“He’s doing just fine. He’s been riding fence for a month. Nothing like being young to heal up quick.”

  “And the rest? Pa? Granny?”

  Both Ma and Aunt Sarah nodded. “Fine. They are fine.”

  I waited for someone to say something. Finally Ma said, “The day I wrote you, Mr. Maldonado sent us this.” She began unfolding a telegram which she’d pulled from her drawstring bag.

  I watched the lady behind her twist her neck like an owl, so I said, “En español. La gente nos escucha.” Then Ma handed me the paper instead of reading it out loud.

  BOYS UNHURT. SEND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS US. SEND ONE PERSON. NO RANGERS. NO DEPUTIES. CASH. CARRY RED FLAG. FRANCISCO WILL MEET YOU IN AGUA PRIETA JUNE 1. ASK FOR SR. AGUIRRE.

  “What boys?” I asked, trembling violently as I handed back the worn paper. “Not our—tienen los chicos?” No one needed to say more.

  Mama dropped her face into her hands, shaking with quiet sobs for a few moments. Then she whispered, “Zachary and Ezra had ridden down to Benson, following Doctor Pardee after he’d come to tend Gilbert and pay a call on your sister Rebeccah. Ezra said he wanted to buy me a kerchief for my birthday. They didn’t think anything about the sun going down. They didn’t have any reason not to ride home in the dark.”

  “My brothers? Weren’t they carrying a rifle? And why?”

  “Maybe he just needs the money,” Ma whispered.

  “But that’s fifty years’ worth of pay,” I said. Fifty thousand dollars. Did they think we were the Vanderbilts?

  It only added to the sadness to find out Zack and Ezra had been on my horse Duende when they’d been kidnapped. I looked at Mama’s face, her eyes scanning the scenery, and said, “We won’t get there until tomorrow, Ma. Our stop is after Deming and Lordsburg, so if you watch for those towns, you’ll know we’re close to home. We have hours to go. Do we have a plan? Do we have any money?”

  Aunt Sarah reverted back to Spanish. “Maybe eight thousand.”

  Ma said, “We’ll sell the farm,” as if it were already done, and it shocked me just to hear the words. “You did ask us to come get you if something happened, remember? I’m sorry about taking you away from your schooling.”

  I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “It’s all right. The boys are more important.” Tears filled my eyes and I turned to the window, wiping my face on my sleeve. I turned back to Ma. “I have the deed to the Wainbridge ranch land. Sell that.”

  Suppertime came and we went to eat in the dining car. Ma could hardly swallow, she said. We slept in our seats, heaped together. I woke once to observe Ma and Aunt Sarah, their arms linked and settled together as if the sore feelings between them were gone and forgotten. I imagined the whole thing as if it came to me in black-and-white moving images on a screen. My proud stallion, the two rascals perched on him, and that familiar road to Benson from our place. That curve where the sandy hills gave way to red rock and granite-lined arroyos where we used to pick up Indian arrowheads. So obviously a place for an ambush. Two silly young boys on a single horse would have been arguing or laughing, poking each other, shooting at ground squirrels with a slingshot. Bandidos would have had no trouble, waiting with guns drawn, to force them to hand over the reins and lead them to the Maldonado’s place. Having my brothers taken felt as if part of my very life had been severed somehow. Were they scared? Did they fight? Were they hurt or killed? Surely, surely, Elsa’s papacito would not harm them. Surely he would remember our childhood friendships. I watched Ezra’s eyes widen with shock and Zachary’s mouth contort in pain, perhaps beaten, perhaps hungry and cold.

  “Mary Pearl, why are you crying?” Mama asked.

  “Temo que están muertos. I’m afraid they will die.”

  She said nothing, but turned to the window for a very long time.

  In Benson, just as promised, Pa was at the depot with a wagon. Two Rangers, wearing badges and bandoliers of bullets, scrutinized everyone who got off the train. To my surprise, though, we did not go home but stopped first at Udell Hanna’s place, now my aunt Sarah’s ranch. There were more Rangers there, a deputy from Sheriff Pacheco’s office, most of the hands from her ranch and some of ours, plus my brother Clover and cousin Gilbert. Cousin Charlie was conspicuously absent, but he’d sent word that he was going to come home from West Point and enroll again in the fall. We left Aunt Sarah at her door, then Pa drove Ma and me home.

  Next morning, the kindling lit and crackled right away as I started the morning stove for Mama, put the coffee beans in the roaster, put on the water to boil. Even fire started differently here than in Illinois. I let out a sigh, standing there over the coffee beans as they began to give off their aroma, staring at Ma’s calendar that hung next to the flue pipe and the shelf of dried herbs. I figured we’d be riding out as soon as Pa had breakfast, but he said no, he was going to town, just for the day, be back after midnight tonight. Ma didn’t ask why, and so I wasn’t free to ask, either, but later she told me he meant to mortgage their ranch and try to sell mine.

  * * *

  Since I’d come home, more than a week had passed and we hadn’t done a blessed thing, but we’d had another note from Maldonado’s people. They lowered the money they wanted to twenty-five thousand. No soldiers came with word about our boys.

  By then, all the other students who’d signed up to see the Grand Canyon and take photographs of one of the great wonders of the world, were already on their way home. I had paid my money and lost it. And it had been at my own insistence that I be brought home for any emergency. Ten days had passed and I could have gone on the trip. Could have seen the Grand Canyon instead of sitting here waiting. Not that my brothers weren’t worth missing something for. Not that I didn’t love them. It was just that I felt this terrible dragging of my soul, as if I’d lost more than the photographs I might have taken. I’d lost my plan for solving my bigger problem and my little brothers were still just as gone as ever. It was so frustrating I wanted to holler.

  Rachel and Aubrey were coming for a visit sometime that day, going to spend a couple of nights. I felt cranky. My skirt was too tight. My chemise, too. Granny hadn’t seemed angry or surprised, but she was not Mama, and I woke up thinking about girls I’d heard about who’d been thrown out of the house, long before they could manage on their own. If only I could have taken the photos at the canyon, I could leave as soon as my brothers were safe at home, and go live in Albuquerque. I spent an hour writing a letter to Prairie. That was, after I started it and accidentally wrote, “Dear Elsa,” at the top. I had to fold it and tear off part. Back at school I’d have gotten a new sheet of paper. Here in the Territory every scrap was precious, and you didn’t waste an inch of it. Using my art paper was out of the question, of course. I don’t know why I felt I had to send a cheery note to my friend, but I felt as if it would be my “last known correspondence,” and perhaps if I perished soon, she’d keep it as a remembrance.

  When I came downstairs I couldn’t keep my face from carrying my peevishness, I suspect. All through breakfast, Mama was watching me overmuch. Finally, as we did the dishes with Rebeccah, she asked, “Mary Pearl, are you feeling poorly? You look peaked. Have you been working too hard?”

  “No, Mama, I’m fine,” I lied. “I don’t sleep well worrying about Zack and Ezra. When are we going back to Mexico to get them? Why doesn’t Pa decide?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t sleep well, either.”

  I wrinkled my nose, smiled, and made a humph in my throat, trying to keep myself from tears, adding, “I think I have a touch of the vapors from all the red chili I ate yesterday.”

  Rebeccah said, “Oh, look up the hill. There comes Rache and Aubrey. They must have left before dawn!”

  “How nice,” I said.

  Ma frowned at the expression of disgust I couldn’t hide. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe he’s sold our land.”

  “Too bad they can’t buy it outright. Aubrey and Rachel. Then they could hold the note and sell it back to Clove.”

  Ma hugged me. Then she looked into my eyes and frowned. “Something’s different about you, my girl. You’re too worried. We’ll get them back. I just know it. I have faith. You must turn to faith.”

  I turned away from her gaze, afraid that any moment I’d blurt out what I’d been hiding. “I want to go for a ride,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m going to ride part of the Wainbridge place.” I smirked. “I guess it’s the Mary Prine place, now.”

  By the time I got a horse picked out—there were only a few left on our place, most of them waiting at Aunt Sarah’s, ready to take off to Mexico—a dust trail appeared on the road behind a buggy. With a little hurrying on my part, I could miss saying hello to them for a couple of hours.

  I mounted the mare and planted myself on a beat-up roping saddle. After that big stallion, Duende, this mare felt little and placid, not fiery and bold. She moved pretty smooth, though, and didn’t take more than a nudge to know what I wanted of her. I tickled her sides with my spurs and we took a good run until I was out of sight from our farm.

  I rode across the Wainbridge land, studying every saguaro, every cholla with the ownership I felt. It was my place now. Got down to the cabin, thinking, watching for rattlers and coyotes. Occasionally I looked around to see if anyone followed me or watched from a hillside. On the way there, I felt a rumbling in my belly and guessed I’d be having some wind later, and like a tick of a clock, I pulled the reins. The bubbling feeling was in the same place as before, not moving naturally. I gulped.

  It was the baby moving.

  The horse stood shorter than Duende. I slid off and hit the ground hard and my ankles stung. All I’d ever done, good or bad, as well as everything I’d dreamed of for my future spread before me, as if I could see my entire life laid here in the desert sun. Burnt and curling at the edges. Wasted. This child I carried could be the death of me and I’ve only just begun, I thought.

  I walked to a fallen fence, brushing through brittlebush and prickly pear, feeling but not flinching from the thorns that poked through my brother’s old pants. That horse just stood where she was, docile and drowsy. I stomped back and grabbed her reins, marching uselessly around the outside of the cabin, and she followed me with a sleepy look in her eyes, as if the hot sun were lulling her as it was baking my brains. She just didn’t have half the spunk in her whole heart as my Duende had in one hoof.

  I knocked my boot against the porch and heard a clunk inside. This had been a place that for all my memories had been banned for us children. Never to step on this land nor enter this house. “Well, it’s my house now,” I said aloud. I kicked open the door. It swung in on creaking hinges, barely enough wood in it to call it a door, and when it hit something inside, buckets of dust fell from the rotted timbers. Either a foot or a cannonball had gone through it, and several bullets had peppered both the door and the walls beyond. There wasn’t one whole piece of glass in any window. Cobwebs draped every corner, and a funnel spider had tied a fallen-over chair to the hearth with the biggest spider tube I’d ever seen. In another corner a pack rat had built a mound of cholla burs and corncobs four feet across and two feet high. The people had left behind curtains, an old bedstead, a tin pan worn through the bottom, and a man’s plaid coat hanging on a peg on the wall. I recognized strips of it in the pack rat’s nest, too. I never knew those people, the Wainbridges. They’d left before I could even ride.

  There were only two rooms. Sky showed through the walls. The back room had a fireplace instead of a cookstove. This room wasn’t so shot up, but some kind of critter had left its lifeblood and bones in the middle of the floor, along with tufts of black hair and a skull with jagged teeth. Might have been a skunk, but I never knew anything desperate enough it would eat a skunk. I heard another clunk behind me and drew a pistol. I turned around. Glaring at me as if I were the intruder, a half-grown bobcat sat on his haunches. The iguana in its mouth gave a wiggle and he shook it. “Go on and eat it,” I said. “I didn’t come for supper.”

  I backed away and as I did something crunched under my boot. I kept the pistol aimed at the bobcat, but bent to see what I’d broken. It was a wheel, come off an axle, the kind on the bottom of a baby’s roll-around toy. I looked around again, looking for some other clue. Diaper cloths coated in dust hung in drifts from the ceiling, and strings laden with them had fallen to the floor. A child had lived here! Some poor woman had brought a baby to this. Had it always been a filthy wreck? Maybe the child died. Maybe that was why they gave up and left. “Only things Aubrey Hanna ever gave me is this rattrap old shack and this baby. This land is mine and this child is mine.” I stepped onto the porch and the cat leapt through a window, hightailed it to the chaparral, and disappeared.

  I stood in the doorway imagining that mother long ago looking over the desert shimmering with heat waves, hoping some cloud would drift by, a little rain, something to cool the air. Oh, lord, is this how a mother feels? I’d watched over Ez and Zack all their lives, but I knew they weren’t my children, they were family, but it wasn’t up to me to teach them right from wrong, just to keep them safe and relatively clean enough to eat at the table. I would protect this child, I vowed to myself. And love it. Her. Him. I would choose a name from bold names I knew, and I would carry on and raise this one to be good. Honest. Decent. Nothing like his father.

  After I got back on the saddle, I turned the mare and stared at the place. I said to the horse, “I’ll bet Aubrey got this for about six bits. It’s hotter than a devil’s frying pan, not a speck of wind, and the only thing any woman could do to this house is to burn it down and save ol’ Beelzebub the chore.”

  I headed home, a bit concerned when I saw a rider all in black making fast tracks away from the house. Pretty soon Pa came out the front door with a rifle and shot at the man! I was pretty sure he didn’t hit him, but this was not like Pa. Ma wasn’t at his side, so I kicked the mare into a gallop and didn’t stop until I slid from the saddle at the front porch. Pa’s gun had smoke still curling from the barrel. He had tears in his eyes.

  The rock that had crashed through the biggest glass window we had in the kitchen was inside a note tied around with string.

  Written in ragged hand unlike the neat printing of the first note, it said,

  Be sad wen tu ninos starf to deth. Com soon or next mesig will contan hand of chico.

  Mama bent over her arms on the supper table, wrenched and wailing while Rebeccah sobbed, her arms wrapped around Ma’s back. I didn’t feel like wailing. I felt stiff and angry and determined to set this right. I felt again that strange strength in what my friend had said, that I could swallow all the air in the room, and that it would hold me up against everything else.

  Pa hadn’t had any luck getting a mortgage on the ranch. The banker had told them in no uncertain terms that the place was worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, but their income from selling nuts and fruits wouldn’t pay it back for forty years, and he didn’t expect them to live that long. No one had wanted to buy a piece of it, either, he said, calling both their spread and mine worthless desert, fit for nothing but snakes and lizards. There was no extra money beyond what Clover had scraped together selling the red-wheeled buggy he’d bought last year to go courting in, to—of all people—Aubrey and Rachel.

  That was what they’d arrived in, just as haughty as you please.

  By that evening everything and everybody was settled. Of course, Aubrey and Rachel had no money to contribute to the ransom. Nope, everything was “tied up in bonds,” he said. “Not liquid,” he said. I couldn’t understand what that meant, but I saw the face he made when he explained to me that, no, he didn’t keep his money in a jar. That meant it was untouchable. “Liquid assets,” he said haughtily, “are things like a checking account, or”—he cleared his throat—“your pocket change or pin money.” I had a bank account. He didn’t have to look so smug.

  They begged Ma to come with them and be safe, but she wanted to be home in case the boys got loose and came on their own. The time had come to act, money or no. We’d take what we had for bargaining, and the rest we’d balance with lead.

  Mr. Hanna senior put in some cash. All he had without going to town, he said, was five hundred dollars, but we believed him. I didn’t know him well personally, but if Aunt Sarah thought well of him, that was enough for me. I studied his face a bit, trying to see any of Aubrey’s features in him. Far as I was concerned, the less anyone looked like Aubrey the better. And then it came to me, a realization that might explain everything about that, too. Maybe Mr. Hanna only thought he was Aubrey’s father. Maybe he wasn’t. My own pa wasn’t the son of the pa who raised him. Well, I’ll be. Surely, a sorrel horse isn’t going to produce a buckskin. Plenty of mares jumped fence. I hoped that Aubrey was not really kin to Udell Hanna. That made it easier for me to be courteous to him. By marriage, he was now my uncle. I looked right at him and said, “Uncle Udell, how come Rachel and Aubrey aren’t coming with us?”

  “Aubrey’d not be any use in a gunfight. Reckon his wife might be too delicate for this riding.” Ah, I thought. Maybe she was at last going to have a baby.

  Aunt Sarah whispered to me, “Never mind about them now. We don’t want to have to take care of a tenderfoot with more brass than sense.”

  A large remuda of horses milled in the front round corral. Several of the hands were there, too. Brody sat on a hay bale, a dog at his feet. Now and then the dog would move and he’d pat its head.

  Aunt Sarah and Udell served us steaks and beans with fried eggs and tortillas. There wasn’t room in the house for everyone to sit, but the food was brought to big tables in the yard. By the time we’d finished supper we had almost everything planned. Mama would stay at home, just in case the boys got loose and came home. Gil and Charity would tend Aunt Sarah’s old ranch. Granny was staying at the Hannas’ place, where Aunt Sarah had made her a room of her own. They told me she’d have only some hired hands for company unless I stayed with her.