Prologue
Applesby, Maine
Winter 1849.
“Turn your face to the wall, Katie, and stop that
coughin’.” With her chest and throat burning, racked with
chills that shook her thin frame, nine-year-old Katie
Whittington huddled in her narrow bed.
“Katie, I mean it. Stop it now.”
Only half-awake, at first she thought she had dreamed her
mother’s voice, so familiar, tinged with a hard-edged,
soulless quality that held no love. But then she heard it
again, clearly and for real, and the sound burrowed into
sleep-fogged corners of her mind, waking her completely.
There were the other sounds, too. Throaty moans, whimpers,
sharp, keening cries. A man’s harsh, ragged breathing. The
whining protest of coiled bedsprings from across the
cramped, cluttered room.
Katie rubbed her eyes and tried to hold back the hollow,
jarring cough, but it erupted anyway. She covered her
mouth with both hands and listened to the coupling noises,
kept her back to the room and hoped that Mama wouldn’t
yell at her again.
She lay there pretending to sleep through the noise,
painting pretty pictures in her head, dreaming of another
life, another world for her and Mama-the kind of world she
had only glimpsed from afar, the kind she could barely
imagine.
In her lovely dream world, she and Mama wore pretty
dresses, clean dresses, with starched lace and ruffles,
and there were pretty hats to match. The weather was
always warm and sunny, and whenever they walked down the
street, no one stepped aside or turned away. No one
pointed at them or
whispered as they strolled along in their pastel finery.
Mama had tried to teach her to ignore the stares and
whispers of the townsfolk, but the rudeness still cut
Katie to her soul, and it always would.
She hugged the torn wool blanket and coughed again, then
wiped the palm of her hand on the dirty sheet that was
little more than a rag.
The linens in her dream home would be soft and clean.
There would be a fancy yellow cover on her bed, too, just
like one she had seen through the window of a big white
house up on Poplar Street. She would have lace curtains,
fancy as snowflakes that would never melt, hanging at
every window. The sun would stream through them, casting
strands of precious yellow gold around her very own room-a
room bigger than the shack she lived in now. There would
be pretty china plates piled high with more food than any
one person could ever eat all by herself.
The roof would never leak. The windows would glisten, and
there would not be even one single crack in them. Wind
would never sneak through holes in the windows or walls.
She shivered, her teeth chattering. Without warning, she
started coughing again, but this time it went on and on
until she lay on her side gasping for air like a dying
fish.
“Katie!”
“Jeezus, can’t you shut that kid up?”
Katie rolled herself into a tight ball, hugging the thin
blanket around her shoulders. Her hands were stiff with
cold, her feet nearly numb even though she had climbed
into bed in her heavy shoes and socks.
She tried to picture her pretty dream house and all the
lovely dresses again, and the plates piled high with hot
food.
When the images would not come, she looked up at the
frosted windowpane above her head. Between the ripped
curtain and halo of frost crystals, she could see a sliver
of moon and one lone star shining in the night sky.
She closed her eyes and wished upon that star. She wished
all her dreams would come true. Then she opened her eyes,
thankful that the moon was not full tonight.
On moonless nights it was easier for her to disappear in-
side herself and shut out the sound of Mama and the men.
On moonless nights she was less tempted to watch.
But on nights when the moon hung full and heavy in the
starless sky, she would silently turn away from the wall,
stare through the milk-white light, and watch the shapes
writhing on the bed. She would peer over the edge of her
blanket and watch as Mama entertained the men who came
scratching at the door.
* * *
She must have fallen asleep, for the next thing she knew,
Mama’s hand was on her shoulder, shaking her awake. The
room smelled of burning whale oil. The single lamp on the
crate beside Mama’s bed cast a weak halo in the corner.
“Katie, get up and put your coat on.”
Mama stripped off the blanket and tossed Katie the ugly
green wool coat that some little girl across town had
outgrown. They had found it in the bottom of the Christmas
charity box that the “self-righteous do-gooders” (as Mama
liked to call them) had left sitting on the front stoop
last year.
Suffering through another fit of coughing, wiping rusty
phlegm on the sheet, Katie sleepily protested. “It’s still
the middle of the night, Mama.”
“Get up. We have to go.”
“Where? Where do we have to go in the dark? It’s cold
out,” Katie whined.
Mama didn’t answer.
Katie pulled herself up, climbed off the bed. Mama held
Katie’s coat as she shoved the girl’s arms into sleeves
that did not cover her wrists. Katie looked around for her
faded red scarf, but Mama grabbed her arm before she could
find it.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Mama would not look at her, and
Katie began to worry and wonder why she was acting so
strangely. “I’m sorry I keep coughing, Mama. I can’t help
it.”
“You almost lost me a night’s wage.”
Before she could promise not to cough again, Katie doubled
over with another spasm.
Her mother pulled a tattered cotton hankie out of the
bodice of her torn gown and handed it to her. Then she
grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her across the room, and
opened the door. Katie ducked her head to avoid the
blustery wind that sailed in off the sea and tried to keep
up as her mother tugged her down one cold, deserted street
after another.
Katie knew most of the lanes near the wharf by heart. They
had trodden them since she could walk, she and Mama. They
lived from hand to mouth on the money that the sailors and
fishermen paid Mama when she took them to her bed. When
times were very hard, they lived on do-gooder charity.
As they passed beneath a street lamp Katie glanced up at
the familiar lines and angles of her mama’s thin face. Her
mama was looking straight ahead with her jaw set.
They were climbing now, up the hill, away from the wharf
and the ramshackle houses that lined the narrow by-ways
and shops close to the water. Katie fought for breath as
they ascended. The houses up here were larger, prettier,
and surrounded by trees, part of a forest that had once
grown all the way down to the sea.
Well into unfamiliar territory now, Mama turned an-other
corner. Barely able to do more than shuffle behind her
mother, Katie lifted her head and saw a tall bell tower
and the steeple of a brick church. Her eyes tearing from
cold, she struggled to read the sign on the front of the
building.
Saint-Per-pe-tua’s-Church.
Mama was fairly dragging her now, walking faster, more
determined.
“Ma-ma?” Katie had to gasp for air. She wiped her eyes
with the kerchief.
“It’s somethin’ I have to do, Katie-girl. Somethin’ I
should have done long ago.”
Mama’s huge brown eyes were watering from the cold, too. A
fat tear slipped down her bony cheek.
The freezing night air, heavy and damp off the sea, burned
Katie’s lungs. She had never set foot inside a church
before. In awe, she stared at a ghostly white statue of a
sad-faced young woman in a niche above the door. Something
about the statue made her whisper.
“Are . . . we going . . . in there?”
The building looked old and sturdy. It was probably warm
as toast inside. If she could just sit down and catch her
breath, maybe close her eyes for a bit-
Mama tugged on her arm when Katie kept staring at the
statue. Katie sighed when they hurried past the church and
the small graveyard beside it.
Except for the sound of their hollow footsteps, the
neighborhood around them was silent. Not a single lamp was
lit inside any of the big houses lining the street.
Suddenly Mama stopped to open a small iron gate in a low
fence bordering the yard of another brick building, one
almost as big as the church. The gate clanged shut behind
them, ominously loud, with a sound that shattered the
silence.
The cobblestone walk that led up to the front of the brick
building was patched here and there with dirty snow left
from the last snowfall. Dead leaves trapped since fall
peeked through. Katie lifted her head.
Mama had already started up the six wide steps to the
front porch. Katie’s legs gave out after the first three.
She knelt on the stair, doubled over, coughing. Mama stood
over her.
“I can’t lift you, Katie.”
“I know, Mama,” she whispered. She struggled to her knees
and with Mama pulling on her arm, made it to the
porch. “Can I just sit here a minute?”
Mama started beating on the heavy wood door with her fist.
Above the door hung a small gold-lettered sign. There was
another statue, too. Smaller, but it was the same sad lady
who stared down at her with her empty, marble eyes.
“Saint Per-petua’s Home for Orphan Girls.”
Orphan girls.
Katie slowly read the words again, faster this time, and
frowned. They didn’t know any orphan girls.
“Mama?”
Her mother pounded on the door again, then whirled around
and knelt down beside her. She grabbed Katie by the
shoulders, leaned so close their noses almost touched.
Mama was whispering frantically now, her raspy voice
ragged and hushed. She talked fast, as if her mind were
running a race with her tongue.
“This is for the best, Katie. Someday when you realize
that, I hope to God you’ll forgive me. I should have done
this when you were born so’s you wouldn’t remember. I’ve
been selfish, Katie-girl, trying to keep you with me, but
it ain’t workin’ out, see?”
Panic squeezed Katie’s heart and lungs. She couldn’t
breathe anymore. “Mama-” She let go of the kerchief and
desperately grabbed hold of Mama’s coat sleeves.
“I gotta do it. Don’t you see, Katie? What kind of a life
are you going to have, growin’ up with me in that shack?
Followin’ me around? It’s bad for both of us, you and me.”
“You’re scaring me,” Katie wailed.
Mama’s eyes narrowed and her bottom lip trembled
uncontrollably-that frightened Katie more than
anything. “I’m leavin’ you here with the nuns where you’ll
have a warm bed and plenty to eat.”
Katie stared in horror at the big door and the gold-
lettered sign. Inside, someone had lit a lamp. Yellow
light bled through plain white curtains. Her heart began
to pound in her ears.
Mama’s fingers tore at hers as she tried to push her away.
“Let go, Katie!” Mama shoved her away. “Don’t make this
worse for me than it already is.”
Having freed herself, Mama stood up; she stepped back as
Katie tried to grab hold of the uneven hem of her coat.
Mama dragged the cuff of her sleeve across her eyes and
then wiped her nose.
Katie jerked around at the chill whine of the front door’s
hinges. An elderly woman wearing eyeglasses and clothed
entirely in black stuck her head out, blinking against the
icy chill.
“Yes? Who’s there?” The woman had a gentle voice, but
Katie was still frightened.
Katie expected her mother to answer, but when she turned
around, Mama was already down the cobblestone walk,
hurrying through the little iron gate.
“Mama!” Katie strangled on the sound, choked on a cough.
She struggled to her knees, grabbed the column of the
porch rail beside her, clawed her way to her feet.
The iron gate clanged with a lonely, hollow, terrible
finality. “Don’t leave me here, Mama! I’ll be good.” Her
scream echoed through the empty streets. She was gasping
between sobs, fighting the dizziness that clouded her
vision.
“Come-b-b-ack!”
As she wilted toward the cold wooden porch floor where
Mama’s torn white hankie lay, Katie felt the old woman’s
arms close around her, heard the clack of wooden beads and
a hushed prayer whispered beside her ear.
“I won’t cough, Mama,” Katie sobbed, staring at the empty
walk through a blur of tears. “I . . . promise. I’ll . . .
be good.”
Chapter 1
Twenty Years Later
Saint Perpetua's School for Orphan Girls
Applesby, Maine
October 1869
Kate awakened, heart pounding, blood racing. She did not
move until her pulse settled back into a slow, steady
rhythm; then she drew back the sheet and slowly slipped
out of bed. Moonlight spilled across her pillow.
She had long ago given up trying to sleep when the moon
was full. Nights bathed in moonlight held too many
memories of the life she had lived with her mother.
It was fall again. Maine nights had grown desperately cold
already. Kate shivered as she walked through a puddle of
milk-white light to the only window in her sparsely
furnished attic room. A utilitarian piece of unbleached
muslin hung limp before the pane, as unadorned as
everything else in this world of routine and orderliness
where she had spent the better part of her life.
I stayed too long.
Kate drew aside the curtain and stared back at the man in
the moon, unable to think of anything except what Mother
Superior had told her after dinner when she had called her
into the office: “I received word today that the
archdiocese is closing the school at the end of the month,
Katherine. We sisters are being sent to a new church
school in Minnesota. The girls will be relocated, but I’m
afraid that you will have to find other employment. I’m so
sorry, Katherine. I wish it could be otherwise, but there
is nothing I can do.”
Eleven years before, desperately in need of another
teacher, the good Sisters of Saint Perpetua had asked her
to stay on after graduation. She was given room and board
and a small stipend in exchange for teaching history and
elocution to girls of all ages.
At eighteen, rather than face the streets of Applesby, she
had accepted the offer without hesitation, knowing that
someday she would have to go out into the world again. She
promised herself that one day she would resurrect her old
dreams, that she would have that pretty little home of her
own and a family to hold dear.
As time slipped away and spinsterhood crept upon her, she
devoted eleven years to Saint Perpetua’s orphan girls and
all the joys and challenges of dealing with them. She had
made a home here, one that was safe and warm and familiar.
The nuns and the orphans had become her family.
She had a certificate of education. She could read and
write in Latin. She was a teacher, a scholar. A spinster
with no living relation. The thought of having to leave
after so long filled her heart with dread.
She had a little money put by, surely enough on which to
survive until she found other employment. She would have
to find another place to live-no easy task in a hamlet
where her mother had been the town whore.
She had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn, and no one to turn
to-not even her mother. On Kate’s eleventh birthday,
Mother Superior had told her that the old shack near the
wharf had burned down, that her mama had died, trapped
inside.
Even in death, Mama had been infamous.
Kate could not go to her mother and tell her that she had
forgiven her abandonment, or that she had cried herself to
sleep for months, missing her mama more than she would
have missed her heart if it had been taken from her.
Now she looked out the window at the round face of the man
in the moon.
“Where will I go? What will I do?”
The moon man smiled back.
Or perhaps he was laughing at her. She could not tell.
* * *
At the end of October, when the butcher made his final
call to the nuns for an accounting, he found Kate standing
outside the kitchen door with a hand-me-down satchel in
hand. When he asked where she was going and she said that
she did not really know, he took pity on her and told her
she was welcome to rent the empty room above his shop. He
was middle-aged and married, a portly man with fingers
thick as the sausages he stuffed, and almost entirely bald.
With no alternative in mind, Kate accepted. She rode the
butcher’s cart back to the shop, a sturdy whitewashed
building near the center of town that was frequented all
day long by housewives and maids.
The room was adequate and clean, a refuge where Kate spent
the better part of the morning scouring up the courage to
go out and find employment.
That afternoon, the butcher’s wife knocked timidly on the
door and told her that she would have to leave on the
morrow.
“Not that we don’t want you here, you see. It’s just that,
well, some folks still remember your ma, and folks tend to
gossip. We can’t afford to have our business ruined, you
understand. It’s nothing against you, of course.”
That was how Kate learned that Applesby had not forgotten
Meg Whittington-that like Mama’s, her name was still as
tarnished as an old copper pot.
She packed her somber dresses and scant personal
belongings again. The next day she held her head high,
kept her tears inside, and moved on.
* * *
She rented a room in an old, gray weather-beaten shack by
the wharf. It belonged to a sickly old woman in need of
coin more than she cared about Kate’s name or her mother’s
reputation. The stoop sagged and the corners of the front
door had been scratched raw and splintered by the old
woman’s flea-bitten dog.
It reminded Kate so much of the places she had lived with
her mother that once inside the small musty room, she sat
down on the lumpy mattress and burst into tears.
To escape the dreary place, she pulled herself together,
put on her hat, and picked up her crocheted reticule-a
misshapen, handmade gift from one of her girls. She
slipped the drawstrings over her wrist and walked away
from the wharf, up Main Street and toward the remnants of
the tall evergreen forest that once grew down to the sea.
She could not help but notice that some of the older folks
stared as she passed by. Slowly the shame she felt as a
child began to attach itself to her again.
She drew herself up tall and straight and walked on. The
stares of passersby confirmed what her mirror had always
revealed-she was the image of her mother. She had grown up
looking into a reflection of her mother’s eyes, wide-set
and dark brown. She thought her lips too full, her mouth
far too toothy, like her mama’s, so she never smiled too
wide. Her arms and legs were long, her waist thin, her
breasts embarrassingly full. Thankfully, the few
serviceable dresses she owned were unadorned and drab and
so overly modest that they did not call attention to her
figure at all.
She never thought she’d experience that old shame again,
but the sting was uncomfortably familiar, even after all
these years.
She stopped by the printer’s and purchased a copy of the
Applesby Sentinel; then she strolled over to the small
park in the middle of the town square. She chose an empty
bench beneath a maple covered with dried leaves that
refused to fall. The paper snapped as she folded it back
on itself, the corners luffed in the same breeze that set
the maple leaves whispering. She began to scan the
advertisements.
Since the school term had already begun, she doubted she
would find a teaching position, but someone in a nearby
town was surely in need of a nanny.
Quickly glancing past advertisements for real estate,
gents’ clothes, and Aladdin stoves, she found one ad
seeking a maid for a boarding house in a village just up
the coast. There was another for a seamstress, but she had
no talent for sewing.
A lumbermill needed a cook, but cooking was out of the
question, too, unless the men were of strong
constitutions. Whenever she was on kitchen duty, the nuns
always offered up extra prayers.
Suddenly a small, boxed advertisement set off with fancy
block type one-third of the way down the page caught her
eye.
RANCHER SEEKING WIFE
SEND A PHOTOGRAPH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY LETTER
TO: REED BENTON
LONE STAR RANCH, TEXAS
Kate slowly lowered the page to her lap and stared down at
the words.
Rancher seeking wife.
Wife.
Her long-buried dream shimmered like a mirage until the
letters on the page blurred.
All those secret wishes, all those hopes tucked away in
the bottom of her heart, dreams that had faded over the
years she devoted to the students of Saint Perpetua’s.
What if?
What if she were to leave Maine forever?
What if she were to reach out for her dream?
She ran her finger over the bold type, closed her eyes,
and turned her face toward the fragile fall sunlight. Just
the word Texas conjured all kinds of images. Wild, wide
open spaces. Cattle and cowboys. Indians. A handful of
knowledge that she had gleaned through reading various
periodicals and accounts over the years.
A place to start over. A place to settle down where no one
recognized her. Perhaps even a place to start a family.
When a dying leaf drifted down from the maple and touched
her cheek, she opened her eyes. The breeze whipped across
the square, picked up a few fallen leaves, and sent them
scuttling in a whirlwind dance. Kate lifted the lumpy
reticule and slid the crochet along the draw-strings. Her
savings lay at the bottom of the bag, a wad of carefully
folded bills and a few coins.
Surely there was enough to spare for a photograph.
Surely there was enough to gamble a bit of it on a dream.
Chapter 2
Seven Months Later
Texas Frontier
Texas Ranger Company J.
May 1870
Spring was bleeding into another long, hot summer of
raiding and retaliation, another round of blood and death
on the prairie.
Hidden in a gully a half mile from a Comanche summer
encampment, gut-tight, mounted, and ready to charge, Reed
Benton and a company of twenty-three men watched Capt.
Jonah Taylor ride down the line of troops, giving last-
minute instructions as dawn stained the morning sky.
Sandy-haired and wiry, a born leader, Jonah Taylor was not
only Company J Ranger captain, but Reed’s best friend.
Reed gave Jonah a nod of encouragement when the man passed
by. There were no formalities among the Rangers, no
uniforms, no military law or precedent. The men were
divided into military units and officered, but all else
was loosely run. Unlettered farm boys fought beside
educated men like himself. Usually outmanned, they made up
for their lack of numbers with daring.
All along the line, horses as well as men shifted,
anxious, all fully aware of what they were about to face.
Reed wished he didn’t know, wished himself anywhere else-
which he knew damn well was no way to go into battle.
Back when other men were leaving Texas to fight the last
few battles for the Confederacy, he had joined the Rangers
to patrol the frontier. He had thought to protect the
settlers living there, knew he would be chasing down
renegade Comanche, but he had never anticipated rounding
up women and children.
Ever since the war ended, the new government sent sporadic
help from Washington, but never enough. Texans had
suffered nearly thirty years of Comanche attacks, broken
treaties, theft, mutilation, and death. They were all sick
of it, and rightly so.
Nearly everyone in the state had lost kin or acquaintances
to the hostile clans through death or capture. Most
Tejanos were of a mind that only the extermination of the
plains tribes would ever settle the score and bring peace
to the frontier.
“You men know what to do.” Jonah kept his voice low as he
swung his gaze up and down the line. They were comrades in
war, friends, at times pranksters, rarely family men.
Rangers were known far and wide for their aggressiveness,
and because of that, they rarely suffered
casualties. “Three women were taken a week ago, along with
two girls, eleven and twelve years old. If they’re alive,
they’ll most likely be hidden in the lodges. Don’t set any
fires unless you’ve rousted everyone out. If we’re lucky,
they’re here, in this camp. There don’t look to be very
many warriors around, just some outlying guards.”
Reed drew his rifle out of its scabbard, touched one of
the two pistols he wore at his waist, and then reached up
and shoved his hat on tighter. He had done this countless
times-ridden into hostile camps, rousted out women,
children, and toothless old folk that the warriors left
behind while they were out stealing horses, burning
cabins, and taking captives.
He wished to God the Comanche would simply turn over the
captives and go back to the reservation without a fight,
but he might just as well have wished horses could fly. It
was the way of the Comanche to raid and take cattle,
horses, and captives and not only from white settlers, but
from other tribes.
Jonah gave a whistle and as one, the Ranger Company
swarmed up and out of the gully. Like a dark stain
spreading across the prairie, the company raced toward the
small encampment, intent on finding the captive women and
evening the score.
Comanche sentries shouted and fired warning shots,
alerting the inhabitants of what amounted to a clan with
thirty tepees staked on the plain. Reed and the others
answered back with their own fire, riding straight into
the midst of the camp, firing in the air to cause as much
confusion as possible so that the captives, if they were
able, could break free and show themselves.
Gunfire erupted all around as Reed rode between the
decorated buffalo hide lodges, instinctively aware of
which Comanche were running frantically to save themselves
and which others were armed and ready to defend the camp.
All the while, he, like the other Rangers, was on the
lookout for captives-a flash of blond or red hair, pale or
sunburned skin, blue eyes, cries for help in English.
Some whites had been captive for so long they were
indistinguishable from Comanche. Others had been with a
clan for so long that they would run from the Rangers,
clutching their half-Comanche children to their breasts.
Cookfires were scattered by charging horses. Lodges
burned. The acrid smell of scorched hides hung heavy on
the air. There was little real resistance from the
inhabitants except for the handful of braves, but women
and even children would fight to defend the camp.
Reed caught sight of a pack of youngsters, boys between
eight and twelve, running swift and free as coyotes across
the open plain. Despite the confusion around him, his
heart involuntarily constricted. He was compelled to
watch. Then suddenly, one of the Rangers behind him called
out a warning and Reed whirled around in time to fire at
an old man charging him with a long lance.
He had come a heartbeat away from being skewered in the
back.
He had no time to react before he thought he heard a
woman’s cry for help in pure English, so he spun his horse
around in the direction of the sound, and before he could
respond, a bullet slammed into his shoulder and sent him
reeling backwards. Grabbing for his saddle horn, he hung
on and pulled himself upright. Then a second shot grazed
his temple, and he went down.
* * *
"You're a lucky man, Benton."
Doc Harper shook his head as he wound a bit of remaining
bandage into a ball and stowed it back into the worn and
sagging satchel that served as a medicine bag. "Doc" was
no more a doctor than any of the other Rangers, but he had
a way with sick horses and wounded men and could keep them
patched up until they could get some real care.
"Funny, but I don't feel lucky right now. My head hurts
like hell." Truth be told, Reed found it hard to focus,
but figured that was to be expected after the bullet put a
new part in his hair just above his ear.
"That shoulder's bound to trouble you, too. Best you get
yourself somewhere you can have it sewn up. The bullet
passed clean through, so don't let anybody go digging for
it again. I already did that and it ain't to be found.”
Reed sat up and looked around. They were a few yards from
the encampment where the Rangers had set up a holding area
for the Comanche they had rounded up. The dead were laid
out a few yards away. Jonah was striding toward him, his
expression tight enough to cut deep grooves around his
mouth.
"I'm not done for yet," Reed told him, hoping that saying
it out loud would make it so. He tried to focus, forced
himself to keep his head up but it throbbed like a war
drum with every beat of his heart. He expected Jonah to
make light of the situation, to make a joke to cheer him,
but the man didn't even crack a smile.
Reed's stomach knotted. "What's wrong? Who died?"
"We didn't lose a single man. You were our worst casualty.
Killed seven of their warriors, three women." Jonah looked
out across the plain. "No children. We recovered two of
the captive women and both girls. The third woman died on
the way here. The others saw it. They're all in pretty bad
shape."
Jonah didn't have to elaborate on what had happen to the
captives between the time they were taken and the arrival
at the camp. There wasn't a grown Texan alive who didn't
know the fate of women captives.
"Sounds like . . . " Reed tried to clear his mind of the
pain and fought for words. "Sounds like it went well. Why
the long face?"
"We found a boy you should see. He's about the right age.
And I'll be a damn pole cat if he doesn't have your eyes."
The pounding in Reed's head was instantly drowned out by
the beating of his heart.
Doc reminded him that he was there by handing Reed his
shirt. Jonah gave him a hand up, kept a hold of Reed's arm
until the ground stopped spinning and he could stand on
his own.
"Can you walk?"
"Yeah." Reed nodded, shrugging into his tattered, blood-
soaked shirt. He could walk. He just didn't know if he
wanted to follow Jonah. As they started toward where the
Comanche were being held, he hoped with every step that
Jonah was dead wrong.
The prisoners had been separated by gender, bound hand and
foot, tied side by side. Older children were huddled in
their own area, trying to appear fierce and sullen,
failing miserably, their fear so palpable that Reed could
smell it. None of them realized yet that they were not
facing death or torture, the fate of anyone captured by
the Comanche, but that a contingent of men would escort
them to the reservation at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
Jonah led him over to a boy who looked to be about eight
years old. He sat alone, separated from the others, but
like the others, he had been hobbled to keep him from
running.
Reed stood over him, his breath coming rapid and shallow,
suddenly lightheaded from more than his wounds. He put his
hand over the makeshift bandage on his shoulder, felt warm
moisture seeping through. He stepped close to the boy, so
close the toes of his boots were nearly touching the
child's knees, but the boy didn't look up.
Jonah bent down and cupped the boy's chin, forced him to
raise his head and look up.
Reed's breath left him in a whoosh. Despite the child's
tear streaked, grubby face framed by dark, shoulder length
hair, one glance into those Benton eyes was all it took
for Reed to know what Jonah and the other men standing
nearby already suspected.
After five long years, Daniel Benton had been found.
Not his Daniel, Reed reminded himself. The child clothed
in a reservation issue long-tailed red shirt and a hide
loincloth sat hunched over with down-cast eyes. His
expression was as grim as the rest of the captured
Comanche. He was not the innocent toddler he had lost, but
what captivity had made of him.
Staring at Daniel brought everything back to him, all the
old painful memories of his marriage to Becky, the day
Daniel was born at Lone Star, his pride upon hearing that
he had a son. He recalled the plans he had made for their
future, his vow to be a better father than his own. His
promise to his infant son that he would listen to him, to
try and understand, above all to let the boy follow his
heart.
The filthy, half-naked child sitting in the dirt at his
feet was the same little boy he had carried on his
shoulders, taken everywhere with him, tucked in at night.
He had joined the Rangers driven by the need to rescue
Daniel, but over time that incessant, driving need had
ebbed until he believed this day would never come to pass.
So much had happened the night that Daniel was taken that
Reed had a hard time trying to make sense of his feelings.
The man he had been before would have wept for joy. He
would have knelt and embraced his son.
Now not only pain, confusion and uncertainty tempered his
reaction, but so did the knowledge that the years Daniel
spent among the Comanche had done irreparable harm. Reed
didn't know what in the hell to do or to say. His wounds
did nothing but befuddle his dazed mind even more.
"Daniel?" The word caught in his throat and threatened to
choke him. Could the boy understand anything? Did he
remember his name?
Daniel refused to look up. In the midst of the company of
men, aware of little but the throbbing pain in his head
and shoulder, of all the grimfaced Rangers watching him,
Reed reached down, impatiently jerked the rope off the
boy's feet and hauled Daniel up by the arm.
Daniel immediately howled in pain and crumpled, dangling
from Reed's hand. Jonah hurriedly stepped up to them.
"He's hurt, Reed." Jonah lowered his voice for Reed's ears
alone.
Reed closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose,
trying to clear his head. Then he looked down at the boy's
bare legs. One of his ankles was swelling above his beaded
moccasin.
An infant's piercing mournful wail cut the hot, dry air
and brought the reality of the morning's action home.
Close by, fires smoldered as tepees and hides continued to
burn. Smoke tainted the wide, clear blue sky.
"Take him home, Reed. Go back to Lone Star. See the boy
settled in and give your shoulder a chance to heal." Jonah
appeared uneasy, as if there was more he wanted to say but
he held his peace.
Glancing around, Reed ignored the stares of his comrades.
He spoke to the boy again but was ignored, so he wrapped
one around Daniel's waist and scooped him up. Holding him
against his side beneath his good arm, Reed walked passed
the gathering of Rangers. He found his horse, tossed
Daniel up in front of the saddle, somehow managed to keep
hold of the boy and the reins and mounted up.
As soon as he hit the saddle, he suffered an intense wave
of dizziness. chilled and light headed, he ached to lay
down. The last thing he wanted to face in this condition
was the long ride back to the ranch. Nor did he look
forward to seeing his father again--but nothing short of
death was going to stop him from taking Daniel back to
Lone Star.