and out to the stable before putting on his riding boots. But standing there in the dark, he knew no one else was stirring. The ranch held a feeling of stillness that could only mean that everyone in the house, and in the bunk house, was asleep. Even in here, it was quiet. The humid dark was laced with the gentle breath of equine dreams. Murdoch saddled his horse in the pitch black, wincing as the door creaked when he opened it. He led the sleepy horse out into the dooryard and paused, staring at the broad back of the big house, its many windows gleaming like square pools in the light of a nearly-full moon, and, opposite, at the bunkhouse nestled at the foot of the hills. No light shone anywhere. No smoke rose from the chimneys. It was too early even for the cook to be stirring. If anyone was likely to see him swing into his saddle and walk his horse slowly out of hearing range before kicking it into a gentle lope, it would have been Johnny, who was nearly as restless at night as Murdoch was himself. But Johnny was off on the far side of the ranch, checking fences with Scott.

The horse shook its head in protest at being forced into service at such an hour, but the road was familiar and the moon was bright and soon they were loping along at a steady, even gait. Which Murdoch immediately slowed. Town was a good distance away and it would take hours to get there, but if he rushed the trip, he would arrive before anyone there was awake, and he knew he would be unable to sit quietly, waiting. He'd gone to bed, knowing he could do nothing until morning, and this was the result. He had to learn more. But the information would not be available until after first light.

The missive that had stolen Murdoch's rest was a note scribbled on the back of an unused sales invoice that had been handed to Mills Johnson late yesterday afternoon when Johnson was leaving town with the ranch's weekly mail packet. The note was from Harlow Benson, who had run the dry goods store in town from 1855 to 1888, and now spent most of his time sitting on the porch of the big, new store, rocking and listening to gossip while his grandson and three hired girls worked behind the counter. All it said was,

"Fellow in town claiming to be a Texas

lawman asking a lot of questions about you and

your boys, specifically probing into July of

1870. Thought you should know."

Johnson had stuffed the note into the packet of mail and handed the whole thing to Teresa when he rode in. Teresa had, in turn, dropped it on the desk in the ranch office, leaving all the mail for Scott to deal with when he came back from his fencing trip. Murdoch, just by chance, had been in the office after dinner and, noticing the packet, had leafed through it in idle curiosity. Nothing personal was in it, and the bills and other documents were not urgent. The note fell to the floor, sliding from where it had been stuffed between envelopes, and he almost tossed it away when he first glanced at it, seeing it was blank on the face. Then he saw the writing. Then he read it. And his agitation had been growing ever since.

It was probably nothing. What would a Texas lawman have to do with any of them, after all? Murdoch knew he had never been to Texas, and was pretty sure neither of his sons had either. Scott had lived in the east before moving out here, and he had left the state only once since, that one business trip to meet with the Australian cattlemen. Johnny, of course, had been all over the west in his younger days. Johnny could have been anywhere. And when it came to Johnny -- or Scott, for that matter -- certain dates stuck out clearly in Murdoch's mind. Most specifically, July of 1870. July 18th, 1870.

Murdoch caught himself urging the horse faster again, and eased back on the rein. The animal pranced sideways, unhappy with his apparent inability to decide whether or not he was in a hurry. He was in a hurry. But all he could do was wait. And all he could think about as he rode, the night stilling and starting to lift around him, was riding home to the ranch thirty-seven years ago, and finding it empty. He'd been gone nearly a month, pushing stock to the mining camps to the north. It was a drive very much shorter than the ones that would become famous in later decades, as cattle were driven from the plains in Texas and Montana to the railheads in places like Belle Fourche, Abilene and Dodge City, but it was still a great deal longer than he had wanted to be away from his wife and son. The boy might have learned to walk while he was gone! Or started talking! He wasn't sure how early babies could do those things, he just knew he wanted to get home, get there as quickly as possible, see his wife, see his son, hold them both till they squirmed to get free. He had run up the ruined front porch yelling, "I'm home! Espe! I'm back! Johnny?" But there'd been no answer. He thought at first maybe she was in the back somewhere, maybe working herself on one of the old rooms, maybe meaning to surprise him by fixing up a bedroom. The huge house was mostly a ruin -- they lived entirely in the big, main, front room. He meant to fix it up, make it livable, make it the palace they deserved. In fact, he had already started on the project, shoring up walls, replacing rotting wood. But right now, they needed cash money to pay taxes and buy little shoes and dresses for the baby, and he'd gone off to get them that. And came home to an empty house.

Well, it was summer. The weather was fine. Maybe they'd gone down to the creek for a picnic, or to go fishing. But he searched the creek, the barn out back. He looked everywhere, and couldn't find a trace of them. And the more he looked, the deeper his sense of dread became. The chickens and turkeys were living wild: no one had fed them or gathered eggs in weeks. The cow in the pen out back had died: no one had let it out to graze or watered it. The horse, he realized slowly, was gone. And what else? Her trunk. Her clothes. The baby's things. Exhausted as he and his horse both were, he swung back into the saddle and rode hard into town.

He asked questions, banged on doors and demanded information from strangers when friends couldn't help him. Where were they? Where had they gone? With whom? How long ago? He finally found someone who had seen her leaving town, more than three weeks ago in the company of a man who had come through, selling hoop skirts and corsets. Without even stopping to pack, he started after them. He rode from town to town, remembering to eat only when he became too dizzy to stay on his horse, eventually falling off, lying in the mud in a forested section of road, and sobbing. Because they were gone. He was never going to find them. Esperanza had been dumped by the drummer at the first town they came to. He had liked her pretty face and full, young figure, but hadn't cared for the screaming of a baby. But Murdoch hadn't found her there. He followed one lead after another, and finally the leads trickled off, faded. He left messages wherever he went: Please, come home. I love you! Please come home!

But he never saw them again.

Winter came, and icy winds blew through the open window holes and leaking roof of the huge, old house. He stayed huddled in a narrow passage behind the front stairs, an area he was certain the original builders had specifically designed as a safe place, where arrows and bullets could not penetrate. Winds could, if not so well as in other areas, and eventually he made a fire.

And that was the start of the healing.

He built a fire to keep warm. Then he started cooking food instead of nibbling on the hardtack and dried fruit that was all that was left in the pantry. Then he washed himself. Soon, he discovered that the pain was more bearable if he worked than if he sat reflecting over and over on what had gone wrong, what had caused her to leave, why she would take his son with her and disappear like that. He threw himself into work, working on repairs by lamplight long into the night after riding all day around the acres, checking cattle, checking water. He bought a dog to help with the stock. He planted a garden in the spring. He worked and worked, and years faded past, one after another. Eventually there were outbuildings, hired hands. Even fences. And then there was Eugene O’Brien, a neighbor with a small spread, sinking fast. A neighbor who was never much good at anything, and who sat and did nothing when his wife left. His wife had left behind his daughter, though. Murdoch thought he was extremely fortunate for that, even if Eugene thought it just meant more work for himself. Murdoch and O’Brien became partners, and Murdoch invited the man and his daughter to come and live in the big, rambling -- and very, very empty -- ranch house with him. So, there was a child living there, finally. A girl-child, and not his own, but that was what the house was meant for: family. He hired a woman to look after the girl and do the cooking and cleaning, and the big old place began to resemble a home.

And he gave up on any thought of ever seeing his son again.

Until he woke out of a fever dream one day to have Teresa clutch tearfully at his hand and tell him, "They're coming! I sent for them just like you asked, and they're both coming."

A sniper, waiting up in a church steeple for just such an opportunity had shot Murdoch and O’Brien both in the back as they were riding home from a town meeting, called to see what could be done about the gun-happy land-grabbers that had infiltrated now that land and cattle were both worth real money. O’Brien, he discovered, had died instantly. He himself had a bullet lodged near the spine and had been operated on twice. Sometime in his fever or drug delirium, he must have talked about his sons. Not just the baby that Esperanza had taken, but the other one, too. Scott. He hadn't even thought about Scott in years. Before he had come to California, before he had met Esperanza and her aging father, before he had invested in the ramshackle house and the few acres that originally were all that went with it, he had had another wife. Larissa Sebastien. He'd been working as a freight driver, hauling goods between town and the dwindling coal mines of the Appalachian mountains, and Larissa had come west with her father to inspect the hole in the ground in which he had been offered shares at a rock-bottom price. He was not impressed. For good reason: coal, in the 1840s was not a terribly lucrative proposition. Coal mining would peak again in twenty or thirty years, when mining all over the west, railroads and industry became major players in the American economy, but it was not at that time a good investment for a high-powered Bostonian lawyer. He had been even less impressed with the big, raw-boned, sunburned man who had taken to sitting with his daughter on the hotel porch in the evenings. He threatened to have Murdoch run out of town on a rail. Murdoch left before he could: he and Larissa eloped. Sebastien had offered Murdoch a job to bring his daughter back into the family, back to Boston. Murdoch had declined, laboring instead in the dusty coal mines when Larissa complained that the freight-driving job took him too far from home and kept him away too long. They had gone to Boston, though, a year later. When Larissa found herself with child she allowed her family to take her back into the comfort of their big home, and Murdoch had found himself apprenticed as a clerk in her father’s big law firm, a job he hated even more than digging for coal, but tolerated for her sake. It was, at that time, considered fashionable for young ladies to be too delicate for the rigors of childbirth, and after Larissa suffered no more than three hours of early-stage, mild labor, the family physician decided to end her “torment” with a Caesarean delivery. Surgery was in its infancy in those days, such things as anesthetics had not yet been developed. It took her father, two uncles and both brothers to hold Murdoch down when he tried to run upstairs to end the screams as the doctor cut into her flesh. She and the child survived the ordeal, but Murdoch sat by her bed for two weeks, watching her die slowly of infection and blood poisoning, holding her hand as she slid farther and farther away from him. The family blamed him, of course. Turned him out of the house, fired him from his “job.” He considered demanding his son from them, but the boy was being cared for by his doting grandmother and a wet nurse, and they convinced him that Scott deserved this chance not only at a comfortable upbringing and good education, but at life itself: a man alone could not care for an infant. So, he left Scott behind, traveling west in search of a new life, a new beginning. He'd barely known the boy, had been too heartbroken, mourning the loss of the child's mother, to even give a thought as to what handing over the infant meant. Then. Later he had regretted it. But later he had had Johnny: a fat, laughing, dark-haired baby with his mother's round cheeks and Murdoch’s own blue eyes. Murdoch had gotten to see him grow from a helpless bundle interested only in warm milk and dry nappies to a small person with an actual personality. He hadn't liked beets. Murdoch remembered how he had turned his head away, screaming, shaking it violently if you tried to feed him mashed beets. He had liked oat porridge though. With lots of brown sugar and raisins. He'd open his little pink mouth and let you put a spoon of that inside. But no beets, thank you very much.

And Murdoch remembered him crawling around the dusty yard outside, exploring, poking his fat little fingers into everything -- and then sticking everything he grabbed into his mouth...

And they were coming.

"How?" he asked.

"I hired those Pinkerton men to find them," Teresa said, young enough to be proud of herself, to be totally unaware of the fear and pain in Murdoch's eyes. "It was easy enough finding Scott. You still had his grandparent's names and address. Johnny was much harder, because he was using a different name. But they found them both, and they'll be here, any day."

"What did you tell them?" he asked, wondering why two boys -- no, they'd both be grown men by now -- would agree to come clear across the country to the bedside of a man they had never known.

"Just that you were in trouble," Teresa said, but she avoided his eyes, and finally he pried the whole story out of her. She'd bribed them! She'd used his name and sent messages that he would pay a thousand dollars cash just to see them again, to talk to them for a few moments.

He'd been horrified. He tried to send messages to cancel the whole thing, but it was too late by then. He'd been laid up for over a month, and both boys were already on the road somewhere, on their way to see him. He had his lawyer sell off some mining shares and managed to get together the cash Teresa had promised them (A thousand dollars each! Her father's daughter all right. Money had never meant anything to O’Brien either -- especially when someone else supplied it!). And he had waited, walking a bit each day, until he was at least ambulatory if still damaged when they arrived, both on the same day -- July 18, 1870.

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to face them immediately. He waited in his own room until they were given rooms, given a chance to look around. The place was something to be proud of now. If Scott knew anything about him, it would be that he'd been an unemployed nobody when he left Boston twenty-five years ago. If Johnny's mother had told him anything -- or if (was it possible?) he remembered anything himself -- it would be memories of an ancient, leaky ruin, poverty and hard work. But the house was fully restored, now. All the downstairs floors were of polished flagstone. They were big, spacious rooms, with fresh, white plaster, and clean, oiled log ceilings. The kitchen was big, comfortable and well stocked. There was a small but formal dining room off the kitchen, and upstairs a whole row of bedrooms that all opened onto balconies that faced the rising sun, not to mention several suites downstairs, with private walled gardens...

He met them in his office, his favorite room in the sprawling house. It was nearly as big as the living room and, added on to one side of the house, it had windows facing three directions. There was a huge stone fireplace with comfortable couches and chairs arranged around it, real mahogany coffee and end tables, an elegant silver tray with decanters and glasses for drinks. At the last second (the boys had already been in the house when it occurred to him) he pulled down the big wedding portrait of himself and Esperanza that hung over the fireplace (Johnny might think it was there to influence him; Scott might think it was in insult that his mother wasn't up there -- but he had no pictures of Larissa!), and looked lamely around for something with which to replace it. He'd found, just in time, a huge, plaster Circle-L brand that Teresa had made for him for his last birthday. And he was standing under it -- trying to pretend he was not out of breath from hanging it -- when they walked into the room.

He still remembered that first meeting, clear as if it were happening in front of him again. He had tried to look nonchalant, pointed out their money envelopes to them, made some ridiculous comments about having their mothers’ eyes, or some such nonsense. A blatant lie, of course, they both has his eyes. But they each did have their mother’s look about them. And, sons! He had long ago given up on the idea of having a family. He'd lost his boys, both his wives, and with a legal wife alive some-unknown-where, he couldn't go looking for another one. He had enjoyed parenthood vicariously for several years, watching Teresa grow through gawky adolescence into young womanhood. But these were his sons. His blood. And it was clear immediately.

Scott walked in dressed in a finely tailored gray business man's suit, looking every inch the lawyer his grandfather had raised him to be. He was nearly as tall as Murdoch, though more slender, finer-boned, and had Murdoch's dark blue eyes and bright blonde hair. He had his mother's fine, aristocratic features, though, and that look she always had of being faintly amused by something no one else could understand. And Johnny... he looked so much like his mother that Murdoch almost couldn't stand to look at him. He was small, like her, with her dark hair, her delicate mouth and high-boned cheeks. His eyes were a different color, but they held her look: wary, guarded. Closed. And that quietness in him, that calm patience as if he were waiting for something, that was a gunman's attitude: Murdoch found out just before they arrived that the reason they had had so much trouble locating Johnny was not only that he was using a different last name, but that he was a hired gun, wanted both in several states and in Mexico. And faced with their adult indifference, he had found himself blurting out that he would give them each a third-share of the ranch if they would help him save it from the land grabbers.

Where had that come from? Had he been thinking that if Teresa's bribery got them here, a bigger bribe might keep them? No, he was pretty sure he said it, without planning or rehearsal, because he meant it. He had spent his life building a home, and had never had a family to share it with. They were his family, and he wanted them to stay.

He hadn't thought they would. Scott was on the verge of becoming a partner in a successful law practice back in Boston, had half the debutantes on the east coast warring for his attention. Johnny had... nothing. Nothing except a life-long grudge against the father he thought had abandoned him, and a long-term alliance with one of the gunmen who had shot Murdoch and Eugene O’Brien. Johnny had stayed in town, visiting that man, playing cards with him, drinking with him... A lost cause. Or so they thought. But both boys had surprised him. Scott had organized the ranch and even the neighbors with all the skill of a military officer -- which in fact he had been during The War -- and had set up defenses to safeguard the ranch. Johnny, so it turned out, had infiltrated the opposition to murder their leader.

"You had your plan, I had mine," was all he said about it later.

And they stayed. Both of them. Not because of Teresa’s bribe, or Murdoch’s, but because they wanted to. Starting on July 18, 1870.

And for twenty years, Murdoch had had his family: both his sons, Teresa, and now three grandchildren.

But there was no statute of limitations on murder, and a lawman asking questions about the Lancers, about that same time when Johnny Madrid came to this area and ceased being Johnny Madrid, scared him as bad as the vision of walking up his front steps to find his house empty.

But Murdoch, who normally enjoyed a good gossip session with Harlow, wasn't in the mood. He swung his horse around and trotted across the street, through the alley, and down two more blocks to First Street, the first street ever built at right angles to Main, and the one that still housed the most saloons. Levy's Saloon was a two-story wood-framed building, almost half a block long, with girls sitting out to sun themselves on the porch upstairs, relaxing, no doubt, after a hard night's work. He ignored their cheery calls and lewd invitations as he tied up his horse and walked inside. The barroom was dark and nearly deserted, except for the daytime barman, cleaning up from the night before, and two men sitting at a table near a window with plates of meat, eggs and beans and mugs of coffee in front of them. One of the pair was a kid, barely older than Murdoch's granddaughter (named Larissa after her grandmother). The other was a pale, lean man in his mid-thirties, with a somber look and a dark moustache. Murdoch thought he couldn't look more like a lawman if someone had printed the word across his forehead with one of those newfangled India rubber stamps. He walked up to the table, stilling the conversation with his looming presence.

"I understand you've been asking about me," Murdoch said, without introducing himself. "If you want information, Mister, you should always go to the source."

"Sounds logical," the man said. "And you would be...?"

"Murdoch Lancer," Murdoch said flatly, with the same challenge in his voice.

"Pleased to meet you, sir," the man wiped his moustache with a napkin and offered up a hand. A soft hand, Murdoch noticed. Limp. Damp. "I'm Brenton Sandlewood, and I have been asking questions all over town about anyone who might be interested in purchasing their own piece of the future."

"Huh?" Murdoch stared.

"I see you are a man of vision, Mr. Lancer," the man said. "A man with vision enough to see that the Ninteenth Century is almost at a close..." And to Murdoch's dismay, he pulled a large sample case off the floor and slid back his chair so he could set it in his lap and work the latches. Across the table, the kid started laughing.

"Bren, he's looking for me," the kid said.

"I beg your pardon?"

The kid also used his napkin, then stood and offered his hand. Murdoch could see then the lead-colored badge pinned to his vest, half-hidden under the open collar of his shirt.

"Sargent Pierce," the kid said. Murdoch took the hand, and reluctantly found himself responding more favorably. The kid's grip was firm without being challenging, the hand itself was clean, but rough with calluses.

"Murdoch Lancer," Murdoch repeated.

"So I heard," the kid said, looking amused. "Listen, Bren, would you mind if we moved to another table? Nothing personal, but we have some business to discuss."

"I never interfere with a lawman working in the line of duty," the drummer said, holding up a hand. "In fact, you can have this table. I have an important meeting with the mayor. Very soon every lawman in this fair city will be ushered, a decade early, into the Twentieth Century, and you will be able to say goodbye to crime forever!"

He was eating even as he was talking, and when he finished, he wiped his mouth again with a flourish, stood, picked up his bag and, with a bow, walked off.

"What is he selling?" Murdoch asked.

"I have no idea," the kid said. "And he sat there trying to sell one to me for almost half an hour. Auto-somethings."

"Horseless carriages?"

"I doubt it. They wouldn't fit in that case, would they? Well, he's gone, so you might as well sit down. How about having a plate yourself? If you rode into town this early, I bet you missed breakfast."

"Well, I..."

"Jeff! Another special," the kid said, though, calling out to the barman as he and Murdoch sat down opposite each other.

"They have breakfast at the hotel," the kid said confidentially as he put his napkin back in his lap. "But they don't serve chile there. I spent enough time in the southwest, I don't eat my eggs without chile. And yes, sir, I have been asking questions about you."

"What did you want to know?" Murdoch asked. He tried to sound gruff, but he wasn't sure if it was coming off right any more. That drummer had broken the mood. He felt like an actor who stepped on stage to discover he had rehearsed for the wrong play.

The kid wiped his hands and reached inside his vest to pull out a long leather wallet that was filled with folded papers. "I'm looking for this gentleman," he said, pulling out the top paper and passing it over, "I have reason to believe you may be able to help me."

Johnny! Murdoch thought in panic. But it wasn't. He studied the picture closely. Except for the damaged face, it did look a good deal like Johnny, but not quite. This man was about Johnny's age, maybe a little older. He had dark hair and pale eyes, a full moustache over a small mouth and a high-boned face. But the mouth was all wrong, the undamaged part still looking like a leer. And the ears... not Johnny's ears at all. This man had small ears, lobes almost non-existent and tucked up against the side of his head. And his eyebrows, and the shape of his eyes...

No, it was just a dark-haired man and a moment of panic. The poster didn't look anything like Johnny at all. Having determined that, he looked at it closer.

WANTED! it said in large bold letters across the top, TERRENCE T. PALMER. Then the pictures, a left profile that looked normal, handsome even, and the full-face view, which could only be described as grotesque. Something had smashed the right side of this man's face -- looked like he'd been kicked by a mule -- caving in the cheek bones, and from the flat, limp look of the scars, knocking out all the teeth as well. There was an empty socket where the eye should have been, and jagged scar tissue drew the man's brow down and his mouth up in a hideous expression that looked like glee. Smaller print at the bottom announced that the man had robbed a bank in Waco, Texas one month ago, killing seven people in the process. Since a relatively small amount of money had been stolen, no reward was offered by the bank, but if anyone had information on his whereabouts, they were asked to contact Captain Eduoard Janiver, Texas Rangers. El Paso Office.

"You're a Texas Ranger?" Murdoch asked, still staring at the picture.

"Special Forces Division, El Paso Office, Special Investigations Team," the kid said, flipping back his collar so his badge showed more clearly. It was a Ranger badge, the signature circle with a star in the center. TEXAS RANGERS, was impressed into the metal on the top of the circle, and SPECIAL FORCES DIV., EL PASO on the bottom, with a number, 283, stamped into the center of the star.

"You don't look old enough to be out of school," Murdoch commented.

"I'm nineteen," the kid said. "Which ain't much, I admit, but I was sworn in almost a year and a half ago. Now, Mr. Lancer, about this man...."

"I've never seen him before in my life," Murdoch said, handing the paper back. "Is that all you wanted?"

The kid looked at his wanted poster, frowning, instead of putting it away. "Are you sure?"

"That's not a face I would forget," Murdoch said.

"Yeah," the kid agreed thoughtfully. "As I understand it, he claims to have gotten this scar in the War. But apparently, he also claims to have fought for the North, for the South, and for a variety of different regiments, depending on who he's talking to at the time. The scar might not be near as old as he claims. He might not have looked like this when you knew him..."

"I guarantee you, I do not know that man," Murdoch said, and he started to leave, but just then Jeff brought his meal. He still might have left, but the smell of food made his stomach growl. He'd look pretty foolish, he thought, walking away now. Besides, the kid flipped a coin at the barman, who caught it easily and walked away. Paid for. So, Murdoch cut a small bit off the steak, rubbed it in the beans, egg and chile like the kid kept doing, and put it in his mouth. He already knew it would be good. Levy had some of the best meals in town.

"I hate these pictures," the kid said, still looking at his poster. "I wish we could get some photographs or at least a pencil drawing, with more shadings. Nobody ever recognizes these."

"I assure you..." Murdoch said.

"And I was looking around for an artist," the kid continued, "Who could bring it back in time a little, maybe take the scars out. Because people look at those scars, and they don't know him, you know? It's possible, like I said, that his face was normal when he was in this area."

"When would that have been?" Murdoch asked, doing justice to the meal in front of him. He was hungry. And with the ranch's cook away, he hadn't had a decent meal in nearly a week.

"Well, my source put the date as late as 1880, but honestly, she's not the most reliable person on the planet. Lies about her age, which puts all the other dates out of whack. From my own research my guess is it's much farther back than that. In fact, I doubt it can be later than... maybe July of 1870."

July of 1870. The blood didn't quite freeze in Murdoch's veins, but it seemed to go cold and slow, time stopping for a moment as the dread that had plagued him all the long ride into town came back. In force. July 1870. July eighteenth, 1870. The memory was suddenly so clear, it was as if he were there again: his heart thudding uncomfortably in his chest, sweat breaking out on his upper lip, partly from the exertion of hiding that painting at the last second, and partly in fear, real gut-deep fear, as he hears the thump of boots on the stairs, hears their voices... They've met already, are talking as they come down to meet him. What do they think of each other? What do they see? And then he sees them, Scott so distinguished and elegant, Johnny so like his mother, and he says something stupid like, "The money's all right there, on the table. You can count it if you want to." Scott barely even deigning to glance that way, Johnny picking up the envelope, staring at his name in bold, black ink as if trying to decipher what it says. Neither of them interested in the money. Both of them came for another reason. He'd known that instantly. He'd known they could still be a family, even this late.

A moment ago when he saw the poster, heard the question, he had thought his worry that something was threatening his family was pointless, an old man's worry. But it was back now. In spades. A stranger's face, a kid's easy chatter, but that date again... A date that was important enough for the Texas Rangers to send a kid out here to look into things...

"The thing is," the kid went on, focusing on his breakfast again, "apparently it's not a great picture anyway. Mind, I've never laid eyes on the man myself, but I have talked to people who have. This one lady..."

"The unreliable one?" Murdoch asked.

"Nope, very reliable," the kid grinned infectiously before continuing. "She said it didn't look at all like him because of the way they drew him, kind of leering like that. She said they made him look evil on purpose, because he's wanted. But, she said, he don't really look that way. He had a nice smile, she said. And such a pleasant way with him that you didn't even notice the scar."

Murdoch shuddered. "Scar!" As if it were a mark, like the tiny white spot on the kid's own face, almost like he'd nicked himself shaving, except that it must have been older and deeper because it made a dimple in that one cheek when he smiled. That was a scar. What happened to the face of the man in the wanted poster wasn't a scar. It was a nightmare.

"I don't recognize the name either," Murdoch said.

"Well, that was something we couldn't be totally certain of anyway. That's why they made out a John Doe warrant on him. Men like him tend not to use their real names."

"How about if I ask you a question," Murdoch suggested, the feeling of dread still licking around the edges of his stomach.

"Shoot," the kid said amiably.

"If this man robbed a bank in Waco, Texas barely a month ago, why do you care where he was in July of 1870?"

"Very good question," the kid said.

"And what connection does it all have with me?"

"Another good question. I guess it goes back to why did he rob the bank."

"To get money, I would suppose," Murdoch said.

"Yeah, but he usually got a lot more money than that without breaking any real laws. He was a con man. The Rangers and about a dozen other law enforcement agencies have files on him, but he’s got no record, you see? He was never actually charged with anything. He had it made. Then he robbed this bank in broad daylight and shot all those people to do it. Now he's going to hang. So, what was so important to him that he had to rob that bank?"

"I give up," Murdoch said. "Anyway, I asked you."

"That you did. And I'll tell you honest, no one really knows for sure. But, I got a theory on that. See, in the course of our investigation, we had to interview people who knew him. In particular, there was this woman, lives behind the Bull Dog Saloon on Front Street. Now, see, Palmer made his living swindling widow-women out of their fortunes. His current victim-to-be tossed him out when she found out about the, er, working girl over at the Bull Dog. So, of course I went and talked to her, and discovered, among other things, that Palmer had been with her the night before the hold up. He'd just lost his con victim and was in a foul mood, drinking heavily and acting very morose and sullen."

"So?" Murdoch asked.

"So. You ever heard of a woman named Rose Bolivar?"

"No," Murdoch said instantly.

"That might not be her actual name, either, but it's the only one I could get out of her. Now, you may be thinking how would you know a saloon girl in Waco, but I may have accidentally misled you a bit there. You see, this 'girl' is probably pushing sixty years of age. She used to live in California, claimed to have had a family in this area, and from the story she told, despite the dates she tried to put on it, it couldn't have been later than July of 1870."

"So what?"

"So, I asked her what she and Palmer had been talking about the night before the robbery, and she started telling me this long, long story about her life in California, twenty years ago. When she got to the part about Murdoch Lancer..."

"What?"

"Yes, sir. Your name came up. More than once. You say you never heard of this woman, but she's got a grudge on for you hard enough to break rocks with."

"Was this the reliable witness?" Murdoch asked.

"No, sir." That grin popped up again. "She's definitely the unreliable one. But here's the thing. How many Murdoch Lancer's do you suppose there are in California? I'll give you a hint. I checked all kinds of records in Sacramento and I only found one."

Murdoch nodded. It was not, as the kid hinted, a common name.

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY: MARCH (Date unknown)1870.

The horse was not moving.

Slowly, he raised his head and looked around. The trail crossed a creek, a small one, but it was running high and fast now with spring run-off and the cold mixed rain and snow that had fallen all night long, and without a rider to urge it forward, the horse had simply chosen to stop there. He would have to kick it to get it moving again, except that he could no longer feel his legs. He was too exhausted to feel alarmed at this revelation, so in lieu of panic, he tried reason. He did not remember how many hours he had been in the saddle. Twenty-four at least, perhaps as much as twice that. He had stayed on horseback, moving and resting, because he knew that if he ever managed to get himself out of the saddle, he would never get back up again. The pain had become a living thing, a demon that rode with him and tormented his every breath, and the only good thing about the weather was that he was so wet and cold he was now more likely to die of hypothermia than of fever. He wasn't going to live through this. He knew it. He knew that if he quit fighting, that if he dropped off the horse onto the ground, if he just lied down and quit, he would die faster. The pain would be over faster. But quitting wasn't part of his make up. Fighting was. He'd been fighting for every breath, every bite of food, most of his life. He couldn't stop, not even now. He just didn't know how.

He sat a moment longer, looking at the swollen creek and the sagging head of his horse, at the pines and aspens dripping cold water on them both, and thought, Maybe Tom was right. Maybe loyalty wasn't the virtue he had always thought it was. Maybe loyalty was, like Tom said, a foolish ideal that got otherwise intelligent men killed. He should have left when Tom did. He should have left when he knew there was no hope, when it was no longer a land war, but a revolution against the local government that he was mixed up in, before, instead of just an outlaw, he had become a “dangerous revolutionary”.

He was north of the border again, he was fairly certain of that, though the thought afforded him little comfort. For one thing, the men after him would not balk at crossing imaginary map-lines in pursuit of such valuable prey. For another, he was a wanted man out here in the Territories, too, which was why he had kept riding and riding, skirting wide around what few populated areas he had come to, despite his desperate need for medical care. And now, a creek had stopped him.

No. No, by God, it wouldn't!

His left arm still worked. The right one hung limp, broken by one of four bullets that had hit him, but he threaded the reins through the nearly-numb fingers of it and swung his left arm free. Pain tore through his gut at the movement, a burning so intense that he broke out in a sweat despite the fact that he was so chilled. But he swung the arm again and managed to slap the horse on the shoulder. The horse's head jerked, but then sagged again, surprised by this sign of life from upon its back, but too exhausted to move another step.

"If I can do it, you can do it," Johnny muttered through gritted teeth, and he swung the arm again. Slap! The horse, like its rider, was also used to not quitting. It picked up a hoof and took a step. It hesitated again, hock-deep in the rushing water, and Johnny swung his arm again. The horse moved forward, pushing knee-deep into the water. But getting it to move sapped all of Johnny's strength. He closed his eyes, counted on his balance to keep him in the saddle, because he couldn't hang on, not with hands or legs. If the horse slipped or jerked at all, he would fall off in the flood and probably drown, being too weak to even pick his head up out of the water.

There was a clack as a hoof hit a stone, and Johnny opened his eyes. The horse's front feet were on dry land. Another two steps, and they were on the broad, flattened area on the other side of the crossing, the trail stretching ahead, a narrow, twisting line between the trees.

"Come on," Johnny urged softly. "Come on, boy. Keep moving."

"No. Hold it right there," a voice said. The horse stopped, and Johnny fought against gravity to lift his chin off his chest. Someone barred the path, someone in a slicker and... bonnet? Holding a rifle aimed at his chest.

"Oh, definitely," Scott said. He snugged the binoculars down near his feet and reached to take the reins from Johnny. It was Johnny's wagon, and Johnny's horse (Scott’s was tied behind the wagon), but he didn't object, just bent to arrange the rifle on the wagon bed next to his foot while Scott slapped the reins lightly against the horse's rump to start him moving along the narrow path that would lead to the bottom of the slope. The wagon was small, not a full-size ranch wagon, perfect for things like hauling fencing materials in rough country. Still, it made a great deal of noise, clacking and banging its way down the path, and the men heard them coming long before they reached the bottom. Heard them, saw them, but -- as Scott had hoped -- didn't seem too alarmed. Two armed men on horseback would spook them instantly, probably resulting in gunfire, injuries or even death. But the two of them, rocking along in the little wagon, made the men more curious than afraid. They paused in their work, shielding their eyes, spoke to one another and laughed. Next to Scott on the wagon seat, Johnny was slumped low as if sitting upright were too much effort. The posture alone added at least ten years to his appearance, and Scott knew that the cheaters he wore and his half-silver hair relaxed them even more. Couple of old codgers, nothing to worry about. Good. He really, really did not want to have to kill anybody before breakfast.

"Howdy," he called as he pulled the wagon up within easy speaking distance. "Doing a little fencing work, I see."

"Yeah, well, we're starting up a spread up north of here," one of the men said. "Don't want any of our cows getting lost in these little canyons and ending up with Circle L brands."

"Nope, nope. Sure wouldn't want that," Scott agreed amiably. "Would we, Mr. Lancer?"

"No, Mr. Lancer, we would not," Johnny agreed, lifting his head just enough to let the men see that he was not asleep, as he may have appeared.

"Mr..?" The talkative one, the big one with the heavy fencing pliers in his hand, continued being the spokesman for the group. "Now, look here! There's no law against a man fixing a fence, even if he don't own it. Shoot, we're doing you a favor."

"We can see that," Scott said. "We're much obliged. Saves us a lot of work. I can see if we're going to have you as neighbors, things are going to be very pleasant and peaceful around here."

The men, who had tensed up at the mention of the Lancer name, visibly relaxed again.

"Well, sure," the big one said. "That's the way we like things too. Pleasant and peaceful."

"I bet you do. You look like very peaceful fellows. Tell me, in case some of your cattle did get through, what brand should we be looking out for?"

"Brand?"

"Yes, sir. What would your brand look like?"

"Oh, well, uh, Circle Box."

"Circle Box," Scott thoughtfully. He tried to sound both ignorant and interested. In fact, he was thinking that that was the lamest attempt he had ever heard of to cover the Circle L brand. From the slight movement of Johnny shoulders, he knew Johnny was thinking the same thing. And trying hard not to laugh out loud. Brand doctoring was simple enough to prove. All it took was killing one steer to look at the hide from the inside. And, this being high summer, it had been some time since they had butchered. His mouth was watering at the thought of some good thick T-bones and sirloins. He cleared his throat and swallowed. No need to let gluttony interfere with business.

"Circle Box, is it? Sounds like that would be kind of hard to make."

"Oh, it's easy," the youngest of the group crowed cheerfully. "All you need is..."

"Is a ready-made iron," the big man said, shooting an angry glare at the kid.

"Well, of course," Scott said. "I was just thinking, you boys know, of those times when you're out alone, far from the home place, and you see a cow with a calf that hasn't been branded, And you have to fix it up right then and there. Of course, you're right though. A hot cinch can make the circle, maybe, and the box would just be straight lines. Have you got your registration papers?"

He switched from the nodding musings to the question so suddenly that it took them a moment to figure out what he had said.

"Registration?"

"Papers," Scott repeated. "As is required by California state law. 'Any person or persons intending...' Oh, that gets a little lengthy and wordy. How about if I just paraphrase the actual law? Anybody using a brand or earmarks to mark livestock of any kind must register that brand with the state, renew it regularly, and be prepared to show any brand inspector the papers giving you the legal rights to that mark."

The three men had started to look worried. Now, they began to relax, even grin. "Yeah," the big man said. "But you ain't no brand inspector, Mr. Lancer."

"Actually, I am," Scott said, and he flipped out a badge to prove it. "Among other things. Now gentlemen, I think perhaps I should quote you some more state law. Or at least, paraphrase again. Using an unregistered brand, that's only a misdemeanor. The fine can vary from fifty to two hundred dollars, depending on the judge's disposition and the attitude of the offender. But, if you happen to slap that unregistered brand on someone else's cattle, say, someone who's own brand could be effectively obliterated by that unregistered brand, that changes the charge to grand theft -- livestock, colloquially known as rustling, which I do believe carried a death penalty last time I checked."

"Death penalty it is, Mr. Lancer," Johnny agreed.

"Yes, I thought so. Thank you, Mr. Lancer. Now, there is another clause which says that landowners who suspect theft of their livestock may perform a citizen's arrest and personally transport..."

"You mean the two of you plan to bring us in?" the big man demanded. Then he laughed, and laughed louder as a fourth man materialized out of the rocks, with a rifle trained at the wagon.

"You know, Scott," Johnny said. "That law stuff you keep quoting is mighty boring."

"You think so?" Scott asked, sounding almost disappointed.

"Yes, I do. I've looked at those books of yours and I can tell you, there ain't much that can put a man to sleep faster."

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is. Oh, they're alright for men like you who like big words and all, but me, I've always preferred picture books."

"Do you think pictures would be appropriate in a law book?" Scott asked.

"I think so. After all, those monks in the Dark Ages put pictures in the books of God's law, didn't they?"

"Now that you mention it, they did," Scott agreed. "And do you know, brother, that those beautiful illustrations they made were called 'illuminations'? They were put in there to illuminate, or enlighten, the reader."

"There, you see, that's just what we need here," Johnny said. "We need to illuminate that law a bit for these gentlemen."

The conversation sounded so ridiculous that the men were caught off guard, staring at them, glancing at one another, wondering if they were dealing with sane men or not. That was all Johnny needed to whip the rifle out and have it at ready position before they could shoot.

"Easy now, let's not do anything foolish," he said amiably, leveling the barrel at the other rifleman's gut.

"Kill 'em, Red!" the big man shouted.

"How about, no," Johnny suggested. "Easy for him to give that order when he doesn't have a rifle trained on his belly, isn't it? You ever seen a man who was gut-shot? Takes them a long, slow, painful time to die. No, I have a better idea here. We'll just do that ‘illuminating’ we were talking about. Now, if you all would look behind you, up the canyon about a hundred and fifty yards is an old weathered sign post, left over from when this used to be more of a thoroughfare than it is now. And there's a knot in that sign post..."

“And you're going to fire that rifle in the air, then tell us to go check," the big man said. "For all we know, there's not a knot at all, but a bullet hole in that post!"

"Tell you what," Johnny said. "Send someone to go check. Go on," he added when they all hesitated. "Take a look. I'm not going to shoot anybody -- if you don't force me to."

The big man hesitated a moment longer, then gave a jerk of his head. The youngest of the group dropped the tools he was holding and trotted off. A hundred and fifty yards is a long distance. It took him several long, tense moments to reach the spot.

"There's a post here all right," he hollered back. "With a board on it. Can't read it any more, but there's a big old knot in...."

Johnny's rifle cracked suddenly. The explosion of the shot roared down the narrow canyon, bouncing off the walls for several seconds before it started to die away. Everyone froze in shock. Slowly, the big man turned to see if his young companion were still standing. He was. His face was white and bloodless, but he was standing, and not leaking blood from any visible hole. He was just terrified, because from that angle he had heard the whip of the bullet past his body, felt the slivers of wood that were sprayed out when it hit the knot in the sign. On unsteady feet, he started back towards the other men. The secret, Johnny had long ago told Scott, was to make it look easy. No matter how long you take picking your target and figuring your shot, do it ahead of time, make it look like a quick snap.

"You coulda killed Blondie!" the big man accused.

"Does he look like a pine knot?" Johnny asked. "I was shooting at a pine knot. And mister, I always hit what I am shooting at."

"That's true," Scott agreed. "He does."

"See, what I am trying to illustrate here is that you stand very little chance of getting out of this canyon alive if you decide to start shooting. And if you do get out, you don't even have to see me coming to feel the tear of one of my bullets through your body some day. I can pick you off like wooden target duck at the carnival from so far away, you won't even know someone's shooting till you drop right out of your saddle."

"I've seen him do it," Scott agreed nodding.

“I ain't gonna hang," the big man roared, and he grabbed for the gun at his hip. The rile cracked again, and the gun jumped, spinning a dozen feet through the air before landing in the dirt with a loud thud.

"You try that again, I'll shoot off your hand instead," Johnny said.

"Now, let's just all calm down," Scott said. "No one said anything about hanging. The way I look at things, hanging is just one of several options here. For one thing, we can go back to your camp, count up how many head of cattle you've borrowed from us, and you can just pay us for them. The going rate right now runs about thirty-five dollars a head. Call it thirty dollars, since we're neighbors and all..."

"But, we got over a hundred head!" Blondie wailed.

"Shut up!" the big man said.

"I take it you don't have the three thousand dollars," Scott said. "Well, that stands to reason. If you did, you'd have bought the cattle -- and paid for registering your brand. But, like I said. We have options. You could, for example, give us back those cows, and no one would be out anything."

"Except the one we already et," Blondie commented.

"Would you shut up!” the big man demanded, slapping the boy with his hat. "Are you trying to get yourself hung?"

"We're not going to quibble over a single beef a hungry neighbor helped himself to," Scott said with a shrug. "That sort of things happens now and then. What say we amble over to your camp and work this out like gentlemen."

********************

“I told you we had options,” Scott commented, reining in his horse to let the cattle stream past him. The big man, whom they had learned was called Ace Bundy, pulled up nearby.

“Yes, you did,” he agreed. The last of the cows trotted past, and Blondie and another man began closing up the fence – between Scott and Ace. Johnny was already through, standing in the wagon box, braced against the seat, double checking his own head count.

“That brother of yours does pretty good,” Ace commented.

“Yes,” Scott said.

“I mean, most men couldn’t have seen that signpost, much less the knot it in, from where he was.”

“Johnny seems to have been born with better than average eyesight,” Scott agreed.

“He must’ve been! I mean, I reckon he knew the post was there, but shooting out that knot...! Most men couldn’t shoot that good even sober.”

“And what makes you think he isn’t sober?”

“Well, uh...” The sudden cooling in Scott’s tone wasn’t lost on Ace, but he didn’t back down. “He had been drinking,” he said with certainty. They had been close enough, counting cattle and going over the details of returning them, for him to smell the whiskey on Johnny’s breath. The cool demeanor, the sharp eye, and the steady hand didn’t seem to him to make sense combined with whiskey-breath at this hour of the day. Only men he ever knew to drink in the morning were, to put it bluntly, drunks.

“A glass of whiskey doesn’t make a man drunk,” Scott said as if he could read that thought.

Ace couldn’t help but look up at the sky, where the sun still rested well on the morning side of noon. He caught Scott watching him, and glanced away, wishing he had never brought up the subject in the first place. Surely, the man wasn’t that foolish.... He was saved from further embarrassment when Johnny circled the wagon around and pulled up near them.

“Hundred and eleven, counting the bull,” Johnny said. “You’ve been busy fellows.”

Ace dropped his eyes for a moment, and did not comment.

“If you’ll just sign this, then,” Scott said, passing over a pencil stub and a piece of paper. The paper was a bill of sale: he regularly kept several blank ones in his wallet for emergencies. Back at the rustler’s camp, he had filled it out with his name and Ace’s name as a transfer of property. All it had lacked was a number, which he penciled in before passing it over. One hundred and eleven head of Circle Box cattle officially and legally belonged again to Lancer, as soon as Ace scrawled his signature where Scott indicated.

“Even a brand inspector has to account for cattle wearing the wrong brand when it comes time to sell,” Scott said, accepting the paper back.

“Listen,” Ace said. “I just want you to know, I ain’t no coward.”

“No one accused you of being one, Mr. Bundy,” Scott said.

“Well, they will. Backing down like I did from... well, from you two. But, the way I figured it, you must have been up above somewhere, watching us for a long time.”

“We spotted you yesterday,” Johnny said.

“Yeah. And I reckon you showed us you could have picked us off like flies any time you felt like it. If you’d come into town with four corpses and one hide showing that doctored brand, no one would have checked over them law books you was quoting to see if that was legal, would they? They’d have patted you on the back and thanked you for clearing some scum out of the country.”

“Most likely,” Scott agreed.

“And that would have been a lot safer for you than coming in to talk like you did. Why Red, there, he could have plugged you cold...”

“Possibly,” Johnny said.

“Um, right. Anyway, you played us fair, Mr. Lancer. More fair, honestly, than we deserved. The law...”

“Mr. Bundy,” Scott said. “I have practiced law most of my life. But law was invented for people with neither manners nor common sense. You’ve shown both today. Continue on the way you’re going, and you will never need to find yourself on the wrong side of the law. And incidentally, if you are serious about starting a spread near here, there is some good land still open and available. Four men, four homestead lots, you could get yourself a good start. Good, honest neighbors can always count on Lancer for help.”

“We’ll think about that,” Ace said. He glanced at both of them hesitantly, then held out his hand. He looked relieved when Scott accepted it. Johnny rose up off the wagon seat to lean over and shake also.

“I reckon we best shove on out of here,” Ace said.

“You do that. After you finish fixing that fence,” Scott said, turning his horse to leave. He turned back, though, and added, “By the way. We are polite, not stupid. Now that we’re on to your game, the guard all around the perimeter will be watching out for all of you.”

“Yes, sir. I understand clear. We ain’t stupid neither,” Ace said.

After a pointed glance towards Blondie, Scott put spurs to his horse, Johnny flicked the reins, and they both headed off down the valley, the fencing supplies in the back of the wagon rattling loudly with every jolt of the wheels on the rough ground.

“Think we should stick around for a day or two?” Johnny asked.

“No,” Scott said. “Now that we’ve got it figured out, the boys can handle it. We should get back home. We were out longer than we expected. Murdoch will be worried.”

“Not to mention your wife,” Johnny said. They rode for several long minutes in silence before Johnny said, “Or maybe I should mention your wife.”

“Or maybe not,” Scott said.

“She sounded a bit unhappy with you the day we left.”

“You were listening?” Scott demanded.

“Didn’t mean to. Didn’t hear what was said. But the volume got a little loud there towards the end. Scott...”

“Drop it, Johnny.”

“I was just thinking. Maybe you should take her on a trip somewhere, just the two of you alone for awhile, no one around to interfere...”

“I said ‘Drop it!’” Scott repeated.

“Well, okay, I just....”

Scott reined in his horse and sat there until Johnny stopped the wagon as well. The wagon didn’t back up easily, so Scott moved up next to it.

“How long have you been married?” he demanded.

“You know I’ve never been married,” Johnny said.

“I’ve been married over seventeen and a half years,” Scott said. “When you have that much experience, maybe you can give me some advice on the subject, but until then drop it!”

“Sure,” Johnny said. “Okay.” He flicked the reins again and the wagon moved off, Scott riding silently alongside. Of course, Scott was right. Married life was something Johnny knew nothing about. But he did know Teresa. He had known her as long as Scott had, down to the second – the three of them met at the same time when she came into Spanish Wells to meet the stage coach they both arrived on. And he hadn’t meant to give advice on marriage, just on Teresa. But, maybe Scott was right. Maybe being married to her gave Scott a knowledge that Johnny, as an outsider, could never have. Still... He'd seen trouble brewing for some time. He wasn't sure what it was, but there was a tension there that he was pretty sure shouldn't have been. Not that he was any expert. His only real role model on male-female relationships was his mother and her long line of male friends, ending with that bastard, Madrid, whom she had called Johnny's “step-father,” though she had never married him. And those few weeks twenty years ago that were as close as he would probably ever come to know married life had, honestly, been as full of pain, anguish and fury as they had been of sweetness, so, maybe, that was what being married was really about: hurting each other.

And hating yourself for it forever after.

Maybe when they got back he could discuss Scott and Teresa with Murdoch. Maybe Murdoch would have some advice. He had been married twice, after all. Never for very long, but still, he knew more than Johnny. And if his advice was to butt out, Johnny would have to be content with that.

Either way, he was glad to be going home. Maybe a soak in a hot bath would ease the pain in his leg. The reason they hadn’t caught those rustlers in the act yesterday was because he had slept in too late after having drunk himself to sleep the night before. He didn’t like drinking. There was nothing about it, from the taste to light-headed feeling of drunkenness to the loggy way it made him feel the next morning, that he found pleasant. Sometimes, though, it seemed like the only thing that could kill the pain, allow him to sleep without feeling as if his leg was being chewed off by fire ants. And it always did its job. However, even as the pain died away, the memories seemed to come flooding in, the feeling of guilt would wash him like a tide, and he'd be lost in the nightmares and the memories, and wake, as he had yesterday morning, wondering why he had ever bothered to drink himself to sleep in the first place.

Odd that drink did that, but it did: brought with it a flood of memories, memories so real that the pain of them, the guilt they brought, stayed with him sometimes for days. He still felt, clear as if he were reliving it now, the dizzy, rushing feeling of falling, could smell the blood and feel the cold rain, even in the dry, summer heat of the morning.

And even after all that, the pain in his leg had come back. He had avoided waking up hung over this morning simply by not sleeping last night at all. One or two drinks would cool the burning a little, without him becoming sodden-drunk, though “a little” relief wasn’t much. He couldn’t sleep like that, but he could function normally. Still, he would be glad to get home. At home, there wouldn’t be rustlers lurking about. Maybe he could go to bed early tonight.

Scott glanced out of the corner of his eye at Johnny, sitting morose and silent in the wagon, and knew he should apologize. Obviously, he never meant to hurt Johnny’s feelings. But, damnit! Where had that come from? Take her on a trip? Scott realized that Teresa was somewhat isolated on the ranch. He and Murdoch and Johnny had each other: blood relations and comfortable friends. It was different for a woman. Since Johnny never married, and Murdoch seemed to decide to call it quits after two wives, Teresa was pretty much alone out there, with no other female for companionship for miles – except their daughter, and he knew that that didn’t exactly count. Larissa was a good girl, but she was still more of a chore to Teresa than a friend. Maybe eventually they could be friends, but not now. So, who could Teresa talk to, confide in, discuss things with? Mrs. Winger, he had assumed, or the ladies at the church socials, maybe. But suddenly he wondered. Did she talk to Johnny? Johnny was her friend, he knew that. Johnny even shared some history with her that he never would. Oh, he hadn’t known her any longer, but he had grown up in the same part of the country, knew something of the life out here, even shared the pain of being the child of a run-away wife. They talked about that, he knew, discussed what it was like to be taken, and what it was like to be left. And that was good. That was something they’d both had to work out, and they were fortunate to have each other for that. But, surely, Teresa didn’t tell him anything personal, anything about their relationship – or the problems in it...? No. He wouldn’t believe that. Even if that comment had struck a little too close for comfort to the argument he and Teresa had been having now for several weeks. Which, as it happened, centered on a trip.

He had received an invitation to a cousin’s wedding in Boston. Not even a cousin, actually, the son of a cousin, a boy he’d never met in his life. The only reason he’d even mentioned it to Teresa was that he had intended to send a nice gift, something small but elegant and useful, and he felt that needed a woman’s advice. But no, Teresa wanted to go. She wanted him to travel three thousand miles to a wedding! In May! Scott had tried to explain that even if such a trip were feasible, May was a bad time of year. The calves would be ready for branding and castrating, there would be grass and feed problems to check and decide, miles of fence repair after the winter storms.

“You love this ranch more than you love me!” was her wholly unreasonable response. And one thing Scott did know was how futile it was to attempt to reply to a statement like that! Anything he said could be taken the wrong way, so he had just kissed her and left. And Johnny knew. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just trying to be nice. Like Murdoch, who suddenly came up with the idea of opening an office in Sacramento, an office that one of them would have to be at several months out of every year. “You and Teresa could live in town for awhile. Take in some shows, do some shopping, put Larissa in a ladies’ college...”

“We’re fine!” Scott said aloud.

“Sure,” Johnny said. “I knew that.”

“But. We’re late,” Scott added, as if he had been talking about their mission against the rustlers, and not thinking aloud about himself and Teresa. This was his normal way of apologizing for unseemly behavior: ignore it. Pretend it never happened. And Johnny seemed to take a deep breath and sit up a little straighter on the wagon seat.

“Only by a day,” Johnny said. He also believed in ignoring some things to make them disappear. For instance, he would never mention his deplorable condition of yesterday morning. And neither would Scott.

“You know, all things considered, we should take the time to check more fence line on the way home.”

“Put us there tomorrow, late,” Johnny said.

“Not if we split up. You take the north east boundary. It’s got the fire line along it so the wagon can follow it easily. I’ll grab a pair of pliers and a roll of wire and come in along the southern section fence.”

“And last one home makes dinner,” Johnny said.

Scott returned his grin. That was an old bet, one they used to make frequently back when one of them probably would have to make dinner. With Mrs. Winger in residence, the bet was unnecessary, but they still made it often.

“You can make me Burgundy Beef,” Scott said.

“You can make me enchiladas!” Johnny said back. Scott laughed. They stopped for a moment so he could pick some tools out of the wagon bed in case he needed them, and tuck them away securely in his saddlebags. Then with a cheerful wave, they parted company, heading their separate ways. Two men, going two directions with two different means of conveyance, but both with the same ultimate job and goal. It was, both of them thought as they rode through dapplings of soft shade and hot summer sun, a good feeling.

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY. MARCH (DATE UNKNOWN) 1870

He was lying flat on his back on the ground. And he was moving.

At first these two things didn't mean much to him. He was lying on the ground. He was moving. Slowly enough reason seeped into his mind to wonder how he could be doing both. It was hard to concentrate. He was so cold, so very cold, and he hurt all over. Certain places hurt more than others, like his arm, his foot...

His foot?

And memory came at once, a story he had heard somewhere, somewhen, when he was a small boy. The story of a man who was mauled by a bear, then dragged, still alive, into the bushes where the bear buried him, intending to come back when the meat was older and softer. He did not recall where he had heard that story, but it had always terrified him, and he was certain that was what was happening now. A bear was trying to eat him. He flailed out, trying to fight, trying to move, expecting his movement to cause the bear to drop his foot and come back and finish him off. Better, though, to be eaten dead than eaten alive.

But, "Hush, now. It's alright," a voice said. Not a bear's voice, a girl's. He struggled to get his eyes open and found her leaning over him, her dark, wet hair brushing his face.

"I'm sorry, I know it must hurt," she said. "But we're almost there. I have to get you out of this rain. I'm sorry, but please don't fight."

"You were at the creek," he recalled.

"Yes," she said.

"There's bears at the creek," he said. "They go there for the raspberries. You... you must never go to the creek alone. They'll eat you."

His voice died into a whisper, and she leaned closer and whispered back, "It's too early for raspberries. They won't be out for months yet."

"Worse," he said. "That means they're hungry. They'll eat you."

"I have a gun," she said. Or maybe she said he had a gun. He did, but he couldn't move his hand to get it, and anyway, all he was carrying now was his pistols. His rifle was... gone. He'd lost it somewhere. He didn't remember. People had been chasing him, and he... dropped it? When they shot him in the arm and he couldn't hold it. Yes, that's how he lost it. And a pistol wouldn't kill a bear. But maybe she said she had a gun. Yes, he recalled a girl, by the creek, dripping wet in the rain. Toting a gun. Bear hunting, obviously. Why else would anyone come out here in the rain with a gun?

Movement stopped. The rain no longer splattered on his face, but he could hear it, dripping. Plopping. A wet, cold sound. He was cold. He had stopped shivering, though, a long, long time ago. And now he slept.

But the demons were at him. He'd forgotten about demons. He had grown up on stories of Hell and punishment, the battle between good and evil. But he had known only evil in his life, and he still did not fully understand how fighting evil could be evil, so he had given up on the Church and its teachings, and he had forgotten. He knew his soul was black with unconfessed sins, both mortal and venial. He had thought of confession, not that long ago. He had ridden past a church and had considered stopping in, talking to the priest. But what God could forgive a man who had done the things he had done? No, better not to be scolded and condemned. He would not repent anyway. Well, maybe some of them he would, but not that one: the one he had always known he was going to Hell for.

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA. JULY 10, 1890.

Teresa came into the stable while Scott was still unsaddling his horse and announced, "Murdoch invited someone over for supper."

Not, “How was the trip?”, Scott noticed. Not, “Welcome home,” or, “We missed you.” Just this announcement, which he could only assume was leading to something else. Leading somewhere, he had a feeling, he did not want to go.

"That's nice," he said, neutrally. "Anyone we know?"

She didn’t seem to hear him at all. She continued speaking as if he hadn't said a word. "In fact, he invited him to spend 'a day or two', rode all the way in to town this morning to do it. Do you know anything about this?"

"Teresa," Scott said, patiently as he could. "I've been searching for lost cattle with Johnny for a week. I've been back maybe five minutes. There's not really much of a chance I could know about this, is there?"

"Where is Johnny?" she asked, looking around as if she expected him to be hiding in one of the stalls.

"Coming.”

"He’s alone?" she demanded.

Scott sighed. "We split up," he said. "He should be here any second, if he isn’t already. I haven’t had a chance to check yet. Why was it you thought I would know about this guest?"

"Well, I just assumed Murdoch had been planning it for some time, and nobody considered it important enough to bother telling me," Teresa said, all her indignation remembered after her brief side-track. Although, Scott mused as he heaved the heavy saddle off his horse and dumped it nose-down on the ground, she had just said that Murdoch rode into town this morning to make these arrangements.

"It's news to me," he said. "Anyway, I suppose Murdoch has the right to invite people over if he wants to. The house is still his, isn't it?"

"The man has been complaining about my cooking for twenty-five years, and he picks now, when Mrs. Winger is gone to go inviting people, with no notice to me, mind you..."

"Why is Mrs. Winger gone?" Scott asked. Keeping kitchen help at the ranch had never been easy. Mrs. Winger was the best cook they'd had in years, and she'd been with them the longest, too. The thought of having to replace her wasn't pleasant...

"Oh, she said her daughter is 'sick' and she had to go visit her," Teresa said. "The girl's just having a baby, not like it's an emergency. Now, here I am all alone and I have only a couple hours left to fix up a guest room and get supper on the table. There's no way I can manage it all!"

"Get Larissa to help," Scott said, picking up the brushes to wipe the sweat and dust off his horse's coat.

"I don't know where she is!" Teresa said, waving her hands in the air. "She took off this morning -- again!– out wandering around, as usual..."

"Without permission?"

"Well, no. I told her she could go. But then I didn't know I was going to need help! And who knows if she'll even be back by dinner! And the boys cause more trouble than getting help from them is worth, and Murdoch is upstairs resting because inviting people over was too much work for him for one day."

Murdoch was over seventy years old. The ride into town must have been important for him to make the round trip all in one morning. It probably was too much work for him for one day. Scott sighed, knowing what he had to do to make peace now, and dreading it. He wanted a hot bath, a change of clothes, and a tall, cold drink. He wanted to sit down and rest his own tired, over-worked muscles. He wanted to sit out the rest of this blazing afternoon in the shade, talking grass and cattle and watching the boys play in the yard.

"I can help," he said instead.

"Good!" Teresa said. Not, "Thank you," or "Oh, don't bother, I know you're tired." Just, "Good," and, "You can see to the fitting up of a guest room then. And you can tell Murdoch that in the future, he should give a person more notice before he does this sort of thing. He didn't even have the courtesy to mention it this before he left. No, he sneaks off before dawn, comes in after lunch and announces..."

Her voice faded because she was walking back to the house as she spoke, waving her arms, emotional, distraught. Upset. Over a guest of all things. Scott sighed again.

"At least one of us can get that rest," he said to his horse. He finished brushing the animal down and sent it into a stall with a slap on its rump. He climbed up to the loft to fork down straw for bedding and hay into the manger, then climbed back down to haul water from the pump outside to fill the trough. The horse taken care of, he went back to where he had left the saddle, untied his pack, rifle, canteens and saddle bags, and hauled the saddle itself to the racks in the back of the long, cool adobe building. There were nine racks: short, fat logs protruding three high and three abreast from the back wall of the building. The old saddle Murdoch seldom used any more was on one of the top racks because even old as he was getting, he was the tallest in the family, and Johnny's saddle was next to his, gleaming with a recent oiling, but unused in over five years. The two small saddles for the children were on the bottom row, with the saddle both Teresa and Larissa used now in the middle. Scott placed his own saddle in the middle row. He looked at the blank space next to where he had placed his saddle and thought it was time Larissa had a rig of her own. She had outgrown the child-sized saddles, which were now Gene and Jack's, and some day she and her mother might both want -- or need -- to ride at the same time. It seemed stupid though, to have another saddle made -- or even buy a used one -- when there was a perfectly good, serviceable saddle hanging right here in the back of the stable. Who's idea had it been to retire Johnny's saddle, anyway? Well, maybe it was for the better. He was still sensitive about being unable to ride anymore. Scott had heard him make a comment not too long ago that a man without a horse in this country was only half a man. Flaunting his saddle in front of him with someone else sitting in it might not be such a good idea.

On the other hand, Larissa would like Johnny's saddle. It was definitely pretty enough for a girl, with its rose blossom carving and silver conchos. The matching bridle had long reins of woven silver strands and black leather braided together, with a rose carved forehead strap and silver conchos at the cheek on both sides. It could be adjusted to fit...whatever she was riding these days. He realized he didn't know what animal was her personal favorite since Queenie had to be retired.

Too damn many things getting retired on this ranch, Scott thought. Years were creeping up on all of them. Twenty years he had been out here. He wondered what his Grandma Sebastian would say if she could see him now: dusty, range-worn as an old pair of boots, his face lined as a man much older than his forty-five years from all the time he spent in the sun and the wind. Something disparaging, no doubt.

Sounds of commotion near the henhouse brought him back to the present situation. Much as he would have liked to stand here and daydream about saddles, Scott had made a promise to Teresa. If he didn't take care of getting a room ready, she would probably work herself into a fury long before dinner time. That he didn't need. Stopping only long enough for a drink of water by the trough, Scott hurried inside to fulfill his obligation.

Housing guests was no problem at Lancer. The huge old house, which Murdoch had restored slowly over a period of almost two decades, had originally housed the extended family of one of California's ancient Spanish dons. Built on to over the years as the original owner's family expanded, it was a warren of wings and suites, sometimes one story tall, sometimes three, mostly two. Over the years, the family had moved around among the multiple bedrooms, finally settling where they each felt most comfortable. Johnny took over the third-floor attics above the center of the house. Low-ceilinged, with upright beams here and there but no individual rooms at all, the eerie, empty spaces seemed to suit his need for privacy. One small area was set up like a bedroom, but all the third floor belonged to him, and he was welcome to it. What ancient treasures and discarded junk the family had accumulated was stored in the unused south wing, which might have originally been part of a monastery or some similar edifice as the rooms were tiny and cell-like, built of rock and heavy, oiled beams and all served by a single, dark, narrow corridor.

Scott, on the other hand, had moved down from the second-floor guest rooms he and Johnny had both originally occupied. Even before Scott married Teresa, he had usurped a small suite of rooms on the ground floor. Two bedrooms, a dressing room and a sitting room, all accessible only through the door of the sitting room, opening out onto a small enclosed courtyard, complete with fountains and flower gardens that Scott tended himself, for relaxation. The dressing room was now mostly Teresa's, and the second bedroom – now an office – had for years been a nursery, but the rooms were still and always Scott's haven in the big, rambling house. Murdoch preferred a simple, single bedroom on the second floor, from which he had a marvelous view of the back end of the ranch. The boys, Jack and Eugene, shared a two-room suite now on the first floor, next door to Teresa's and Scott's rooms, and Larissa had a second floor bedroom to herself, leaving four empty bedrooms up there and another small suite downstairs, all free for guests. Scott considered the suite, and found that it had not been cleaned recently. Getting it ready for a guest would mean beating rugs and scrubbing floors in two rooms. He might have found the time for that, but he did not find the energy. Instead, he went upstairs and picked one of the empty bedrooms, the bedroom closest to the end of the corridor by the back stairs to the kitchen, one or two removed from the rest of the family. For privacy.

It was a nice room, and well-enough cared for that all he had to do was open a window, make up the bed and lay out fresh soap, water and towels.

The day was hot and dry. The room was stuffy. With the window open, a hot breeze blew through from outside, smelling of dry grass, pine trees and animals. He stood on the tiny balcony, letting the wind dry the sweat that still soaked him, making his shirt feel cool and clammy against his hot skin, and a sense of deja vu came over him suddenly. Twenty years melted like snow on a sunny day. Same room, same view. Things outside had been a little different then: fewer stables, less activity, fewer fences. A ranch dying, and two young men, strangers, brothers, looking at it through very different, but equally critical and curious eyes.

This had been Johnny's room, Scott realized, back at the beginning, back when they had both arrived, on the same stage, in the middle of a range war.

Was it a day after, or that same afternoon, that they had both stood in this room, side by side, staring out at a new world? A wealthy view of grasslands spread out behind the building. A hard, opinionated old man, stranger to both of them, waited downstairs. And they had looked at each other and thought strange new thoughts, like Father, and Brother. And Home.

Scott wondered suddenly exactly what thoughts Johnny had had that day. He had never been easy to read. Scott knew the paths his own mind had taken, though. The grandparents who had raised Scott had told him that his father was dead. His mother had died, and they merely extended the real death into an additional, fictional one for what they considered convenience. He had been raised by his mother's family, who were wealthy and prominent in Boston. His Grandpa Sebastian was a lawyer, so were several uncles and great-uncles and cousins, and it was expected that Scott would be a lawyer, eventually. He was trained in law and finance from a very early age. He was presented at balls and parties so he could choose a suitable wife from the right class, the right family. He was sent to Harvard to study, had even taken a Grand Tour of Europe, as all fashionable young men of that time did.

What had happened to all that?

The War in part. After the War, after the fighting and the dying -- sometimes tens of thousands at a time -- writs and clauses seemed... insignificant. He'd lost interest. He'd lost direction and headway. He was floundering, drowning in satin and silk and propriety, and making a living because it was Expected, not because it was needed, and a Pinkerton man had shown up out of the dark of night like a character in a dime novel to tell him his father was alive and living in California and that he needed help, would even pay for it, all Scott had to do was go out there, meet him. Talk to him....

"What are you doing in here?"

The voice didn't clear away the daydreams at once, because it was part of the daydreams: Johnny's voice.

"What are you doing in here?"

"Looking for you...."

Ah, but that was twenty years ago, and this was now. Johnny's voice was different. He'd been just eighteen then, he was closing in on forty now. His voice was rougher, whiskey-edged. And the tone was different, just curious now, not accusing, and his crutches thumped on the floor when he came into the room.

"I was fixing up a guest room," Scott said, turning slowly from the window. "Teresa said Murdoch invited someone out to the ranch for a few days. I don't suppose you know anything about that?"

"How would I know?" Johnny said. "Smoke signals? By the way, I beat you by almost fifteen minutes." He stumped across the hardwood floor, and joined Scott by the rail of the narrow balcony.

"Still pretty, isn't it?" Scott said.

After twenty years of working together, twenty years of feeling out each other’s thoughts and the directions in which they ran, Johnny didn't have to ask what Scott had been thinking about.

"I don't like to remember that summer," he said.

"I know," Scott said. It was obvious in his eyes, in the way he held his body, every time some old memory was dredged up. What Scott had never fully understood was why. Johnny had been shot in that fight, but from the scars they found on his body when they were dressing the wound it certainly hadn't been the first time, or -- Scott knew for a fact -- the last. He had healed quickly, with no infections or other complications. Then he had taken the thousand dollars Murdoch had offered each of the boys for coming to his aid and left. Scott had been sorry to see him go. He had been looking forward to building a friendship with his younger half-brother. Then, just as unexpectedly, about three months later, Johnny had returned. He moved back into this very bedroom and took up work around the ranch as if he had always lived there, as if those three months -- and in fact the eighteen years which preceded them -- didn't exist.

Scott took a breath, intending to ask again where Johnny had gone at the end of that summer, but the habits of reticence, of respecting each other’s privacy, were too deep. Instead he said, "You remember standing here then?"

"Yeah," Johnny said, drawing his shoulders in as though a chill air had suddenly struck his chest.

"What were you thinking that day?"

"What were you thinking?" Johnny countered.

"I was thinking it made sense," Scott said.

"Sense." It wasn't quite a question, but Scott could tell he was asking for enlightenment.

"Boston didn't anymore. Not for me. Life back east had turned into an elaborate dance. You step and turn and bow and step because that's the way the dance goes, no other reason. And everyone else is doing the same thing, so if you miss a step, you cause confusion. I looked out this window and I saw a different kind of life. God, how I love watching the seasons change, the grass come up in the spring, being there when a calf is born. Law is important, never mistake that. But this... this is life."

"You thought of all that the first time you stood at this window?"

"No. But I felt the stirrings of it. I knew what it was Murdoch was fighting for. I knew I would help him, whether the old bastard wanted it or not. Remember that first day? When he said he'd split the ranch into three equal shares, only policy and decisions would rest entirely with him. I didn't know whether to laugh or be hurt when I heard that one."

"He was hedging his bets," Johnny said. "He didn't know either of us, after all."

"What were you thinking about?" Scott asked him again.

Johnny stood silently, staring across the broad fields to the low foothills of the mountains beyond.

"Belonging," he said finally.

Scott knew there were parts of his brother he could never really understand: they had grown up too far apart, separated not just by distance, but living in entirely different worlds. But he wondered now what belonging had meant to Johnny twenty years ago.

Belonging had always been natural for Scott, it was only the location that had changed. True, he had grown up thinking his father was dead, but he had done so in the center of a loving family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all around, all the time. He joined sports teams and clubs at school, had been a natural choice for officer when he joined the military during The War, had even been elected "governor" of the small corner of Hell he had occupied briefly in Andersonville prison. But Johnny had grown up alone. Moving from town to town, there had never been playmates at school – when there even was school for him. There was an unstable mother, a series of false “step-fathers,” most of whom resented the presence of the boy in their homes. With little or no formal schooling, on his own and on the road before he hit puberty, Johnny had grown from a naturally shy, quiet boy into the very definition of a loner. Belonging must have been a strange concept to him then, something alien an potentially dangerous. Scott tried to imagine thinking of a word like "belonging" with the kind of fear Johnny's tone implied, and found himself incapable. He also, even after all these years, could not understand how Johnny had managed it: going from that kind of loneliness to being part of this family, fitting in. Belonging.

"So, how do you feel about it all now?" Johnny asked, breaking into Scott's musings. "Any regrets?"

Scott considered the question seriously. He thought of the pretty young girl, still a teenager really, whom he had married seventeen years ago. And he thought of Teresa, down in the kitchen, banging pots so hard in her fury that he could hear them even up here. When had that change come about? Was he the cause of it? He had never meant to cause her any hurt. He did regret that, if it were true. But then he heard, through the clear summer air, the shouting of boys playing in front of the house. He heard locusts buzzing in the heat and horses stamping, and smelled the smells of barnyard and fresh grass, already seasoning to gold under the summer sun.

"No," he said. "I have no regrets. How about you?"

"No," Johnny said quickly. Too quickly. Johnny may never have been that easy to read, but some things Scott had learned over the years. Like, what a poor liar he was. Scott was saved from deciding if he should pry into that question deeper when Johnny suddenly said, "Rider coming in."

Scott squinted into the sun, shading his eyes with his hand, and made out the distant shape of a rider coming up out of the Hidden Lake Trail. "Probably Murdoch's guest," he said.

"Riding double from town? I doubt that."

"Are you sure," Scott asked. He could see a horse, but it was small and distant.

"Two riders, one horse," Johnny said. Then he added, "That's a girl on the back of that horse!"

When he said that, Scott recognized the skirt - a sweep of faded denim - the plain calico print blouse, his own old, discarded straw hat, usurped by his daughter as a sun hat.

"Larissa!"

"Yep," Johnny agreed.

"Who's she with? One of the hands?"

"I don't recognize the horse," Johnny said. "Palomino coloring... big animal, though, looks like part apaloosa maybe. Definitely a stranger. Want me to shoot him for you? Give me another hundred yards, I could pick him off without so much as disarranging her hair."

"Let him get up to the house," Scott said. "If her hair is disarranged, then you can shoot him."

When they rode into the dooryard behind the big house, Scott was there, waiting. Johnny had been right about the horse: it was yellow and it was big. It strode into the yard, all long legs and youthful energy, tossing his head and trying to get enough rein to run, even loaded as it was. Not only was the horse carrying two riders, but a rifle, saddle bags, two half-gallon canteens and a full saddle pack. Whoever this stranger was, he was packed for a trip. And loaded for bear. Besides the rifle in the scabbard (a good, serviceable Henry), the snout of a shotgun peeked out of the pack, a big knife was shoved into one boot and he wore a pair of Remington .44s on a heavy cartridge belt around his hips. Bounty hunter, was Scott's first assessment, and the thought definitely soured his mood. On top of being tired and stiff and in bad need of a bath, there was Murdoch's unexpected guest, Teresa's tantrum, and now a bounty hunter was giving his daughter a ride home. He'd had better days.

He waited, watching, while the stranger got the horse under control, aware of the firm hand on the reins, the way he used knees, thighs and heels to give commands to the horse. A good horseman, he thought with grudging respect, not just some clod on top of a good horse. Well, in his business, he probably had to be. The horse stopped. The stranger slid to the ground and reached up to help Larissa down from the saddle. Not help, actually. Lift. Entirely. He picked her up and set her on the ground, and Scott couldn't help but think that she hung on to the stranger a moment longer than was necessary, that she smiled too long a thank-you up into his eyes. He considered that he may have been overreacting. He didn't think so, though. What had happened to the little girl who wanted only to please her daddy? This young woman seemed a stranger to him sometimes. And it irritated him when total strangers paid this much attention to her. Of course, it irritated him just as much when men like this didn't pay attention to her, as if that meant there was something wrong with her.

"Larissa," Scott said, maybe a little sharper than necessary, and she dropped her hands at once, turning to him with a faint flush creeping into her face.

"Oh, Pa. Hello! I was just..."

"Just walking up at Hidden Lake again?" Scott guessed.

"Well, yes, I..."

"Lissa, how many times have you been told..."

"Pa! The lake is right on the ranch, and not that far away!"

"No, it's not that far," Scott agreed. "But as this gentleman just proved, it lies on a back trail into the place that is not altogether unknown. It's not safe for a young lady. On foot, alone, no dog... I bet you don't even have a gun with you!"

It seemed a safe bet, since he couldn't see one, but her embarrassment turned instantly to indignation. "Of course I do!" She slid her hand into her skirt pocket and extracted a pistol, which she handed to Scott for him to examine. It was a tiny thing, a little .22 derringer with silver plating and mother-of-pearl grips, specifically designed for use by a lady. He had never seen it before, but he could be pretty sure it was a gift from Johnny. Trust Johnny to know just what sort of weapon a girl could be enticed into carrying. Scott always tried to get Larissa to carry a shotgun, or at least a good target pistol.

"Won't do much good against a bear," he said, handing it back.

"I don't believe bears were what you were worried about," she said. Getting altogether too smart, he thought. He found himself now in the uncomfortable position of being embarrassed, and from the look on her face, Larissa evidently thought he deserved it. He tried to cover his embarrassment by saying, "You're needed in the kitchen. Right away."

"May I make introductions first?" she asked, coldly polite.

"I'll take care of it," Scott said.

She was angry, and he didn't blame her. But she really didn't understand the dangers of being alone in a distant place like Hidden Lake, or of strangers. He didn't think he could ever get that through her head, without terrifying her completely of everyone and everything -- which might not, he thought, be such a bad idea. But that would come later. For now, she spun on her heel to march away, and just as suddenly, that stranger grabbed her and spun her back. By the time Scott opened his mouth to protest, it was all over. Larissa was safe in Scott’s arms, the stranger was walking away, leading the horse that had, a moment ago, nearly taken Larissa's ear off with its teeth.

"Are you all right?" Scott demanded.

She, too, realized a little late just what had happened. Or what could have happened. Her eyes were wide, and the hand she lifted to the side of her face shook slightly, but there was no skin missing, her ear was still there, no blood was pouring...

The stranger tied the horse securely to a rail of the corral fence. "Sorry about that."

"Foul tempered horse," Scott commented, releasing Larissa now that the animal seemed to be restrained.

"Not so much bad tempered as always pushing to see what he can get away with," the stranger drawled. "You got to be quick around him, never let your guard down."

"Doesn't sound like the kind of horse you'd want to travel far on," Scott commented.

"Oh, I got used to his habits. He may snap now and then or try to run you into a tree, but a dog wouldn't be a better night guard, and he's got stamina and to spare. He's a fine horse."

Scott found his foul mood dissipating somewhat under the kid's easy attitude. Partly, maybe, because he was just a kid. Even if he was taller than Scott by an inch or so, he was not that much older than Larissa. He was long-legged and youthful as that horse, with a shock of gold hair and wide-set, brown eyes: a big, slow-moving lad with a gentle grin and a drawling voice that was already thick with low, masculine tones. Although, he had just proven that he could move like lightning if the situation warranted.

"Hhmm." Scott stepped warily around the horse, looking at the line of leg, the solid hip, the broad chest.... Johnny wasn't the only one in the family with an eye for horses.

"Appaloosa and... mustang?" he asked, looking up again.

"Yeah," the stranger grinned, apparently pleased at Scott's identification. "You can even see a few spots on the back end -- well, you can when he's not so dusty."

Scott slapped the animal appreciatively on the rump, a gesture that caused it to turn its head as much as its rein would allow and roll one liquid brown eye his direction.

"He was a gift, actually," the kid continued amiably. "My godfather said he looked too much like me to belong to anyone else." Larissa giggled, and Scott found himself softening even more. Anybody who could laugh at themselves couldn't be all bad. Scott began to feel he could actually like this kid, if Larissa hadn't been standing there, smiling up at him, totally infatuated. Good thing he was a bounty hunter. It gave Scott an excuse to run him out of here.

"I'm sorry," the stranger said. "Didn't mean to get sidetracked before we even began our introductions. I'm Sargent Texas Butler Pierce of the Special Forces Division of the Texas Rangers, El Paso Office, Special Investigations Team. I've been making some inquiries locally concerning a man wanted in the state of Texas who may have been out here about twenty years ago, mostly likely mid-summer of 1870..."

"We can't help you," Scott said flatly, the good feelings that had been growing gone suddenly cold and dead.

"Pa!" Larissa exclaimed in surprise.

"Bounty hunter or lawman, there's nothing we can do for you. You can leave now," Scott said.

"Pa! Grandpa invited him out here!" Larissa said.

That definitely put a different slant on things. "Why, Mr. Pierce?" was all Scott said.

"Tex. And, I ain't real sure, honestly," the kid said. "He came into town this morning, and we discussed the case some. He didn't know this fella, but I think he wanted me to talk it over with the rest of the family. See, the man I'm looking for is a Terrence T. Palmer, at least that's what we know him as currently." The kid pulled out a leather wallet while he spoke, extracted the wanted poster and handed it to Scott. Scott's reaction was similar to Murdoch's. He searched for a resemblance to Johnny, and didn't find one. And he relaxed when he saw that the man was known to have been in Texas as recently as a month ago. Johnny hadn't been farther from the ranch than Spanish Wells in several years.

"What has this got to do with us?" Scott asked. "And why twenty years ago?"

"That's what I was trying to explain to ... your father?"

"Murdoch is my father, yes. I'm Scott Lancer."

"Pleased to meet you," the kid said, shaking his hand. "See, one of the witnesses I interviewed..."

The words froze in his throat as a loud, high-pitched scream tore through the air. A moment later, Jack came pelting around the side of the house, still screaming, running as hard as he could, a big, rangy cow dog hard on his heels, barking furiously. Before Scott could open his mouth to tell them both to shut up, the stranger's gun -- a heartbeat ago secure and tied down in his holster -- was out and speaking.

III.

He shot the dog dead, then dropped to his knees to grab the boy by the shoulders.

"Are you all right? Did he bite you? Boy! Are you all right?" Tex yelled in Jack's face, giving him a little shake when the boy just stared at him blankly. Before Jack could answer, Gene showed up, also running, also screaming. Gene had mud smeared on his bare chest and face like war paint and was brandishing a toy tomahawk. He skidded to a stop, yells dying in his throat, as he took in the scene, and Tex stared back at him, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.

"Where did you come...?" he whispered. He looked down at Jack again. "It was a game? You're not hurt? It was a game?"

He gave Jack another shake, this one a little harsher, and Scott pulled Jack out of his grip, pulling the boy back against himself protectively.

"What happened to Bingo?" Gene asked.

Tex dropped to a sitting position on the ground as if even kneeling his legs could no longer support him. "Oh, dear God! There were two of them!" he murmured, and he put his face in his hands.

The sound of gunfire had brought the rest of the family on the run. First Teresa, then Murdoch ran out the kitchen door. Johnny seemed to materialize out of nowhere, and dropped into the grass next to the body of the dog. Several ranch hands appeared, armed with a variety of firearms and tools. "We heard shots, Mr. Lancer!"

"It's okay," Scott told them. "Go on back to work. It's okay."

"It is not okay!" Murdoch thundered. "Scott, what on earth is going on here?" The hands, who had started to turn away, now hesitated.

Tex took a deep breath and drew himself to his feet. "It's my fault, Mr. Lancer. I thought.... The kid was screaming, and I thought... I shot the dog," he admitted.

"You shot...?" Murdoch stared.

"There was a lot of screaming," Scott said, wondering as he did why on earth he was defending this young idiot. But, it was true. The screams had startled him, and he was used to the boys' rowdy games. And Tex... Tex was obviously upset by what happened, by what he had done. If he hadn't been, Scott would have run him off the ranch on the spot, no matter who had invited him.

"It sounded a good deal worse than it was," Scott continued. "Jack, you have been told before...."

"Don't you dare try to blame this on him!" Teresa said, and she grabbed Jack away from Scott's embrace, dropping to her knees to hold him fiercely in her arms. "He's just a boy! He has a right to expect to be able to play safely in his own yard!"

"I only meant..." Scott started, and stopped. This was too much like the argument they had had when he and Johnny were packing to go on their week-long fence-fixing excursion. They had wanted to take the boys. Teresa had insisted they were both too young, despite the fact that she herself had been helping with ranch work when she was younger than Gene, and that Larissa had been allowed on these overnights before she turned six. But, Scott wasn't about to start that argument again, not here and now.

"Is the dog actually dead?" he asked Johnny instead. Maybe there was some hope. After all, it had been so sudden, a fast draw, a snap shot. Not likely to be a great aim like that.

But, "As a doornail," Johnny said grimly.

"Bingo's dead?" Jack asked. Shock was beginning to wear off both boys, and while Gene was trying to look brave, Jack's lower lip quivered. "You killed my dog!"

"I'm sorry," Tex said, looking down at Jack's disconcerting stare. "I thought he was hurting you."

"Bingo would never hurt me," Jack said.

"Perhaps," Scott said, interrupting, "You children need to organize a funeral."

"That's a good idea," Larissa said as she realized her father was trying to distract the boys. "Bingo needs you to do this for him, Jack. You can't let him down."

Jack sniffed while he considered. "Can we put him in the family cemetery?"

"No, he's not..." Scott said.

But Teresa talked right over him. "Of course! He was family, wasn't he? But you'll need a coffin."

"Can we build one?" Gene asked hopefully. One thing he liked better than torturing his younger brother was hammering, and the idea of an involved carpentry project was even pulling his attention away from the tragedy.

"Certainly," Scott said. "I believe there's plenty of wood and nails in the barn."

"Can we have black armbands?" Jack demanded. "Like the Carey's all wore after Mr. Carey died?"

"I think I can make you some," Larissa said.

He would mourn the loss again and again in the future, but for now, Jack was distracted enough that with one last searching look at the stranger, he allowed Gene to lead him away to the big barn that now doubled as a carriage house and workshop.

"Someone needs to keep an eye on those two," Murdoch commented, and Teresa hurried after them.

"As for you," he said, turning his attention to the Ranger. "I understand that what happened out here was an unfortunate misunderstanding..."

"Sir, I...."

"Shut up! From now on, you will go about this ranch unarmed, is that clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"The only reason you're not swinging from a rafter in that barn right now is that... " Murdoch sighed. "Is that I know how much screaming that boy does. Not that that's any excuse!"

"No, sir."

Murdoch stalked angrily back into the house. Scott walked across the dooryard to where Johnny still knelt by Bingo's very lifeless body. Larissa and the ranger both trailed after him.

"You should have let me shoot him," Johnny said as they walked up.

Scott, of course, knew what he meant, but the statement startled Larissa. "Shoot Bingo, Uncle Johnny?"

"No. Shoot this trigger happy idiot," Johnny said, waving a hand at the kid. He reached out and caught both his crutches in one hand and planted them firmly together to heave himself upright. Once he was standing, he arranged them, one under each arm, and looked up, only to find the kid staring at him.

"What's the matter?" he demanded irritably. "Never seen a one-legged man before?"

But his challenge didn't seem to bother the stranger, who continued to stare, not at his missing limb but at his face. "Uncle Johnny...? John Lancer?" he asked finally.

"Yeah, why?" Johnny said.

"Johnny Madrid?" the ranger asked.

Johnny did not react noticeably, though his eyes suddenly went flat and dark. Johnny eyes were warm and gentle most of the time, but Scott had seen that look in them before: all the warmth melted away into something hard as flint, cold as ice.

"You were right the first time," Johnny said in the flat, emotionless voice that only a few people knew hid his most deadly furies. "It's Lancer. You understand that, kid?"

"Yes, sir," the stranger said, but he continued to stare at Johnny, even after Johnny turned his back on him and walked into the house.

"What..?" Larissa started.

"Liss, please go see what's burning in the kitchen," Scott said.

She instantly spun around and raced into the house. Which left Scott, finally, alone in the yard with the young stranger.

"Well," Scott said.

"Maybe I should leave," the kid said, and he turned to go back to his horse.

"Why?" Scott asked. "Just because you made a total ass of yourself twice in less than five minutes? Let me tell you something I learned from hard experience: it happens to everybody now and then."

The young man didn't turn around, but he paused, allowing Scott to continue.

"At your age, it's called the foolishness of youth. But unfortunately it doesn't end there. At my age, all a man can say is, 'I've had a rough day'. By the time you catch up with Murdoch, you have to be more careful because everyone suspects creeping senility."

The young man snorted softly, amused but refusing to show it, and turned finally, to face Scott again. Across the yard, his horse was making a serious attempt at kicking a hole in the side of the adobe stable.

"Why aren't you mad at me, sir?" the ranger asked. "I did kill the boy's dog."

"I am mad," Scott said calmly. "I'm furious. And I'm still shaking inside. What concerns me is not the dog, but how close you came to taking one or both of those boy's lives."

Tex looked down, and swallowed hard, closing his eyes.

"Around here, we're fairly used to Jack's screaming. But it does occur to me what that might have looked like to someone who wasn't familiar with the boys."

"It didn't sound like a game..." the stranger started.

"I know. And you're afraid of dogs, aren't you?"

There was a hesitation before the stranger admitted it. "Yeah. I thought I was over all that by now, but when he came running around the house, screaming like that, with the dog chasing him..."

"Deja vu?" Scott suggested.

"Sir?"

"A feeling that you've been there before."

"Oh. Yeah. Like that." He stared for a moment at the corner of the house, where the dog was lying still in the dust. Two holes were gouged in the adobe plaster of the lower wall where the bullets, after passing through the dog, struck the building. "I really should leave, I think, sir," he said, still staring at the house. "You can't get a man who hates you to talk about the past, it won't work. I made a mess of things..."

"You came here on legitimate business, apparently," Scott said. "And Murdoch didn't send you packing when you shot the dog, so he must think there's something we can do to help you. So. Put your horse up in the first stable, the one he's tied to. There are racks in that stable for saddles and tack, your gear will be safe there. And your guns. All of them. When you get everything settled, come in through the back door of the house, and Teresa or Larissa will show you a room where you can leave your pack, and get cleaned up before dinner."

"Yes, sir."

"And incidentally, I'd like some proof that you are with the Rangers, as you claim. You can present it when you present yourself for dinner. At seven o'clock. Good day, Mr. Pierce."

"Yes, sir. Thank-you sir. Good day, sir."

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY: MARCH (DATE UNKNOWN) 1870.

He opened his eyes.

He could see. It was light... yet, it wasn't. It took a few moments for him to understand. It was broad daylight outside, but he was not outside. There was a roof over his head, and walls... three walls, made of crumbling, unplastered adobe. The fourth wall was missing, and a section of roof. But there was a roof over him, and it must have been solid enough, since he was dry. He remembered rain....

He twisted his head and looked around more. There was a small fireplace in the corner, a home-made looking affair of stacked, flat rocks that made a little hearth, but did not have a chimney. It did not look like a structure anyone would want to use much for cooking, yet there was a small fire crackling in it, and a tin pot balanced on a rock near it, which was giving off the sound of boiling liquid and a very enticing odor. There was no table in the room, and no cupboards, but some rocks and a bit of board made a small shelf on which a few mismatched cups and plates and cookware were neatly stacked, and a small section of log near the hearth looked like a makeshift bench. Surely, he thought, no one would live in a three-walled house. But the grassy floor was swept clean of loose leaves and debris, and a little vase of early spring irises sat on the bench.

Demons came to his mind again, but he dismissed them as fever dreams. Surely, this was no way-station in Hell. It looked more like a child's playhouse set up in an old abandoned building. Besides, he could see his horse outside, grazing contentedly in the sunlight. And that was his saddle in the corner, resting on its end to protect the wooden frame, his bridle and spurs draped over it.

Another look showed him to be lying on his own bedroll tarp, his blankets tucked under him for more padding, and a clean, if somewhat ragged quilt draped over him for warmth. His right arm was splinted and bandaged, and though he could not see the rest of his body, he could feel the bindings on his belly and foot and thigh as well. Four bullets had hit him, he recalled that now. And four places were bandaged. But by whom?

There was a girl...

No, that was surely part of the fever. Hadn't he dreamed that she had been eaten by bears? That he was in the mountains here and not in a home or doctor's office must mean that he had been caught by the Mexicans, and would be taken back to face a firing squad, instead of shot again and left to die here. Well, that was fine with him. The longer they delayed killing him, the greater the chance he had of getting away again.

He moved the fingers of his right hand, and found he could do so, though it sent shooting pain up through his whole arm. Now was as good a time as any. He would leave now, while his horse was here and they weren't. He knew they weren't because of the quiet. A squad of military police was never this quiet. He threw back the quilt and tried to sit up, and instantly he tipped over and hit the ground solidly, darkness and stars dancing in front of his eyes. He was just thinking he would have to move slower to start with, when there was a rustle of petticoats, and a warm hand on his shoulder, and a girl's voice saying, "You mustn't try to get up yet. You're still weak. You rest. I'll get you some soup."

The darkness swam away and he saw her crouched near the hearth, feeding the little sticks she had been gathering into the flames. Goldilocks. Who hadn't been eaten by bears after all. Only her hair wasn't gold, it was a flat dirt brown, tied tightly back in one of those fancy braids that seems to start at the top of the head and run all the way down to the end of the hair. Tiny wisps of curl escaped to feather around her face and neck, and the braid was tied at the end by a strip of pink gingham cloth.

"Who are you?" he asked, his voice sounding hoarse and rough to his own ears.

"My name is Hilary," she said. "And you're the one they're looking for, aren't you?"

"Who?" he asked.

"The Mexican soldiers. The sheriff was angry when they rode into town, said they had to leave at once, they have no jurisdiction here. But they wouldn't go. They said they had chased a dangerous revolutionary across the border and they knew he was in town and they wouldn't leave ‘til they found him. I was going for the doctor when I saw them. Then I decided I had better not let anyone know you were here. The sheriff, well, everyone, seems to think if you were just handed over to them, they'd go away and we'd all be safe again."

"Likely," he croaked.

"What would they do if they did catch you?" she asked.

"Kill me," he said.

"They talked about taking you back for a trial...."

She stopped when she saw his head moving slowly from side to side. "Tried and convicted in advance?" she asked.

"Pretty much."

"I thought you might be worth more to them dead than alive," she said, stirring the pot on the stove. Chicken soup. He could smell the broth, pick out the odors of onion, garlic and sage in the steam. He closed his eyes and prayed that some of that was for him, that it wasn't just her picnic lunch. He didn't care for chicken soup, generally. But his stomach was burning from hunger, and the smell was making his mouth water so that he was almost drooling.

"Why?" he asked, mostly to distract himself.

"Your horse. It's a fine animal. And that saddle -- it must be worth a lot of money. Even your guns. Silver-plated, ivory grips..."

"A gift, actually," he said, a smile touching his lips.

"Expensive, though. If they take you back, all that is confiscated by the government, isn't it? And if you happen to die out here somewhere, and they happen to find all those expensive things just lying around..."

"Funny, you look a lot more innocent than you talk," he said, opening his eyes again.

"I am sixteen," she said, primly, returning to sit next to him with a cup of the broth in her hand. "And a graduate of the New Orleans Academy of Domestic Sciences."

"What's that mean?" he asked.

"That they taught me how to sew and cook," she said with a shy grin.

"I thought maybe you were a doctor."

"A doctor?" she said, and she shook her head with a laugh. "Oh, I can just see that! I doubt they'd let me into medical school on the basis of an education in Domestic Sciences! Anyway, I'm not much good at books and things. I always did terrible with arithmetic and spelling. That's why Pa sent me away where I would learn more practical skills. Although, I'm still lousy at embroidery. I can cook, though. But I can't get this into your mouth with you lying down."

"I can sit up," he said, struggling to get an elbow under himself again.

"No you can't. Don't be ridiculous. Here. Wait." She set the cup down on the bench and slid closer to his head. Gently she lifted his head and placed it in her lap, then she shifted closer and rested his shoulders in her lap, holding his head up in the crook of her arm, and she reached for the cup again. It was a stretch, but she managed it, and she held it, blowing on it for several seconds before offering it to him.

The tin was hot and scalded his lips, but he let the soup touch his mouth before pulling his head back, and licked it off his lips. Heaven. Pure heaven. How long since he had eaten? He tried to guess, but since he had no idea what day this was, it was impossible. When she offered the cup again he managed a small sip. The hot, salty liquid slid down into his hollow stomach, burning a trail through him as if he were a hollow shell, not a man. He could actually feel it in his stomach, rolling around in there, and he thought that he knew now how a barrel felt with just the tiniest drop of whiskey left inside of it. He sighed and closed his eyes, and heard her murmur, "It's all right. Take your time. You don't want to eat it fast after all this time."

"How long?" he asked.

LANCER RANCH: NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA. JULY 10, 1890 (Evening)

Discretion is the better part of valor, Tex knew from the decent education he had had, was a line from an old play spoken by some goof-off who had just spent most of a major battle playing dead. He had been told that the line was supposed to be humorous, though he had personally found it, and the character who uttered it, to be smug, self-centered and cowardly. Still, there were times when staying out of the way was the better choice – cowardly or not. Like this afternoon, when the Lancer family gathered at a fenced plot of ground slightly above and north of the house to lay the body of their dog – stuffed into a poorly-made and ill-fitting box – in the ground. He was pretty sure that if he had chosen to participate in the funeral, he would not have been sent away. Still, all things considered, he thought it better to stay out of sight.

Actually, he considered just leaving, even after Scott Lancer talked him out of it. Apparently, he had come here primed with false information. If Johnny Madrid was alive, and not lying in a shallow unmarked grave in Sonora, Mexico since July of 1870, that changed things. Changed dates anyway. It didn’t, he concluded after wrestling with the question of leaving for several long minutes, change what he had heard in that interview in Waco. Murdoch Lancer’s name had definitely come up. That part was still accurate, and now that the year was changed – the year, apparently when Johnny Madrid ceased to exist and Johnny Lancer came into being – maybe they’d all quit telling him they couldn’t help him before he had a chance to tell them what he was asking about.

He’d wondered about that, coming first from the old man, then from his son, Scott Lancer. Nerves, he had thought. Stubbornness, maybe, or the protective instincts of the father of a beautiful young girl. It made sense though, once he realized that Johnny was alive.

He had seen the old wanted posters, of course. None of them had even these poor pen-and-ink drawings, just a description: “Mexican Male, approximately 25 years of age. 5'8" tall, 150 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes...”

Well, they’d had the hair right, anyway. Height and weight – not even a good guess, and the age on those 20-year-old posters was off by more than half a decade. And of course, to some lawmen he knew, anyone with dark hair and the ability to speak Spanish was a “Mex”, never mind what side of the border they had been born on (not to mention their parents, grandparents, etc.). Small wonder he’d never been brought in, that he’d been able to change his name and just disappear completely.

Discretion meant not interfering in this case, but Tex tried to stay inconspicuous and in sight at the same time. He had spent the past few weeks on the road, and he had been taught that a good lawman is only as good as his horse. So, while he waited on the family, he tended Showboy’s hooves, not just cleaning them, but pulling each shoe off completely, checking and refitting them, trimming and filing the hooves. He re-nailed each shoe carefully, filing down the tops of the nails where they poked out of the hooves. And while he worked, he snuck peeks now and then at the funeral up on the hill. Black armbands had been produced for both boys and all three of the adult men. The woman and the girl had little squares of black on their heads. Meant to represent veils, was his guess. The older boy had taken charge as a sort of combined preacher and master-of-ceremonies, delivering a eulogy, then leading them all in singing Silent Night, which Tex thought was an odd choice until he realized it was probably the only song the boy knew all the words to. All in all, very touching, he supposed. Personally, he agreed with the blonde man, Scott, who – he was sure – had been about to protest that a dog doesn’t belong in a family plot when he had been overruled. Tex himself never had understood what people saw in dogs. Nasty, dirty animals. Vicious. That dog in particular was big and rangy and dangerous-looking, and Tex broke out in a cold sweat all over again, remembering that second boy coming around the corner of the house when he had just fired his gun that direction! The dog scared him, he’d admit that, but when he realized how close he had come to killing that boy, he started shaking all over again and some feeling he could not name clenched in his gut like a ball of cold steel.

Though he was bent over with a hoof clenched between his knees, a mouth full of nails and a hammer in one hand, he could still see under the belly of his horse everything that was going on. He watched, pretending not to, as they all filed past the grave, dropping in wild flowers. Scott Lancer still had an arm around his daughter’s shoulders, as he had through most of the service. The dark-haired woman (he never had learned her whole name, but he figured Mrs. Lancer was a good bet) knelt in the dirt to wipe the tears of the younger boy on her apron. Jack, they had called him. The older boy had his grandfather’s blonde hair and blue eyes, but the younger one was as dark-haired as Madrid.

Lancer. He’d have to remember that. No need to put them all on the defensive again. Johnny Lancer managed to drop his flowers into the grave, even though he needed both hands to manipulate the crutches, especially on that uneven terrain. He stopped to give the dark-haired boy a warm hug and lightly touch the woman’s hair before he and the other men headed for the house. So, the wanted posters may not have been too accurate, but the stories were, apparently. Gentle, he had been told. Kind and compassionate. Which had never made the least bit of sense to Tex. His own reaction to almost killing a boy by accident was still violent enough to be physical, yet this man had once taken money to kill people. To commit murder. No self-defense involved. No need to protect others, like a lawman in the line of duty. No rage or anger or, near as he could tell, any feeling at all. Just hand over the cash and bang! You’re dead.

Totally incomprehensible. Although, in a way, Tex was glad to see it was true. It had been something of a shock discovering Madrid was still alive, but it was nice to know all his information wasn’t suspect.

Murdoch, Johnny and Scott headed straight to the office and helped themselves to glasses off the tray on the end table. Murdoch poured drinks, and the three of them all settled into their favorite chairs.

"I didn't see that kid all afternoon," Johnny commented. "He leave?"

"He's out near the barn," Scott said.

"Doing what?" Johnny asked.

"Near as I can tell, taking all the shoes off his horse, one by one, and replacing them."

"Why?" Murdoch asked.

"Killing time. Waiting for us," Scott said. He turned to Murdoch and asked, "Did you know he wanted to ask questions about the summer of 1870?"

"Yes," Murdoch said. "That's why I went looking for him in the first place. I heard he'd been asking a lot of questions, not just about the date, but about Lancer specifically. I thought if he wanted to gossip about the Lancers, he could go to the source. But, now, I'm not so sure I want him here."

"Oh, I'd like to have him stick around a little longer," Scott said.

"Why?" Johnny demanded.

"The way I figure it, he'll have to explain himself in more detail before he can reasonably expect any information from us. The name he gave me wasn't familiar. Had you ever heard of Terrence Palmer?" he asked Murdoch.

Murdoch shook his head.

"So?" Johnny asked.

"So. I want to see how many more slips he makes."

"Slips?"

"Of the tongue," Scott said, but he didn't elaborate. Johnny frowned, considering, but he couldn't think of any "slips." Maybe it was something the kid had said when he and Scott were alone together.

"The kid's gun-happy," Murdoch said, sourly.

"We disarmed him. Anyway, I don't think you're right about that. I think he's very much aware of how to handle a gun. He was really scared of that dog, but his habits of carefulness went deeper than his fear."

"What are you talking about?" Murdoch demanded.

"You were studying the dog, Johnny," Scott said. "What do you think?"

Johnny's whiskey glass was already empty, but the chair he had picked was close enough to the drink tray that he could reach the decanter without getting up. He reached for it now, uncapped it, and refilled his glass, all with a thoughtful frown.

"Had he moved, from the time he shot until the time we all got out there?"

"No. Not significantly."

"What?" Murdoch asked again.

"He wasn't quite at the corner of the house," Johnny said. He took a mouthful of whiskey and swallowed, trying for as little contact with his taste buds as possible. He paused, grimacing at the taste, before continuing. "But, he was close to it. For a couple seconds, when they first came into sight, Jack and Bingo would have been almost running straight at him, dead on. But they swerved when they came around the corner of the house, and cut directly between him and the building at a right angle."

"Yes," Scott said.

"Did you see him draw?" Johnny asked.

"It was like lightning. You wouldn't have believed it. I can hardly believe it. His gun was out and level before they got to the corner of the house."

"So he hesitated?" Johnny asked.

"Just for a moment. A second. Maybe a fraction of a second. For a minute I thought he had realized his mistake and wasn't going to shoot at all, but the hesitation was too brief."

"What are you two talking about?" Murdoch asked.

"A lot of men carry guns, Murdoch," Johnny said. "Most of them do it without realizing what a ... an engine of destruction they're toting around."

"He's a gunman, isn't he?" Scott said.

Johnny shook his head. "Maybe. No, I don't think so. Most men who kill for a living don't have enough conscience to hesitate like that, to make sure their target is lined up so that no one else gets hurt before pulling the trigger. I'd say he really is a lawman, and a very carefully trained one at that. I didn't see the draw, but I saw the pattern. Two shots, right?"

"Right."

"Both of them hit, so tight the entrance wounds overlapped. There were two exit wounds, because the dog was moving, the angle was just a little different, but it looked to me almost like a single entry wound. And he waited," he added, looking at Murdoch, in case the old man was too dense to understand what they had been talking about, "until Bingo was in line with a nice, soft adobe wall that would stop the bullets without causing a deadly ricochet before he fired."

"What do you think he's really after?" Murdoch asked, after he'd thought that over a minute.

"I don't know. That's why I want him to stay," Scott said. "Maybe we can stall him for a day or two. He said something that really interests me."

"What?" Murdoch asked.

"He wanted to know if this," he pointed at his brother, "is Johnny Madrid."

"If he is a lawman, he probably has a whole pocket full of old wanted posters," Johnny said. He finished his drink and refilled his glass for the third time. Murdoch frowned at him, but didn't say anything. The action distracted him enough that it took a moment for Scott's reply to sink in.

"No," Scott said. "He didn't say 'Wow, is that Johnny Madrid?' He said 'Lancer'. 'John Lancer.' And he qualified which John Lancer this might be by the name of 'Madrid.'"

"He connected the names," Murdoch realized slowly.

"He connected the names," Scott agreed. "And not by face either, but because Larissa had just called him 'Uncle Johnny'."

"How?" Murdoch said simply.

"I've been trying to figure that out since it happened. Outside the three of us, there's not all that many people who could have connected the names. Teresa knew, but none of the kids did, not even Larissa, though once she's through worrying about the dead dog she'll start to wonder about it."

"There was the Pinkerton agent who found you in the first place," Murdoch said. "He was killed on a raid to capture Jesse James a short time later. I remembered his name when I read the article."

"And the lawyer," Johnny said. "Remember, when you first split Lancer legally with Scott and me, you told the lawyer to make it Madrid instead of Lancer on the deeds."

"Just to see what you'd say," Murdoch said.

"And I said leave it, but in essence, you told him."

"He's dead too," Scott said.

"That's right." Murdoch agreed. "He came west originally because of consumption. It was only a few months after the signing of the deeds that he went into the sanatorium, and he died a short time later."

The three sat in contemplative silence for a long while.

"Jelly," Johnny said finally.

Jelly had worked for Lancer for about ten years, mostly as a cook. He'd been a cowboy for many years, but when he became too crippled up to ride the range any more, he was happy enough to "retire" to the kitchen of the big house instead. His cooking, rustic though it had been, had been a definite improvement over Teresa's youthful attempts at feeding the family. Jelly had lived off the kitchen, not in the bunkhouse, and had been a friend as well as an employee for years. A part of the family, almost. And well aware of who every member of the family was. Jelly was also dead. Age, cold, whiskey, a touch a pneumonia had ganged up on him all at once, and they had buried him like family in the little plot on the hill, next to Teresa's father and her one stillborn infant.

"No telling who any of them talked to," Murdoch said.

"There was a kid once," Johnny said suddenly. "Jelly told him who I was, and he hired me to kill the men who'd killed his father."

"You didn't, did you?" Murdoch demanded.

"Of course not! But I went with him to look into what happened a little clearer. Turned out his old man just plain fell off his horse, no one's fault really. But it could be the same kid."

"No," Scott said. "I remember that: it was eighteen or nineteen years ago -- not long after you came out here, and that kid was already... I don't know. Maybe sixteen then. This kid isn't old enough to be the same one. Besides, that kid wouldn't have had to ask if you were the Johnny Lancer who was also Johnny Madrid. He'd have just taken it for granted. And he'd have known you by your face."

"It's a puzzle, alright," Murdoch said.

Scott nodded in agreement. Johnny reached for the whiskey decanter again.

III.

By the time the ranger stepped into the dining room, the entire rest of the family was already seated. Without being obvious, Murdoch watched carefully to see how the boy reacted when he came through the door. Murdoch himself had stopped cold and gaped in surprise. The table had been set with Scott’s grandmother’s hand-made, lace-trimmed, imported table linens, delicate, antique flowered china, heavy, engraved silver flatware and etched crystal goblets. There were also heavy silver bowls filled with fresh-cut roses, and huge silver candelabras with so many flickering beeswax candles that the dining room looked like a church. Larissa’s doing, Murdoch suspected. Teresa wasn’t likely to want the extra labor of caring for all this antique finery without Mrs. Winger’s help, and Larissa had also appeared at the table with her hair neatly arranged and wearing her best dress.

But the ranger didn’t even blink. He paused long enough to take in the long, empty end of the table, and the one vacant set place between Johnny and Jack, and he stepped up to the table. He passed his leather wallet to Scott before sitting down, then slipped into the chair and spread the fancy napkin on his knee and bowed his head to wait for Murdoch to bless the meal. So. He might look like the wide-open plains themselves, but someone had gone to the trouble of teaching this boy parlor manners. He even slid his multiple silver forks to the left side of his plate where, Murdoch knew, they were positioned in the fancier restaurants.

“Get lost on the way to dinner?” Scott asked, as he started passing the food.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Tex replied. “This is a big place you have here. Very nice, but big.”

“Murdoch practically built it himself,” Scott said.

“Really? I would have guessed it was older than that.”

“It was older,” Murdoch said. “When I got this house – and the bit of land that came with it – it was a ruin. Most of the roof was missing, the floors were all rotted through, no windows. The walls were mostly all that was left, and the adobe parts of the walls were starting to dissolve. Some of it I was able to rebuild, but some of it had to come down completely, start again from scratch.”

“The upper stories aren’t adobe,” the kid said, more of a statement than a question.

“Why would you think not?” Murdoch asked.

“Weight. You’d need buttresses to hold them up if they were.”

“You did say you’d lived in the southwest,” Murdoch recalled.

“Yeah. And, I am from El Paso,” the kid reminded him.

“Yes, that’s right. And you’re right. The second floor is mostly log, and the third floor, where there is one, is frame.”

The food was all passed out and served, and Tex looked with dismay at the contents of his plate. Dinner was fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, glazed carrots and corn bread, which sounded wonderful. But, the crust of the chicken was blackened and grease-soaked, and when he cut off a small bite with his heavy silver knife, the meat inside was pink. No, it was bleeding. The potatoes were a gray, gooey, gelatinous mass with large, crunchy lumps, and the gravy tasted like boiled water with cornstarch and salt -- too much cornstarch, and not enough salt. The carrots were cooked to the point of being limp and flavorless and the glazing seemed to be a form of sweetened charcoal. The cornbread was so dry he almost choked on it, and it had all the flavor of rancid grease.

“Is El Paso a very big town?” Teresa asked. She may have been angry earlier at not having been given notice that a guest was coming, Scott thought, or maybe, she had been angry at something else entirely and had only used that as an excuse. But the one thing that could thaw her quickly was hearing about places she had never seen. She was always interested in stories of new and different places. Maybe, Scott considered, glancing across the table, maybe Johnny was right after all. Maybe travel was something that would interest her...

“Hard to say,” Tex said. “I reckon it depends on what you call big. It’s bigger’n Spanish Wells, but it’s not so big as St. Louis.”

“Have you been to St. Louis?” Scott asked skeptically.

“Yes, sir, I lived there for about three years. My ma did a course of study in nursing at a convent there.”

“Really!” Larissa said. “Your mother is a nurse, then? Does she like the work?”

“Oh, yes, she does.” Tex said, turning – to Scott’s displeasure -- that grin of his her direction. “The reason we moved to El Paso, you see, was that there’s a new hospital down there that specializes in surgical procedures, and Ma trained as a surgical nurse. She’s very good at it....”

“Maybe surgery is not the best topic at the dinner table,” Scott suggested quietly. But having put a stop to what he considered a flirtation between his daughter and this young man, he suddenly found silence at the table which would have to be filled with eating if someone didn’t say something quickly. Tex must have had the same thought because he turned to Teresa and said, “Ma’am? I don't believe we got a chance to introduce ourselves formally. My name is Texas Butler Pierce, I'm with the Texas Rangers."

"Teresa," Teresa said, smiling. "I think you need to find yourself a new summer name, Mr. Pierce."

"I have been thinking about making one up," Tex said. "But Ma hung 'Texas' on me when I was born, and sealed it with chrism oil when I was baptized. I reckon I'm stuck with it."

"An unusal name," Teresa said. "Let me guess. You were born in Texas."

"Abilene, Kansas, actually," he said, grinning. "No accounting for mothers -- if you pardon my saying so."

Murdoch looked up. “Abilene, Kansas? And didn’t you tell me you were... nineteen?”

“Yes, sir,” Tex agreed.

"When exactly were you born?"

"Exactly?" It seemed an odd question to Scott, but Tex didn’t seem to notice. "'’71. March 12, 1871."

"Is that significant?" Scott asked, hoping that if he cut the food up into small enough pieces no one would see how little of it he actually ate. He thought with longing of the bacon he had made for breakfast, half burned and half raw from hanging on a stick over an open fire.

"That's about the time Wild Bill Hickock was the town marhsall in Abilene, I believe,“ Murdoch answered. He looked at Tex. “Of course, you'd have been too young to remember him...."

Tex nodded amiably, agreeing.

"But were you named after him?" Murdoch said, making it almost as much a statement of fact as a question.

"Can't believe you caught that," Tex grinned.

"I've always been interested in men who live by the gun," Murdoch said. "Collecting stories about them is one of my hobbies."

"I don't understand," Larissa said, looking, from her grandfather to Tex and back again.

"Hickock's name wasn't actually 'William,'" Tex explained.

"James Butler Hickock, if I recall correctly," Murdoch said.

"You do," Tex agreed. "Ma always called him 'Butler'. I believe that's what many of his friends called him."

"Your parents knew him?" Murdoch asked.

"My Pa worked for him," Tex said. "I reckon you could say I was born into the lawman business. Pa was Hickock's deputy marshal."

"Didn't Hickock kill his own deputy?" Scott asked.

"Yes, he did," Murdoch said thoughtfully. "And.. wasn't that in the spring of '71?"

"March twelfth," Tex said.

"That's horrible!" Larissa gasped.

"Why would he kill his own deputy?" Teresa asked, apparently so absorbed in the story that she, too, forgot to eat.

"A case of mistaken identity," Murdoch said. "Hickock and a man by the name of Phil Coe were having a disagreement over whether or not the sign for Coe's Boar's Head Saloon was 'pornographic,' which by law meant it had to come down. It culminated in a gunfight..."

"Over a sign?" Larissa demanded, wide-eyed.

"I've seen men killed for less," said Johnny, who had been sitting at his place as silently as if he were half asleep.

Larissa stared his direction, surprised not by his condition but by the statement, and looked back only when Murdoch cleared his throat loudly before continuing his story.

"Yes, well. As I understand it, Hickock killed Coe, caught movement out of the corner of his eyes, spun around and fired again, accidentally killing his own deputy."

"How very tragic," Teresa said sincerely. "And on the night you were born?"

"Almost to the minute, as I understand it," Tex said. "Butler must have felt pretty bad about it because he supported Ma until she was up and around again, and then got her a job in the boarding house where he was staying, cooking and cleaning in exchange for room and board for both of us. It wasn't his fault, though. He had glaucoma."

"What's that?" Gene demanded, forgetting the rules about interrupting adult conversations.

"Disease of the eyes," Tex explained to him. "He shot because he didn't know who was behind him, couldn't see clear in the dim light. He gave up marshalling shortly after that, cause he knew it was not a good line of work for someone who couldn't see. He'd have been stone blind eventually, if he hadn't died a short time later."

"Shot in the back," Murdoch said.

"Up in Deadwood, yeah," Tex agreed.

"Did Wild Bill Hickock teach you how to shoot?" Gene demanded.

Murdoch and Scott waited, curious, for the answer to that one. Even Johnny lifted his head to look at the kid. If they were expecting a foolish slip, though, it didn't come here. Tex just grinned at Gene and said, "Shoot, I was just a baby when he died. I don't even remember him really. He left me a letter though, before he left town. A kind of an apology."

"Do you have it?" Gene asked, thinking how impressed his friends would be by a document actually signed by Wild Bill Hickock.

"Not on me," Tex said. "I keep it now in a safety deposit box in El Paso."

Which, he thought, was where this meal belonged. Locked up, somewhere far away. Preferably not a safety-deposit box, but a lock box, one with chains around it, kicked off the deck of a ship, floating slowly to the bottom of the ocean.

"Quit picking at your food and eat it," Teresa said sharply, and Tex automatically took another bite before realizing it was the boys she was actually speaking to, not him.

"We're not very hungry, Momma," Gene said at once, and Jack, who had been looking with interest at their guest, suddenly dropped his eyes to his plate and puffed out his lower lip, the picture of a boy in greif. It worked. Teresa smiled gently at both of them and didn't push it.

At the head of the table, Murdoch coughed explosively. He's just tried the cornbread, Tex thought. But Murdoch covered it well. He grabbed a drink of water and said, "Shouldn't try to talk while I'm eating! Now, what was I saying...?"

He hadn't been saying anything, but the sight of the wallet still sitting beside Scott’s plate saved him. “What is that here for?”

“I asked Mr. Pierce to bring proof that he works for the Rangers,” Scott said.

“Well.” Murdoch took the wallet himself and opened it, at the same time flicking open a pair of reading glasses and putting them on his nose.

"A wanted poster for John Doe, alias Terrence T. Palmer," he announced, lifting it out. He had seen it, as had Scott, but Teresa reached over and picked it up curiously, shocked by the evil, twisted face of the man depicted.

“Is this who you’re looking for?” she asked.

“He said he would have been in this area about twenty years ago,” Scott said.

“Well, actually...” Tex started.

“Even if he were here thirty years ago, I’d remember that face if I’d ever seen it!” Teresa said. “And I guarantee you, I’ve never seen it.”

She passed it back to Murdoch and wiped her hands as if just touching it had somehow sullied them. Murdoch set it down next to his plate and took out the next sheet in the wallet.

"Extradition papers from the State of Texas for the State of California for one John Doe, aka Terrance T. Palmer, approved by the California supreme court, June 30, 1890. A letter requesting assistance and cooperation of the California law enforcement officials in searching for John Doe, aka Terrence T. Palmer. Note attached." Murdoch flipped the page to read the attached note. "'Permission granted for Texas Ranger T. B. Pierce of the Special Forces Division, El Paso Office, Special Investigations Team, to proceed with his investigations inside the state of California'. I take it they didn't care to waste man power on this themselves?" Murdoch asked, looking at him over the tops of his reading glasses.

"No, sir."

Murdoch nodded, looked down through his glasses again, and shuffled to the next paper. "'To Whom It May Concern,'" he read. "'The following confirms the identity of Texas Butler Pierce, Sargent, Special Forces Division of the Texas Rangers, El Paso Office, Special Investigations Team.' Maybe instead of a summer name you can invent a shorter title for yourself. Let's see. 'Date of Birth: March 12, 1871. Place of birth: Abilene, Kansas.' You already told us all that. 'Present Address: 14 Paseo de las Ovejas, El Paso, Texas.' Sounds pleasant."

"It is," Tex said. "Roses by the door and everything."

"Married?" Teresa asked, thinking of the roses.

"I live with Ma, actually," the kid admitted, and seemed unaware of how Larissa's frown relaxed into a warm smile at that answer.

Murdoch looked down again. "Where were we? Ah, yes. 'Physical description. Height, six-foot-four. Weight, one hundred and eighty-five. Hair: Blonde. Eyes: brown.'" He paused to study Tex over the top of his reading glasses for a moment, then he nodded, satisfied and continued. "Distinguishing marks. Small scar on left cheek, causes dimple in same.' What happened?" he asked, looking up again.

"Got hit with a rock at school when I was six or seven."

"I just wondered," Murdoch said, "because I knew of someone who had similar results from a bullet."

"Just a kid scuffle," Tex said, shaking his head.

Murdoch nodded and looked down again. "'Seven-inch scar with twenty-seven suture marks on left thigh, still purple in color....'"

"That was a bullet," Tex said.

"Not too long ago, obviously."

"Almost a year, actually. Broke the bone, though. Took a couple surgeries to get it all back together right."

"That's tricky stuff," Scott commented.

"Yeah, well. Like I was saying, we got us a real good new hospital down in El Paso."

"Lucky you," Murdoch said, and finished the description. "'Evidence of animals bites on both..." He hesitated, almost as if he didn't wish to read the rest of it aloud, but he did, in as close to the same cool voice as he could manage. "On both legs and feet, hips, back and shoulders and upper arms. Shotgun pellet wounds on right foot, also last two toes of same foot missing. All these scars are several years old, faded to white. Signed, Captain Edouard Janiver. 25 May, 1890.'"

Murdoch's voice trailed off and he sat for a long time, staring at the paper. He looked up at Tex and took off his glasses, but didn't comment.

"I guess that would explain your fear of dogs," Scott said.

"The papers weren't meant to be an explanation, sir, that's the identification you asked for," Tex said. He glanced up at Murdoch and added, "If you need to examine the rest of the evidence, I'd prefer to wait for a more private moment."

"The evidence?" Murdoch asked.

"The judge that OKed the extradition insisted on seeing the 'identifying marks' for himself, and so did more than one local lawman I had to contact."

"Ah!" Murdoch said. "I don't believe that will be necessary just at the moment, Mr. Pierce." He passed the entire wallet to Scott, giving him the opportunity to re-examine every paper in it.

"That seems like sufficient identification to prove he is who he says he is," Larissa said, looking pleased and satisfied.

"Assuming of course that those are legitimate papers," said Johnny, again surprising them that he was paying attention.

"What is that supposed to mean, Uncle Johnny?"

"It means, the description may fit down to his toes -- or lack of them. That doesn't guarantee anything. There's nothing in that packet that he didn't prime us with, or that we can't confirm by sight. We don't know this Captain Janiver who supposedly signed that paper. Shoot, you could have written all that upstairs in your room before dinner," he added, waving at Tex. "You're good with a story, kid, but that doesn't mean a thing."

"You can telegraph to El Paso," Tex suggested.

"How do we know who's telegraphing back?" Johnny said.

"The Captain has a telephone in his office."

"We could call. How do we know whoever answers is who you say they are? You could have someone there waiting to give anyone who calls confirmation of your story."

"I think you are being unfair, Uncle Johnny," Larissa said. "Tex has been perfectly open and honest with us..."

Johnny just snorted.

"What kind of 'proof' would you want?" Tex asked.

"Photographs," Johnny suggested.

"Now, don't be ridiculous!" Larissa objected.

Tex, however, considered the matter. "How about someone in California who can identify me personally."

"What person, though?" Murdoch asked.

"Grandpa!"

"If we don't know who this person is, what difference does his identification make?" Scott asked her reasonably.

"Would you believe the word of Virgil Earp?" Tex asked.

"Marshal Virgil Earp?" Murdoch asked.

"He's not a marshal any more, but yeah, that's the one."

"And he lives in California? I thought he died in Tombstone."

"That was his brother. Virge’s been out here for several years. He was marshalling in Colton, near Los Angeles, until about a year ago. Right now he’s running a gambling house in San Bernadino."

"And he knows you well enough to give you a character reference?" Johnny asked.

"I didn't say anything about a character reference," Tex said. "You asked for identification. Virge can give you that; I grew up around him. But except for a few letters and a visit recently on my way through Los Angeles, I haven't seen Virge for years. I wouldn't ask someone for a character reference on the basis of having known them when I was a kid. Kids change."

"How is it that Virgil Earp knows you?" Murdoch asked.

"He's one of the men that shot the dogs off me."

"And this was how long ago?" Scott asked.

"Eight... No, nine years ago. I was ten years old."

“So, you were born in Abilene, lived in St. Louis at some point, are in El Paso now, but just happened to be in Tombstone in 1881?”

"From ‘80 to sometime in ‘81," Tex nodded.

"I suppose you were an eye-witness to the shootout at the O.K. Corral then," Johnny said.

"No. We’d moved to St. Louis by then. Just in time, too. It was obvious for some time that trouble was brewing, and Ma and I were rather closely allied with one of the two factions forming in town."

“I can understand St. Louis, where your mother could go to nursing school or whatever that was, and El Paso, because she got a job there, but why Tombstone? That couldn’t have been a very healthy place for a woman alone with a boy. If she was a woman alone?”

“And still is,” Tex said. “Ma never remarried.”

“Then why would she want to move to a raw, new mining town?”

“There are opportunities everywhere,” Tex said, sounding, Scott thought, just a bit defensive. But then he shrugged. “You remember me saying that Butler felt kind of responsible for us? When he moved away, he asked a freind of his to check up on Ma and me from time to time..."

"And that freind happened to be Virgil Earp?" Murdoch asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Bat Masterson, actually. But he and Wyatt Earp were friends. The Earps were all living in Tombstone, and Bat and a friend of his...”

“Luke Short?” Murdoch guessed.

“Right. They were on their way south to hook up with Wyatt again. Bat told Ma she could probably get a decent job there. She had been working as a kind of live-in cook and housekeeper for a man who's wife was ill -- but the wife was recovered, and she'd been let go."

"Wasn't Tombstone a pretty wild town?" Teresa asked.

"No, actually, by the time we got there, the marshal -- that would be Virgil Earp -- had things well under control. He'd slap you in jail if you just rode through town too fast on your horse. I've heard all kinds of stories about dust-ups in that town, but I know for a fact that the entire time he was living there, Virgil only fired his gun inside of town two times -- for that now-famous shoot-out, and when I... uh... had some trouble with dogs."

"Yes, the dogs," Murdoch said. "How exactly did they fit into this gunfighter story?"

"That was because of the food. See, Wyatt and Bat wrangled Ma a job supplying meals to the jail house..."

"Johnny Beehan's jail?" Murdoch asked.

"No, no! It was the town marshal who bought meals from Ma, not the county sheriff. Virgil Earp. That’s how I knew him."

"Seems like it would be hard to make a living like that," Teresa commented. "I mean, what happens if no one's been arrested? There's no one to sell a meal to."

"True, but as I said, Virge kept a tight lid on that town. He averaged thirty or forty arrests a month. And he was the Deputy U.S. Marshal, too, so sometimes there were federal prisoners he was holding over. It wasn't a lot of money, but Ma always had somebody to feed. And, that's where the dogs come in. See, I didn't get much growth on me until my teen years. When I was ten I was still a pretty scrawny little thing, and lugging around that big basket leaking smells of bacon, ham, gravy and all... Well, it attracted dogs on more than one occasion. Eventually it attracted more attention than I could handle. And, being an idiot kid, instead of tossing the basket for the dogs to fight over, I wrapped my body around it to protect it."

"Evidence of animal bites on both legs and feet, hips, back, shoulders and upper arms..."

A dog had nipped Murdoch once, many years ago. Not a deep bite, just a clashing together of teeth that scraped on the sides and bruised in the middle. He remembered that it had hurt, badly, for several days. Suppose it hadn't been just a nip, but a real bite? What if the canine teeth had actually dug into the skin, tearing, ripping raggedly at a young boy's soft flesh...

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS,CALIFORNIA. JULY 10, 1890 (Late night).

Johnny was drunk.

It was just one of many unfortunate side effects of trying to use alcohol as a painkiller. Sometimes it actually worked. Or maybe he just got himself drunk enough to pass out and forget about the pain for awhile. Today, it wasn’t working so well, and he’d never gotten around to that hot bath. When they’d arrived late this afternoon, there hadn’t been any hot running water in the room on the second floor he and Scott had converted into an indoor water closet and bathing room. Just a year ago, they had spent months digging and laying pipe to install running water in the main house. A large holding tank was set on the hill above the cemetery. A windmill pumped water to the tank, gravity fed the water through the pipes they had so carefully laid, down to the house where spigots opened in both the kitchen and the bathing room to pour water without any hauling or pumping involved. They had further upgraded the system by running a series of pipes through and behind the big wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen which heated the water to anywhere from scalding to luke-warm, depending on how much was being used and how hot the stove was. Ordinarily, Mrs. Winger kept the stove hot all day producing, from early morning until late evening, not only a steady stream of hot meals for the family, but also hot running water. With her gone, Teresa had obviously been pretty lax in preparing meals: the stove hadn’t been on at all today until she had to light it to make dinner.

Of course, he had taken baths all his life without hot running water. There was even a stove in the bathing room itself so that water could be heated right there instead of being hauled up the narrow back stairs a bucket at a time. But stoves take a long time to heat, and water an even longer time, and there had been that funeral this afternoon, which he felt obliged to attend, even if it was just for a dog. All that ranger kid’s fault, too. Blasting away like that. Then they all sat down to dinner with him and carried on civilized conversation as if nothing had happened!

Could hardly blame the kid, though, if those stories of his were true. And that was a question in itself, wasn’t it? How much of the kid’s tales to believe. Because they were tales, fairy tales and campfire tales, top-notch entertainment. It was the stuff of dime novels, a kid just happening to be born in the same town, at the same time that Wild Bill Hickock was marshal, taken under his wing only to end up in Tombstone in time to meet up with Earp and his crowd. The kid had offered to show his scars for his proof of identification, so undoubtedly at some time or another he did get chewed up by dogs. But Johnny sincerely doubted that Virgil Earp and his friends had had anything to do with the whole thing. He had been so sure of it, in fact, he half-expected the kid to claim it was Holiday who shot off his toes with the famous sawed-off shotgun he had used in the fight at the OK Corral. But the kid knew enough to know that that particular shotgun was actually owned by the marshal’s office: Holiday had grabbed it out of the case to go to that shoot out – later, according to the kid’s story, than the incident with the dogs. No, he had Virge, the famous lawman Virgil Earp, coming to his rescue with a shotgun -- possibly that same one, no way of knowing for certain --, damaging the kid while he saved him, and sending little gifts to the boy while he was laid up in bed to assuage his feelings of guilt.

Virge.

He did not believe the kid’s tales. Absolutely not. All those famous gunfighters. And that about the horse... What about the horse? He didn’t remember now, but something about the kid’s horse had struck a note in his subconscious. Mustang and Appaloosa. That meant something.... He’d lost it. Too much whiskey.

No, the kid’s stories were all just too good to be true, but that bit about Virgil Earp Johnny found himself believing.

Funny, he had heard of the famous lawman Virgil Earp before, but he had never made the connection, until this kid blithely called the man by his nickname, the same nickname Johnny had known him by, years and years ago.

He'd had the feeling ever since he laid eyes on him that this kid looked like someone he knew, but he hadn't been able to place it until now. Virge. Virge had not been much older, really, than this kid back when Johnny knew him, and he was very much like the kid: a big, easy-moving, freindly, smiling man with dark reddish-gold hair, always grining, always able to make a joke, even if he himself were the butt of it. And if the kid had known Virge when he was younger, he may have picked up some habits Johnny reocognized, though he couldn't think of any specifically. Funny to think of it: chance meeting today, yet in a strange way, their paths had crossed once before. They both had known Virgil Earp when they were youngsters. He could even suppose Virge had taught that kid how to handle a gun. Like he had taught Johnny.

How old had he been when he first met Virge? He had to think about that, simply because until he came to Lancer, he had no idea of how old he actually was. Or what his real name was. His mother had never celebrated his birthdays, seldom even seemed to remember he was around. If she didn't recognize them, there was no way he could have known when they were -- or how many of them he'd already had. And, she had always told him his name was Juan, not John. Juan Francisco. He remembered seeing the name John Murdoch Lancer for the first time in his life, scrawled on the envelope thick with cash in a bold, backwards slanting hand. He'd picked it up and stared at it, wondering, is this me? Is that really my name? The day after, when Teresa took Scott into town to buy him some work clothes, Johnny had tagged along, feigning indifference, acting casual. But as soon as they left him alone, he'd gone straight to the church, and asked the priest's permission to look through the big record book in his office. Since he wasn't sure exactly where to look, it had taken him some time, but he had found it. John Murdoch Lancer. Born October 9, 1852. Baptized November 22, 1852. He wasn't too good at reading and writing, but he could do sums fairly easily, and he did the math then. Eighteen. He was eighteen years old. He would have guessed he was older, really. He felt older. Eighteen didn't seem like that many years.

So, he'd been thirteen when he knew Virge. Yeah, that would be about right. It was barely after the War. Virge was a stage driver, working a route in southern California and Arizona. Johnny had met up with him in.... He couldn't remember the name of the town. Just that it had been winter, so the nights were cold, and he was sleeping in a pile of soiled hay tossed behind the livery stable to keep warm. He was bone-thin, hungry and ragged, and he stank, and people shunned him or chased him away, shouting obscenities at him, throwing rocks sometimes. He remembered standing outside the saloon in a fridgid winter rainstorm, working up the courage to step inside. He was cold, and hadn't eaten in so long that his stomach had begun to feel like an enemy, not a part of him: something that gnawed at him like a hungry animal. Finally, he shoved open the door and stepped inside, shivering violently in the smokey warmth after the chill outside, and instantly, someone shouted at him, "You! Kid! Get out of here! You can't be in here!"

"I need to talk to Virge," he said, trying to sound grown up, though his nose and eyes were streaming, making it look like he was sobbing.

Virge was at a table near the fire, a warm, dry table, playing cards with several other men. They laughed at his announcement, and Virge had laughed too, but when the owner tried to toss him out, Virge had said, "Bring him on over, let's hear what he wants to say."

So, he was allowed to stand by the fire, dripping and sniveling, and several men had commented on his smell -- which he knew was unpleasant, but there was nothing he could do about it without a better place to sleep.

"You wanted to talk to me?" Virge asked him

"I wanted to ask you for the job of guard on your stage coach," he'd blurted. He knew that the position was empty. The regular guard had died after he got drunk and fell off the high seat and had been run over.

The men at the table had howled in laughter, slapped each other and the table in their mirth. Virge had choked on his drink but managed to keep a straight face when he said, "Well, son, truth is, that ain't my stage coach. I just work for ths company. You'd have to talk to them about it."

"They won't talk to me," he'd said. "No one will talk to me. I really need the job. I'd work hard..."

"Can you shoot a gun?" Virge demanded.

"I never had a chance to try," he'd admitted, ashamed. Then he looked up and added, "But I killed a man once."

The laughter that comment brought tapered off when the other men saw he was dead serious. They snuck peeks at him and at Virge to see what the big man would do. Virge stroked his moustache thoughtfully, looking at his friends, looking for a way out of this embarrassing situation. "Tell you what," he said finally. "You hit a bulls-eye with my pistol, I'll talk to the company about you."

They all trooped outside right then and there, in the rain. For a target, an empty peach can was set on a fence post. Virge himself slogged through the mud to set it up, then came back and extracted one of the big, heavy pistols from his holster, showed Johnny the double-action on the trigger, made sure the cylinder was spun so that the hammer would fall on a fresh cartridge, and handed him the gun.

He had never fired a hand gun, but he had cleaned them for his step-father before, so he was familiar with the weight of it. He lifted the heavy weapon easily, pointed it at the can, cocked back the hammer with his thumb and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil knocked him clean off his feet, and the men were laughing so hard, it took them few seconds to realize that the can was no longer on the post. They found it ten yards away, where the impact of the bullet had sent it, a neat round hole bored straight though the picture on the label.

Virge never actually talked to the stage company, Johnny was sure of that because Virge would always pick him up just outside of town and drop him off before going back in. But he did teach him how to handle and shoot the big shotgun, bought him clean clothes, arranged for him to sleep inside the barn, on a bed of fresh, clean hay, and shared meals with Johnny in the warmth of the saloon, twice a day. He gave Johnny a few dollars a month, probably out of his own pocket, for "pay", and in the weeks that followed, he not only made sure Johnny was clean and fed and warm, but taught him about handguns and rifles, about figuring the drop in a bullet to hit accurately at a distance, and about handling the horses and gear necessary for stage coach driving. They were held up only once, by men who assumed that a stage without a guard would be an easy target. Two men where killed in the altercation, and while Johnny never knew if he had shot them or Virge had, Virge gave him half the reward money.

Knowing Virge was one of the what-ifs that Johnny tried not to think about in his life. What if he had been given a real job with the stage line? What if he could have stayed on, working for the company, making an honest living....

But one of Virge's brothers came into the area. Which, Johnny did not know, but all the Earps were notorious for sticking together, and for nepotism, although Johnny had not been aware of that word in those days. Virge had talked to the stage company then, got his brother the official job as guard. He'd felt bad about turning Johnny loose, on his own again. That was clear enough. And because he felt bad, he had given Johnny a gift when he told him he couldn't use him any more: a fancy pair of matched pistols in a carved, black leather cartridge belt. He had won them in a poker game, and they were worth a lot of money. Probably he thought Johnny could sell them if he ever got that hungry again. But Johnny never had. Instead of selling the pistols, he had sold himself.

Yeah, most of that kid’s story had been far too good to be true. But that part, that little addendum to his story he told them towards the end of dinner, that part rang all too true. The kid may have been making up stuff right and left to entertain them all, but he had known Virge, known his personality, known how he would react in a situation like the one the kid described. And a thought came to Johnny then that maybe Virge was how the kid had known that Johnny Lancer was the same man who used to call himself Johnny Madrid. It was a tempting conclusion to make. In fact, whiskey-addled as he was, he thought it was the right conclusion. Simple. Coincidental, but believable. He had temporarily forgotten himself that he had never used either the names Madrid or Lancer at the time he knew Virge. Virge couldn’t have passed that information on to the kid because Virge didn’t have that information himself.

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY. APRIL (DATE UNKNOWN), 1870

"The problem is," Johnny said through gritted teeth as he flexed and unflexed the fingers of his right hand, "I just don't believe you."

The girl laughed. "What if I told you I performed my first surgery when I was ten?"

"Flat out call you a liar," Johnny said, and he was pleased when she laughed again, not offended at all. He liked the sound of her laugh, liked the fact that he could be that honest and still hear it.

"It's true, though," she said. "My father used to be a chaplain for the military. He was stationed over at Fort Union. I don't know why we had a big house all to ourselves, all the other officers had to share. But we did, so Mama used to take in the convalescent soldiers who needed some care, but didn't need to be in the hospital."

"And she let you practice on them," Johnny guessed.

"Oh, no! I wasn't even supposed to go into that part of the house! But Mama got sick, and someone had to help them change bandages and so forth. Papa said he couldn't be bothered with it, made up some excuse. The fact is, it made him sick. He couldn't stand looking at the wounds."

"Didn’t it bother you?"

"No. Not really," she said. She leaned over the pan on the hearth to taste her stew, and added some more wild garlic. "In fact, I found it rather fascinating, especially sometimes when you could see right inside, at the layers of skin and fat and muscle... I sound like a ghoul, don't I?"

"I'm not sure what a ghoul is," Johnny admitted. "But I think: Yeah. You do."

"But it is fascinating," she said, after treating him to a grin. "Anyway, there was this one solder who had been shot in the leg. The bullet had gone through, and it seemed to be healing fine, but he kept saying there was something in there, poking him. He told the doctor and I told the doctor, and the doctor kept insisting it was just his bone, but bones shouldn't poke like that, should they? One day, you could actually see something pushing against his skin from the inside, like a baby trying to cut a new tooth. So, he held the skin tight, and I lanced it, and pulled something out. It was about this long," she held her fingers barely a quarter of an inch apart, "but very thin, pointy, and hard. I showed the doctor, and guess what he said?"

"It was the man's leg bone," Johnny guessed.

"Yes! How did you know that?"

"I was being... uh.."

"Sarcastic?" she guessed. It embarrassed him that he didn't actually know that word himself, so he just pretended that he had forgotten it. "But, it was his bone! A chip that had splintered off when the bullet grazed the bone. The doctor said -- in more detail this time! -- that bone chips will sometimes work their way out on their own, sort of come to the surface and slide right out, and he'd been waiting for it, thank you very much."

"Did you get in trouble?"

"Did I! And, I was told again to stay away from wounded soldiers -- ‘it's not proper for a young girl!’ But, Mama stayed sick. Someone had to keep doing her chores. Though I didn't lance anything any more."

"Huh," Johnny said, still working his fingers. Open shut, open shut, each movement causing a burning sensation in his forearm, as well as a dull ache.

"Your bone wasn't shattered," she said, watching him. "Whoever shot at you must have been pretty far away. The bone stopped the bullet. I think it was broken, but it looks straight to me now."

"Yeah. Probably just cracked a bit," Johnny said.

"And the bullets in your thigh and your side went straight through. I washed them out good and bandaged them. You bled a lot: that's partly what made you so sick and weak. But it was a good thing, too. Made them good, clean wounds."

"You know, all the people who told you it was improper to dress a man's wounds were right. That one in the thigh is.. um.. pretty high."

"Well, I couldn't let you bleed to death!" she said, averting her face. He grinned, still able to see how red it got, but didn't comment as she went on. "Or take you into town, after what Marshal Gonzales said."

"What did he say?"

"That even if the federales couldn't legally take you away, you were wanted on this side of the border too, and if they found you, they'd hang you."

"Huh," was all Johnny said.

"You don't look like someone who's killed people for money," she said.

"You ever met a hired gun before?"

"Well, no..."

"Then how would you know what one looks like?"

"You keep exercising your hand," she commented. "Which is good. Making the blood circulate seems to heal things faster. But we need to work on the foot and leg too."

"The foot is broken, isn't it?" he asked, collapsing back onto his saddle. Sweat was pouring down his face just from the exertion of repeated flexing of his hand!

"I'm afraid I didn't do too well with that one," she said. "I can take you to town, if..."

"If I want to be hung," he finished for her. "Thank you, but this is fine. Uh, that is unless people start wondering where you are and follow you."

"Oh, that's the beauty of bringing you here! I come up here all the time anyway. No one's the least bit suspicious. I think you should eat first, because the exercise will wear you out. Then I can give you some willow bark tea for the pain, and you can rest."

"Food sounds good," he agreed, pushing himself to a half-sitting position again. It was good to be able to do that much for himself. The first week or two, he'd been so weak he'd been helpless as a baby. She had come every morning, around mid-morning, to check his wounds, feed him soups and herbal teas with lots of sugar added to them. She'd dressed and re-dressed the wounds, keeping them all clean, removing the splints to massage blood into the broken bones, and -- to his enormous embarrassment! -- replacing the newspaper pads that she slid under him to catch any blood or other bodily fluids that might happen to leak out of him in his fevers. He was able to stand now, though only with her help, to move out of the shelter for certain needs. But they were short trips, and they exhausted him, and he wished, not for the first time, that it was at least a male person, not a female, who was available to help him just now.

But, he had to admit, she was good with wounds. Worked with the veterinarian in town, she told him, until her father said it was disgusting and sent her off to that school back east. He was fortunate, really, to have ended up in the hands of someone like her. She bathed the deep holes in his side and thigh twice a day with some warm, sweet-smelling concoction that kept them clean, and kept the outside from sealing up before the insides were healed so that the draining fluids could come out, instead of building up and causing infection. The arm, too, was coming along nicely. Sore, but healing clean. He might soon be able to grip a gun with that hand again. But the bones in his foot had been broken by the bullet that struck him there. They were healing, but there was a hump on the top, like a wildly overstated instep, that would be with him forever. And it did ache.

He fed himself stew and tea and some of the biscuits she had brought with her this morning while she sat, as she often did, sewing in the sunlight. She had repaired his jeans and jacket: they were patched, but they'd hold. The shirt she had given up on and used as bandages long ago, and he suspected, though she never said anything, that she was sewing him a new shirt. Either that, or she brought her home chores with her when she came. Which was possible.

When he had finished mopping up the last of the gravy with a biscuit, she offered him more stew.

"Later," he said.

She set down the sewing then and came to kneel at the foot of his makeshift bed. "Then, we should get to work," she said.

He tucked the blanket securely around himself as she massaged his foot. She worked at it for a long time, which was, he knew, exhausting, but she never said anything, just kept massaging and manipulating. Finally she lifted it to her shoulder and leaned forward so that he had to push first with his toes, then with his heel, bending and flexing all the muscles from his big toe to his hip. It hurt. And it was a lot more work than he would have imagined. Sweat popped out on his forehead, and it seemed like only a few seconds passed before he had exhausted himself.

"Rest for a minute," she said, and she stood to get him some cold, clear creek water to drink. But then she was back, taking the foot on her shoulder again, this time rocking her whole weight so the leg flexed at the knee, straightened, and flexed again. He put pressure on it himself, but when it was obvious that she was doing most of the work and he had run out of strength, she lowered his leg gently to the bed again. He got a quick massage then, both feet and lower legs, and a few inches above the knee. Higher above the knee would have been nice -- for the sore muscles of course -- but in spite of what she already had to have seen, they were maintaining a fairly high level of decorum. It was for his own sake as much as for hers, he realized. It made him more comfortable as well.

"Do you need to, um, get up?" she asked him.

"I need to rest," he said.

"I'll leave the rest of the stew on the bench where you can reach it easily," she said. She didn't have to add that the water was there, and some rapidly cooling tea. She left it all laid out every time she left.

"Tomorrow is Sunday," she said as she arranged things. "I won't be able to come tomorrow."

He was surprised at how much that statement bothered him.

"I'm sorry. I snuck out the past couple Sundays. My father will get suspicious if I keep it up. But I'm leaving you plenty of stew, and biscuits. And there are some meat pies in this bag. And lots of water. There's more in the bucket there if you need it."

"I'll be fine," he said.

She knelt down next to him and waited while he drank down the bitter tea she made from the inner bark of green willow boughs. Nasty stuff, even with the sugar she added to it. The sugar, she said, was for strength as much as flavor. And the willow would ease the pain. He knew it would. It always did. She left him more, and some mint tea as well, gathered up her things and prepared to leave.

"Hilary!" he said when she had reached the wall-less end of the ruined house.

"Yes?"

She looked like a bird, he thought, perched at the end of a twig, ready to take flight at any second. One hand gently touched the broken wall, the other clutched her work basket. She was poised on her toes, stopped dead in mid-stride to answer him. And he really didn't have anything to say. It was just... he would miss her. He'd been alone so long, riding with other men sometimes, but alone all the same, that the thought that he longed for company seemed strange. But he did.

"See you Monday," he said finally, and was rewarded by one of her warm smiles.

"I'll come all the earlier," she promised.

"Hilary!" he said again.

"Yes?"

"Thank you," he said.

She grinned. "You see?" she said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

The night was hard, though. A storm moved in and hit just before dawn. The ruins of the cabin were open to the east, and normally, this was good. It gave him full benefit of the warm, morning sunshine, and most of the storms and prevailing winds came out of the west. But this storm was what weathermen of a much later generation would call a counter-clockwise rotating, slow-moving low-pressure ridge. It did come out of the west, but its circulation was blowing the wind in from the east. Johnny managed to drag his bedroll into the farthest corner of the cabin, tucked up beside the makeshift hearth and behind the log bench. But he couldn't escape the cold winds, the sprays of rain, the hail. He tried building a fire, but only succeeded in exhausting himself and giving up on the damp twigs and sticks. He wrapped as much of the blankets around himself as possible and tried to huddle into the warmth. But water leaked under the wall of the house, cold seeped up from the ground, and when Hilary arrived Monday morning, though the sun was out finally, he was still huddled into the corner, feverish and shaking with chill. She lit a fire at once, with the dry kindling she always brought with her. She hung his damp blankets out to dry, and wrapped both of them together in the only dry thing left -- his saddle blanket -- warming his body with her own until the shaking stopped. When he finally slept, she spent the rest of the afternoon dragging long sticks and hay into the shelter to build him a warmer, safer place to sleep.

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA: JULY 10-11, 1890

The sound of the scream brought Scott bolt-upright in bed, heart hammering hard against his chest. Before he could even sort out what it had been and where it came from, Teresa was scrambling out of bed, reaching for her wrapper and slippers in the dark.

"Johnny," Scott croaked hoarsely, sleep still clogged in his throat. He cleared it out and said, "It's just Johnny."

"Just Johnny!" Teresa said. "You know how bad those nightmares can get!"

"No," Scott said. "I don't." Because those nightmares were one of the things, like where he had gone that summer twenty years ago, that Johnny never talked about. At least, not to Scott.

"He talks to you about them?"

"No," Teresa admitted, and he could hear the disappointment in her voice. Scott was glad, though. The thought that his brother might share confidences with his wife that he had not shared with him had caused him an uncomfortable feeling in his heart. Jealousy? He hated to think so, but he was sure that's what it was.

"Stay here, Teresa," he said, trying to make it sound as if he weren't pleading.

He must have managed, because she didn't respond as he had hoped. "You know he'll wonder if I don't go up," she said, and that was probably true, because she always did run to Johnny's bedside when he had a nightmare, as if he were one of her children who needed her to care for him and keep the dark at bay. The feeling, Scott thought as he watched her tug her long, loose hair out of the collar of her wrapper, was definitely jealousy, a feeling he did not like having where it concerned his only brother.

When she was gone, he laid back down on the bed, arms folded behind his head. Because of the full moon, the room was not pitch dark, and he laid there for some time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence in the big house. The thick adobe walls insulated sound fairly well, but he already knew there was no one else stirring. The boys could sleep through an Indian attack. Murdoch, he knew, would have been awakened by that scream, same as he had. But, without a wife to leave him feeling guilty for his jealous inclinations, Murdoch would probably go back to sleep. And Larissa... even if she was awake, she knew better than to go wandering around the house in the middle of the night.

After several minutes, he gave up. He wasn't going back to sleep, and he knew it. Instead he got out of bed himself, pulled on a pair of trousers and a robe and walked barefoot out into the livingroom. West-facing, that room was very dark, but the office, with its many windows, glowed lighter, and he went that way, heading, before he even stopped to think about it, for the drink tray by the couch. He hesitated. But one drink in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep didn't make him an alcoholic. An interesting concern. Funny, how they never talked about Johnny's drinking, even as they never discussed his nightmares, yet it was in all their minds.

He selected the decanter with the silver top: imported double-malt scotch whiskey. That was for enjoying, not for gulping. He poured himself two fingers in a small glass, then, catching a glint of light reflecting off portrait frames behind him, he turned. The fireplace, a whole wall of river-rock that Murdoch had painstakingly hauled up from the creek bed, one sled-load at a time, dominated the entire room. As did the portraits hanging over it. On the left was Scott's mother, on the right a portrait of Murdoch with Johnny's mother, Maria Esperanza Ordoñez. The portrait of Scott's mother had arrived more than ten years ago, part of a bundle of freight that had been sent out after Scott's grandmother died. He had written to his grandparents and specifically asked them, just months after he had arrived here, not to leave him any Boston properties in their will: "I love you both dearly, and I am truly thankful for the upbringing you gave me. But I have found my place in the world, and it is here..." Instead, they had left him the civilizing influence of his grandmother's best tableware, and this portrait. He had hated this portrait when he was a child. His grandmother had hung on the wall opposite the foot of his bed, where it could smile down at him every night, and he awoke to that face looking at him every morning. He supposed she had meant it to be comforting, to remind him that he was not alone in the world. But he had often slept with the covers over his head, hating to have her staring at him, smiling that superior smile, as if she knew every naughty thing he had ever done, and, worse than punishing him, was just going to remind him, over and over, of his shortcomings. Scott had not been a particularly naughty child, no more, he reflected, than any other boy. But he had lived for years with feelings of guilt and inadequacy because of this portrait. When he opened the crate and discovered it lurking inside, he had been dismayed, and relegated it instantly into the darkest of their storerooms. Then Murdoch had asked if he could have it, since Scott did not seem to want it. Murdoch liked to collect family pictures. He had threatened to have them all immortalized in oil, but had never gotten around to finding a good enough painter, so he settled for photographs, with which he adorned the walls of his bedroom. Scott had assumed that this portrait would go into Murdoch's bedroom with the photographs. But instead of hiding it in there, Murdoch had hung it in here, digging the wedding portrait out of storage to hang next to it.

Scott had made peace with his mother over the years. In this room, and with himself an adult, he had come to realize that her smile was not weary or accusing as Scott had imagined in his childish fears, but gently amused, the smile of a girl secure in her beauty, in her family, in herself. He admired her more now that he knew more of her story. She looked like a frail, useless debutante, but he knew she must have had a great deal of courage, as well as a sense of adventure, to leave behind everything she had ever known and take off into a virtual wilderness with a man who had nothing to offer her but ambition and the strength of his own two hands. So, he toasted her tonight, raised his glass to this woman who had given him life, who had started the Lancer family, as certainly as Murdoch had, though she had not lived to see what became of them. And, he toasted the other portrait as well. Johnny's mother. Esperanza, whose name meant "hope". He took a sip then, replaced the stopper on the decanter, and a voice said sharply, "Freeze right there, mister! Don't even breathe!"

II.

"You don't mind if I swallow, do you? That is why I came out here," Scott said mildly.

The ranger stepped into the room, and lowered the pistol he had leveled at Scott's chest.

"I thought I told you to leave the guns in the stable."

The kid flushed -- Scott could see it even in the dim light -- and tucked the gun safely away in his waistband. "It was out there, but when all that screaming started, I... uh..."

"Ran outside in your stocking feet to get it?" Scott guessed.

The kid looked down at his socks, then up again. "I had boots on. I was outside, actually, taking a walk..."

"At this hour of the night?"

"It's not that late," the kid said defensively. "I was... thinking about the case, about some reports I got to write. Then I heard that racket... Sounded like somebody was being eaten alive! I ran into Mrs. Teresa down in the kitchen, and she said it was Mr. Johnny, having nightmares. Nightmares! Then I heard someone moving around in here... Mr. Lancer, is this place always this crazy after dark?"

"You hit us on an especially good night," Scott said. "Can I offer you a drink?"

"No. Thank you, sir," Tex said.

"On duty?"

"No, sir. I just never cared for liquor all that much. Don't like the way it tastes."

"Yet Murdoch said he found you early this morning in Levy's Saloon."

"Where, as I'm sure you know, they serve a good breakfast."

"Very true," Scott conceded. He took a sip of the fine scotch in his glass and rolled the smokey-tasting liquid around on his tongue, considering the young man standing before him in the dark. "Do you remember, Mr. Pierce, the conversation we had in front of the stables this afternoon?"

"Very well, sir."

"We spoke of the feeling of deja vu. This ranch has had a veritable plague of deja vu ever since we first heard your arrival was imminent. It began even before you got here, and is still carrying on. My brother has not had nightmares like this in years. What is it you do for the rangers, Sargent Pierce? Torture innocent people by dredging up memories best left forgotten?"

"I am an investigator, sir."

"Because of your connections?"

"Because of my successes."

"Ah. Success at stirring things up."

"I never meant to cause any one any discomfort, sir. I just need to double check on some information I was given by someone else. If none of you recognize this Terrence Palmer, likely it's another dead end. But I have to find out for sure before I start looking elsewhere. Palmer walked into that bank and shot seven people in cold blood, after peacefully swindling widows for years. And the only connection I got for that sudden change in behavior is the name Lancer."

"You seriously think that is a connection?"

"I'm beginning to have some doubts,” Tex admitted. “The timing, for one, is probably wrong. But it's all I got. Let me explain..."

"Please," Scott said holding up a hand. "Not now. I don't want the details just yet, you can give them to all of us together tomorrow. Murdoch and Johnny -- even Teresa -- are more likely to be of help than I am."

"Yes, sir," Tex said, with obvious disappointment.

Scott smiled. "Oh, we'll hear your story, Sargent. Don't worry. I am very interested in hearing it, and I know my father and brother are as well. It's just..."

His voice trailed off and he turned again to look across the room to where two portraits hung side by side over the mantlepiece. In the dim moonlight, they were blobs of light and shadow, but Tex had seen them earlier, when he came in this room looking for the diningroom, lost. The wedding portrait of Murdoch Lancer and Esperanza Ordoñez, painted about forty years ago, showed Murdoch as a mature man in his prime, tall, broad-shouldered, golden haired. A man, Tex had thought, obviously in love, with a sappy smile on his face and a sparkle in his eyes. Esperanza had been little older than Larissa Lancer was now, a tiny, plump, dark-haired girl, with a faintly suspicious look in her eyes that he thought the artist would have done well to remove. The other portrait was a young, fair-haired woman in fancy evening clothes, her blonde hair piled high with jeweled stickpins tucked in it and a single gold curl hanging over one bare shoulder. She was a delicate, fine-boned girl. More jewels sparkled on her hands and throat, and her lips were curved in a faint smile. His first thought was that it was a picture of Larissa, but he realized that the mischievous gleam in those dark blue eyes didn't look like Larissa at all.

"Twenty years ago -- exactly the time period you are interested in...” Scott said.

“Actually, sir,” Tex started, but Scott didn’t seem to hear, and just kept talking.

“... Lancer was involved in a major land war. A good many people were killed, including Teresa's father. It was... a turning point for all of us, a pivotal year for the ranch and the family. Quite frankly, if there was some two-bit outlaw in the vicinity, I doubt any of us would have noticed. We were a little... preoccupied."

"Yes, sir," Tex said. He moved, preparing to leave, but he paused again. "Sir?"

"Yes?" Scott said, still staring at the portraits.

"Is it about his leg?"

Scott turned then, frowning in a puzzled manner. "Excuse me?"

"Mr. Johnny's nightmares. Do they have something to do with him losing that leg?"

"Oh," Scott said, nodding with understanding. "The screaming. It does sound like a man having a limb amputated, doesn't it? I heard that sound often enough in The War. I am old enough to have fought in the War. The question is, where would you have heard that sound?"

"On Ranger business," Tex said. "Four of us were ambushed by Comanche renegades out in... well, anyway. We had to take a man's arm off with a Bowie knife."

"I see." He took another small, slow sip. "In answer to your question, Johnny only lost the leg two or three years ago." He paused, and considered. "Or maybe... seven. I hadn't realized it had been that long, but Jack was still a toddler. Gene was only five. They don't really remember him as he was." He took another sip of the scotch and shook his head. "No, it's not an amputation he dreams about. Those dreams cropped up... actually, at least twenty years ago."

"That date again," Tex said ruefully.

"Yes," Scott said thoughtfully. He was thinking now that he did not recall Johnny having had any nightmares before he left that summer of 1870, but the first night after he'd come back he'd awakened the entire house with his screams. Of course, he had never had them every night, even back then when they were more frequent, and he hadn't been at the ranch all that long before he left...

"So, this has been going on for twenty years?" Tex asked.

"Oh, not every night. After a few months, he seemed to get it mostly under control. Unless he drank. That was the main reason he never drank much, except for an occasional beer on a hot afternoon. That and the fact that... he never cared for the taste."

"I'd say he got used to it," Tex said dryly.

"Would you now? What gave you that idea?"

Tex hesitated before answering. "My nose," he said finally. "I sat next to him at dinner."

Scott nodded. "His leg hurts," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"After he lost the leg, he kept complaining that it hurt," Scott shrugged. "Not the scar, the whole leg: his knee, his toes, everything. He has no leg. Yet, he claims it still hurts, quite often, even after... what did I just say it was? Seven years. Some nights he has to drink himself insensible to sleep at all."

"Doc always said nothing eased his chest and his cough like whiskey," Tex said. "Course, after awhile, the whiskey got to be more than a habit. Sometimes you can't stop once you start."

Scott nodded, looking thoughtfully down at his own glass. "Hmmmm. There was a spurt of nightmares again after he started drinking heavily, but they'd died down -- as his drinking actually has, too. Except for occasions. Tell me, Sargent, as a modern investigator, surely you've read some of these theories by that German doctor, Fraud..."

"Freud. Yes, sir."

"What do you think of his theories on the meanings of dreams?"

"I can't help but think that, like most educated people, he over-complicates things. My ma always said if a man can't sleep, it's probably just a guilty conscience."

"Interesting statement, from a man wandering around fully dressed in the middle of the night."

"Yeah," Tex offered a rather lopsided grin. "I reckon that hit home, even if I hadn't meant it to."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, I was restless because I was thinking. I like being a lawman. But I was wondering if a man who shoots first and asks for the facts later ought to be in a business where he's supposed to carry a gun." He sighed and shook his head. "I still can't believe... When that other kid came around the corner...." He threw up his hands. "I ain't even got words," he said.

"But you do have a conscience," Scott observed. "Maybe this incident will help you work through your own fears so you do ask first next time."

"Thank you," Tex said.

Scott nodded. "Maybe you should try sleeping again. It is late."

"Yes, sir. And you sir?"

Scott looked at the empty glass in his hand, and at the variety of decanters on the tray. "I might try Johnny's formula for sleep tonight. I don't think I am subject to nightmares, but I do find it difficult to get back to sleep when my wife goes off to take care of my brother..."

"Your wife?" Tex asked, surprise obvious in his voice.

"My wife," Scott agreed.

"Mrs. Teresa...?"

"She and I have been married nearly as long as you have been alive," Scott affirmed. He watched as closely as the dim light would allow as the younger man digested this information, obviously shifting things around in his mind.

"Then the boys...?" Tex asked.

"Are my sons," Scott said. "All three of the children are ours. Johnny is a confirmed bachelor."

"If I may ask then, who's the blonde lady in that portrait?" Tex asked, gesturing over Scott's shoulder.

"Whom did you think it was?"

"Well, I reckon... I guess I thought that was your wife. Larissa bears quite a resemblance to her, and... " He let the sentence trail off lamely, embarrassment darkening his face.

"My mother," Scott said, looking back at the portraits. "Larissa does resemble her. She's named for her too, actually. I never knew her myself, but Murdoch tells me Larissa has some of her same mannerisms and gestures. Interesting that such things can be inherited, isn't it?"

"Um, yeah," Tex said, sounding even more uncomfortable. "Um, sir? Can I ask you a personal question?"

"I believe you already have," Scott said. "But, go ahead."

"Yes, sir. Well... If Mrs. Teresa is your wife, sir, what's she doing upstairs with Mr. Johnny?"

Scott turned and stared at the boy until the flush darkened on his face and he shifted uncomfortably under the scrutiny. After a very, very long pause, Scott finally said, "They're friends."

"Yes, sir," Tex said, looking down at the carpet.

"I met my wife and my brother on the same day. At the same time, actually. We're all very good friends."

III

Scott stopped to peek in at the boys before going back to his own room. They were both snuggled down in their blankets, dead asleep. The moonlight cascaded like a flow of silver water over Jack's soft, dark hair and Gene's tousled blonde head, turning both to various shades of silvery-blue. Scott watched for several seconds the gentle lift and drop of the blankets as they breathed, and wondered if he was getting senile.

He'd made a joke along those lines just this afternoon, he recalled. But then he had stood in the dark, telling a total stranger -- a kid bedsides -- personal things about the family that he had never shared with anyone. He hadn't done anything like that in his entire life!

No, that wasn't true, strictly speaking. Ever since they'd first met, he and Johnny had talked like that, sitting up long into the night after the rest of the ranch was quiet, not playing cards or drinking, just talking.

"I guess we have a lot of catching up to do," Johnny had once commented ruefully when they realized the sun had come up and they were still sitting in the kitchen, where they had been since dinner the night before.

But that was two brothers sharing the lost parts of their lives with each other. This was... Not like Scott at all. To talk like that to a total stranger, to say those things...

It bothered him that he had said those things, but what bothered him even more was what the kid had said: that he had thought Teresa was married to Johnny.

Well, they hadn't actually made introductions. No one had said, "This is my wife," or "This is my husband..." There was too much confusion earlier, and at dinner, the kid had taken care of introductions himself. More or less. There were three "Mr. Lancer"s at the table, and one "Mrs. Lancer", and the kid had had to put things together on his own.

Still... Is that how a total stranger saw them? Teresa and Johnny -- and the boys! -- as a unit? And himself... what? An outsider? The bachelor brother-in-law and uncle that was Johnny's role in the family?

Scott closed the bedroom door behind him and stepped back into the hallway. But instead of returning to his own empty bedroom -- his own empty bed -- he leaned up against the wall and thought about it.

They shared a bed, as they always had. Shared a room. Spent hours discussing ranch business with Johnny and Murdoch. Spent hours, also, discussing more personal things, like the upcoming ball for Larissa's birthday.

But did that count? Deciding if the cows should be hayed longer or put out to grass, deciding to hire extra kitchen help for the party so the burden didn't fall on her or Mrs. Winger... he could have conversations like that with anybody. And did. Was all their interaction that cool and aloof, or was he seeing things that weren't real because of the reaction of a stranger? Was there a coolness, an isolation, between them? Is that what Johnny had noticed, commented on today? Had he backed off from her? Had she separated herself from him? Or was it just that it was late, and he was tired, and his wife was gone, and he was feeling lonely enough to tell personal things to a total stranger, then wander around the halls in the dark, feeling sorry for himself?

A sudden, Bang! Crash! brought him off the wall, upright and alert, his heart pounding wildly, even as his ears registered a startled bellow of surprise.

Johnny! He'd dropped something, probably, or fallen over, up there in the attic. He turned, and started down the hall to the back stairs -- the only stairs that went up to the third floor -- to see if any assistance was needed, when suddenly, Bang! Crash!

Gunshot, he realized then. He hadn't recognized it at first because of distance and the muffling of the adobe walls. The gunshot was far outside somewhere, but the crashing of glass was coming from upstairs: windows shattering under the impact of the bullets! Scott dove into the boys' room and snatched them out of bed. Dragging Gene by the arm, grabbing Jack around the chest, he drug them both into the broad hallway that ran between the living room and the bedroom suites. With heavy adobe walls outside and inside, this was the safest place in the house.

"Pa!" Gene protested.

Bang! Crash!

A high, female scream rang out.

"Daddy what is it?" Jack asked, rubbing his eyes.

"You boys stay right here!" Scott said. "Don't move, you hear me?" He sprinted up the nearer front staircase, taking the broad steps two at a time.

He crashed into Murdoch on the second floor landing. "What the...?"

"Get Johnny and Teresa, they're still upstairs!" Scott said, and Murdoch wheeled to run in front of him, limping awkwardly as they both raced down the second floor corridor.

Bang! Crash!

Larissa was scrambling out of bed when Scott ran into her room. He grabbed her up in his arms, blanket and all, without a word and dashed down the hallway towards the steps. It was very dark inside, but there was something darker than shadows on Larissa's face.

Bang! Crash!

"Scott!" Johnny called. He and Teresa and Murdoch were all hurrying towards the second floor landing now.

"Downstairs, everybody downstairs!" Scott shouted. Murdoch and Johnny stumbled behind him as his hurried down the steps.

Bang! Crash!

"What is it, what's happening?" Teresa asked as they ran.

"Maybe it's Indians!" Eugene suggested.

"Not likely," Johnny said. "The locals never were hostile, and they've been on the reservation more than twenty years. Teresa, take this."

Bang! Crash!

Teresa took the gun from Johnny and held it while he opened a cartridge bag with teeth and one hand, holding himself upright on one crutch with the other. He lost his grip. Cartridges clattered to the floor and scattered everywhere. Eugene dove towards the floor and began gathering them up.

Bang! Crash!

And why not, "Scott, take this?" Scott found himself thinking. Because I'm kneeling on the floor here, Scott reminded himself, not as close as Teresa at the moment.

"Oh, my god!" Teresa said. "Oh, my God! Lissa! Larissa, are you all right."

"I'm fine," Larissa said. "Why?"

"There's blood all over your face, honey," Scott said. "Does it hurt anywhere? Were you hit?"

Bang! Crash!

Teresa let out a shriek.

"Calm down. They can't reach us in here," Murdoch said, cradling his arm around her shoulder.

"The window broke right over me," Larissa said, sounding amazingly calm in view of the fact she was the only one bleeding. "It must have cut my face..."

Bang! Crash!

"Is that all?" Scott asked. His hands, strong and gentle at the same time were still probing her head, under her hair, around her face. She winced as the fingers touched a bit of glass still protruding from an open cut.

"Ow!"

Bang! Crash!

"Windows," Johnny said.

"What?" Murdoch asked.

"Someone's shooting out the windows. Listen. Every single gunshot, you can hear glass shattering and falling."

Bang! Crash!

"Pa, where's Tex?" Larissa asked.

"Tex?"

"The ranger. His room is right next to mine. If my window was shot out, I’m sure his was too!"

Teresa lit a lamp, secure in this sealed section of the house that it wouldn't make them targets to the outside, and she moved Scott out of the way to probe her daughter's face herself, picking gently at the glass still embedded in the skin. Her daughter, Scott thought. But a stranger had looked at them and had not even seen that relationship.

Murdoch and Johnny had both added extra cartridges to their guns, but they were locked inside, had nothing to shoot at. Jack, looking frightened, was carefully staying out of everyone's way.

Bang! Crash!

"Pa, we have to make sure he's okay!" Larissa insisted, trying to brush Teresa aside.

"We'll make sure you're okay first," Scott said.

"I'll get some water," Teresa said.

"You'll stay right here," Scott said, catching her arm as she started towards the kitchen.

Bang! Crash!

"All from the east," Johnny said. Scott looked at him, wondering what that meant, but instantly he realized the significance. They were not surrounded and under attack. This was a single gunman, one weapon, one position.

Bang! Crash!

Still, they were safest staying right where they were. A quick check showed that Teresa had stepped on glass slivers in her escape and had a small cut on one foot. Larissa was bleeding from several cuts, but all of them seemed to be small and superficial. Teresa tried to minister to the cuts, but Larissa protested, saying again that their young guest was stranded upstairs, probably lost or hurt.

Bang! Crash!

"Can't we do anything besides stand here and get shot at!" Johnny demanded in frustration.

"No," Scott said flatly.

"Maybe out in the bunkhouse they can get a better perspective on this," Murdoch suggested.

Bang! Crash!

There was the distant sound of shouting, running and a pistol shot outside. Johnny pushed open a bedroom door and headed towards the sounds of commotion.

"Johnny! Stay here!" Scott yelled. Johnny ignored him.

Bang! Crash

"Can you see anything?" Murdoch called after him.

"No. But it's got to be by the old cistern. That place always was a perfect ambush point."

"Ow!" Larissa said again.

"There, now, all done," Teresa said.

Bang! Crash!

"Twenty," Johnny said. "Now we find out how serious he is."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Scott asked.

"You ever look at the house from the top of that hill? You get a flat view of the back side. The stables and the courtyards hide all of the ground floor, but between the second floor and the attic, you got twenty windows facing the rising sun -- or glinting like water in the moonlight right about now."

There was a moment of silence. Everyone had paused, listening. Eyes met eyes in the flickering lamplight as they waited, tense and silent. The silence stretched out. Suddenly, there was shouting, the snap of handgun fire. Johnny pushed through the crowd again, this time heading for the kitchen and the back door that would lead out to the stable yard. Scott followed close on his heels, with Murdoch right behind.

"Stay here," Murdoch growled over his shoulder when Gene tried to follow them. He was disappointed, but he obeyed – mainly because Teresa caught him and pulled him back. The women and the two boys listened while incoherent shouting went on outside the thick adobe walls. Finally, the door at the end of the passage was flung open again, and the male voices from outside grew loud and clear, getting louder as they approached.

"...Con seen the flashes from the gun and headed up there. Billy and Gabe's the ones reached him first though, caught him crouched down right behind the cistern. Must'a taken out every window in the house before we catched him, sir. Sorry about that, sir. Where do you want him, Mr. Lancer?"

"Right here," Murdoch said, indicating a settee that rested against the wall in the hallway. Three men, lugging a fourth, unconscious man, squeezed through the second door and headed for the settee. The unconscious man was far too large to lay on the small seat, but they tossed him there rather unceremoniously anyway.

"I reckon someone ought to take watch the rest of the night," one of the men said in a tone that indicated he hoped it would not be necessary.

"Thank you, but you seem to have taken care of the problem," Murdoch said. "We appreciate your fast action, men. You may have saved lives tonight. Thank you."

Murdoch shook hands with each of the men and they left. The family all turned their attention to the still form on the settee. Blood-smeared blonde hair hung over one arm of the couch, and long legs sprawled on the floor.

"Looks like they found the ranger for you," Johnny told Larissa drily.

Tex hurt.

At first, he didn't even seem to have a body. He was not aware of arms or legs or head or back, just of pain, as if all his being was consciousness, floating in a sea of pain. Slowly the pain focused. He had legs that felt bruised and banged and sore. He had a back and ribs that thudded painfully, arms that were stretched to a painful position, wrists that burned unmercifully, and a head that felt like someone was standing nearby kicking it repeatedly.

"Here," a voice said. Ah, a voice! He must have ears then. Maybe he had eyes, too, but he was afraid to open them. They felt as if they were sealed with shards of glass.

"Come on," the voice said. "Drink."

Something smooth touched his lips. A glass. He opened his mouth, expecting the cool sweetness of water, and the Voice poured liquid fire down his throat instead. He gagged, tried to cough, swallowed to keep from drowning. The fire seared down his throat and splashed into his belly, sending hot fumes back up to his head, hitting him with a sudden swirl of dizziness.

"Come on," Voice insisted. "Drink it all."

He tried to resist, but something was holding his arms, and hands prevented his head from turning. More liquid poured into his mouth, a flood of it, and he gulped and choked, gulped and choked.

"Pa, you're going to kill him!" A new voice, this one female.

"Are you sure it's a good idea to give him alcohol at a time like this?" another female voice asked.

"I hope not." This voice was definitely male, but not the first voice, not the one that was trying to drown him. But not a friendly voice, either.

"Come on," the original voice said again. "Finish it off."

"No." That sound, he realized, he had managed to make himself. He tried shaking his head too, but the hands caught him again, the glass pressed against his lip, forcing the soft inner sides against his teeth painfully, until he opened them reflexively, and the liquid poured in again.

"God! I hate that stuff!" he said when he stopped choking.

"It'll make your head feel better," the original voice said.

"I doubt it," Tex said. And they forced more on him. When they drew back, he opened his eyes, but it didn't help much. A blur of totally unfamiliar faces spun around him and he realized he was already drunk. More whiskey. Tex struggled against the hands that were forcing the liquor on him and suddenly, the hands were gone. He felt light for a moment, like he was falling, and when he smacked his face into the flagstone floor, he realized he had fallen.

"Ouch," he said into the floor.

"Get him up," one of the voices said. Hands grabbed his upper arms and jerked. His whole, dead weight pulled on his arms, and he could not fight the hands off, as his own hands were tied -- tightly -- behind his back. His own weight dragged at his shoulders and at the bonds on his wrist causing burning pain that for a moment threatened to overcome the effects of the alcohol. But, only for a moment.

"This ain't so bad," he heard a voice say. Some part of him realized with a shock that it was his own voice, and he giggled at himself for not knowing it before. "Kind a like them drugs the doctors give you. Barkeep! Another shot of morphine! On the rocks!"

He giggled again, laughing at his own joke. But the spinning in his head was making him sick to his stomach and he grew serious just as suddenly.

"I got a leal row tolerance for this stuff," he warned the blurred faces and voices.

"I have a real low tolerance for people shooting up my house in the night," the original voice said. Tex squinted, forcing his eyes to focus until he could see the face clearly. Of course, he could see it double, but it was still an improvement. Man's face, mid-forties, lean, angular, blonde hair fading to silver.

"Murdoch Lancer," Tex mumbled.

"I'm Scott," the voice said. "You almost killed my daughter, did you know that? Do you see her face? That's from the glass you shot out of her window. An inch difference, and you could have shot her head off!"

"I didn't shoot anybody," Tex protested. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs away, but they fluttered back over his thoughts at once. Still, he was sure he hadn't shot at anyone. "Why would I want to shoot Larissa Lancer?"

"You were caught in the act," the mean voice said. Tex slewed his eyes to the side and fought to focus. Another man, much smaller, dark hair, hard eyes. Johnny Lancer. Johnny Madrid.

"How come you're so short?" he asked Johnny. "It don't make sense, you bein so short. You wouldn't get shorter if you just lost one leg, would you?"

Somewhere deep inside, behind the rising tide of drunkenness and pain, some spark of reason tried to tell Tex to shut up. The same spark saw the fury flash in the eyes before him, but he couldn't seem to do anything about it. A hand raised up, in an attitude of striking, but a girl's voice called out, "No, Uncle Johnny! He doesn't know what he's saying! You two made him drunk, and he was hit hard. You can't expect him to make sense!"

"It worked though." The first voice, the one that claimed to be someone named Scott Lancer, spoke up grimly. His hands grabbed the front of Tex's vest and shook him roughly. Tex's head rolled on his shoulders, his vision faded in and out. "He's talking now, not fancy stories of famous men, but what's really going on. Keep talking, Pierce. Who are you really? What do you want here? Why the Hell did you shoot up the house?"

"Ah!" It was getting harder and harder to move his tongue, which no longer felt like his tongue, but like some swollen, turgid animal in his mouth. He tried to spit it out, then tried to talk with it. It was numb. "Texas Butler Pierce, Sargent, Spessal Forshes... Speshul Forshes... Spesh...."

"Who are you?" Scott demanded again.

SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA. JULY 11, 1890

"Murdoch, Murdoch, Murdoch," Marshal Tayback said, shaking his head as if admonishing a small boy instead of a man twenty years and more his senior. "You can't pistol whip a lawman, force whiskey down his throat, then tie him up overnight! Generally we consider that sort of behavior to be... well, illegal."

"How about shooting at people's houses in the dead of night, Vernon," Murdoch snapped back. "Isn't that considered illegal, also?"

"Are you sure he did it?" Tayback asked more seriously.

"Not completely," Murdoch admitted. "But his tracks go out the back door and up to the hill. My men found him crouching up there in the dark where the shots were coming from."

"With twenty empty twenty-two rimfire cartridge shells scattered around," Tayback agreed. "But no sign of a twenty-two rifle -- or handgun even, is that correct?"

"Yes," Murdoch admitted. "But maybe he tossed it before they reached him.”

"And maybe he was out there hunting the shooter, same as your men were," Tayback said. "Which would explain why he was there, but the gun wasn't."

"There was no other sign..."

"Murdoch. Did anybody look?" Tayback asked. "Or did you grab the kid and assume you'd solved the problem?"

Murdoch didn't answer. Tayback nodded. "That's what I thought. Murdoch..."

"Vern, there's something very fishy about this kid. He's got a wallet full of identification..."

"I saw it too..."

"...With nothing really concrete to prove it's his identification! And his questions, and... other things. Look, he claims a famous lawman in California can verify everything. So, let's give this famous lawman a call and find out how real this kid is."

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA: July 11, 1890

Inside Larissa Lancer's wardrobe were several pretty dresses: school girl dresses, with starched white pinafores to cover them. Mother was out for the day, however, and Mother's wardrobe held a few more grown-up things than Larissa's did. She found a dark skirt, navy calico with a tiny pattern of white and pale pink flowers. It was tulip-shaped, fitting snugly about the waist, stomach and hips, and flaring broadly towards the ground. She also "borrowed" a starched white blouse with puffed sleeves and a little black bow tie at the collar. And an apron, instead of a pinafore. She fixed her hair carefully, part up and part down, making sure a single curl hung over her shoulder, like Grandma in her portrait. Perfect. Simple enough to look like "work day" clothes, but elegant as well.

Larissa returned to the kitchen and carefully fixed a tray. Chicken soup in one of Great-Grandma Sebastian's fine china bowls, two slices of bread she had baked herself, fresh this morning. A cup of coffee, with cream and sugar pots next to it. Heavy silver soup- and teaspoons. White linen napkin - embossed with an "S" instead of an "L", but still very elegant. And a small crystal vase with a single red rose tucked into it. She lifted the tray, balancing it carefully in one hand so she could pull the long skirt out of her way with the other, finding it harder than she would have guessed to climb the stairs in this get- up. At the second door along the second-floor corridor, she paused, straightened her apron and her curl one handed, and knocked on the door. She grasped the handle and pushed it open as soon as she knocked, and found the ranger stretched out on the bed with both wrists tied to the bedframe above his head.

Tex turned his head slowly at the sound of the door opening and bit back a groan. He had been hoping to see one of the Lancer men, come with an apology, perhaps, or at least with his freedom. Instead it was that girl again, dressed in what looked like her mother's clothes and carrying a fancy silver tea-tray loaded with flowery china and a bud vase! Just what he did not need right now!

The girl stepped into the room, at least having the presence of mind to leave the door partially open behind her. "And how are we feeling this morning, Mr. Pierce?" she said, affecting a cheery bedside manner, despite the fact that he was a prisoner, not a patient.

"I can't answer for you, but I've felt better," Tex said, in sarcastic understatement. His head ached, his stomach was rolling unpleasantly, his arms were stiff and sore and there were rope burns on both his wrists. He did, however, regret the sarcasm, and added by way of apology, "Mind the glass, Miss," as she came around to the far side of the bed. Despite the fact that her shoes were crunching on the glass shards still scattered over the floor, Larissa misinterpreted the admonition, and used one hand to straighten and steady the bud vase as she bent to set it down on the bedside table. She reached to pull up the upholstered chair that sat near the window. As she smoothed her skirt to sit down, Tex said sharply, "Miss!" startling her into stillness.

He regretted that, too. Not because it startled her, but because the suddenness and volume of the word caused pounding to start up in his head again and the waves of nausea to crest. He shut his eyes against the discomfort and said in a much milder tone: "The glass, Miss. Mind the broken glass."

She looked down then, saw the shards from the French windows scattered over the seat.

"Of course. How silly of me," she murmured, and started to wipe them off the seat with her hand.

"Miss, please don't do that," Tex moaned. She paused again, looked around, and finally tipped the chair front, dumping the shards onto the floor. Though the chair wasn't perfectly clean, it was safer, and she perched herself daintily on the edge. With a careful flick of the wrist plucked the napkin off the tray and unfolded it, tucking it, to Tex's great discomfort, under his chin.

"There!" she said, pleased with herself. "It's been a busy morning around here, Mr. Pierce, and I'm sorry that no one's come to sweep the debris out of your room yet. Perhaps this afternoon I can do that for you..."

"That won't be necessary, Miss. However, if you could untie me..."

"No, I'm sorry. I can't do that. I have brought you some soup though. I can help you with that, at least."

"I think I'll pass," he said, letting his eyes sink shut again. The soup smelled good, actually, but even that smell made his stomach heave unpleasantly.

"Now, Mr. Pierce! You must eat..."

"No, thank you," he said.

A smile touched her face. "You don't have to worry. Mother is in town, seeing to the glazier and the lumber yard. I cooked this myself. And I learned cooking from Uncle Johnny and Mrs. Winger, not from mother."

"That's good to know," he said, opening his eyes again. "But, I still think I'll pass. There is one thing you could do for me though."

Larissa leaned closer, eager to hear his request. She was thrilled with the thought that she could do something for this young man, something he would appreciate more than he apparently appreciated her offer of good, fresh, hot food. But then he asked it again.

"Untie me," he whispered.

She sat back again, color rushing into her face. "I really am sorry, Mr. Pierce, but I can't go against Pa and Grandpa Murdoch's wishes."

"Oh, so it was their wishes that you came in here alone with this tray of food for me?"

"Well... no. I thought I'd..."

"Or was it their wishes that you wander out to that pretty lake all alone yesterday, just to enjoy a fine, summer day?"

The color blossomed into a full blush. "I just went for a walk!" she said at once. "I wish everyone would quit treating me like a child!"

Tex relented. "The thing is, Miss," he said more gently, "That they're not really treating you like a child. They're treating you just like what you are: a very pretty, sweet, young woman. If I could cut through that back trail, anybody could. And as a lawman, let me tell you, there are lots of people out there you really don't want to meet when you're alone and that far from the house -- even with a derringer in your skirt pocket. "

Ordinarily, Larissa would have felt insulted at the insinuation that she was not capable of taking care of herself. But all that she really heard of the speech was the part where he called her "pretty" and "sweet!"

"Promise me that you won't be taking off like that again," he insisted.

And Larissa felt a warm happiness spread through her whole being. Without mentioning that she had already been forced to make that same promise to her father, her grandfather and her uncle, she smiled warmly, placed her hand over his (bound) wrist, and said, "Of course, Mr. Pierce. I'll do whatever you want."

"Except let me go," he guessed.

"I'm..." she started, ducking her head.

"Sorry," he finished. "I know. But what I really need..."

"Is for Lissa to get out of here," Johnny said from the doorway. He shoved the door wider and stepped into room, glaring from the ranger to his niece. He settled on her and said, "What do you think you're doing in here?"

"I was bringing Mr. Pierce something to eat. You all forgot..."

"We didn't forget anything. And you got no business ever being alone with a strange man in his bedroom!"

Larissa stood up. "Really, Uncle Johnny!" she said. "Mr. Pierce is wounded, and he's tied to the bed! I don't think I'm in much danger in here!"

"If you think that, then it just proves you got no business being in here. Go."

"Unc..."

"Go!" he repeated, louder, and she scurried out of the room, holding in the tears only long enough to get down the hall to her own room where she slammed the door and flung herself on the bed, wondering as she wept whether she would ever be able to face the ranger again, after being humiliated in front of him like that.

In Tex's room, Johnny looked over at the tea tray, the napkin tucked under Tex's chin, and snorted.

"You hungry?" he asked

"Nope," the ranger said.

"Call when you are," Johnny said, and he started to turn and leave.

"Wait!” Tex said. Johnny paused and turned. "Untie me. I really, really have to get out of here."

"Give me one good reason," Johnny said.

"What did you eat for dinner last night?" Tex asked.

This was not the response Johnny had been expecting. He blinked back his surprise and said, "Um, I don't know. Why?"

"Whiskey," the kid said. "You didn't eat the food, and nobody paid any attention because you'd been drinking. The kids picked at theirs and faked too much grief to eat. And your father and brother passed my papers back and forth like they'd found the Holy Grail so they would have an excuse not to pick up a fork. Unfortunately, my mama taught me that it was good manners to clean my plate. I didn't. But I did eat some of that dinner last night, sir. Believe me. I really, really have to get out of this room."

"Let me ask you something," Johnny said. "You lied to us all through dinner last night, why should I believe you now?"

"I didn't lie to you," the kid said. But his guilt showed clear on his face in the way his eyes dropped, not meeting Johnny's any more, and the hot color that rose up as he realized Johnny had noticed that.

"Huh," Johnny said. It was a shot in the dark, pure and simple, but it had hit home. Very interesting. And somehow, knowing that getting caught out embarrassed the kid made him feel better about the lies themselves.

"The chicken was raw again?" Johnny guessed, giving the kid an out from his embarrassing situation.

Tex nodded miserably.

"Your mama might have taught you manners, but she should have taught you more common sense," Johnny said. He reached a hand up, like a man about to scratch the back of his neck, but instead of scratching he materialized a small, thin, flat-bladed knife from a sheath hidden below his collar. The ranger didn't seem surprised at this old border-outlaw trick. But then, he had a leather thong showing at the neck of his own open-collared shirt. It was apparently a trick he was well familiar with. Johnny moved closer to the bed, leaning over cautiously to sever the ropes holding the kid in place. Tex rubbed his wrists and hands and swung his feet over the side of the bed. When he stood, he wobbled and almost fell over. Johnny, braced firmly on one crutch and one leg, caught him and kept him from going over, even though he lost the other crutch in the process. Tex bent to retrieve it, but Johnny said, "I can get it. And by the way, you don't have to go down to the back yard. We installed a new water closet at the end of this corridor, that's the next door down."

"Thanks," Tex said.

"And do me the favor of restraining yourself to these two rooms, at least until Murdoch returns."

"That's really not going to be a problem," Tex said, and he left the room, quickly. Johnny listened to the next door over slam, then bent to retrieve the fallen crutch. With them both in place, he went around to the far side of the bed, crunching on broken glass, and picked up the silver teaspoon to taste the soup. It had a slightly smoky flavor: obviously made from recycled dinner. But it was a good, rich, salty, well-cooked broth. Larissa always had been a better cook than her mother. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe she started younger, or maybe she took pride in her cooking while Teresa was more likely to fret about missing something going on somewhere else. Either way, she'd learned her baking, too. He helped himself to one of the slices of bread, stuffed it in his mouth and grabbed both crutches with his hands to leave the room.

II.

"Where are the boys?" Johnny asked, pushing open the door to Larissa's bedroom. She sat up quickly, wiping at her eyes, and pretending not to have been doing what she had been doing.

"I... Uh... they're out back somewhere..."

"Wasn't it your job this morning to keep an eye on them?" Johnny asked, coming into the room.

"They won't go far, I'm sure, they..."

"Lissa," he interrupted her sharply, "Do you think that that ranger was the one who shot up the house last night?"

"No, I don't!" she said instantly, eyes flashing.

"Well, did it occur to you that if he didn't, then someone else did? And that a man who would shoot up a man's house would just probably be lurking around looking for other mischief he could wreak?"

That stopped her cold. Her mouth was still open to protest, but understanding came into her eyes.

"I don't think he did it either," Johnny said. "Because I got up at first light and checked out the spot where the men caught him. Their scuffle wiped out all tracks but his, but there was evidence below the hill of a horse having been tied up last night. Your pa went out this morning with half the men on the ranch to try to trace that horse, or maybe find a spot where someone might be camped out nearby. Meantime, you were asked to do one thing, keep the boys in the house, because all of us wanted to be sure that the three of you were safe."

"Uncle Johnny, I'm sorry. I didn't think..."

"I noticed you didn't."

She dropped her eyes, color rising in her face. Johnny nodded to himself, satisfied that his message had sunk in.

III

"Whoa! Watch it there!" Johnny said, catching the flour bag before Gene dumped out any more.

"But we need flour to roll the dough, don't we?" Gene protested.

"This much," Johnny said, separating a small corner of the pile. The rest he began scooping back into the sack. After a brief pout, Gene helped him. They were still cleaning up the mess when, behind them, Jack let out a high, girlish squeak. Johnny turned to see that Jack had spilled his glass of water into the pan of hot grease on the stove and sent it shooting up and splattering across the top of the range. The grease rolling across the stove top ignited at once, even as Johnny snatched Jack out of the way. He shoved both boys behind the work table and used a lid to put out the fire in the pan. The other flames died out slowly as the spilled grease burned up. Johnny waved a dishtowel at the smoke as Gene ran to open the back door. Coughing in the heavy smoke, Johnny chased them outside, and went to gulp in fresher air himself. Maybe, he thought, letting the boys help him cook dinner hadn't been such a great idea after all.

"Anybody hurt?" he asked when he could breathe again.

Jack held up the middle finger of his right hand, and almost got in trouble for that, until Johnny saw the large white blister on the boy's knuckle. Leading them back inside the still smokey kitchen, he broke off a bit of the plant the cook kept for just such emergencies and smeared it on the burn.

"Better?" he asked.

Jack nodded, but his eyes were still wet, his lip quivering.

"Anything more I should now about?" Johnny asked. "Like maybe, all your skin is missing under your shirt?"

Jack shook his head, but then the tears overcame him and he threw himself, sobbing, at his uncle. Johnny staggered back into the table, but managed to catch himself and the boy.

"There now, take it easy. All over."

"I'm sorry!" Jack sobbed.

"Yeah, of course you are."

"I didn't mean to!" Jack sobbed.

"I didn't think you did," Johnny said, smoothing the boy's hair. "Anyway, now you know, water and hot oil don't mix well."

He had tried to make light of it, but this statement elicited another sob from Jack. Johnny tried again: "We'll think of it as a history lesson."

"History?" Gene demanded.

"Sure. You know. Like that book you were reading the other day about the people storming the castle, and how the people in the castle threw hot oil down on them."

"I wondered why they did," Gene recalled.

"Oil sticks to you," Johnny said. "And you can't wash it off -- you saw what water does to it. And, it lights on fire."

Even Gene shivered at that thought. "Those guys in the castle were pretty mean."

"Yes," Johnny said, bending to give Jack a kiss on the burned finger. "But, you have to remember, they had to defend themselves. Themselves, their home and their families. They didn't have guns. The cannons they did have back then were as likely to blow up as shoot anything out. They had to take drastic measures."

"My dad says a man's home is his castle," Gene observed. "Does that mean he'd take drastic measures to defend it?"

"As long as you're here, you bet he would," Johnny said.

"Would he throw hot oil on people?" Jack demanded in a worried voice.

"It is possible," Johnny said, "that if someone were threatening you -- or your mother or sister -- and hot oil happened to be more handy than a gun, he might use that."

Gene was awed. He'd always thought of his father as a mild-tempered man. He’d never even thrashed Gene as some of his friends at school had been thrashed by their fathers for misbehaving, although secretly Gene thought a few licks with a belt might be easier to take than his father’s soft admonitions and sad, disappointed eyes. But this was a new concept entirely. That his father would do something drastic to save him was an interesting thought. Scary, even.

"I think we'd better get this mess cleaned up before your mother gets home," Johnny said.

But Gene wasn't done chasing this particular chain of thought yet. "It's my home too," he said. "Should I do drastic things to defend it?"

"Yes," Johnny said. "You have to do the most drastic thing of all. Both of you."

"What?" the boys asked in unison.

"Obey your father. Especially now, do everything he tells you to do instantly, whether you like it or not. Don't hesitate, don't ask, just do. Or if me or Grandpa Murdoch tells you to do something."

Obedience hadn't been exactly what Gene had had in mind. It was Jack who said, "So they can keep us safe, and not have to worry about us. Right, Uncle Johnny?"

"Right."

"How about what Mother tells us to do?" Gene asked.

"Obey her too," Johnny said.

"How about when she tells us one thing, and you tell us something else," Gene said.

"Won't happen," Johnny said with certainty.

"Oh, but it did!" Gene said, grinning at having caught out an adult. "Mama said she didn't want that Ed Casson kid anywhere near the house or Larissa, and you put him to work with her upstairs!"

"Well," Johnny said, wondering how to talk his way out of this one. "What she meant was... Uh... different. Lissa can't do all that work alone, and Ed's the least valuable ranch hand we have, so he got drafted for house work."

It was well past dark, and Johnny was sitting alone at the table with a sopapilla and a cup of coffee when Murdoch and Teresa came in.

"What happened in the kitchen?" Murdoch demanded immediately.

"Small grease fire. Nothing serious," Johnny said.

"The paint is all peeled off the back of the stove!" Teresa said. "There's smoke marks on the ceiling and walls! What do you consider serious?"

"Ceiling and walls burned down?" Johnny suggested.

"Anybody hurt?" Murdoch asked.

"Not to speak of," Johnny said, dipping his bread in his coffee. Before anyone could demand more information, he added, "Help yourselves in the kitchen whenever you want. I had dinner with the kids awhile ago. They're in the hallway now, Lissa's in charge of setting up a sort of sleep-over party."

Larissa, he did not add, had not taken kindly to the suggestion that she stay with the smaller children, out of sight and out of harm's way. Fortunately, Johnny knew -- had known for years -- exactly how to manipulate her feelings around to where she would volunteer to do what was required. Never force. Though she was more amenable than Teresa, she still did not take well to force. Like a young horse, she had to believe everything she did was her own idea. So, he hadn't told her what to do, except for putting the bedding in the hallway. He had merely come to her, as if he had a problem, wondering how he could get the boys to settle down safely and sleep on the floor. Making it a party had been her idea. Now she was Wendy and the boys were Lost Boys, and they were hiding from the pirates while she told them stories, waiting for Peter Pan to come and rescue them.

"I don't know how you manage her so well," Teresa murmured, bending to plant a kiss on Johnny's cheek. "But thank you. You sit Murdoch, I'll bring us something to eat."

As she disappeared into the kitchen, Johnny asked Murdoch, "What did you find out?"

"We'll wait for Scott," Murdoch said. "He rode up as we were coming in. He'll be in in a moment." He groaned loudly as he lowered himself into his chair. "I'm getting too old for all this running around! How did I ever get so old?"

"You married late," Johnny said.

"You're a fine one to talk!" Murdoch shot back. "I was younger than you are now when I was married the second time. What happened with you?"

"What happened?"

"How come you never married?"

Murdoch wished he'd bit his tongue instead of letting it flap free like that. He had not meant to ask that question, especially not so flippantly: it just popped out. He had long suspected that Johnny's bachelorhood was do to the fact that he and his brother had both loved the same woman -- and his brother won. But Johnny seemed amused by the question.

"Never met the right girl, I suppose," he said.

"Never?" Murdoch asked.

"Well..." Johnny stared for a moment at the black, blank windows across the table from him, but Murdoch suspected he was actually seeing something else. "There was a girl once..."

His words trailed off to nothing, and for several seconds there was silence. Cautiously, Murdoch cleared his throat, wondering if he should change the subject.

But, "I gave her the locket," Johnny said.

"You gave her what locket?" Murdoch asked, feeling like he'd missed something important. Johnny quit staring at the wall and turned to look at him.

"My mother's old locket. You must know. You gave it to her, didn't you? 'To Esperanza, my life and my hope.' At least, I always assumed you gave it to her. There was a miniature of your wedding portrait inside."

"I gave it to her," Murdoch said, looking amazed. "The day you were born. How did you end up with that? I just assumed..."

"What?"

"Well... That she sold it. Or that step-father of yours did."

"He probably would have. But she kept it hidden from him. Gave it to me and told me to keep it for her. I never mentioned this before?"

"No," Murdoch said.

Johnny shrugged. "Well, she did. I kept it for years. But, since I wasn't in the habit of carrying around diamond rings just in case I ran into the girl of my dreams on some mountaintop... I gave her my mother's locket instead."

"When was this?" Murdoch asked.

"Oh... long time ago. Before I came back here."

"Whatever happened to the girl?" Murdoch asked. "What was her name?"

"Doesn't matter any more," Johnny said. "She died a long time ago."

"I never knew about this," Murdoch said. "I'm very sorry..."

Johnny shrugged again. "It was a very, very long time ago," he said.

"What was a long time ago?" Scott asked as he and Teresa came in from the kitchen, bearing food.

"Nothing," Johnny said.

"Sounds exciting," Scott commented. "It was a long time ago, and nothing happened. Can't wait to hear the sequel to that one. By the way, Teresa tells me the new glass could take weeks."

He sat down at his usual spot, arranging a plate, cup and silverware for himself and passing the extras to Murdoch and Teresa. Teresa set down the platter of enchiladas, the big bowl of beans and the basket of sopaipillas she was carrying and sat down across from him.

"Let's hope it doesn't rain," she said as she settled herself.

"No, we need the rain," Scott said. "Grass is shorter than normal and the stock ponds are down two feet from last year."

"Don't you ever think about anything but business?" Teresa demanded.

"One of us has to," Scott said.

"We'll have to board them up," Murdoch said. "Occupied or not. No use advertising which rooms we’re in.”

"That’ll make things dark," Johnny commented. "But, I'd rather not put up new targets for that shooter until we find out what's going on. So, I ask again. Any luck today?"

"You first," Murdoch told Scott.

Scott washed down a bite of the spicy food with a big drink of water before answering. "Couldn't pick up a trail from where Johnny saw that horse tied, so we fanned out and looked for camps. Someone had been staying in the ruins of the Benevidez place, but the signs there are three or four days old. Interesting thing though, whoever stayed there swept all the bare ground before they left."

They all looked up at this information. Scott did not have to add that an innocent person, strayed onto the ranch, needing a place to sleep for a night or two out of the elements, wouldn't have bothered to erase his tracks. A guilty man, on the other hand, would certainly think of it.

"More than one man?"

"I'm guessing they had at least three horses, maybe five."

"I should have gone," Johnny murmured.

"We had that windstorm two nights ago. And they did a decent job of cleaning up. You wouldn't have gotten any more out of it than I did," Scott said, but he didn't sound angry. "How about you, Murdoch? How'd it go in town?"

"I got the marshal to call San Bernadino for me," Murdoch said. "And we discovered that Virgil Earp does have a gambling house there. So, we put in a call to his office, and I spoke to the man personally. It was a bad connection, and we got cut off, but before that happened, he related to me in detail how his brother, Wyatt, and Bat Masterson looked after Tex and his mother after Wild Bill Hickock left Abilene. He mentioned Bat writing to the kid’s mother to invite them to move to Arizona after Bat and Wyatt migrated that direction to hook up with most of the rest of the family. And he described in detail the incident of the dogs attacking Tex, up to and including how he accidentally shot off two of the kid’s toes with a marshal’s office shotgun when he was shooting at a dog that was gnawing on the kid's foot."

"Damn!" Johnny said.

"I know," Murdoch said. "I figured all that had to be made up. It was just too good to be real."

"The kid as much as admitted to lying to us," Johnny said, and he described his test in the bedroom that morning.

"But if he wasn't making up that wild story, what was he lying about?" Scott wondered.

"Lots of things would be my guess," Johnny said. "I checked his pack. Besides his Henry and pistols, he had a shotgun, but no .22, and no .22 ammunition anywhere. However, I followed his boot tracks out the back door and halfway or more up that hill where the cistern is. He came back down from there and went into the stable, then back into the house."

"He wasn't wearing boots when the men found him," Murdoch said.

"No, and his sock-foot tracks were harder to find, but there were indications that he came out the front of the house, circled wide around, and came down on the cistern from above."

They contemplated what that could mean for a few seconds, but Scott said, "That could add up." He described his encounter with the kid in the office last night -- though not all of their conversation. "He admitted to having been outside..."

"Why?" Murdoch demanded.

"Guilty conscience seemed to have been keeping him awake. Anyway, he took off his boots when he heard me in the office, so he could sneak up and get the drop on me: I think he thought we were being robbed. The shooting started shortly after I left him. It makes sense that since he doesn't have the priority we all had of gathering the family and making sure everyone was safe, he would determine -- as Johnny did -- where the shots were coming from, and take the safest route up there to catch whoever was shooting."

"Or," Johnny suggested, "he went out to meet with his accomplice earlier, came back armed when... Well, when I started screaming like a school girl who sees a snake."

"And he snuck out later...?" Scott asked.

"To make sure the accomplice got away safely."

"But why go out there in the first place?" Scott asked.

"To tell whoever was doing the actual shooting that he had taken care of the problem of the dog," Johnny said.

Unfortunately, that made more sense than the kid wandering around because he couldn't sleep, and just happening to end up only a few feet from where the action later took place. Murdoch sighed heavily. "Where is that kid now, anyway?"

"Upstairs," Johnny said.

"Please tell me he's not still tied to the bed," Murdoch said.

"In a manner of speaking," Johnny said. "He's been a bit under the weather today."

"He has a hangover because of what you did to him last night!" Teresa said, pushing her chair back. "I'm going up there and..."

"He'll survive the hangover," Johnny said, grabbing her hand to hold her at the table. "And the concussion. Mainly, all day he's divided his time between lying on his bed moaning and running next door to the water closet."

"Oh, don't tell me he ate the chicken!" Murdoch said.

"Don't you start in about my cooking!" Teresa said angrily.

"He ate the chicken," Johnny said, swallowing his laughter.

"It wasn't that bad!" Teresa shouted, glaring from one man to the next. They all looked so... so... amused!

"Did you eat it?" Johnny asked her.

"Well, I... That is... Now, Johnny, you know I don't eat much meat...."

Scott joined in when his father and brother broke out in roars of laughter, but he wasn't comfortable. If it had been just him, would she have allowed that teasing? He wasn't sure. Was it because Murdoch had started it that she didn't storm out of the room, furious, and refuse to talk to any of them because they had hurt her pride? Or had Johnny's teasing been why she tolerated it, embarrassed but not furious?

Or was he overreacting, seeing things that weren't even there?

"It was pretty awful," Teresa admitted, and when that didn't immediately quell the tail-ends of mirth, she added, "Tell them what else you uncovered in town, Murdoch."

Murdoch wiped his eyes, laughter instantly replaced by something a lot more serious.

"What else did you uncover in town, Murdoch?" Johnny asked.

"This was waiting in the box with our mail," Murdoch said, and he tossed small, plain, grubby envelope onto the table. Opposite each other, Scott and Johnny both glanced at it, and glanced at each other.

"You eat," Johnny said finally, and he picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded twice to make it fit. Unfolded, it had letters pasted on it, letters cut out from various newspapers, spelling out the date May 28, 1870. Johnny sucked in his breath.

"What?" Scott asked. Johnny examined the missive front and back, but there was no more information. He passed it to Scott.

"That mean anything to you?" Scott asked Johnny.

Obviously it did, from his reaction. But he seemed calm enough when he shrugged and said in an off-hand manner, "May 28? My guess is about that time I was either running out of New Mexico Territory with a pack of federales chasing me, or I was already back in Mexico."

"The Mexican military chased you to Mexico?" Murdoch asked doubtfully.

"Odd as it may sound, yes. They managed to get permission to hunt me in the territories, so the only way I could escape was to look for people who were mad at the Mexican government. There was this group of farmers over in Sonora who had a sort of revolution going... Never mind. Does the date mean anything to you, Scott?"

"May 28th?" Scott mused. "I think it was about the fifth of June when those Pinkerton's Murdoch sent to look for us met up with me in Boston. On May 28th..." Scott shrugged. "I was working in my grandfather's law firm, and being partied to death by the local matrons who all thought it was high time the heir to the Sebastien empire married -- preferably one of their daughters."

"May 28, 1870," Teresa said, "Is the day Murdoch and my father were both shot in the back."

"My God, I had forgotten," Scott said. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I really didn't think!" He reached across the table to hold her hand reassuringly. Of course, he hadn't been in the area on that date, but he should have recognized it. It was carved in stone. Literally. Her father's tombstone out behind the house in the family cemetery. How could he have forgotten a date that important to her!

"Someone," Murdoch said soberly, "Wanted to connect in our minds very clearly the attack last night, and the shooting twenty years ago."

"Tex?" Johnny said.

"How does this anonymous note connect that kid with the shooting?" Scott demanded.

"Because of what he said last night when we got him drunk enough that he was having trouble remembering his lies," Johnny said. "He said, 'If you don't know him, why is he shooting at you?'"

"And?" Scott asked.

"And, I'm assuming he was talking about that guy Palmer. He keeps talking about this unknown bank robber and the year 1870 like it's all supposed to mean something to us, but the only connection between the two is the kid himself."

"We definitely need to find out what he knows," Murdoch said thoughtfully.

"Why don't you just ask him?" Teresa said.

Tex declined the offer of dinner, but he sat at the table with the rest of them, his elbows on the table and his head resting in his hands.

"I feel like my brain exploded!" he moaned. "I don't suppose you have any willow bark tea?"

"No. But, we could get you a little hair of the dog," Murdoch offered wickedly.

"No," Tex said flatly. "Contrary to popular belief, liquor does not cure all ills. In fact, it makes some of them worse."

Nevertheless, Scott set a glass down in front of the boy before taking his own seat again.

"I really don't want..."

"It's soda water, with a twist of lemon for flavor. It'll settle your stomach," Scott said.

Tentatively, the ranger took a sip. "Greet all strangers to your house that way?" he asked.

"We would have been a bit more trusting if you hadn't lied to us," Scott said.

"That was stupid," Tex agreed.

"You're admitting you lied to us?" Murdoch demanded.

Tex had dropped his head back down into his hands. He moved it in an affirmative gesture without looking up.

"Why?" Johnny demanded.

Tex lifted his head to look Johnny straight in the eye and said, "Because I'm a bastard, and it's embarrassing." He glanced at the other two men and said somewhat ruefully, "I spent a lot of my growing up years in little Spanish towns where people have known each other for hundreds of years. They're always asking, 'who's your daddy'. 'Quien es tu papa.'"

When both Murdoch and Scott looked at him blankly, he said, "It's like in The Bible, you know, where Saul asks someone to find out who David's father is. I mean, he knows David, David’s his private musician. But finding out who his father is is finding out what his connections are, his tribe, his loyalties, his personality, his whole family history back for generations. Do you know what it's like to grow up in a situation like that, and have to answer that question with 'I don't know'?"

"Yes," Johnny said flatly.

"You grew up not knowing who your father was?" Tex asked skeptically.

"Oh, I knew Murdoch was my father," Johnny said. "But I grew up believing he had thrown my mother and me out of the house after he got his hands on my grandfather's property. You think I wanted to admit my father was a man who would do that? Sometimes I'd tell people 'I don't know' just so I wouldn't have to answer that question."

"Sometimes," Tex noticed.

Johnny shrugged. "Sometimes I told them Madrid was my real father. I hated him. But I hated Murdoch more."

"Huh," Tex said.

For a moment, there was silence at the table. It wasn't a shocked silence though. Scott, Teresa and Murdoch all knew this part of Johnny's life, had known it for twenty years. But Scott surprised them, and even himself, when he said, "Maybe it's easier if you believe you're an orphan. My identity when I was a boy came from my mother's family: Grandfather Sebastien, all the uncles and great-uncles. But when I was cornered, I... I never admitted my real father was a self-made Scottish immigrant. I told everyone he was the younger son of an earl. He came to America to make his fortune because his older brother inherited the title and the lands. And," Scott added with a wry smile, "he died heroically saving my pregnant mother from an Indian attack."

"I was an orphan," Murdoch said. "Worked like a slave from the time I could walk to help feed my mother and me. When she died, I ran off to sea, jumped ship the first time we made port in America. And I used to tell everyone who asked that my father was the captain, who couldn't acknowledge me because of his marriage and position, but who arranged for me to come to America so I could live a better life."

"Murdoch, you never said..." Teresa started.

"I grew up enough to realize how foolish I was being long before I met you and your father," Murdoch said. He turned to Tex and said, "But, I know how important it is for a boy to be able to have pride in his father. We all need it. So, it's not so surprising that you would make up a romantic past to make up for the lack of one."

"Actually, most of it was true," Tex said. "Except for my mama being married to that deputy." He took another sip of the water, winced, and rubbed his eyes. "If you must know, Butler found my mama living down by the railroad yards. A runaway, no money, no food and no family. He took her to the boarding house where he was staying, got her room and board there in exchange for helping with the cooking and cleaning. He was a good man. He had no obligations to us, but he helped us out, took care of Ma, baptized me. And, I was born the night of that gunfight. He came back to the boarding house expecting tea and comfort and walked right into the middle of a bunch of women running around with towels and hot water. Like to scared him to death. And he did leave me a letter. Among other things, it says, 'You came into the world at the same moment that I took an innocent man out of it. I feel that your birth is a kind of atonement for my sin...' When I understood what he meant, I stole a dead man's name just so I wouldn't have to keep saying, 'I don't know' to people. And I lied to you. Which was stupid, I admit it. And now that that's all out of the way, maybe you can tell me what you know about Terrence T. Palmer."

"Never heard of him," Murdoch said flatly.

"He obviously knows you," Tex said. "Enough to want to shoot at you, anyway."

"That's what you said last night," Scott said. "We want to know why it is you think that was Palmer up on that hill, shooting at the house."

"Bootprints," Tex said shortly.

Scott looked at Johnny, who shook his head slowly.

"The only prints we found up there were yours," Scott said. "And they weren't with boots on."

"Wait a second," Tex said, and he took a slow sip of his drink while he thought. "Last thing I remember is kneeling in the dirt to look at the boot print. Then... pain and whiskey."

"Some of our men caught you up there," Murdoch said. "They thought you had done the shooting, and they knocked you out, tied you up, and brought you back here."

"Then I probably fell face first on that print. There was only the one good one."

"And only your word that it ever existed," Johnny said.

"Even if it did, can you be that sure of who it belonged to?" Scott asked.

"That one, yeah." Tex said.

"How?" Murdoch demanded.

"Did you ever hear of Jack the Ripper?" Tex asked.

"Are you telling me Palmer is Jack the Ripper?" Murdoch demanded.

"No, of course not! But he got away, didn't he?"

"Which one?" Scott asked.

Tex lifted his head enough to give Scott a long bloodshot stare. "Jack the Ripper. You know why he got away?"

"We give up," Murdoch said.

"Because a cop's job has always been to stop crime in progress, that's why. Guys like me, we're supposed to track people we know have committed crimes. But if you don't know who did the crime, how are you supposed to find out? Detection is a new art. Jack the Ripper got away mostly because we're not that good at it yet. Since that fiasco in London, a couple of law enforcement agencies, including the one I am associated with, have been trying to learn more about that. We have what we call a crime scene investigation team, which I happen to be part of. But, most of what we are doing right now is looking at crime scenes where we already know who did it."

"Why?" Murdoch wanted to know.

"It's like learning tracking," Tex said. "When you want to learn about tracking, you don't go out into the woods and try to guess how old the turkey tracks are. You go out in the back yard, plunk down a turkey and look at his footprints. Then you look at it later today, and tomorrow, and the next day. And you compare. What does a track look like when it's fresh, when it's a day old, when it's a week old? What direction was the animal going when it made this track, how big was it? You look at what you know, first, see?"

Murdoch, Johnny, Scott and Teresa all exchanged looks. It did, they had to admit, make sense. "So?" Murdoch said finally.

"So, Palmer," Tex said. "You've all seen his picture. I think you can agree anyone that described that face could only be talking about one man?"

"Yes," Murdoch agreed. Teresa shuddered at the memory of that broken, twisted face.

"Right," Tex said, noticing. "So when he walked into the First National Bank, blew away the guard, two tellers, three innocent bystanders, and one of the men who came running to the rescue, scooped a few thousand out of the vault and vanished again, we knew who did it. But the crime scene team went in and investigated anyway. We looked at things like bullet holes in the walls. So now we all know what a bullet hole looks like when made by that size of gun fired at that angle -- and having passed through a body. Get it?"

"Yes, but..."

"Well, he also walked through the blood of one of his victims on the way out."

"And you recognized his footprints, a month later and two thousand miles away?" Johnny asked skeptically.

"That boot print is kind of branded into my mind," Tex said. "Seeing as to how it was painted on the floor in the blood of an eight-year-old girl. Even discounting the fact that he wears custom-made, Eye-talian leather, square-toed dress boots, I think I would have spotted it again. Yes. But he made it easy to identify him. His footwear anyway. And if that man wasn't sitting outside your house last night, then somebody who stole his shoes was!"

"You could have just said you knew what his tracks looked like," Johnny commented.

"And you just proved to me how easy it would be to convince you of that," Tex said back. "I lied, and it was stupid, but I recognized that boot print."

"The problem is," Murdoch sighed. "We have no idea who this man is, or why he would want to shoot out our back windows."

"Why don't you let me give you some history," Tex suggested. "Maybe something I know about the man will jog your memories."

"Sounds reasonable," Scott said.

They paused to pour out more coffee all around. Tex accepted a cup himself, and, after thinking about it a moment, one of the pieces of fried bread. When they were all comfortable, he began his story.

"Palmer first showed up in Texas about five years ago. First thing anyone noticed about him was that he was living in an elegant hotel in Houston, going to plays and shows. He seemed to be a man of substance, but with no visible means of support. He played cards now and then, but lost as often as he won -- he wasn't a professional gambler. He claimed to have had a big plantation in South Carolina before The War, though later investigations showed no record of it."

"Fortunately for all of us, lying about your past isn't illegal," Scott commented.

"Exactly," the kid shrugged. "So, shortly after he arrived in town, he began to be seen in the company of a widow named Amelia Perkins. Her husband had been in shipping. There was, apparently, a great deal of money."

"A young, attractive widow?" Murdoch guessed.

"No. Mrs. Perkins was about sixty-five years old. She lived all alone in a big house -- her kids had their own homes, although some of them weren't far away. She didn't get out much. All of a sudden she was going to the theater, to fancy restaurants, all over. Escorted by..."

"By that monster," Scott murmured.

"He was described to me as a very charming and elegant man, with a gentle voice and very polished manners. Since the War, there's a lot of men in Texas -- in the whole country -- with violent disfigurements. We learn not to judge men by their outside appearances. And apparently, Palmer made that easy for many people."

"Mrs. Perkins told you this?"

“No, I never spoke to her personally. It was Mrs. Kahne that told me that. Anyway, one day, some men came to Mrs. Perkins and told her she had to leave her house."

"Why?" Teresa asked.

"It seems that in order for this Palmer to help her manage her money and control her investments, she had deeded the house over to him, and put him down as joint depositer on all of her bank accounts. One day, he sold the house, cleaned out all the accounts, and left. Simple as that."

"And the banks just let him do it?" Teresa demanded.

"His name was on the accounts, his name was on the deed. There's no law against a man selling his own property or taking his own money out of the bank."

"Whatever happened to Mrs. Perkins?" Teresa asked.

"Oh, she came out of it all right. She still owned all her husband's shipping interests -- she hadn't signed that over to Palmer. Her family was furious. Seems they had been counting their inheritance, and suddenly it was much smaller. They complained to the local police, and the police checked into it, but like I said, it was all legal. Not very nice, but perfectly legal."

"If he had all that money, why would he rob a bank?" Teresa wanted to know.

"He didn't, right away. He went through everything he got from Mrs. Perkins, and when the funds started getting low, he started in on the next old lady. Then the next. It was number three that I interviewed. Elaine Kahne. She had five children, all of them married and with children of their own, but she was very lonely. The kids were all busy with their own lives. They hardly even bothered to write her letters at Christmas or her birthday. She didn't have many friends, or, since her husband died, much of a reason to go out and enjoy herself. When this dashing, polished, handsome-except-for-the-scar younger man started showing an interest in her, she was flattered. She knew he wasn't in love with her, but he was well-mannered, and concerned. He knew all the best plays, all the best things to order at restaurants. He escorted her to events she had had to miss in the past for not having anyone to go with...."

"And she gave him care of all her money," Teresa guessed. "How gullible can a woman be?"

"Pretty gullible when they're lonely, apparently. Captain Janiver said it was mostly the fault of the families, not of the women themselves. All these women were old and lonely, and people expected them to just sit at home mind their own business until they croaked and the family could grab their money. Mrs. Kahne hadn't seen any of her children in years -- and some of them lived less than ten miles away! -- ‘til they found out she was broke. Then they came and raised Caine with the local police, trying to get the money back, but..."

"It was all legal," Scott observed.

"Exactly. No law against a woman giving her money to someone other than her own children, alive or dead. Mrs. Kahne wasn't as fortunate as Mrs. Perkins. There was no stocks, just what she had had in her house and in the bank, and it was all gone."

"But, at least she had her children," Murdoch said.

"Actually, they pretty much turned their backs on her. Said it was her own fault she was suddenly poor. Two of the boys got together and bought her a house, but it was a tiny, clapboard ruin on the edge of town. And she had no income, no way to make any money. I wouldn't have been surprised if she died of hunger or cold during the winter months, that's how much attention those kids paid to her."

"That's awful!" Teresa said.

"Why didn't she die?" Scott asked.

"Strangest thing," Tex said. "She had this old, empty chicken coop in her back yard. One day, it was suddenly all full of chickens, good laying hens. I reckon they got loose from someone else's pens and just sort of drifted in there to keep warm."

"Did they now?" Murdoch asked, raising an eyebrow. "And they brought their feed along with them?"

"Turns out, there was a bag in there. Reckon she never noticed it before. Or the pile of split cordwood under the tree in the back yard. She started out selling eggs to her neighbors, and ended up with quite an operation. Two coops and over forty chickens, I understand."

"She must have had a guardian angel looking after her," Murdoch commented.

“A guardian angel that was about six-foot-four, with blonde hair and brown eyes?” Teresa guessed.

“Uh, well...” Tex said, and cleared his throat loudly.

"I still don't see where the bank fits into this," Johnny said.

"Well, he was working on Number Four, see," Tex said. “Problem is, Waco ain't Houston. Pickings were a little more slim. He latched on to this one old lady, but she was mean and sharp. Demanded more of him than the other women ever had."

"Like?" Murdoch asked.

"Like... fidelity, apparently. While he was trying to romance Mrs. Weaver, he was low enough on funds he had another woman who was actually supporting him. He was living with her, in fact. And that's where the connection comes in. Mrs. Weaver turned him out entirely. He hadn't gotten a cent out of her. And he went back to the other woman, and poured out his troubles to her. She was the one who mentioned your name, Mr. Lancer. When I spoke to her, she recalled talking about the old days to him, about her own troubles, and the next morning, he got up and robbed the bank and left."

"I don't see..."

"Her name is Rose Bolivar. She was actually a who..." he paused, glanced at Teresa and said, "A working woman. I know it sounds odd, because this woman herself had to be at least sixty years old. But that is how she made a living. Entertaining men."

"Did she run a bawdy house?" Murdoch asked.

"No, she just had a little place back of one of the saloons. Two rooms, private entrance. That's it. She has a fondness for certain things -- not just alcohol, but hemp and opium as well. Maybe that's what attracted some of the men. Maybe she was selling those products as well as using them herself. I'm not sure about that. I'm just sure that the night before the robbery, Palmer went home to her place -- where he was staying -- and they drank and talked, and your name was mentioned. And...."

"And in the morning he robbed a bank," Murdoch said. "And now he's here, sending cryptic letters and shooting out windows. I'm sorry, son, but that story doesn't hold water. I've never heard of either of those people..."

"Well, they've heard of you," Tex said. He stood up suddenly. "That smoke smell's getting to me," he said and he turned to open one of the windows behind him on the north wall of the room.

"It does seem to get worse, the longer you sit in it," Scott agreed, with a cough.

"It is worse," Johnny said, looking up sharply. With the window open, a warm breeze lifted the curtains and ruffled their hair, but the breeze was thick with the smell of smoke. "That's not from the kitchen. That's from outside."

"Brush fire," Scott said, knocking the chair over as he leaped to his feet. They had been worried about fire, had been expecting it with the grass and brush as dry as it was. But when he ran out the back door, intending to alert the men in the bunkhouse and get a crew after the fire, he found that it wasn't brush that was burning. It was the barn.

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY, APRIL (DATE UNKNOWN)1870

"You don't have to do everything for me," Johnny snapped irritably. "I'm not totally helpless."

"I was just trying to help," she said.

"Well, stop it!" he said. She stepped back away from him and he took another step. But he put too much weight on the damaged leg, didn't get the crutch in place on time, and the shock of pain that shot through him made him loose his balance. He fell heavily to the ground, the impact jarring all his wounds, but when she ran to help him he gasped through gritted teeth, "Leave me alone!"

So, she did.

He tried to sit up, but the healing wound in his side felt like it was tearing open, and he'd pulled a muscle in his back in the fall. Finally he managed to roll and get to his hands and knees, and though that caused terrific pain in both his arm and his leg, he managed to crawl back to the open end of the ruined house. What was wrong with that girl anyway? Couldn't she see that now he did need her, now he couldn't do it alone? Apparently not, since she just stood there, watching him struggle. It took him more than a full minute just to get himself up onto the rickety bench by the door. His back spasmed several times, his leg gave out on him. He gasped in pain more than once, but she just stood there.

"If you're going to be that useless, you should just leave," he said, when he could.

"You said not to help you," she said.

"Don't you ever think for yourself?" he yelled. "Daddy says do this, so you do it! Johnny says do that, so you do it! I may not have a third of the education you do, but I know how to use my head!"

She took a step forward and he said, "What are you going to do now? I made it, I don't need your help now!"

"I'm sorry, I..."

"Need someone to tell you what to do? Why don't you go inside and light the fire. Make me something to eat."

"I thought you didn't need me to do everything for you any more."

"But you like doing it, don't you? What you have here is your very own life-size talking doll, and you've been playing at nurse, playing at mommy. Why don't you try playing at woman some time. That's more what I could use."

"You're disgusting."

"No, I'm real, Hilary! I'm not a toy for you to play with, I'm..." When he leaned forward, a bolt of pain cut off his words. He leaned back again, resting his weight on the side of the house, and he could breathe, but the pain was still there. He couldn't even remember any longer what it was like to be normal and healthy, to be able to do a simple thing like walk outside and sit in the sun without gasping and grunting, moving like a helpless old man. Or a cripple.

"Playtime's over," he said. "Go home."

"Johnny," she said, worry clear in her voice. And he couldn't stand that, he really couldn't.

"Leave me alone!" he said.

"But, I..."

"Just go! Leave! Get out of here. I don't need you hanging around here all the time. I'm not a side show freak for your entertainment! Get out! Don't come back!"

And she gathered her basket and left, ran down the path with light, easy steps that he envied. Oh, how he envied her freedom, her strength.

"Good riddance," he muttered when she was gone.

But she was gone. And he was alone. He sat in the sun for an hour, telling himself he needed this peace and quiet more than he needed some silly girl prattling at him all day long. Silence settled over the ruined cabin, the kind of silence he had lived with much of his life. Open spaces, bird calls, the buzzing of a few early-season insects, and the kind of quiet that never exists where people are grouped together.

Silence was good. But it had never felt so empty before. He missed her voice. Missed the sound of her singing, missed even the feeling of anticipation, knowing she would be back tomorrow, or later today, because she wouldn't be. Not this time.

Sitting hurt. So after awhile, he levered himself to his feet and walked. Across the clearing, and back. But he wrenched his back again, trying to keep from falling. A silly thing that, if she were here, she could have prevented just by grabbing his elbow. But she wasn't here, and she wasn't going to come back, and he marched across the clearing again. And back.

He walked and rested, and walked and rested, and never felt more alone in his life.

When the shadows grew long, he walked into the shelter, and built a fire with the kindling and dried mistletoe she had left behind, and her little pile of matches. He managed. All by himself. And tomorrow, he'd go collect more mistletoe and more dry firewood. The forest around was lousy with it. He didn't need her.

He opened a can of peaches she had left on her makeshift shelf, gouging himself only twice with his knife before he pried the lid off. He ate all of them, drank down the juice, then ate the biscuits she had left him. Tomorrow her little cache of food would be gone, but he could go down to the creek and catch a fish, or shoot a rabbit or something.

He didn't need her.

When she walked in in the morning, and set down a basket full of pancakes, molasses, sausage and more biscuits, he didn't smile, didn't say, "I'm sorry," just glared at her and said, "Why'd you come back?"

"I decided I had invested too much time in you to give up and let you starve to death at this point."

"I won't starve!"

LANCER RANCH, NEAR SPANISH WELLS, CALIFORNIA: JULY 11-12, 1890.

Murdoch rang the big bell, which had once called people for dinner, but was now used only for emergencies. Johnny headed for the stable, to release the horses in case the fire spread to there. When he realized what Johnny was doing, Tex ran to help him. Scott’s first move was to open both spigots in the kitchen, but all that happened was a gurgle, a burp and a trickle of water that trailed away to nothing in seconds.

“I don’t think that’s an accident,” he said grimly. “Okay, we do this the old-fashioned way!” With Teresa helping, he dragged the big washtub out of the kitchen and began hauling water from the outside well, one bucket at a time, and dumped it into the tub. Alerted by the bell, Larissa and the boys ran outside.

"Get rag rugs and towels," Scott told Larissa. "Search the house. Dump them in this tub. You, boys. Get buckets, pans, anything that'll hold water!"

Larissa gathered the boys and ran back inside. The hands boiled out of the bunkhouse and came on the run, still tugging on boots and shirts, as horses came pouring out of the stables and the corrals, neighing and rearing and adding to the general noise and c