Disclaimer:  I don’t own them.  I just borrow them on occasion and then try to remember to return them. 

Note:  This short piece was written in honor of Wayne Maunder’s upcoming birthday.  Sorry, Johnny Ladies, but he only gets a brief mention here.  This piece is not betaed, so any and all mistakes are mine.  Any and all feedback is welcome, although not necessary.  I welcome constructive criticism, as will help me to improve my writing skills.  Thank you for reading.  I hope you enjoy.

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He was going to be six in just another day.  Grandfather said that he was getting to be a big boy.  He did not think he was so big, not compared to Billy Braden and Jack Sooner.   They were much bigger than he and they were the school bullies.  They teased him all the time about how he talked and how he acted – at least he was polite, they were rude and cruel.

He thought about Grandfather’s friend that had come on his fifth birthday.  The man was so tall and so big ­– it was like looking up at a giant.  Scott wondered what it would be like to have a giant like that as his father.  The man was bigger than the oldest boys at his school.  Lately Scott had been pretending that the man was his father and would someday come get him.  In this fantasy, his father had come to tell him that he was sailing around the world on one of the ships that Scott had seen at the docks.  When his travels were over, he would take Scott to live on a grand ranch in California.  It was wonderful pretending that it was all true, but it was terrible when the pretending was over and he had to remember that his father didn’t want him. 

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Tomorrow would be his sixteenth birthday.  Without telling Grandfather, he had sent an invitation to Murdoch Lancer, Morro Coyo, Calififornia.  He had done so on an impulse.  There was no use hoping to hear from the man.  After all, it had been nearly sixteen years and Scott had not seen nor heard from Murdoch Lancer in all that time, at least not as far as he knew.   What would it hurt to sending the invitation?  Maybe the man would come out a sense of guilt.

Scott pictured it in his mind.  Murdoch Lancer would come to the door, hat in his hands, show the invitation so he could come in; then seeing Scott, he would fall to his knees and beg forgiveness. 

‘If it happened,’ Scott thought, ’would I be able to forgive him?’ 

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Scott looked around at the beautiful pastures, the mountains in the distance, and the buildings and the hacienda spread out in the foreground.  This was the place he dreamed of when he was just a small child.  He had pictured this place in his fantasies when he dreamed his father would come to get him.  Now that place was a reality.

His father had not come to Boston to get him; he’d sent a Pinkerton agent instead.  There had been money to pay his travel expenses and a promise of more – one thousand dollars – when he would spend one hour with Murdoch Lancer.  Upon arriving in Morro Coyo, he’d learned that the young man that had been picked up on the road was his half-brother.  What a surprise!

Now they were entering the house and the young girl that had been in Morro Coyo to meet them, or as she explained, to meet him for they had not expected Johnny, showed them to the room where they would meet with Murdoch Lancer.

Oh, my, his fantasy had come true – more or less – for the giant of a man that had been at his fifth birthday party was indeed his father.

‘I have to be more careful about what I wish for in the future,’ Scott thought as the man gave a curt synopsis of why Grandfather raised him and not Murdoch.

The End

Paula Richard

12/18/2011