Mustang Moon

by Terri Farley

  “Oh,” Rachel said again, eyes sliding toward the cheerleader. “I guess the little cowgirl”—she pronounced it cow gull, and studied Sam’s shoes as if looking for traces of manure—“can’t be expected to know Ms. Santos is our principal.”

  Cowgirl. Sam swallowed hard. At River Bend Ranch, she would consider that description a compliment. Here at school, from Rachel, it clearly wasn’t.

  On the other hand, cowgirls were tough. They stood up to trouble.

  “You’re right,” Sam said, lifting her chin just a little. “I’ve been going to school in San Francisco and I don’t know a lot of the local people.”

  “San Francisco?” asked the cheerleader.

  “San Francisco isn’t London, honey,” Rachel said, but the snub fell short when Mr. Blair interrupted.

  “Rachel’s grasp of geography is quite astounding,” he said. Then he glanced at the classroom clock and back at Sam. “Run over to the office and schedule that interview.”

  Sam grabbed her notebook, wondering what in the world she’d ask Ms. Santos if she was available.

  Think fast, Sam ordered herself. She’d been on her middle school newspaper. She could do this.

  So what if she didn’t have time to make a list of questions or review what a “back-to-school” interview should include?

  With determined steps, Sam headed toward the door.

  “Don’t be surprised if she puts you off until tomorrow,” Mr. Blair called. “I have a feeling Ms. Santos is rather busy today, Samantha.”

  Sam was headed toward the door, when Rachel’s silky laughter came after her.

  “Samantha. See, Daisy, you lose. You thought she was a boy.”

  Chapter Eight

  SAM WAVED GOOD-BYE to Jen, then started the long walk home.

  Late August sun shone on the bare nape of her neck as if yesterday’s storm had never happened. It didn’t feel like the one-hundred-degree day Dad had wished for, but it was plenty hot.

  Sam grumbled to herself. This walk ought to count as a chore. It wouldn’t, of course. She’d need to check the hens’ nests for eggs and make sure the animals were fed. Monday was also laundry day. Even though Gram had a perfectly good clothes dryer, she hung fresh laundry on a clothesline. She expected Sam to take it down and fold it. Sam lengthened her stride, hurrying. She had to admit that her sun-dried sheets always smelled better than those tumbled in the dryer.

  Something moved.

  Sam stopped. Because it could be the Phantom, she didn’t turn to face the movement. Instead, she stood still, letting her eyes search until they found a rabbit crouched on his haunches, watching. It was close enough that she saw its nose twitch.

  When Sam started walking again, the sand-colored rabbit launched itself across the desert in the opposite direction.

  It could have been the Phantom, but it wasn’t. Sam’s heart sank as she remembered last night. The Phantom had come to her, rearing against a turmoil of stars and lightning, but she hadn’t been able to go to him.

  How unfair. Sam lengthened her stride as she grew angry. Not only was she grounded, she hadn’t even done the thing she was being punished for.

  There was no use talking to Dad. She could only hope the Phantom spotted her on one of these afternoon hikes home.

  Thoughts of the stallion pulled at her heart.

  She remembered the tickle of his whiskery muzzle as he’d nuzzled her hand when they both stood in the river. She remembered that amazing day at the Willow Springs corrals, when he’d put aside his hatred of humans to rest his great, heavy head on her shoulder.

  Sam was almost home when she heard hooves and saw Buddy streaking toward her.

  “What are you doing out here?” she shouted.

  The calf kept coming at a clumsy run, her front legs running to the right while her rear legs swung left. Ross, a River Bend cowboy, rode behind her at a lope.

  Sam realized the big-eyed calf had no intention of stopping, so she braced her feet apart. Even though Sam was standing firm as Buddy plowed into her, the calf nearly knocked her down.

  “Settle down, girl,” Sam said.

  Buddy curled around her, streaking Sam’s new jeans with dust. The calf walked two laps before stopping and finally pressing against Sam’s side to face Ross.

  “Good girl, Buddy,” she crooned. “You’re safe.”

  Sam slung her arm over Buddy’s neck, brushing her fingers over the plush red fur. The calf trembled.

  As she looked up at Ross, Sam wondered if he was shaking, too. She’d never met anyone so shy. Ross’s downcast eyes told Sam she might have a better chance getting an answer from Tank, Ross’s flop-eared bay horse.

  “What happened?” Sam asked.

  “Got out,” Ross mumbled.

  Sam nearly laughed. It had cost the big cowboy so much to tell her what she already knew.

  “It’s a good thing I came along when I did,” Sam said.

  The cowboy nodded. “Want a rope?” He touched the lariat coiled and strapped to his saddle.

  “If you go ahead of us, back to the ranch, I think she’ll follow me in,” Sam said.

  Without a word, Ross spun the cow pony away.

  In appreciation, Buddy rubbed her muzzle against Sam’s white shirt. Sam looked down at the smear of grassy slobber.

  “Yeah, you’re welcome,” Sam said.

  She finished the long walk home with the calf tagging along at her side.

  At dinner, Gram and Dad asked endless questions about her first day of school.

  “English, history, and journalism, I feel fine about,” Sam told them. “And I had a good Spanish teacher last year in San Francisco.”

  “That will be a help,” Gram said, passing Sam another slice of the whole wheat bread she’d baked that afternoon. “Did you see Maxine Ely?”

  “She’s my history teacher,” Sam said. “She must have recognized me. She sort of smiled when she called my name during roll.”

  “She’s a good woman,” Dad said, but he sounded preoccupied.

  “Don’t you have a few other classes?” Gram insisted.

  Sam knew what Gram was asking. During the last two years, when they’d communicated by letters, Sam hadn’t been shy in telling Gram she was a terrible, hopeless, thick-headed math student.

  “P.E. and algebra,” Sam admitted.

  In fact, she dreaded her gym class almost as much as math class. Darton High required students to shower after gym. Both Rachel and Daisy were in Sam’s P.E. class, and she had no desire to stand in the same locker room with those beauty queens.

  “You be sure to ask for extra help in algebra,” Gram said, “if you need it.”

  Sam knew she’d need it. Still, she couldn’t help being irritated that Gram was waiting for her to fail.

  A wave of weariness washed over Sam. She stifled a yawn. She had finished the first two chapters in her journalism book during study hall, so her only other homework was to cover her textbooks. After that, she wanted to climb into bed.

  “Buddy got out again,” Dad said.

  Sam’s weariness vanished as if Dad had tossed a bucket of water her way. “I know. I caught her.”

  “Next time, you might not,” Dad said.

  “I don’t think—” Sam began.

  “Now, hush,” Gram said. “It wasn’t your fault. That calf’s just trying to do what’s natural. She wants to be with the other cattle.”

  Most of the other cattle will die soon, Sam thought.

  “But Buddy’s different,” Sam said. “Dad told me so, just this morning.” Sam stared at her father for confirmation.

  “I did,” Dad said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m softheaded.”

  “Just softhearted,” Gram said, looking amused.

  Dad ignored her. “Buddy needs branding.”

  Sam shivered, remembering the smell of the small fire of dried sagebrush and the sound of white-hot branding irons clinking against each other. As a child, the stink of burning hair hadn’t bothered her a
s much as the bleating of the calves. She’d imagined they were crying to their mothers.

  Now, she was Buddy’s mother.

  “It’s going to hurt,” Sam said, wincing.

  “It always does,” Dad said, “but just for a minute and not nearly as much as getting caught up with someone else’s herd and butchered.”

  That was the point of a brand. Thousands of red, white-faced cattle wandered the range. Even when they were gathered together, they were impossible to tell apart. Cowboys might remember a steer with a crumpled horn or a cow freckled with white, but such differences were rare.

  A brand guaranteed each rancher moved his own cattle to summer pasture.

  “If you’re serious about keeping her,” Dad added, “we should do an ear mark, too. That way riders can see who she belongs to from horseback, when the herd’s packed together tight.”

  “I’m serious about keeping her,” Sam said.

  “We’ll do it this weekend.” Dad pushed his chair back from the table. Sam heard him plop into his recliner in the living room.

  Sam felt the prickle of tears. Sure, Dad could just go off and forget. Branding Buddy meant nothing to him.

  She knew it had to be done to protect Buddy, but when they seared the calf’s skin with a branding iron, they were burning her and creating a scar.

  “You know,” Gram said, as the television clicked on in the other room, “it would only take him a few minutes to brand Buddy while you were at school. He’s waiting for the weekend so you can comfort her when it’s over.”

  “I know,” Sam said. “And I know it has to be done, but I don’t have to like it.”

  By the time she finished washing dishes, dusk had fallen, but Sam still went out to visit Buddy.

  Buddy didn’t want to visit. In the middle of the pasture, she stopped grazing, looked at Sam, and flicked her tail as if shooing a pesky fly. She turned her attention back to the grass.

  “Okay for you,” Sam muttered, then walked toward the small corral beside the barn.

  Ace nickered when he saw her coming.

  “No carrots,” Sam confessed, holding her palms open as she approached.

  Sweetheart blew through her lips and shuffled away from the fence rails, but Ace remained.

  He looked a little scruffy. Since she hadn’t ridden him today, she hadn’t brushed him, and the little mustang loved the massage of the rubber brush.

  “You are spoiled, you know.” Sam led him into the barn, turned on the light, and began grooming.

  As she brushed, Sam turned from telling the bay gelding how pretty he was, to confiding her worries. She could tell Ace her troubles and not worry that he’d tell anyone else.

  “I suppose I should ask Jake about the blue roan,” she murmured to Ace. “I want to, but he’ll think of some reason to worry. He’s so protective, you’d think he was my brother.”

  Sam smoothed the brush along Ace’s back, thinking. The hammer-head stallion was young, but he had a broad chest and the muscled haunches of a mature horse.

  Sam had seen small bands of bachelor stallions cast out of their herds as potential challengers to the ruling stallion. But they tended to be gangly youngsters.

  Sam would bet the hammer head was at least three years old. He might have lost his harem of mares to another stallion, or maybe they’d been captured in one of the BLM’s wild horse gathers.

  When Ace stamped, Sam realized she’d been so deep in thought, she’d stopped brushing.

  “Sorry,” she told the gelding. “But the more I think about him, the more I believe Hammer is trouble.”

  Ace swung his head around and his eyes met hers.

  “That’s what I’ve been calling him in my head,” Sam explained. “Hammer, because of his big head and the way he kicked that fence.”

  Ace’s brown eyes stayed fixed on her, as if he expected more. “That’s not silly, is it?”

  Ace bobbed his head, and his forelock fell away from the white star on his forehead.

  “Too bad,” Sam said, laughing, but she didn’t give Hammer another thought until morning.

  Sam and Jen were waiting for the bus when a baby blue Mercedes-Benz swished past, carrying Rachel Slocum to school.

  “Wave to the princess,” Jen said, lifting her arm so high, her raspberry tee shirt cleared the top of her jeans.

  Sam loved Jen Kenworthy’s sarcasm, but as she stared after the car, she pictured the mansion at Gold Dust Ranch. The Mercedes must have passed within yards of the foreman’s house.

  “I can’t believe they’d drive right past your house and not give you a ride to school.” Sam took the snub personally. “What do they think,” she sputtered, “you—you’ve got cooties?”

  “Don’t bring out the elementary school insults on my account,” Jen said, but her eyes sparkled behind her glasses. “I mean, I am just the foreman’s daughter. The housekeeper wouldn’t expect to drive me to school. Besides, Rachel and I don’t exactly belong to the same clique.”

  “I don’t care,” Sam said.

  “Linc told my mom that Rachel rides alone, because she can’t be distracted. She uses the drive into Darton to do her homework.”

  Jen twirled the end of one blond braid. Though she smiled, Sam could tell Jen didn’t like being shunned.

  “Home. Work.” Sam pronounced the words slowly. “Do you think Rachel hasn’t quite figured out the concept?”

  Jen gave her a grateful grin. “I don’t want to be her friend, anyway. In fact, if Dad didn’t love the ranch so much, and it weren’t for the horses, I’d like to move.”

  “I believe you,”

  “You know, when Linc Slocum had his well drilled, it ended up draining too much water from ours. My mom can’t do laundry some days and we have to be careful when we take showers.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “My dad did, but that was over a year ago. Nothing’s changed and I don’t expect it will.” Jen shrugged. “He had a bulldozer scrape dirt into a pile, so he could be king of the mountain, where there wasn’t even a molehill before!

  “Every night before sunset, that huge house casts a shadow over ours.” Jen’s voice faded to a whisper. “I don’t like living in Slocum’s shadow.”

  A crow glided overhead, cawing. Jen looked up and pulled the neck of her tee shirt to cover her lips.

  “You’re right,” she called after the bird. “Blah, blah, blah.”

  Sam bit her lip. Everything Jen said made Sam like her more. They valued the same things. Since she’d come home from San Francisco, she’d learned that sunsets were more important than fancy houses.

  She needed to cheer Jen up.

  “Speaking of homework, do you know how to work that fancy calculator of yours?” Sam pointed to the complex grid of buttons and arrows showing through the mesh pocket on Jen’s backpack.

  Sam could tell by the sudden glow on Jen’s face that she’d hit the right topic.

  “How to work it? To put it humbly, my dear Samantha”—Jen made a mock bow—“I am a math goddess. My mom quit home schooling me because I passed her in geometry when I was in fifth grade. This year I’m taking calculus.”

  “I’m taking algebra for dummies,” Sam told her.

  Jen tilted her head to one side, and sunlight glazed the lenses of her glasses.

  “You can’t be taking honors English and remedial math.”

  “Yes, I can,” Sam said, surprised she didn’t mind exposing her shortcomings to her new friend. “I am truly ungifted with numbers.”

  “Well, girl,” Jen said, giving her a playful punch in the arm, “today’s your lucky day.”

  Chapter Nine

  SAM’S FIRST WEEK of school almost ended well.

  She’d been on time for each class. She’d turned in every bit of homework. She liked her teachers, especially Mrs. Ely and Mr. Blair. She’d interviewed the principal, Ms. Santos, and discovered she had humor and a flair for lively language that made writing the interview easy. RJay, Dialogue’s edito
r in chief, read the story and flashed Sam a thumbs-up.

  And Sam’s locker only jammed once.

  The week had grown hotter each day, and no rain was predicted. Dad went about his work with a smile, getting ready to pounce on the one-hundred-degree day when it dawned.

  As Jake had said weeks ago, the fall roundup paled in comparison to the cattle drive to summer pasture or the spring roundup. In a single day, the steers vanished off the home range, and Dad shipped them off to market with Dallas, the gray-haired foreman, as escort. Now, Dad waited for the final tally saying how much they’d earned from the range-fed Herefords.

  Best of all, Dad said Sam could ride, come Sunday. The announcement launched her into a dozen daydreams of taking Ace out over the foothills with Jen and her palomino.

  In all, the week had been great, except Sam did wish Jake hadn’t been so busy. With the beginning of school, things had been bound to change, but she was surprised by how much she missed him.

  Her spirits lightened, though, when she remembered Jake’s birthday. It was still six weeks away but Sam knew she could count on Gram to do something special, even if they couldn’t afford an expensive gift.

  Standing at the bus stop on Friday morning, Sam wore a sleeveless blue blouse, but she was already flushed and warm. Dozens of mouse-colored clouds hovered overhead, but they didn’t offer the coolness of shade. They just made the morning dark.

  Sam pulled the collar away from her neck as she and Jen planned a ride to War Drum Flats.

  The bus was coming. The girls settled their backpacks in place as the diesel huff of the bus drew near. The familiar sound was interrupted by a sudden squeal of tires and screeching of brakes.

  The murky sky made the car’s headlights glare red-gold. The lights veered from side to side, as if pushed by a demonic wind. Sam recognized the car.

  Line Slocum gunned his Cadillac until it lurched within feet of the bus’s back bumper. He swerved into the lane for oncoming traffic, then angled across the bus’s path and sped forward, toward Jen and Sam.