It wasn’t until the dust cloud had entirely faded away that the dream faded too. Carly sighed deeply, gathered up imaginary reins, and galloped toward Greenwood.
Carly Hartwick, Pony Express rider, galloped through dangerous Indian territory on her beautiful black stallion, her right hand holding the reins while her left clutched the mail pouch against her chest. The mail pouch smelled like molasses cookies.
The smell reminded her of the cookies in her pocket. Pulling her spirited steed to a rearing, prancing stop, she glanced quickly around her. No Indians in sight. She dismounted and tied the reins to a nearby sagebrush—actually one of Woo Ying’s flowering plums, but in Indian territory it would most likely be sagebrush.
Fishing in her pocket, the Pony Express rider found that her food ration for the long dangerous ride had been reduced to crumbs. No doubt struck by the arrow that had grazed her leg. A bad wound, but not fatal. She’d made it. The ride was over and the mail had gone through. Her mission had been accomplished.
She limped, favoring the wounded leg, to the garden bench next to the petunia bed, sat down, and gave her full attention to the contents of her pocket. Nothing but crumbs, all right. She must have bounced on them while Comet was galloping. She sighed. After a moment she pulled her pinafore pocket up to her mouth and stuck her tongue in among the cookie crumbs. Suddenly she was the black stallion, enjoying his nosebag of oats at the Pony Express rest stop. She nickered contentedly and munched molasses-flavored oats.
“You sick, Miss Carly?”
Carly sat up with a start and pulled down her pinafore. It was only Woo Ying. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” she said sternly. “You scared me.”
“Missy sick?” Woo Ying asked again. “Why apron over face?”
Carly giggled. “I’m fine,” she said, brushing cookie crumbs off her chin. “Look. I brought Auntie some cookies.”
Woo Ying took the package and shook it gently. “You make?” he asked, and suddenly his wrinkled face became a mask of terror. “You try poison Woo Ying again?”
Carly laughed. She laughed so hard she choked on cookie crumbs. Woo Ying was always teasing and lately his favorite tease was about the cake she’d baked for him and Aunt M. a few weeks ago. Woo Ying had been down with the lumbago and Aunt M. had been trying to cook, and making a mess of it as usual, so Carly had offered to make a lemon cake. Lemon cake was one of Nellie’s specialties and Carly had watched her make it many times. Hers would have been just as good as Nellie’s, too, if Aunt M. hadn’t been trying to reorganize Woo Ying’s kitchen.
“I didn’t try to poison you, Woo Ying,” Carly was finally able to gasp. “You know I didn’t. It was Aunt M. who put the salt in the sugar bin. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Don’t know.” Woo Ying shook his head slowly, his face a caricature of suspicion. “Think you try poison poor Woo Ying.” Suddenly he stopped playing. “Come on in house now, missy. See poor Auntie.”
Chapter 3
AS THE OLD man in his soft black slippers shuffled down the brick path through the beautifully tended garden, Carly skipped beside him.
“Poor Auntie?” she asked. “Is Aunt M. sick?”
“No. No sick. Lonely. Aunt M. miss you. Why missy not come Greenwood? School all done. Got lots of time. When missy not come Aunt M. very sad. When Aunt M. sad—very cross. Yell at poor Woo Ying all time.”
Carly giggled. “And you yell right back,” she said. “I’m sorry. Really I am. It’s just been so hot. It’s a long way to walk when it’s so hot. But I’m here now, so don’t be cross.”
Woo Ying glared angrily at her and she giggled again. That terribly fierce scowl had been a joke between them ever since she could remember. Nothing went back farther in her memory than the games she played with Woo Ying. She could even remember when she’d been so small that he put her on a chair beside him while he made dinner, so she could play at cooking. That must have been before her fifth birthday when she was still living at Greenwood.
She knew her fifth birthday had been after she’d gone to live with the rest of the Hartwicks. She would always remember how she had cried on that day because Woo Ying wasn’t there for her cake and presents. She’d always remembered how sad she’d been on that birthday. But the next day had been wonderful. Aunt M. and Woo Ying had come to bring another present. And the present had been the best one Carly had ever received—a fat white puppy with funny brown eyebrows who was fiercely Tigerish even then, when he still walked with a puppy wobble.
Aunt M. was not in the parlor, dining room, or in the library. In the library Carly stopped for a moment to inspect a recently opened book packet on the desk near the windows. Just as she suspected, it was from Sears, Roebuck, and it contained several new Bertha Clay romances. Carly and Aunt M. loved Bertha Clay romances. Aunt M. said that romances were their secret vice, hers and Carly’s—a secret that was not to be shared with such persnickety people as the members of the Santa Luisa Ladies’ Literary Society or, of course, Carly’s father.
“Trash, I know,” Aunt M. said, about Mrs. Clay’s exciting stories. “But harmless enough, and it’s my opinion that one needs a little relief from edification now and again.”
Carly agreed. At least she loved Mrs. Clay’s beautiful romantic heroines and dashing heroes and all their terrible tragic problems followed by comfortably reliable happy endings. She hoped Aunt M. would hurry and read this bunch so she could borrow them. The top book in the packet, Love’s Chain Broken, looked fascinating, and Carly was skimming the first page when Woo Ying called her.
“You come, missy? Woo Ying find Auntie M.”
Mehitabel Carlton, Carly’s great-aunt, was working in the greenhouse. Wearing a loose gardening smock over her green dimity, she was watering ferns with a long-necked watering can. Her back was toward them, but when she heard the squeak of the greenhouse door she began to shout without even bothering to turn around. “Where have you been, you lazy Chinaman? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“No hear you call,” Woo Ying shouted back. “Tell Woo Ying work in garden, Woo Ying work in garden. More better stop yelling, old woman. Got company.”
“Company?” Aunt Mehitabel turned quickly. “Carly, you good-for-nothing child. Where have you been?” She held out her arms and Carly ran into them and was enfolded in a violent hug and the combined odors of lavender and household ammonia.
They finished the watering together, with Aunt M. wielding the watering can while Carly and Woo Ying followed along behind—talking. Carly talked and Woo Ying talked and sometimes they both talked at once. Carly told about the picnic on the last day of school and the new batch of ducklings and other news from the ranch house, while Woo Ying pointed out plants that had been forgotten and scolded about others that had been given too much or too little water. Finally Aunt M. shoved the can into his hands. “All right!” she said. “Do it yourself, you tiresome old wretch. Carly and I are going into the parlor. When you’ve finished, you can come in and make us some tea.”
As Aunt M. led her out of the greenhouse, Carly looked back over her shoulder and grinned at Woo Ying. “In the kitchen,” she said to Aunt M. “Let’s have tea in the kitchen.” Having tea in the kitchen was always a lot more fun because Woo Ying would sit down and join them. In any other room of the house he insisted on behaving like a proper servant, standing at attention near the door while they ate and drank.
Woo Ying liked everything to be proper, and he’d always had very definite ideas about what was proper and what wasn’t. But standing at the door like a proper servant had never kept him from shouting and yelling. And since he couldn’t hear too well from across the room, the things he shouted didn’t always make much sense.
“Why say Woo Ying telling lies,” he’d yelled once when Aunt M. was telling about the wonderful fly trap he’d invented. “Woo Ying not ever telling lies.”
“Killing flies, you crazy Chinaman,” Aunt M. had yelled back. “I said you’ve been killing flies.”
Carly had to run to Woo Ying to explain, and then they had all laughed. Carly always laughed at the shouting and yelling at Aunt M.’s, even though some people thought it was disgraceful and embarrassing. Carly had tried once to explain it to her mother, to make Mama understand how there were different kinds of shouting and how the kind that Aunt M. and Woo Ying did wasn’t at all embarrassing. “Do you mean because they don’t really mean it?” Carly’s mother had asked. “Oh, they mean it.” Carly grinned. “They mean it, all right. It just isn’t—serious.” Mama had shaken her head with sad disapproval, and Carly said stubbornly, “Well, I like it, anyway.”
But even more entertaining than the shouting was the conversation when the three of them sat around the kitchen table. Sometimes when they were sitting together Carly could get the two of them to tell about the olden days. There was nothing that she liked better than hearing Aunt M. and Woo Ying talk about the olden days in Santa Luisa, and the even more olden days when Aunt M. was growing up in Maine and Woo Ying in China.
Chapter 4
SOME OF CARLY’S favorite stories were the ones Woo Ying told about his childhood in China and how he had gotten to California as a stowaway during the gold rush when he was only a boy. He’d had a terrible time on the ship and had almost starved to death before the sailors found him. After that he had to work very hard in the ship’s galley and was sometimes beaten, but at least he had enough to eat. He’d been told that he would be sent back to China when they reached San Francisco, so as soon as the ship docked he jumped overboard and swam to shore. He’d wanted to be a gold miner but after he made his way to the goldfields, he found that Chinese gold miners were not much safer than Chinese stowaways. In fact he was about to be shot by some evil miners when he was rescued by a kind and brave prospector named Edward Carlton. The same Edward Carlton, of course, who later became Aunt M.’s husband.
All of Woo Ying’s olden-days stories were full of terribly exciting things like narrow escapes and beatings and starvation and evil people with knives and guns. Aunt M.’s stories were interesting in different ways.
Aunt M. had grown up in a small town in the state of Maine, and although her early days hadn’t been nearly as dangerous as Woo Ying’s, she had fascinating stories to tell about such strange things as storms called blizzards that buried everything under huge drifts of snow.
But the part of Aunt M.’s life that Carly liked best was the love-story part. Aunt M., who was Mehitabel Johnson then, was only fourteen years old when she fell in love with a neighbor named Edward Carlton. According to Aunt M., she had mooned around for weeks before she discovered that the tall, handsome neighbor had proposed to Miranda, her older sister. Edward and Miranda became engaged, but in the meantime the California Gold Rush started, and in 1850 Edward Carlton joined the rush to the goldfields. He promised to come back for Miranda as soon as he made his fortune, but it had taken much longer than anyone expected, and Miranda had grown tired of waiting. Two years after Edward Carlton went away, a new young minister named Everett Hartwick came to the Presbyterian church that the Johnsons attended, and he and Miranda fell in love and were married.
Years passed and Aunt M. finished school and became a teacher. Edward Carlton had written to her now and then while he was engaged to her sister, and afterward their correspondence had continued. When he wrote that he had finally made a small strike, she’d hoped that he might soon return to Maine, but that was not to be. Instead he had decided to buy land and settle in southern California. But their correspondence continued, a friendly but rather formal exchange of letters between old friends, until 1869 when a very special letter was delivered to Mehitabel Johnson. It was from Edward Carlton and he wanted to know if she would consider coming to California to be his wife.
Carly was particularly interested in that part of the story. Sometimes, alone in her bedroom, she would act it out. She would be the young Mehitabel Johnson, sitting at her window, crying and staring out at mountainous snowdrifts. In Carly’s imaginings there were always blizzards in Maine. Having never seen snow except from afar on the tops of distant mountains, she yearned for blizzards and snowdrifts, and included them whenever possible. So there was always snow in Aunt M.’s story—snow and tears.
The crying was necessary, of course, because her heart was still broken. Carly had always been good at producing tears more or less at will, a talent envied by a few of her friends, but regarded with suspicion by others. So she would sit at the window crying real tears and staring out into a shimmering white landscape, until a postman appeared holding a letter over his head as he struggled through shoulder-high waves of rapidly drifting snow.
Sometimes she went on to act out the rest of the story—the bidding farewell forever to Maine and all her old friends and the long, dangerous, and uncomfortable trip to California in the very early days of the transcontinental railway. And then there was the meeting with Edward Carlton, her true love, after almost twenty years of separation.
But today, even though Aunt M. agreed to having tea in the kitchen, she didn’t seem to be in the mood for stories about the past. “Where has your father been?” she demanded while she was still filling the teapot at the kitchen sink pump. “I haven’t seen him in three days.”
Carly was feeding the fire in the huge gleaming stove. The stove, a magnificent Princess, the most regal of kitchen ranges, had six burners and two enormous ovens. Woo Ying’s pride and joy, it was always polished and blacked to perfection. In the wintertime it was the center of the house, a warmth-giving, comforting presence, but now in the summer heat it was less inviting. Gingerly, Carly scraped the remaining coals into a pile and added a few small sticks.
“Father went to Ventura,” she said, “to see about getting some extra hands for the apricot pitting. Charles went with him. They’re supposed to be back tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that he was planning to go this week.” Aunt M. pulled out a chair and sat down at the round oak table. Her voice had a tense, edgy sound as she went on. “He might have stopped by before he left. I’ve something important to discuss with him. And now he won’t be back until tomorrow.” She brushed imaginary crumbs off the table with quick, irritable sweeps of her hand. “Should have been able to telephone him,” she muttered. “Lines could have been up the valley months ago, and they would have been, too, if certain people hadn’t been pulling strings.”
Carly sat down next to her. Leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands, she looked carefully at the wrinkle-furrowed face of her great-aunt before she said, “What’s the matter? What’s happened, Aunt M.?”
“Nothing’s happened. That is, nothing’s happened yet. But I’ve had another letter from Quigley. He’s after the spring water again. And he says that this time he’s going to get it.”
“Aiii!” The angry shriek from directly behind her made Carly jump even though she recognized it immediately as the sound Woo Ying always made when things didn’t go to suit him. “Aiii!” he always shouted when the toast burned or the biscuits didn’t rise, or when anyone so much as mentioned Alfred Bennington Quigley.
Many years ago Alfred Quigley had been Edward Carlton’s partner. By the time Edward died in 1894, Quigley was the biggest landowner in the Santa Luisa Valley and he had decided that all of the Carlton land should be his too. He had tried to buy the Carlton holdings from Aunt M., but she had refused his offer. Instead she asked her nephew, Ezra Hartwick, to come to California to take over as foreman of the ranch. Ezra agreed, and that was why Carly’s family had come all the way from Maine to California. But even after the Hartwicks had arrived and Carly’s father had taken over as manager of the ranch, Quigley had not given up.
Woo Ying said Quigley would never give up. “Aiiii! Devil Quigley never give up.” Carly had heard him yell it enough times to be used to it. But this time Woo Ying had come into the kitchen so quietly in his soft black slippers that she hadn’t known he was there, and his sudden shout had made her jump.
“Stop
that,” Aunt M. said. “I’ve told you and told you not to make that dreadful noise. It’s enough to scare a body out of their wits.”
Woo Ying shrugged, muttered something in Chinese, and shuffled into the pantry. A moment later he came out carrying a loaf of bread and a huge knife. All the time he was slicing and buttering the bread he went on muttering to himself and occasionally swishing the knife around his head as if he were charging into an army of attacking Quigleys. Carly poked Aunt M. and nodded at Woo Ying.
“Look at Woo Ying,” she whispered, grinning.
“I know,” Aunt M. said, frowning sternly. “Crazy old coot.” Carly giggled and she said it again. “Crazy old coot.” But this time she was smiling.
Chapter 5
THE SUN WAS low and long shadows were creeping over the Santa Luisa Valley by the time Carly left Greenwood and started the long walk home. At the gate she turned to wave good-bye. Aunt M. and Woo Ying had come out on the veranda to see her off. Clanging the wrought-iron gate shut behind her, she waved once more and started down the dusty road, swinging a carefully wrapped package by its neat string handle. In the package were some books she was borrowing from Aunt M.’s library, some horehound drops, and a few Chinese nuts.
The horehound drops and the nuts were supposed to be a surprise, but she’d seen Woo Ying slip them into the package. Actually she didn’t care much for horehound, but Lila liked it. Carly always saved her horehound for Lila.
The books were King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, both of which she had read before, and two new ones. One of the new ones was Love’s Chain Broken, which she’d managed to talk Aunt M. out of even though she’d not yet read it herself, and another called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. She couldn’t wait to read that one because Aunt M. had hinted that Father might find Sherlock Holmes even more unsuitable than Bertha Clay.
And Condors Danced Page 2
