“I mean to come along,” I said. “I’ve planned it ever since I knew.”

  Pa looked at me like I was a four-year-old, and Clover shook his head like I hadn’t a brain in my skull.

  I stuck out my chin. “Well, if you don’t let me ride with you, I’ll wait back and follow behind.” Everyone’s eyes rolled, except Brody’s. My skirts still fit. They were tight, but they fit. There was no reason I couldn’t go along. I felt just fine and no one knew the truth. “I’ll do what I’m told. Besides, no one here speaks the lingo better than I do.”

  Granny raised her head from over her plate, and said, “Little Gilbert and his wife can keep me company. I’ll be all right. You fetch those boys.”

  Gilbert cringed at being called “little,” but he nodded.

  “The deputies are already headed down to the border,” said Brody. “They’re waiting for us there, and they can’t cross but we can. Maldonado wants one person, but he knows everyone here, so if he sees two or three he knows, he won’t be too surprised. Then we’ll split up and let the rest follow. If eight or ten more are behind, they’d come in handy.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” I said, although even I didn’t believe I’d had that in my head before he said it.

  Pa said, “I want the shadow bunch to stay at the border. Just me and Clover will go to Agua Prieta.”

  Aunt Sarah said, “Should be me and you, Albert. Clover is a good man, but I shoot better than you do.”

  Nobody was of a mind to argue. They knew it was true. My aunt Sarah stacked the dishes and then brought out her gun-cleaning rags and rods. As we worked, nighthawks started their evening swooping, trying to get the mosquitoes before the bats came from their caves. Their trills came from the air around about, echoed from hills to the east, and an owl crossed us overhead on silent wings. Coyotes sang to the moon, a sound that gave an eternity to the place, that life would remain the same even though it wasn’t. How could I have grown up in this land, thinking I was safe and that Pa provided for us, never hungry, never afraid, rarely sick, and the worst thing Ma worried about was a few daffodils? I breathed deeply of the creosote-laden air. Watched a tarantula scaling the water trough near my brother Clove. He picked it up and sent it on its way so it wouldn’t drown.

  I watched the people around me with the interest of an artist, composing the scene, trying not to think that we could lose anyone else. Certainly not Pa. No one spoke for a good while. I wished I hadn’t spent Pa’s money on college. I wished I hadn’t bought hats and dresses and all that camera equipment and the new trunk. I thought about its gleaming leather straps and buckles, filled with costly gelatin plates and stands, but I still had money left from the two thousand that Aubrey had sent. “I brought the deed to six hundred and forty acres, next to Ma and Pa’s place,” I said, breaking the silence. “Can’t we add it to the money?”

  Clover sat up straighter. “I was fixing to ask you if I could buy it, on time of course. I’d be paying you for ten years or more. There’d be no cash in it.”

  “Well, it’s got to be worth something. I’d like to wait on you, Clove, but we have to get the boys back. I’ll give the rest of my money. I’ve got nine hundred and thirty-seven dollars.”

  Pa said, “It wouldn’t be right.”

  I stood. “It is right. I don’t see why I can’t give my money.”

  Aunt Sarah spoke. “Trying to sell land could take months. Even when I knew the railroad wanted Granny’s land, it took a month to get the cash. We don’t know anyone itchin’ to buy any of our land. I’ve got six thousand, three hundred, and nine dollars in cash.” She took a deep breath. “It ain’t twenty-five.”

  “I’ve got a hundred and eighty dollars,” Clover said. “Mary Pearl, would you write down what everyone wants to put in? You have a faster hand than the rest of us put together.”

  In a few moments of flurried activities, a lamp appeared on the outside table, bringing with it a storm of moths and other bugs. By the time I’d taken every name and every amount down, we had a total of nine thousand and sixty-seven dollars.

  Ma said, “Clover, you stay home with me. We’ll load up the wagon and drive to town. We’ll sell the furniture on the streets if we have to. Take everything in the house. The dishes. Every last curtain. Together it ought to bring another two thousand dollars. Maybe.”

  In the middle of people mumbling and talking, I felt like I’d got my back up, hearing her say that. “Wait just a minute. Why do we have to pay him at all? If we’ve got a couple score of deputies, some Arizona Rangers, and the dozen or so of us, and we aren’t fools with a gun, any of us, why are we counting up wages and cash holdings and furniture? What’s he got down there, an army?”

  Pa replied, “The Rangers thought so, Mary Pearl. He’s at least got a dozen or so men, and you don’t know what a gun battle could be like. You don’t know what it’s like to shoot at someone who’s shooting back at you. You aren’t a fool with a gun, but you aren’t a soldier, either.”

  Aunt Sarah patted my arm, her face grim and dark, saying, “It’ll make you old, real quick.”

  Gilbert said, “I don’t see why we don’t just ride in there and shoot them to blazes and take the kids.” That started a whole new round of talking. I held back and listened. It seemed like I’d left a home I knew and come back to a strange place filled with familiar faces, but everything around was upside down and distorted. Dangerous. Out of focus. My head ached. For a few moments, fear overwhelmed me. I wanted to get on my horse and ride, ride far and fast, and to come home again and find it as I’d left it a few months ago. Even a year or so ago. Before Aubrey Hanna had come into our lives, before the railroad and greed had turned our good neighbors, the Maldonados, against us.

  The advent of a single day had turned my life on end again. If only echoed through my thoughts, yet I wasn’t given to wishing on stars or thinking a bent twig or the flight of an owl had meanings other than the bird was on its way and some cow had stepped on the twig. I meant to live my life taking hold of the reins, not drifting in a breeze like a seed.

  In the end, long after deep darkness had settled, long after the sky filled with stars, the moon rose, and the coyotes started a new distant chorus, we simply drove home. There was nothing we could do that night. Nothing. I had been ready to saddle up and ride south at midnight. This doing nothing left me feeling like a loose wheel, purposeless.

  At dawn I was up again and kissed Ma good-bye, taking some cornbread in my pocket. I picked a good mule to ride bareback to Aunt Sarah and Udell’s place. Bats fluttered through the air as we loped along. I was filled with joy to see my granny sitting on their front porch in the half-light, rocking in a chair, wrapped in a shawl against the last coolness this day would hold. “Granny, it’s me. Mary Pearl.”

  “I knows you, honey. You back from Kentucky?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m home.”

  “Sit with me a spell?”

  “That’s why I came.” I pulled my legs under me and sat on the porch at her knee. She rested her gnarled hand on my head a moment, then let it settle on my shoulder. After a long while, I said, “So much has happened, Granny. I feel like I should never have gone off to school. If I hadn’t done that, none of the bad things—”

  “You reckon you’da stopped the kidnappers, single-handed?”

  I had only been thinking of my predicament. My embarazada situation. I brushed away the thought. “Well, I might have been riding with the boys, and I pay more attention to things than they do.”

  “Reckon they will from now on.”

  “Granny? You know you’ve asked me to keep some really big secrets. Suppose I can ask the same of you?”

  “What is it, girl? You got you a fella?”

  I told myself, Stop being so teary-eyed. Stop flying off the handle. But tears filled my eyes anyway. “No’m.”

  After a long silence, she asked, “Some man take advantage of you?”

  I put my head on her knee.

  “Look up here at me, Mary Pearl.”

  I did. Her eyes looked opaque, soft, the lenses indistinct, but staring as if she could see into my soul.

  “You carrying a babe?”

  “Please don’t tell anyone. It would hurt so many people.”

  “That’s what comes of a girl going off on her own. What you plan to do? Run away?”

  “After we get the boys home.”

  At that moment Udell Hanna stepped onto the porch with two cups of coffee in his hands. “Granny, I brought—oh, well, here, Mary Pearl. I’ll go get another for myself.”

  While he was gone, she put her lips next to my ear. “You cain’t hide it fer long.”

  “I know. Everything was all planned. I was going to Albuquerque as a widow when I got done with school. I even thought of getting married quick to someone else. Anybody. But who knows what kind of fellow that would end up being.”

  “Whose baby is it? Someone we know?”

  Udell returned, letting the screen door bang behind him. He had to turn quick and open it again because Aunt Sarah followed him carrying her own cup of coffee.

  I couldn’t answer so I looked toward the hills and said the first thing that popped up under my hat. “Sometimes nothing’s better than coffee on a porch. Smells better than in the house.” The three of them looked at me like I’d said something foolish. “Sorry. I suppose I’m feeling dreamy.”

  Aunt Sarah set her cup on the porch rail and said, “Time to mount up.”

  No more dreams. This was an awe-filled, terrible morning. I felt I could hear Ezra calling me and Zachary crying.

  Pa and Clover rode up. My pa looked like a man I hardly knew, his face crossed with lines and his lips turned in so his mouth was but a slit in his face with bandoliers crossing his chest, one of them full of shotgun shells. An owl hooted from the corner of the roof. Then out of the door came my cousin Charlie.

  “Charlie! You’re here,” I called, as if he needed announcing.

  * * *

  We had five Arizona Rangers riding ahead of us when we started south. I wore Clover’s old clothes and my Stetson work hat so I’d look like a man. A small man, for sure. I was going to wear Joshua’s things, but he’d left home before he was fully grown and they were so tight they actually made my round shape look rounder. I used Josh’s boots, though. My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it over the hoofbeats as we rode. I liked being included with the men and my aunt. She wore her usual split skirt and a wide black Stetson. Aunt Sarah and Pa, Udell, Charlie and Clover, Brody, the Rangers, and two other hands plus myself made fourteen. Brody’s dog, Checkers, followed him everywhere, and he trailed behind us, out of the way of all the hooves.

  We split up the money we came with into seven different saddlebags. It made eleven thousand dollars, total, because the hands all pitched in their pay as well. We also had three mules loaded with camp gear and two more loaded with dynamite sticks and blasting caps. The Ranger boss had made a big speech about who was to do what, and he assigned everybody a job. I know he frowned when he saw me. He figured, I believe, that I was either a girl who’d scream and faint or a boy without any mettle.

  With hard riding it would take two days to get to the border, and another day and a half for Pa and Aunt Sarah to reach Agua Prieta. I knew that the main reason I had been allowed to come along was that I could speak the lingo like a native, but I hoped to be of help in other ways. Silly thing was, you’d think a girl would be assigned to cooking, but that was not the case. One of the Rangers was their cook and they made me second wrangler alongside Brody. I figured he’d probably want to be boss, but I didn’t care. This was about anything I could do no matter how small, to get my brothers home.

  By midafternoon one of the hands declared his horse was played out and lame. We found a spot by a dry creek to camp, but Pa wanted to push on. He and Charlie got to bickering about killing the horses by hard riding against killing the boys by resting. Charlie could see my pa was just plain rattled by the whole thing, but he said another few hours in the heat of the day wouldn’t change anything that happened tomorrow. Brody took a shovel and began digging under a paloverde, taking turns with Clover, and before long what had only been a damp spot became a small pool. We let the horses drink first, in case there wouldn’t be enough, but thankfully it kept running and I was purely happy to have a fresh, cool canteen of that little well.

  Just as I was about to take a drink, Aunt Sarah snatched it from me. “Boil first,” she said. “Always boil first. You know that. We’ve got the fire going and the tub is ready. Pour that in it and Oscar will tell us when it’s hot enough. What’s wrong with you, Mary Pearl? You look plumb wore out already, like you softened up sitting in a classroom.”

  “Just tired. I forgot about water. I just wanted a cool drink; it’s so blessed hot.”

  She looked at me with suspicion, asked, “They don’t have typhoid in Illinois?” and I turned to settling the horses and pulling up feed bags.

  That evening, the sun seemed to never set. We were all steaming with sweat, but we lit a fire and boiled drinking water, and some drank it warm. It made me feel sick, as if it would come back up. Around the beans and tortillas, without even a grain of salt for flavoring, we talked awhile as the shadows lengthened and a few of the men put out bedrolls. I laid mine between Pa’s and Aunt Sarah’s, because I could tell by the stares I got from some of the men that they’d figured out I was a girl and were none too happy to have me along. Voices stayed low. No one brought out a guitar and settled the sun with a song. This was unlike any herd-gathering or ranch work, where we’d ride fence all day and settle in on the ground until sunup. A soft rhythmic sound came from the Rangers’ campfire, and when I asked Charlie what it was, he said they were sharpening their knives. In the somber shades of dusk, serenaded by two packs of coyotes in opposite corners of the world, we quit talking all at once, and everyone crept into their private thoughts.

  “Aunt Sarah?” I whispered.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Why did Pa wait so long to come down here?”

  “He was trying to get the place mortgaged. He sent a man to Maldonado’s old place and told them to carry a message to him in Mexico, to please wait. That day he drove us to town to catch the train, he sent two telegrams as well.”

  “I think we should have all gone down with the soldiers.”

  “Soldiers have a different way of doing things. So do the Rangers. They are going to hold back and let your pa go ahead and try to reason with them. Albert is hoping Maldonado will listen to him, since we’d been friends for so long.”

  “You and I are the only ones who talk the lingo good enough to know.”

  “Well, Rudolfo Maldonado speaks plenty of English, too. I reckon your pa can make his point.”

  “Why do you think ‘El’ turned so mean?”

  “Don’t know. Reckon a man that’s got everything he could ever buy, sometimes wants things he can’t buy. Power. And maybe he went crazy with guilt after he accidentally shot Elsa.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Are you feeling better? You seem out of sorts.”

  “Do I?” I inhaled. Was there some way I was behaving that would give away my secret before we got home? “I’m fine. Do I look sick, or something?”

  “No. Pretty as ever. Maybe it’s the men’s baggy clothes on you. I’d gotten used to seeing you looking all grown up with a nice figure and all those pretty dresses from Illinois, and here you are dressed like a down-and-out caballero.”

  I touched my belly. It was only slightly more rounded than usual. “Ma always said I looked like her sister Ulyssa. Do you think so?”

  “You resemble her quite a bit. At least, from when I first knew her.”

  “How come Mama doesn’t ever talk about her except to say, ‘God bless her soul, the poor thing,’ and then go on about something else? I figure she did something sinful Mama doesn’t want to recall.”

  “No. She never did anything wrong. She had some trouble. Then she caught the consumption and died.”

  “Trouble like in school?”

  “Mary Pearl, let’s don’t talk about it.”

  “See? That’s what Mama always does.”

  I could hear a noise, a shuffling. Then I saw my aunt’s eyes reflecting the last glimmers of the firelight. She’d rolled over to face me and had to prop up on an elbow to see over Checkers’s back. “She was set upon by two men who left her no choice, and it destroyed her mind.”

  I stifled a moan, wary of the night air’s way of carrying sound. It was some minutes before I could talk again. “The poor girl. Did she give them any justice?” I pictured Aubrey’s blood running to the floor. Felt the knife hilt in my grip. Heard again the crash of the mirror he broke to hide his cruelty. Wished again I’d killed him.

  “I shot ’em. Now, go to sleep.”

  “Yes’m.” I thought how she’d said that killing a man made you old before your time. Saw again the startling face of the bandito with the red dot between his eyes. I thought what it would be like to actually do it. To carry the knowledge that you’d deprived a human of life, just like you’d butchered a calf. I’d never even stayed around for that. Always hid in the house until it was time to hang the meat. I didn’t mind meat. Just didn’t want to see the calf killed. I wondered if I could pull a trigger if I needed to. I marveled that my aunt had, and more than once. I guess I could have killed Aubrey after he hurt me, and I was mad enough to do it, but I didn’t have heart to do it now. That was murder. Surviving things, though, that’s what made a woman tough like my aunt. It wasn’t that long ago that the family had fought Geronimo and Ulzana at every turn.

  This being on the tear with a neighbor wasn’t near so bad. Surely we wouldn’t have to actually shoot anyone. After a while, I said, “You’ve shot a few in your time.”

  “Go to sleep, Mary Pearl.”

  Maybe I wasn’t a strong person. Maybe I couldn’t stand up to things any better than Ulyssa had. Maybe I’d lose my mind. Maybe Ulyssa had a baby after what happened, and that caused her to be touched. I reached out and petted Checkers and he startled. I kept my hand still, though, so he’d know it wasn’t a threat. The dog turned his muzzle toward me and dropped his head back on his paws. “Good dog, Checkers.” I was glad to have him lying there, but I stayed awake a long time, thinking about what it might take to lose a person’s wits.