by Lisa Plumley
Oblivious to her, they pushed together as a group, kicking toward the center of the circle. Muffled cries rose from within it, then the awful sound of pounding fists. Her blood racing, Amelia ducked a poorly aimed rock and grabbed the nearest bony-shouldered boy she could reach. She dragged him from the group, creating an opening to wedge herself into.
“Stop it, all of you!” she cried, hauling another child—a pink-ribboned, jeering girl—away from the circle. The girl stumbled backward, wide-eyed at adult intervention, Amelia supposed, and ran toward the plaza.
“Stop it!” Coughing from the dust their scuffles had raised, Amelia pried a rock from the hand of the next youngster she saw and shoved herself further into the circle. Almost as one, the group stepped back as they became aware of her presence. Still yelling insults, two more ran through the cottonwood trees.
Two remained in the center, both boys. One stood almost as tall as Amelia, albeit stockier and meaner-looking. Recognizing him as the first rock-thrower, she grabbed his shoulder just as the smaller boy landed a punch in his belly.
She caught only air. The boy doubled over, yelling, between gasps, a stream of profanities such as she’d never expected to hear from a youth.
Furious, she grabbed his ear and pulled as hard as she could. The tactic worked as well for her as it always had for Miss Fitzsimmons back at Briarwood. The boy yelped and immediately straightened, his lips compressed with pain.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Amelia scolded, feeling for all the world like pushing the ruffian into the dirt where he belonged. Picking on younger, smaller children, indeed!
“Where are your parents? I’ve half a mind to turn you over to the sheriff. Perhaps you didn’t realize he’s right over there,” she threatened, nodding in the direction of the cantina.
With the instigator in hand, Amelia looked past him to see if the younger boy had been badly hurt. At the sight of him, though, whatever else she’d meant to say dropped straight from her mind.
The poor child stood panting, staring at the dirt, one leg bent as though he favored it. Was that where they’d kicked him? Fresh anger surged through her. The boy was surely hurt, and quite likely scared as well. He kept his head down, swiping blood from his lip with his torn sleeve. Would he allow her to help him?
The youth she held used the moment’s distraction to wrench himself free from Amelia’s grasp. He made a horrible sound in his throat, like a person choking, then spat heavily, straight toward the hurt boy. Turning with one last bold look at Amelia, he ran from the cottonwood trees, his parting words echoing behind him.
“At least my pa ain’t no murderer!”
“Neither is mine!” shouted the younger boy, coming up from wiping his lip with his fists doubled, angling his whole small body into a fighter’s stance. “I’ll kill anybody who says he is!”
Left alone with the boy, Amelia held her breath, careful to remain motionless. She felt almost afraid to approach him, lest she scare him away. Ignoring her, the child stared at the older boy’s retreating back. Only his profile was visible to her, but determination and defensiveness fairly vibrated in the air around him.
His dark hair stood on end, ruffled during the fight. His face was blackened with dirt all along the side facing her, as though someone had rubbed his cheek into the ground. From a rip in his pants his bony knee showed through, making him seem fragile somehow—despite the angry stance he showed to the world. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old.
“Let me help you,” Amelia whispered, carefully stepping closer. “It looks as though you’ve been hurt, and I—”
He jumped back a pace, everything about him screaming wariness. His eyes met hers, dark in the swinging lamplight from the tree branch, and within them she glimpsed fear.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said, holding out her hand to touch him. The way he stood, so proud but alone, made her heart want to shatter. Ducking his head, he brushed his fingertips over his eyelids, smearing a streak of dampened dirt over his brow bone.
He was crying, Amelia realized. “Please, I—”
The boy raised his head and met her gaze full-on, despite the tear smudges on his freckled cheeks. His hair, his eyes, his demeanor…something about them was powerfully familiar. Almost as though she’d seen the boy before, although she knew she hadn’t, and…and then she knew.
Amelia gasped, her fingers trembling just inches from his slender, straight-held shoulders. She wanted to weep at the sight of that small, lost face. The face so like his father’s.
So like Mason’s.
“B—Ben?” she whispered. “Ben, is that really you?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mason wove through the fiesta crowd, careful to avoid the hanging lanterns that might reveal his presence to the sheriff or one of the men in his posse. With George Hand long-gone to Cruz’s house, none of the Sharpes in sight, and night falling quickly, his chances of finding Ben looked bleak. His last hope was the group of children he’d glimpsed playing beneath the cottonwood trees near the cantina. Maybe Ben was with them.
Leaving the plaza, he approached the cantina’s ramada—and saw the sheriff sitting at a bench beneath it. Mason swore beneath his breath and ducked behind one of the ramada’s support poles, then headed around the kitchens instead. Rounding the back corner, he nearly slammed into two boys running full-out from the cottonwood grove.
“Whoa, boys,” he said, holding out both hands to stop them. His palms touched their shoulders, and both boys looked up…and up…until their gazes reached Mason’s face. “Watch where you’re going, there.”
Their eyes bulged wide. “Ahhh!” Screaming, they scrambled from beneath his hands. Feet pounding hard, they ran past him down the alley as though the devil himself were chasing them.
Frowning, Mason watched until they disappeared into the fiesta crowd. If those boys were any indication, the children’s games he’d seen were already finished. Even if Ben had been among them, he’d likely be gone, too, by now.
Instead of checking within the cottonwood grove, maybe he ought to go search the crowd in the plaza one more time, before it got any darker. Turning, Mason headed back down the alley.
Footsteps pounded up behind him. Another child ran past, this time a girl with long, pink-ribbon-bound pigtails streaming out behind her. Her dress billowed, kicked up by her long strides toward the plaza. She vanished into the crowd, just as the two boys had.
Mason’s steps slowed. What the hell had made them run like that? He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Nothing but empty, deep-shadowed alley and the surrounding adobe buildings met his gaze.
Curious now, he turned and headed back around the corner of the cantina’s kitchen. Maybe fifty yards away, the cottonwood trees rose into the sky, backlit by intermittent fireworks. At least two people still stood within the trees, but Mason was too far away to make out their features. The smaller of the two was almost certainly a child. The other looked tall enough to be an adult. The same person who’d set those first children running like their feet were on fire?
Hand on his gun belt, he moved closer, keeping to the cantina’s back wall to remain hidden as well as he could. Their voices, too low to make out the words, reached him as he stepped away from the wall. Snaking into the deeper shadows beneath an overgrown mesquite, Mason climbed over the picket fence separating Levin’s Park from the rest of the town. He hunkered down to listen, squinting into the darkness toward the pair ahead.
Muffled words came toward him, borne on a warm breeze between the cottonwoods. The sound mingled with the farther-off music in the plaza, making it nearly impossible to hear clearly. Mason shifted impatiently, edging closer. The child was a boy, he saw, a boy with dark hair. He kept his face turned away, talking intently with his companion.
He reminded Mason of Ben.
But so had so many others. He couldn’t just charge out into the grove without knowing for sure. All the same, his fingers flexed on the butt of hi
s Colt with excitement. His pulse sped up, his heartbeat roaring in his ears. Mason looked toward the person talking with the boy—a woman, he saw as he neared the tree they stood beneath—and his breath stopped.
Amy.
She crouched on one knee before the boy, her skirts spread on the dirt all around her. Her hair was upswept into the same fussy, fancy curled style it had been when he’d first rescued her from beside the road. In the light shining over her and the boy from the lantern a few feet away, she looked like an angel. A spanking-new, stylish one without a care in the world beyond hair ribbons and dresses.
She looked, Mason realized, exactly as though she’d never met him. Never spent days on the run. Never come close to drowning herself in an arroyo, never busted them both out of jail, never thrown herself into his outlaw’s arms.
Never loved him.
His heart ached at the sight of her. He yearned to go to her, to touch her and assure himself she was really there. To soak up the love she’d given so freely, the love Mason knew now he’d needed all along. To explain why he’d left her behind.
Yet something held him back. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to race into the cottonwoods and take her in his arms, knowing it wasn’t right.
Knowing it would only make her unhappy in the end. Unhappy like Ellen. Unhappy in Mexico with him and Ben.
Digging his heels into the soft soil beneath him, Mason watched a moment longer. Amy had made it to Tucson, then. If her fancy dress and gee-gaws were anything to go by, she’d retrieved her book bags and her money, and was getting along just fine.
Without him.
He couldn’t go to her. Wouldn’t. But the pain inside him only sharpened, honed by the sight of Amy and the knowledge that his love for her had only gathered strength while they’d been apart. He’d been a fool to believe anything else. And however torturous it was to have Amy so near and yet so far out of reach, Mason knew he’d stay and watch her as long as he could.
He couldn’t turn away. She would never know, would never be hurt. And he…he would be hurting forever, with only the memories of her to warm him.
Amy’s hands touched the boy’s shoulders. Gently, she smoothed back a lock of hair from his forehead. Even considering the several inches of space remaining between them, the gesture put Mason in mind of a hug.
The boy sniffled, then nodded, his profile nearly turned toward Mason. His relaxed posture, the easy set of his sharp, small-boy’s shoulders, all conveyed his comfort in Amy’s presence. But what child, here in Tucson, could Curly Top know intimately enough to hold that way?
Only one.
Ben.
Mason’s feet were moving even before he’d fully decided to act. His boots crunched over tangled branches and fallen dried mesquite pods. He ran full-out toward his son.
He could almost believe he’d imagined him. Believe that he’d conjured him up somehow, just from wanting to find him for so long. Yet there he was, all elbows and knees and messy hair and solemn little face, just as Mason remembered him. Ben.
Amy spotted him before his son did. She looked up over Ben’s shoulder, and her face went white with shock. Whispering something to the boy, she nodded and then stepped back.
Mason had no time for anything more. For in the next instant, Ben turned at Amy’s direction, and saw him.
His face lit up like it did on Christmas morning—maybe bigger. “Pa! Pa!” he yelled, running with his skinny arms outstretched.
Mason glimpsed his son’s huge grin as it broadened his freckled cheeks, saw that his clothes were wrecked and unfamiliar. And then sixty pounds of wriggling boy slammed into his middle, and Ben’s arms came around his waist, and he couldn’t see anything at all for the tears that blurred his vision. He squeezed his son, and nothing in the world had ever felt so good as holding him again.
Burying his face in Ben’s dark mussed hair, Mason tightened his hold on him, breathing deeply of castile soap and dirt and hay, and all the mixed-up scents that always surrounded his into-everything boy. He kissed the top of his head, almost afraid to let him go and risk losing him again.
“Pa!” Ben cried, the sound half-buried in Mason’s shirtfront. “Pa!”
Right then, Mason decided that was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. Grinning like a fool, heedless of the tears on his cheeks, he hugged Ben tighter and pressed his lips to his hair. His heart swelled with love, with gratitude…with relief at having found him at last.
Before long, Ben started squirming to be free. He sucked in the huge breath that always foretold a barrage of his questions and stories and comments, and Mason let him go so he could listen.
“What took you so long?” Ben asked, sounding breathless. His gaze, quick and eager and filled with sudden happiness, met his father’s. “I knew you’d come after me. I told everybody so. Everybody.”
Mason put both hands on the sides of Ben’s head, tilting the boy’s face upward to the meager lantern light. More tears tightened his throat and made his words feel choked when they came.
“You did, eh?” he asked, hoping Ben wouldn’t hear the quaver in his voice.
He had believed his father would come for him. The realization shook Mason to his soul, lightened his spirits, made him doubly determined to create a good life for them in Mexico.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” Ben said, nodding vigorously. “I even told Uncle Nathan, and Unc—” He went on, the words pouring over themselves, and Mason listened as Ben explained how he’d told his uncles his Pa would be coming for him, and they’d better watch out when he did.
He’d been hurt, Mason realized. His lip was swollen, smudged with dried blood at the corner. His face was covered with filth on one side, although it looked as though someone had, recently, at least attempted to clean some of it away. His clothes looked like he’d wallowed around in that same mud, and he kept one leg bent at the knee as though afraid to put his whole weight on it. Darkness slanted over Mason. Whoever had hurt him would pay.
“And then she said she was your friend,” Ben was saying, his voice cracking with his urgency to get everything out, and Mason realized his son was speaking of Amy. Shoving back his anger over Ben’s injuries, he looked for Curly Top and found her standing a few feet away.
“And so,” Ben went on, “I reckoned it was all right to talk to her. You’re not mad, are you, Pa?”
“No, son,” Mason said slowly. “I’m not mad.”
“Good.” Satisfied with that, Ben nudged closer against Mason’s middle. His head pressed into his belly, and his skinny arms came around to hold tight to his father.
“I’m tired of visiting,” the boy said, his voice muffled. “All my uncles are old. I want to go home. Can we go home tonight? Where’s old Candy?”
Rearing back, Ben looked past the cottonwood grove toward the street, as though fully expecting to find the old nag he spoke of—his favorite mount—saddled and ready for them.
“Our horse is at home,” Mason said, stroking Ben’s hair from his forehead until he leaned against him again.
Lord, but he hated this. Hated the mean-spirited accusations that had sent him on the run and made taking his son back home impossible.
“I borrowed another one from James and Juana,” he said. “Do you remember them?”
Ben nodded, his hair rubbing soft on Mason’s shirt.
“I borrowed a fine horse from them—”
“Not as fine as Candy.”
“Not that fine,” Mason agreed, “but a good one, and it’s saddled up around back at my friend George’s place. Just waiting for us.”
Waiting for them to ride clear out of town, away from everything familiar Ben had ever known. His throat aching, Mason breathed deeply and hugged his son’s shoulders.
“Can we go get it, Pa?” Ben asked, stepping back with his hand still clasping Mason’s shirt. His eyes shone in the moonlight. “I don’t want to wait for Uncle Nathan and the rest of them. They can just go back to the States without me. It’s all right. I don�
��t think they’ll mind a bit. And I—”
He paused for breath, and Mason spoke instead. Always Ben talked so quickly, the words practically blurred together.
“We’re not waiting for your uncles,” he said.
“Good. All they ever wanted to talk about was Mama, and how sad it was she ended up here, like this was some horrible kind of place, and I—”
“We’re going to visit somebody else,” Mason interrupted gently. “Some family of Juana and Manuel’s. They say we can stay with them for a while, just until—”
“In Mexico?” Ben’s eyes brightened. “We’re going all the way to Mexico, Pa?”
Mason nodded. Later he’d tell him more, tell him Mexico was no grand adventure, but their new life. Maybe by then, Ben would welcome the news. For now, he couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing him with the truth.
“All the way to Mexico,” Mason said. “But first—” He glanced toward Amelia “—I have to thank Miss O’Malley for helping you.”
Ben’s face reddened. Looking shamefaced, he stared toward the ground, digging up puffs of dirt with his toe. “I forgot,” he mumbled.
Mason leaned down, waited until Ben glanced up at him—and then winked. “I’ll take care of it,” he whispered.
Amy remained where he’d first seen her, only a few feet away. She kept her back to them, probably trying to allow them whatever privacy she could. Her shoulders slumped and her head stayed down, exposing the fragile-looking nape of her neck beneath all that fussy hair. Something about the way she held herself told Mason she was weeping, and the pain in his gut redoubled.
He’d hurt her already, with leaving her, he realized. And he’d have hurt her still more if he’d stayed. There was no way around it, no way through it. As far as Mason could tell, their being together could only cause Amy more pain.
“You should’ve seen her, Pa,” Ben said, looking toward Amy too. “She scared the daylights out of those bullies that were picking on me. Sent ‘em clean out of here, yelling like they’d been whupped.” He grinned, plainly delighted. “She was meaner than a schoolmarm. And all ‘cause of me.”
