by Holly Hughes
“I feel just the same way, Davy,” Annie confessed with a catch in her throat. She opened her arms and wrapped them around her little brother. They sat huddled like that for a few minutes.
Finally Annie let him go with a deep, comforted sigh. Jumping to her feet, she seized on a new task, folding the blankets that the coach passengers had left in a heap by the woodbox. Davy picked up a broom propped against the wall near the fireplace. He began to whistle as he swept the hearth.
Underneath the blankets Annie found the McGuffey’s Reader Davy had been thumbing through yesterday. She slipped it into her pocket. Books were few and precious out here. With no school around, she was bound and determined to teach Davy his letters herself. She couldn’t let him lose this book.
Carrying the pile of blankets to the chest of drawers, Annie forced herself to think about Magpie. She knew if she didn’t, she’d begin to worry about her family’s future—and right now, that was even more worrisome. Instead, she ran over yesterday’s events once more in her mind. Who had had a chance to cut Magpie? Jeremiah and her pa, she remembered, had been going back and forth between the hay meadow and the barn all afternoon. Billy might have helped with the haying too, though Annie suspected he’d slipped off to the hayloft instead for an afternoon nap—he’d been dead tired after his hard ride. Once the stagecoach came in, however …
Suddenly, Annie noticed small thunking noises coming from the far corner of the room. “Davy? What are you doing?” She glanced over at her brother.
Davy was kneeling by the woodbox, the broom on the floor beside him. In his right hand he held a folding pocketknife. He cocked his wrist, then threw the knife at the log cabin wall. Its silver point pierced the wood and the knife stuck there, quivering.
Annie frowned. “Where’d you get that fancy knife, Davy?” she asked. “I’ve never seen it before. I’d remember something newfangled like that.” Most of the men at the station, like Billy, carried long Indian-style knives in their belts, not clever folding contraptions like this.
Davy yanked the knife out of the wall and clutched it to his chest. “I found it out in the barn. I reckon one of the coach passengers dropped it. But they’re gone now, Annie—I can keep it, can’t I?” he pleaded. “Finders keepers, you know.”
“When did you find it?” Annie asked, suspicion dawning. She shut the blanket chest and stepped over to get a closer look.
“Last night, after supper,” Davy confessed slowly. “I guess I should’ve said something then, so the owner could claim it. But it’s so fine, Annie!”
Annie took the knife from Davy. She turned it over in her hand curiously.
The knife had a dull brown handle and a short steel blade. At the base of the blade, where it folded into the handle, was a flaking crust of something dark red.
“Where in the barn was it lying, Davy?” Annie asked sharply.
“On the floor—just outside Magpie’s stall,” Davy answered.
Annie pushed the blade backward on its spring. Twisted in the tiny hinge were a couple of horse hairs—white and black.
Here was the proof Annie needed. Someone did cut Magpie deliberately—using this very knife!
CHAPTER 11
SCENE OF THE CRIME
Annie held the telltale knife tight. “Can I take this, Davy?”
His face crumpled. “But it’s mine, Annie—I found it first!”
“You can keep it for good, Davy, I promise. But I’ve got to have it for a little while just now. You see, this might tell us what happened to Magpie. I think someone used it to cut her. And maybe this will even help Pa.”
“You mean that it will make his head stop hurting?” Davy looked puzzled.
Annie sighed. “Maybe not that. But it’ll get him out of trouble with the Overland Express bosses. Oh, I don’t have time to explain now, Davy. I have to look around the barn and see what else I can find.”
Davy looked excited. “I’ll finish tidying up for you,” he offered. “I’ll fill the woodbox and haul some water, too. And I’ll feed the chickens—Ma hasn’t done it yet today.”
Annie was surprised. Maybe Davy wasn’t lost in his daydreams as much as she’d thought. “I’m proud of you, Davy,” she said, giving his shoulder a grateful pat. “Ma will be grateful too, I know she will. I’ll go to the barn, then.”
“Good luck,” Davy called after her as she hurried out the door.
Annie dashed across the station yard to the barn, a flutter of hope in her chest. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly. But if the poisoner had been distracted enough to drop his knife, maybe he’d left some other proof of his crime.
In the dim, hay-scented coolness, the horses were contentedly munching, stamping, and whisking their tails. Annie paused to listen for a second, relieved that no other ponies seemed to be sick. The poisoner must have gone after only one horse. But why did it have to be Magpie? she wondered, angrily kicking a stall doorpost with her shoe.
Then, as she walked down the row of stalls, she realized why Magpie had been chosen. It was simply because her stall was at the back of the barn, where the poisoner was most likely to escape notice.
Annie stopped at the entrance to Magpie’s empty stall. She drew a deep breath to steady herself. Now that it was daylight, maybe she could see things she hadn’t seen last night. The blanket she’d slept on still lay crumpled on the straw, she noted. That was good—it meant that Jeremiah hadn’t yet come in to clean the stall. If anything suspicious was lying around, it hadn’t been cleaned up.
Tossing her braids behind her shoulders, Annie knelt down and began carefully to look over the floor of the stall. Brushing the straw aside, she ran her fingers over every inch of the dirt floor, from the stall door to the back wall.
Near the back, she ran across a patch of mud under the littered straw. Annie’s heartbeat began to speed up. This must tell her something! She turned to check where the overturned water bucket lay, but it was on the far side of the stall. It couldn’t have made things muddy over here, she reasoned. Looking directly up, she saw sunlight streaming in through the stall window, halfway up the log wall. It was tightly shut now, with an iron latch, and she was sure it had been closed when she slept here last night. But the mud was pretty fresh, and there was a good deal of it. That window must have been open last night during the storm.
She sat back on her heels to think things through. Could the poisoner have climbed in that way, to avoid being seen by the men in the barn? Suddenly, with a chill, she remembered Goldilocks coming into the station house on his own. His clothes had been plenty wet. Could he have crept out to the barn and climbed through the stall window?
She stood up and looked more closely at the window itself. Though it was small, it was certainly big enough for a grown man to climb through.
Think logically, Annie told herself. All right. She knew the storm had started before the stagecoach arrived; she remembered hearing rain pound on the station-house roof as her family gathered for dinner. And Jeremiah hadn’t gone out to the barn until after the stagecoach arrived, she recalled. Even if he’d closed the windows then, this patch of mud would already have been here.
Looking down at the floor again, Annie noticed something she hadn’t seen before—an impression in the soft mud. Tense with excitement, she bent down to study it.
It was a footprint—a single footprint.
“What are you looking at, Annie?” Davy’s voice broke into her thoughts. Startled, Annie whirled around to see her little brother in the stall doorway, eyes shining with curiosity. “Did you find some clues?” he asked.
Annie nodded. “Someone’s left boot landed here in the mud last night,” she explained, pointing to the footprint. She bent down and studied the print closely. “It ain’t very deep. If someone had climbed in through that window, he’d have landed with a real thump. I reckon this was left by someone who just walked into the stall.”
Davy squinted, as if trying to picture the intruder entering the stall. “T
he toe is pointing toward the back wall,” he commented. “Someone climbing through the window would have landed the other way around.”
Annie raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Good, Davy. Now, let’s try to imagine just how things happened. This person must have been in the stall after the rain started, and before I came here to sleep. But nobody needed to enter Magpie’s stall in all that time. The men tending to the coach horses had no call to be down at this end of the barn. And I’d already fed, groomed, and watered Magpie hours earlier.”
Davy frowned. “Could that be your footprint? You were poking around the barn last evening—I noticed you had straw on your skirt when you came back into the house.”
Surprised again at how much Davy had noticed, Annie paused. “That’s true. But look here.” She set her shoe next to the print. “This was made by a foot much larger than mine. Looks big enough to be a grown man’s foot.”
“So whose could it be?” Davy wondered.
“Well, let’s think. Not Billy’s—the toes on Billy’s boots are more pointy than this, and Billy’s boots have a high heel, to hold better in the stirrups.”
“Pa’s boots are all cracked and broken on the bottom,” Davy recalled. “I always hear Ma telling him he’s got to get some new ones, now that we have a little money saved up.”
Annie nodded, grateful for Davy’s help. “But I have no idea what Jeremiah’s boots look like. Not to mention Nate Slocum’s, or any of the coach passengers’.” Frustrated, she bent down and, with a fierce intent, studied the print once more. “Look, Davy, see that pattern on the sole? All those zigzag ridges cut across the ball of the foot? The mud’s preserved it, clear as day.”
Davy leaned over to look. “There can’t be too many boots with that design,” he agreed.
Annie sat back on her heels with satisfaction. “I can compare this print to Jeremiah’s boots. Maybe he stepped in the mud when he was shutting the window against the rain last night. Fair enough. But if this boot print is someone else’s, it’s a good guess that that someone was up to no good!”
Davy looked troubled. “But the stagecoach has already left, Annie,” he said. “How could you compare this print to the boots Mr. Slocum wears, or the guard, or any of the passengers? You can’t take this patch of mud anywhere.”
Disappointed, Annie dropped her hands to her lap. She felt the McGuffey’s Reader in her skirt pocket. A thought struck her, and she pulled the book out triumphantly. “Here’s the answer, Davy! This blank page inside the front cover—there’s room here to copy that boot print. I’ll just need something to draw with.…”
“Pa’s pen and inkwell, by his ledger in the tack room!” Davy declared. “I’ll go get it.” He dashed out of the stall.
As she jumped to her feet, Annie’s mind danced. She could see it all now—the mystery man crowding into the stall with Magpie, treading on that muddy spot, ducking away from the rain leaking in. “Maybe Magpie bumped him up against this wall—” she said to herself.
Her eyes flew to the rough log wall. She froze.
Right in front of her, she spied a tuft of colored thread on a splintered spot on the back wall. It looked to her as if someone had snagged his clothes on the wood.
Hardly daring to believe her luck, Annie leaned over and pulled a few threads from the wall. “Better leave some in place, just to prove this was where I found ’em,” she muttered.
In the light that streamed through the cloudy window glass, she saw the color of the threads—a dull olive green. She rubbed them between her fingertips, feeling their rough texture. Wool, she guessed.
Now, who was wearing green wool last night? She shut her eyes to check her mental picture of everyone at the station. Jeremiah and her pa had been wearing brown. Mr. Slocum, she remembered, had on a mustard-colored oilcloth cloak. She squinted as she tried to recall Goldilocks’ clothes. He’d been wearing a dark blue coat, she was pretty certain.
Then her heart skipped. The stagecoach guard! She saw him now in her mind’s eye, sitting last night by the fireside, murmuring to Nate Slocum—wearing an olive green coat.
CHAPTER 12
IN THE NAME OF REVENGE
Annie opened her eyes and shivered with excitement. “It’s got to be him—the signs all point toward him!” she sang under her breath. “He was in the barn at the right time and everything!”
Then she halted suddenly. She remembered her pa’s opinion that the guard was a company spy. It just didn’t make sense that a fellow like that—a trusted insider-would want to injure an Overland Express horse.
Her thoughts were shattered by a commotion outside. Annie stood on her tiptoes to look out the window. Rumbling into the yard was a long string of heavy, mule-drawn wagons.
She heard Davy run back into the stall behind her. “I didn’t know we were expecting a train of freight wagons today,” she said over her shoulder.
“They must be running ahead of schedule,” Davy suggested.
Annie turned back from the window. “I’d better go on out,” she said, straightening up with a newfound sense of responsibility. “Pa’s ill and Billy’s off in the woods—Jeremiah’ll need another hand to help the drovers feed and water those mules. And Ma can’t cook for them today, not with Pa the way he is. But if they want to buy food, we could sure use the extra money.”
Davy reached up to take the McGuffey’s Reader from her. “You go on—I can copy the boot print.”
Annie hesitated. She remembered the beautiful drawings Davy made on his slate sometimes when he was supposed to be doing sums. “I reckon you can, Davy,” she said. “And we’ll need it for sure, because I have an idea who may have poisoned Magpie. If that boot print matches his … well, you draw it as perfect as you can! I’ll be back directly.”
Annie hurried out of the barn. She dodged around the lumbering wagons that were crowding into the wide dirt yard. Hooves clopped, harnesses jangled, wheels rattled. Already three or four glossy brown mules were dipping their noses thirstily into the water trough.
Annie spotted her mother, anxious and pale, stepping out of the station house to talk to the chief drover of the mule train. Seeing them with their heads together, Annie hung back near the side of the yard, reluctant to break into a grown-up conversation. But the drover looked over at Annie and raised a hand to signal her over. Annie obeyed.
“One of our mules has been having trouble breathing,” the drover said to her. “Your mother tells me your father’s in a bad way, but you know where things are in the barn. I need some medicine. Is there any belladonna there?”
Annie nodded. “We have a couple bottles in the remedy cabinet. I’ll go get one.”
She ran lightly to the barn. Entering the tack room, Annie opened the small wooden wall cupboard. The various horse remedies were lined up, same as always. Except—
Annie paused, confused. She made herself study the cupboard carefully again.
“When I opened this cupboard yesterday, I just know there were two full bottles of belladonna, right in front,” she muttered.
Today there was only one.
She lifted the remaining bottle. It felt awfully light. She couldn’t see through the thick, dark brown glass, so she shook the bottle next to her ear. The faint, hollow splash inside told her that it was almost drained.
With a knot of dread in her throat, Annie walked back outside with the bottle. She handed it to the drover. “I hope that’s enough, sir. The bottle’s nearly empty.”
“Thanks,” the drover replied. “A few drops are all it should require. Belladonna’s right powerful.”
“I know—that’s what worries me,” Annie said. She turned to her mother. “There was a lot more of that stuff in the cabinet yesterday, I’m just certain. Ma, what if somebody stole it and gave Magpie a big dose?”
Mrs. Dawson drew in a sharp breath. “Would that have made her go loco like she did?”
The drover frowned. “You say a horse of yours was acting loco—and some belladonna’s missing? Was she
frantic and wheezing and staggering around?”
Annie turned to him excitedly. “Yes—like her insides were on fire.”
The drover rubbed his lean, whiskered chin. “That sure sounds like belladonna poisoning.” He held up the bottle in his hand. “A little belladonna can cure a horse, but too much can … well, it could kill.”
Annie clasped her hands together. “How fast can belladonna poisoning take effect? The stagecoach hadn’t been here more than a half hour before our horse took sick.”
“It depends on how big a dose the horse got,” the drover judged. “But it can take effect pretty quick.”
Ma gasped. “Who’d do such a thing?”
Annie burst out, “I think I know, Ma. It was that stagecoach guard. I have proof!” Her hand slipped into her pocket, feeling the little tuft of green threads she’d tucked away.
Her mother’s face darkened with concern. “Chet Ambrose?”
The drover’s eyes widened. “Chester Ambrose?” he repeated.
Ma frowned. “That’s right—a stocky fellow, with dark hair and a big beard. He was working on the stage that came through here last night. Why, do you know him?”
The drover raised an eyebrow. “Don’t know about the beard, but otherwise the description fits a feller I knew. He used to work the southern route for the Butterfield line when I did.”
Annie’s heart leaped. Did he know something about the man she suspected of poisoning Magpie?
The drover scratched his neck and made a disgusted face. “He was a mean-spirited scoundrel, right enough. Last year, after I started working for the Overland Express, we caught him sneaking at night into our camp, just outside of Sacramento. He was trying to cut some of our harness traces.”
Annie’s mother raised her eyebrows. “Why on earth would he do that?”
“Apparently he took the rivalry between Butterfield and the Overland way too serious,” the drover said. “But we got him arrested for that trick in Sacramento. The Butterfield bosses fired him afterward, or so I heard.”
