There was no holding Judy back after that. She seized the boy by the tail of his T-shirt while Danny turned on him.
“I know you, Buck Lester,” he announced. “You ran away from the orphanage two years ago. What’d you come back for and where’d you find that lady stick?”
The boy seemed frightened by the question.
“What’s it to you, Danny?” he asked, not looking at Judy or Horace. “I’ve got a job, and I have to do what my boss tells me.”
“Did your boss tell you to throw that thing in the water?” Judy asked. “It’s a valuable table leg. Don’t you know the whole table’s over there in that house?” Judy waved her hand toward the house with the boarded-up windows.
“That’s my house. My father’s there,” Danny began, but a voice stopped him.
“No, son, I’m right here,” Mr. Anderson said, coming through the trees. “I can’t take you home until the police have hauled all that stolen stuff back to Roulsville where the owners can claim it. But we can go and see Ma, as you call her in your letters. How would you like it if she became your real mother and we were a family again?”
Danny hesitated a moment. Then he said, without emotion, “I’d like it fine.”
They looked at each other then, and the years they had been separated seemed to evaporate like the morning mist over the pond. With his arm around his son, George Anderson turned to Judy.
“I guess I owe you an apology,” he began, but she interrupted.