Crazy Horse

by Jenny Oldfield

  “Looks like you had a tough ride.” He noted their dripping slickers, the soaked coats of their three horses. “Where did you come from?”

  “Half Moon Ranch.” Charlie dismounted and introduced himself.

  Kirstie studied the man’s face. No reaction. Or maybe just a flicker of his eyelids, a glance up at her and Lisa as he shook Charlie’s hand.

  “We’re looking for a couple of our horses,” Charlie explained, deliberately laid-back. He took off his sodden leather gloves and tipped the brim of his hat back.

  “You lost them?” Keeping to the shelter of the porch, Wes Logan folded his arms.

  “Stolen,” Charlie said. “Last night, around midnight.”

  The rancher sniffed. “That’s tough. You sure about that?”

  “We saw the rustlers,” Kirstie told him. She tried to read his reaction, saw him drop his gaze then look sideways toward the stables, where a man was standing in a doorway. “They headed up onto Hummingbird Rock.”

  “Which is why we’re asking you if you spotted anything not right,” Charlie went on. He was tensing up, sounding less casual than before. “They could’ve ridden over the ridge and down in this direction.”

  Wes Logan shrugged. He seemed perfectly relaxed. “Not a thing. Sorry.”

  Kirstie glanced at Lisa and frowned.

  “No one rode by?”

  “I told you, no. What did you lose, a couple of quarter horses?” The rancher’s manner suggested it could be no big deal.

  “A quarter horse and a Thoroughbred. Good-looking horse, pure gray. The best we had.”

  Don’t pretend you don’t know who we’re talking about! Kirstie said to herself. She saw the moment as a test for Logan.

  “I know him.” The rancher nodded briefly. If anything, his face went blanker than ever. “Nice horse. Put in an offer for him myself.”

  “You don’t say.” It was Charlie’s turn to put on a show.

  “Yep. Reckoned he’d be a good match for a horse of mine. You wanna see?” Without waiting for an answer, and with an unexpected burst of hospitality, Wes Logan invited them all across the yard to the stables. “San Luis Dawn is her name.”

  “I heard of her,” Charlie said. Behind Logan’s back, he shrugged at Lisa and Kirstie, then gestured for them to dismount and follow.

  “What’s he up to?” Lisa whispered as she tethered Jitterbug to a post in the corral.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t trust him,” Kirstie breathed. She took off her slicker and slung it across Lucky’s saddle to save it from getting wet. Then the two girls ran after the men.

  Inside the spacious, airy stables, the rancher was walking Charlie down a central aisle, pointing out the good points of this horse, then that. There were two men at work filling hay nets and raking out stalls. They took no notice of the visitors, keeping their backs turned and heads down. Finally, at the far end of the aisle, Wes Logan stopped and stood to one side.

  “San Luis Dawn,” he said, his voice altering for the first time to include a note of pride.

  They were looking into a stall containing a tall, elegant creature the color of cream on top of milk. Her white mane was long and silky, her dark eyes fringed with gray, her nose long and straight, her muzzle soft. She had neat ears pricked forward and a long supple neck.

  “Cadillac’s double!” Lisa whispered.

  “Do you like her?” There was a satisfied smile on the rancher’s face as he studied their reactions.

  The horse inside the stall raised her head and whinnied. She stamped on the floor with a well-polished hoof and tossed her mane, inviting them to admire her.

  “Fabulous!” Kirstie murmured. A horse this beautiful struck at her heart. “Out of this world. Amazing!”

  6

  “I’m c-c-cold!” Lisa complained. “My feet are freezing, I can’t feel my fingers, and my face is a solid block of ice!”

  Kirstie allowed Lucky to plod ahead, up the slopes of Lazy B land toward Miners’ Ridge. Light was fading and snow clouds rolling in. She reckoned they had half an hour of daylight to make it back to Half Moon Ranch.

  “Sure was a waste of time back there at Ponderosa Pines,” Charlie admitted. “Aside from being given the chance to take a look at the mind-blowing gray mare, of course.”

  The coil of fancy rope hanging around Kirstie’s saddle horn attracted her attention as the others grumbled on. Finding it had been their last lucky break in their quest to trace the horse thieves. After that, the clues had dried up, and even she was questioning her own hunch that Wes Logan had somehow been involved.

  “I can sure see why Mr. Logan wanted to buy Cadillac,” Charlie went on. “He and San Luis Dawn would look mighty fine.”

  “Oh, I’m c-c-co-old!” Lisa groaned. She hunched inside her slicker, letting Jitterbug pick her own way up the mountain. “Next time you mix me up in some crazy notion of tracking down a bunch of horse thieves, Kirstie Scott, I just gotta tell myself, ‘warm fires, hot chocolate, TV’! ’Cause no way do I want to go through this again. I’d rather stay home like any normal person!”

  Kirstie gave a faint smile but no reply. She’d reached the ridge and turned to wait for the other two riders trailing along behind.

  “How come you’re not telling me to cowboy-up?” Lisa challenged. It was Kirstie’s usual way of joking Lisa out of a tough situation. They could be starving hungry out on a trail and the rain could come down in buckets. They would be drenched to the skin, lost miles from anywhere, and Kirstie would drop in the old Half Moon Ranch motto: “C’mon, Lisa, cowboy-up!”

  “Hmm? Oh, I guess I’m thinking about Wes Logan’s plans for San Luis Dawn,” she answered quietly. Charlie and Rodeo Rocky had joined them on the ridge, and this time, she let the wrangler’s horse lead the way down onto Meltwater Trail.

  “You mean shipping her out to California for the winter?” Lisa recalled the rich rancher’s phone conversation about the white horse.

  His cell phone had interrupted them as they admired his pride and joy, and he’d answered it to confirm arrangements with his wife, Nancy, for San Luis Dawn to spend the winter in the warmer climate of the West Coast. There’d been talk of two drivers being used to drive the horse box the long distance, mention of times and dates, of a ranch called Bluebird Hill outside San Francisco, and the expected day when “they” would arrive.

  The word “they” had bothered Kirstie. “They should be with you late Sunday,” Wes Logan had told his wife down the long-distance line.

  Who were “they”? Did it mean he was planning to send more than one horse in the truck? If so, who? One of the other horses in the luxurious stables at Ponderosa Pines? Or did “they” refer to the men who would be driving the truck; presumably two of the silent workers fixing up hay nets and checking water feeders as Kirstie and the others stood admiring the Thoroughbred gray horse?

  “Just think what that’s gonna cost him!” Lisa went on, regardless of Kirstie’s silence. “A horse box like that is worth more than my mom’s entire house and diner!”

  “A man with that kind of money doesn’t care,” Charlie cut in, a touch of envy in his voice. “I guess he can do most anything he wants.”

  Kirstie frowned as Lucky negotiated a slippery section of rock ahead. “Would that include stealing a horse he can’t buy legally, by any chance?” she wondered out loud.

  “Kirstie!” Lisa sighed. “You need evidence. You need something solid to go on. And what did we find? Zero, zilch, nothing!”

  Charlie nodded once, then made Rocky put on speed along a flatter stretch of trail.

  “Let it drop,” came the advice from Lisa.

  The horses broke into a trot, eager to be back.

  “I can’t!” Kirstie muttered under her breath, her earlier doubts giving way to fresh certainty. Sure, Logan was smooth and friendly. Sure, he never gave us a clue that he was mixed up in stealing Cadillac and Crazy Horse. But…there was something about him that was not quite right. The low log cabins of Half
Moon Ranch came into view, their red roofs covered in snow. He knows more than he’s saying, she decided, as Lucky lengthened his stride and loped for home. And I aim to find out what it is!

  “Matt knows!” Sandy Scott came onto the porch to greet a chilled and dejected Lisa and Kirstie. She didn’t give them a chance to tell her the results of their search for clues. Instead, she hurried them inside to deliver the bad news.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Sandy looked out across the darkening yard before she closed the kitchen door.

  “Unsaddling the horses,” Kirstie explained. She took off her slicker and left it dripping in the porch. “What are you saying—Matt found out about Cadillac and Crazy Horse?”

  Making the girls sit by the stove while she fixed a hot drink, her mom nodded. “I just had him on the phone before you got back. He was pretty mad, looking for someone to blame. I had to get him to cool down; said what were we gonna do, have someone guard the remuda every second of the day and night? He took the point. Then he got real upset.” Sandy faltered and sighed as she mixed the hot chocolate. “It kinda sank in slowly, I guess. He asked me over and over, were we sure it was Cadillac and Crazy Horse?”

  “Jeez!” Kirstie pictured her brother making the phone call from a pay phone on the college campus. All her efforts to persuade her mother not to tell Matt about the horses had come to nothing, after all.

  “How did Matt find out?” Lisa wanted to know as the door handle turned, and Charlie followed them into the room. The wrangler came forward for his mug of hot chocolate, unaware of what had happened.

  Silently, Sandy handed over the drink.

  “Mom, how did Matt hear the bad news?” Kirstie insisted.

  Charlie stared at her, then retreated two or three quick steps into the corner of the room. Kirstie and Lisa followed his movement in the gathering silence.

  “Oh, gee!” The young wrangler’s jaw dropped as Kirstie, Lisa, and Sandy stared at him. “You mean, Matt had no idea…?”

  “You told him!” Kirstie stood up, eyes wide, voice strained and high.

  “Hush, Kirstie!” Sandy warned.

  “How? When? Why?” She advanced toward Charlie in disbelief.

  “I called him earlier today. I thought he knew. I left a message for him to call me back when he came out of his exam, said I wanted to talk with him about Cadillac and Crazy Horse going missing…” Charlie tailed off and took a deep breath. It came out again as a loud, helpless sigh.

  “Why?” Kirstie repeated. “Didn’t you know we wanted to keep it from him?”

  “Obviously not.” Sandy stepped in between Charlie and Kirstie. “How could he? Charlie isn’t a mind reader. He wasn’t in the room when we talked about it, so how could we expect him to realize that we were keeping the theft a secret so that Matt wouldn’t come rushing home?”

  “I wanted to tell him I was sorry,” he said quietly, head down, staring at the brown and cream patterned rug, the parallel lines of the polished floor-boards beyond. “He’s my buddy. I thought it must be tough for him not having anyone to talk to over there in Denver.”

  “Poor Matt.” It was Kirstie’s turn to gasp and sigh. She understood in a flash that Charlie had called her brother because he was a good friend. “Sorry, Charlie. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Yeah, but I feel bad,” he told them, managing to look up from the floor at last. “What did Matt say he was gonna do?”

  Sandy closed her eyes and screwed up her mouth, leaning one hand on the table for support. “He didn’t make much sense,” she admitted. “He was like you, Kirstie: he was more afraid about what’ll happen to Crazy Horse. He could see the point of stealing Cadillac, but…”

  “OK!” Kirstie cut her mom short. “I know! But Matt doesn’t plan to come home, does he? You told him there isn’t anything he can do?”

  “Yes.” Sandy Scott pulled herself upright again. “He wanted to jump right into his car and drive out here, of course. But I told him Larry Francini knows all about it, and we’re doing every single thing we can to get those horses back.”

  “So?” Kirstie knew her brother’s impetuous nature all too well. He matched her for hot-headed decisions more often than not. She imagined him, headlights glaring, speeding along Route 3 through San Luis, down the five miles of dirt road to the ranch right this minute.

  “So, in the end, he agreed to stay in town,” Sandy told them. “He’ll take his exam tomorrow.”

  “He promised?” Kirstie double-checked.

  Sandy nodded and moved briskly to take away the empty mugs from the table.

  “But who knows if he’ll stick to his promise?” she concluded quietly, as Charlie backed awkwardly out of the room onto the porch and Lisa went to call her mom for a lift home.

  “Maybe he will,” Kirstie whispered back as she stared out of the window at the dark horizon. “I guess all we can do is wait and see.”

  “Well, there ain’t a whole lot of information to go on,” Sheriff Francini drawled when Kirstie came into his Main Street office early next morning.

  She’d put the coil of rope down on his desk and told him where they’d picked it up. Then she’d asked if his investigation into the theft of the two horses had made any progress.

  “Did you check the local saddlery store?” She reminded him about the fancy red and white bridle—the one detail about the rustlers that might prove useful.

  “Yup. Nothing,” he replied shortly. “Ain’t no local source for plaited bridles. You see them advertised in American Cowboy magazine every now and then, most likely made way out in California. A bridle like that comes pretty darned expensive.”

  “California?” Kirstie frowned. She opened her mouth to make the connection between Wes Logan and his ranch at Bluebird Hill, then shut it quickly. Even she had enough sense to realize that Sheriff Francini would call it coincidence—a long shot not worth considering. Better keep quiet and store it carefully inside her own head.

  Larry Francini stood up and eased the silver buckle of his belt where it had pressed against his ample waistline. “We’re pretty much looking at a stone wall,” he confessed, picking up his white Stetson. “You kids are doing a good job picking up a clue like this fancy rope on Hummingbird Rock, but I wouldn’t let it get your hopes up too high.”

  “Why not?” Kirstie had visited the sheriff on her way to school. Glancing at her watch, she realized she had to hurry to make her first class of the morning.

  Sheriff Francini was also on his way somewhere. He led her out onto the street, where his car was parked. “You want my theory,” he said with quiet confidentiality, “we’re looking at professional horse rustlers here, not local amateurs. I heard last week about a gang from the south, moving north through the state.”

  Kirstie listened hard. “Do you know who they are?”

  “Nope. They’re too smart to get caught so far. Four or five of them. They hit and move on. Took three horses from a ranch in Idaho a couple of weeks back, then five from a place in Arizona. Now it’s Colorado and your bad luck to be a target.”

  Sighing and saying good-bye, she wondered if he could be right. Turning to the car, she asked the sheriff one last important question. “What do these rustlers do with the stolen horses?”

  Larry Francini leaned out of the car to answer. “They drive ’em out of the neighborhood while it’s still dark; maybe south to New Mexico, to one of the big sale barns there.”

  “They sell them?” It made her blood run cold to think of Cadillac and Crazy Horse being prodded and poked by indifferent buyers.

  “Sure. No questions asked. These guys make a fast buck and move on to the next hit.” Looking her straight in the eye, Sheriff Francini delivered his best advice. “Listen, kid, forget it. Put it down to bad luck, move on. OK?”

  His car was in gear, cruising away from the curb as he spoke. Kirstie watched him go. Forget it? Move on? With Crazy Horse likely to be sold for dog meat? With Cadillac split up from his best friend, pining for home? Forget i
t…no way!

  The school day had never been longer, classes never such a drag. Kirstie willed herself to concentrate and failed. Instead of algebra, she thought of Matt riding Cadillac by the side of Eden Lake on a spring day, blue columbines carpeting the meadow at the lakeside. Or she saw Matt on Crazy Horse, loping a figure eight, performing a sliding halt in thirty feet, spinning on the spot.

  “Hey, Kirstie.” Lisa met her at the school gates at the end of the day. “You wanna ride out to Lazy B on Lucky and Jitterbug? Maybe we could pick up a couple more clues.”

  Kirstie nodded. “Thanks, Lisa. Let’s give it another shot.”

  They sat together on the school bus, which dropped them off at the turnoff to Half Moon Ranch, then hitched a ride with Smiley Gilpin, the forest guard, in his national forest jeep, reaching the ranch without having to call Sandy to drive out to meet them on the dirt road.

  Smiley dropped them off at the gates and watched them down the first few yards of the steep driveway, then revved his engine and drove on. As they walked, the girls discussed the route they might take over Miners’ Ridge, down into the next valley. This time they would choose a right turn along the side of Horseshoe Creek to Jim Mullins’s ranch.

  It was only when they drew within fifty yards of the ranch house itself that Kirstie looked up and paid any attention to her surroundings. It was a quarter after four on a dull, gray day, dirty snow on the ground, the ranch-house chimney smoking, the kitchen door swinging open…

  “No!” Kirstie let out a sudden groan. There, parked close against the porch steps, was a pale blue, beaten-up car. Its fender was bent and hanging off, the body was dented and deeply encrusted with dirt.

  “That’s Matt’s car!” Lisa gasped. She stood still and let Kirstie run ahead.