The Outlaw And The Runaway. Tatiana March

down a blanket from his bedroll.

      “Don’t draw attention,” Saldana complained.

      “All right,” Roy admitted. “It was a stupid mistake.”

      And yet he couldn’t regret what he had done. The girl was a puzzle he wanted to solve. And witnessing her misery had tugged at something inside him, some faint remnant of sentimentality and compassion. He knew what it felt like to be ostracized, to be treated like an outcast. Whatever transgressions the girl might have committed, she didn’t deserve such a public humiliation.

      “What do you want me to do?” Saldana asked.

      Roy hesitated. The sensible thing would be to escort the girl home and ride away before the townspeople had a chance to get a closer look at him, but doing the sensible thing seemed to be eluding him today. “Take the horses to the water trough by the saloon and make sure they drink their fill. I won’t be long. Half an hour at the most. Then we’ll leave, head north toward Prescott.”

      Saldana’s narrow face puckered in dismay. “No dancing?”

      “No dancing,” Roy replied, and tried to mollify the Mexican by appealing to his vanity. “You’re too handsome. The ladies would remember you.”

      Saldana smirked, tapped his eyebrow to indicate the black patch Roy wore over his left eye—a feature far more memorable than a neatly trimmed moustache or a seductive smile.

      “My eye patch don’t matter,” Roy told him. “You’ll understand later.”

      He left Saldana to deal with the horses and returned to the girl. She was sitting on the ground, arms wrapped around her upraised knees, watching him stride over. Roy spread out the blanket beside her, gestured for the girl to move onto it and settled opposite her, one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee, the hems of his long duster flaring about him.

      “Thank you,” the girl said. She started to unpack the contents of her basket. “It was a gallant thing to do, to rescue me from standing out there like a convict in front of a firing squad.” She kept her face averted, the words spoken barely loud enough for Roy to hear.

      Not wasting any time, he got on with solving the puzzle she presented. “Why didn’t anyone else bid? What do the townsfolk have against you?”

      The girl didn’t reply. She merely handed him a piece of fried chicken wrapped in a linen napkin and refused to meet his gaze. At her reticence, Roy let his irritation show. “Wipe that red muck from your face,” he told her curtly. “You don’t need it.”

      Still she didn’t speak. Not acting insulted or angry, she pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in her skirt, uncapped the bottle of lemonade she had lifted out of the basket and tilted the bottle to dampen the scrap of cotton. With movements that were slow and deliberate, she lifted the handkerchief to her face and rubbed her cheek clean of the rouge, finally turning to face him squarely.

      Roy stared. It hadn’t occurred to him that every time he’d seen the girl, she’d presented him with the same side of her face. Now he understood the reason. The other side of her face bore a scar. Not a great blemish by any means, but an unusual one. Two lines of pale, slightly puckered skin that formed a cross, and beneath it an incomplete circle, as if someone had drawn some kind of a symbol on her cheek.

      “That’s why they didn’t bid?” Roy frowned at the idea. “But the scar on your face is hardly noticeable. It certainly is not unsightly.”

      When the girl showed no reaction, when she merely contemplated him with a pinched, forlorn expression on her pretty features, Roy decided not to press the topic for now. Lowering his attention to the piece of chicken in his hand, he took a bite and spoke around the mouthful.

      “This is good, very good.”

      After a moment of enjoying the food, he glanced up at the girl. Appearing more in control of herself now, she was studying him—his eye patch, to be more accurate. So that was it. That’s why she had stared at him with such intensity—in him she had identified a fellow sufferer of some physical deformity.

      “How did you get the scar?” Roy asked gently.

      “I fell against a stove when I was small. The hatch had a decorative pattern. A cross, like a plus sign, and a circle at the end of each spoke. Part of the pattern burned to my skin.”

      “It’s very faint. Hardly worth worrying about.”

      “I know.” Her voice was low. “When I grew up, the scar faded. The skin is a bit puckered, but the blemish isn’t terribly obvious. Not enough to ruin my appearance. But out here in the West the sun is stronger. The scar doesn’t tan, and I like taking walks in the desert. As my face got browner and browner from the sun, the scar stood out more and more...and then the bishop came...”

      The girl fell silent and darted a glance toward the crowd, where a teenage boy was playing “Oh! Susanna” on a violin and the others were singing along.

      “The bishop?” Roy prompted. “Is he the tall man dressed in black?”

      “That’s the preacher, Reverend Fergus. The bishop is his superior.” Abandoning any pretense of eating, the girl folded her legs to her chest again and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Have you ever heard of a satanic cross?”

      Roy met her gaze, unease stirring within him. “Can’t say that I have.”

      “It’s a cross with an upside-down question mark at the base.” The girl touched her fingertips to her cheek. “Like the open circle at the end of my scar. The bishop came out to bless the new church a few months ago. He is a fanatic, and he told people that I bear the mark of the Devil on my face.”

      Startled, Roy lifted his brows. “And they believe him?”

      The girl’s lips twisted into a disparaging smirk. “I don’t think they really do. I think they want the reverend to tell them it is all complete nonsense, but he is a weak, spineless man, and he doesn’t have the courage to contradict his bishop.”

      Roy swallowed. The chicken had lost its flavor. Now he could understand those questioning glances the townsfolk had been sending to the preacher while Celia stood holding up her lunch basket, and why the reverend had been pretending not to notice them.

      “I wish I could help you,” he told her quietly. “But I can’t.”

      “I know. I am grateful for this.” The girl released one arm from around her knees to gesture to the lunch basket. “I’m supposed to collect your five dollars and hand it in, but I won’t do it. I’ll tell them I forgot. I know it’s petty, but it will make me feel better.”

      “If you like, you can tell them I refused to pay.”

      She let out a bleak gust of laughter. “If I do that, they’ll say it’s because I served you a lousy meal, so it will end up being my fault anyway.”

      “Don’t...” Roy shook his head. Don’t beat yourself up so.

      “It’s the same everywhere,” the girl went on bitterly, the words flooding out on a wave of anguish. It seemed to Roy that the hurt had festered, and now it was gushing forth like a boil that needed lancing. “Back in Baltimore, no man would marry me, because my mother was sickly. They feared I’d be the same, and they’d be lumbered with a useless wife and a stack of doctor’s bills. Then my mother died...”

      Pausing to draw a breath, the girl dashed the back of her hand across her eyes. “My father has a growth in his stomach, a cancer, and he worries about me being left on my own, so he brought me out here, where women are scarce. To start with, everything went well. I had two suitors, Stuart Clifton from one of the ranches, and Horton Tanner, who works for the stage line and comes by twice a week. No knights on a white stallion but good, decent men...and then that blasted bishop comes along and ruins it all...”

      Memories of being shunned flooded over Roy, bringing with them a wave of pain, even now, after half a lifetime. He swept a glance around the