Johnny climbed the stairs to his room. He was fully recovered now – he'd had worse than the wound from Pardee's bullet plenty of times. A few hours riding today hadn't bothered him. He felt fine but Murdoch had insisted he go upstairs to rest for a while before supper. Strange how the old man fussed. Johnny had no illusions about Murdoch Lancer. The man had needed Johnny Madrid's gun – alright, and arms and legs and guts – and had done a deal. There was no sentiment behind it. Johnny knew that Lancer would honor his side of the bargain and he, Johnny, was prepared to put in the work that he knew part-ownership of a ranch would entail. The three of them were going to the lawyer's in Morro Coyo tomorrow to sign the partnership agreement. But it was a business partnership. He and Murdoch Lancer would be working partners, nothing more. How could they be anything more? Murdoch had made that impossible twenty years before when he'd turned his wife and son out.
Sure, Lancer claimed differently. And there was that story Teresa had told him about his mother running off. Johnny didn't think for a moment that Teresa had lied. The kid believed what her father had told her, and so she should. But Johnny believed his mother's story. It made no sense otherwise. Why would a woman leave a home like this to go to the poverty the two of them had lived in as long as Johnny could remember?
Johnny opened the door of his bedroom and went in, then stopped. His bedroom? That was something he would have to check. He'd been shown into this room the first evening to clean up and change after fighting the fire Pardee had lit and he'd stayed in it since but it looked like a guest room. It was large and well-furnished, one of the best rooms in the house from what he'd seen. They might not want him occupying it permanently. He'd ask Teresa. She managed all the household arrangements. In fact, he'd go do that right now. He turned around and went back out into the hallway. Now there was a nice piece of luck – Teresa was just coming out of her own room further down.
"Hey, Teresa," he called.
"Hey Johnny, how are you feeling?"
"I'll feel a lot better when people stop asking me how I'm feeling," he said half laughing and half exasperated. "I'm fine, better, fit and well, recovered… "
"Alright, I get the idea," Teresa laughed back. "I'll start thinking of you as hale and hearty from now on."
"Good," declared Johnny. "Oh, and if you could convince everyone else as well, I'd appreciate it. But hey, what I was going to ask you was, what room do you want me to stay in? "
"Why, you can have any room in the house, Johnny. You don't like this one?" she asked.
"Yeah, I like it fine," he answered, "only I thought that since I'm going to stay on here, you might not want me to keep using it. I mean, it looks like one of the best rooms. And there are things being stored in it, as well," he added.
"What things?" Teresa looked puzzled.
"In this trunk over here," Johnny said, going back into the room and walking over to a carved trunk standing below one of the windows. "It's full of packages. I didn't go looking into them," he put in quickly. "I wasn't being nosy, I just opened the trunk when I was looking for somewhere to stow my saddle bags. But they'll belong somewhere, won't they?"
"Packages?" Her brow cleared. "Oh, those are your Christmas presents!"
"Christmas presents?" Johnny was baffled.
"Yes, and your birthday presents too, I guess. Scott's were sent to him in Boston, of course, but Murdoch didn't know where you were for so long, so every Christmas he'd just put your present alongside mine in the drawing room," Teresa explained. "After we all – Murdoch and my father and me – had opened ours, your father would take yours upstairs and put it here in your room."
"My room? This one?" His mind was beginning to whirl.
"Yes, this was always your room, Johnny, and the one next door was always Scott's," she told him. "Even when the house was full of guests, your father would never let them be used by anyone else. And he insisted Juanita keep both rooms aired and the beds made up. He wanted your places to be ready for you any time you walked through the door." She opened the lid of the trunk and knelt down by it. "See, they're all labelled. Here's the one from last Christmas. Your father brought that back with him from a trip to Chicago last year, just before Pardee started raiding Lancer. And they go right back." She stood up and smiled at him. "You've got a lot of unwrapping to do. I'll let you get on with it." With a quick touch on his shoulder she slipped out the door.
Johnny watched her go, then knelt down beside the trunk in his turn. He reached for the top package then on impulse scrabbled down to the bottom of the pile instead. The first ones would be underneath. He was curious to see how far back they did go; when Lancer had started this. He pulled up a package and looked at the date written on the wrapping paper. Christmas 1850. That must have been not long after Murdoch had turned him and his mother out. He opened the package. It was a toy horse, made of leather and stuffed with straw, he guessed. The vaqueros' kids had toys like it. It would have been just right for the two-year-old he would have been then. He reached back in the trunk to fish out another package.
This one had a date on it: his fourth birthday. It was a wooden box with six tin soldiers inside. He gave a half-ashamed grin; the toys made him think of his dumb remark to Scott that second day they were here. But he sure would have loved them back then. He kept on pulling out the parcels, unwrapping them one by one.
There were more kid's toys in the early years, then fancier stuff. A leather tube sort of like a telescope had him puzzled for a moment then he realized what it was as he put it to his eye and saw a brilliant coloured pattern. He'd seen one before; a travelling magician had had one. A kally-something, he'd called it. The fellow had let the kids of the village take turns looking into it. Johnny had gazed astonished when his turn came but he only had a moment to look before the other boys grabbed it off him. It was the same as always: a half-breed wasn't allowed a share. Johnny had been pushed aside and just stood and watched and listened to the "oohs" and "ahs" from the others. Left out. And yet all the time, he'd owned one himself, and didn't even know it.
There were books. The first one was bound in green leather with the title embossed in gold. Sure different from the Beadles that were the only books he'd ever owned. 'Ivanhoe' it was called. He opened it and saw writing on the fly-leaf: "To my son, John Lancer, on his twelfth birthday, from Murdoch Lancer." More books followed. Other things, too: a jack-knife with a mother-of-pearl handle, a saddle blanket embroidered all over in Mexican style, with the initials JL in the corner. But the books kept coming: 'The Talisman', 'Oliver Twist' and others, all of them leather-bound, all with inscriptions inside. He stacked them on the table. Maybe he could figure some way of storing them neatly later. He went back to the packages. Hey, this one felt heavy. Christmas 1864. He pulled away the paper and grinned. A pair of solid marble bookends. The old man thought of everything. He lined the books up. The bookends were carved in the shape of horses' heads and his library looked as smart as ol' Boston's, he reckoned. He grinned again. Imagine that, Johnny Madrid with a library. Then he sobered. He picked up one of the books and looked at the fly-leaf again. "To my son, John Lancer." Johnny Madrid didn't have a library, John Lancer did.
Finally he opened the package Teresa had pulled out of the trunk, the one Murdoch had got for him just last Christmas. Whoo-ee, spurs, and beautiful ones. Double mounted silver engraved with swirl patterns. His old iron spurs were well scratched and battered; they hadn't been new when he'd got them five or six years ago and they'd had hard use since then. He'd keep them for working around the ranch but these silver beauties would be the thing when he went into town. His pa couldn't have chosen a better gift. He pulled up his thoughts. Murdoch Lancer, he meant. These weren't gifts chosen by a father for a son, these were… what were they?
Johnny sat still, looking at the pile of gifts, a pile built up over years. A pile of objects that spoke louder than any words and shouted an inescapable conclusion at him.
A man didn't buy Christmas presents for someone he'd turned out of his home. A father didn't inscribe books to a son he didn't want.
Murdoch Lancer hadn't turned him out.
All those years, Murdoch had wanted his son – his son, John Lancer.
It was hard to think of himself as John Lancer. As far back as he could remember, he'd been Johnny Madrid and it was John Madrid who would own a third of the ranch tomorrow; he'd said the first night that he wanted the name Madrid on the deed of partnership and Murdoch had agreed to it. And yet when he'd faced off with Day Pardee, he had declared, "It's not Madrid." He had almost surprised himself with his own words as he spoke but he'd realized by then, deep down, that if Lancer was his land then he needed to be Lancer.
There'd been no time to answer Day's challenge then but perhaps the time had come now. Johnny had never wanted to use the name of a father who had rejected him but if Murdoch Lancer hadn't rejected him after all, hadn't turned his son out of his home, well, that made things different, didn't it? If that was the case, there was no reason why Johnny shouldn't use his father's name.
He didn't have to, of course. The agreement would stand. Johnny Madrid could have a share of one of the finest ranches in California: cattle, horses, land.
But Johnny Lancer could have a father as well.
Next morning all four of them went into Morro Coyo for the signing of the deed of partnership, Murdoch and Teresa in the buckboard, Scott and Johnny on horseback. Johnny rode the palomino he'd broken the first morning. The palomino's saddle blanket showed the initials 'JL' and Johnny Lancer was wearing the silver spurs his father had given him for Christmas.