It only took about twenty minutes to get the horses saddled. We had about two hours of sunlight left when we began to ride toward the hill where Big Boy had been killed.
As soon as we got to open grass, I moved my horse into a trot.
Stephanie was a good rider. Actually she was a great rider. The fast way to find out if someone knows how to ride is to watch them when the horse trots. A trot is very, very bouncy. Bad riders pound up and down in the saddle. Good riders stay glued to the saddle and move at the waist.
After a few minutes of trotting, she leaned forward and started to gallop her horse. I didn’t have any choice but to keep up.
My horse Blazer is not only cow-smart, but he’s also big, tough and fast. I began to pass Stephanie.
“Hey!” she shouted, laughing. “No fair!”
I love the feel of riding a horse at full gallop. The wind rushes into your ears. You rise and fall with the drumming of horse hooves. It’s almost as much fun as moving up the ice with the puck on your stick and the crowd screaming at your back.
A few minutes later, though, I pulled up on the reins for a couple of reasons. The first was safety. Horses gallop at more than twenty miles an hour. If a horse steps into an animal hole, its leg will snap like a stick broken over your knee. The rider will probably get thrown and badly hurt. The horse will have to be shot. It’s not something I ever wanted to happen to Blazer.
The other reason is the horse. I’ve seen movies where the good guys chase the bad guys on horses, and it goes on and on and on and on. Like a car chase. When I see that, I get grumpy because it could never happen that way in real life. The longest you could ever keep a horse at full gallop is fifteen minutes. And if you pushed the horse that hard, its heart might actually explode. Horses aren’t machines. They are athletes and can only be pushed so hard.
“I see you know how to ride,” Stephanie said as she reined to a stop beside me.
“Just having fun,” I said. To change the subject away from me, I pointed down the valley. “Ten minutes down that trail is where we found Big Boy.”
Stephanie looked around. “No road. You were right. Whoever killed your cattle would have a tough time getting down there. Any ideas yet? Besides witches on broomsticks?”
“None,” I said.
“You told me the police only found footprints around the dead cattle. No tracks in. No tracks out. Right?”
“Right.” I kept my horse moving alongside hers.
“Just like at our ranch,” she said. She looked back toward the ranch house. “And just like at our ranch, the house is quite far from where the cattle were killed but close enough that someone would have heard a helicopter in the distance. Maybe it was broomsticks.”
I enjoyed watching the expressions on her face as she talked. It caught me by surprise when her eyes opened wide and her mouth formed an O of surprise.
“What?” I said.
“Ernest,” she said. “It’s been bugging me. I just remembered where I’ve seen him before. He was part of a work crew that built a new barn on our ranch.”
“And?” I said.
“Don’t you think it’s strange he showed up here to work for you?”
“Guys like him move around a lot,” I said. “You know that.”
“Yes, I do. But here’s something you don’t know. We finished the new barn just after Champion and the rest of the cattle were killed on our ranch.”
“Stephanie—”
“Look,” she said, “he was at your ranch when your bull was killed. What does that tell you?”
“That maybe your dad is right about your imagination. You’re not helping us come up with answers. You’re just making the questions harder.”
“At least,” she said, “someone is asking questions.”
Chapter Eleven
We reached the corral where the cattle had been killed. Dull brown smears of dried blood still covered some of the grass and bushes. Looking at it, I remembered how angry Dad and I were when we first saw the dead cattle here.
“You’ve got that look on your face,” Stephanie said.
“What look?”
“The one I’ve seen at hockey games. Sometimes you take your helmet off when you’re sitting on the bench. When the Blazers are losing, you look mad and ready to take on the world.”
“Oh.”
She got off her horse and tied the reins to a tree branch. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s start walking circles, bigger and bigger until it’s nearly dark. If you see anything, holler.”
I did as she said. Although I was looking at the ground as I walked, part of me was happy and grinning. Stephanie had been watching me at hockey games—
I started to daydream about scoring five goals in a play-off game. With her in the stands, of course. Then I figured if I was going to daydream, I might as well make it a good one. I’d score five goals, all right, but only after someone hit me so hard in the first period that my ribs were cracked.
Yes, that was it, I told myself as I reworked my daydream. I’d be a hero. Broken bones and still able to carry the team to victory.
Then after the game she would give me a hug. I would manfully tell her it didn’t hurt that much when she squeezed me. Then she would see the tears of pain in my eyes and admire me for being able to take all that pain in silence. She would look into my eyes. She would close her eyes and wait for me to kiss her—
“Ouch!” I said. I began to hop up and down, holding my right foot with both hands. “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”
Stephanie came running over. “What is it?”
She didn’t ask if it was a rattlesnake. It was too early in the year for rattlesnakes to be out of their dens.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” I said, still hopping on one foot. “It’s my big toe.”
I hopped around some more until my toe finally quit throbbing.
She giggled.
“What?” I said. I was cranky. “What are you laughing at?”
“You big baby. You were dancing like someone cut your foot off.”
“Look,” I said. “Cowboy boots don’t have steel toes. I kicked something and—”
“Weren’t you looking at the ground for clues? How come you didn’t see where you were going?”
“Maybe, just for a second, I was thinking about something else, okay?” I walked back to the deep grass where I had whacked my foot against something hard. I bent over and moved the grass with my hands. I saw what I had kicked. “Why do you suppose there’s a steel pole half buried in the ground?”
We both stared at it.
The pole stood a little under knee height. It had been driven into the ground at an angle, like a giant tent peg. The top of the steel pole looped into a tight circle.
“It’s like something to tie a rope to,” Stephanie said.
I pulled at it. “It’s stuck pretty tight.”
Stephanie kneeled down. She stared at the top of the pole for a few minutes.
“Josh,” she said, “with something this heavy, you would have to drive it into the ground with a sledgehammer, right?”
“Unless you were tough like me,” I said. “Then you could use your bare hands.”
“Remember I just saw you hopping around and howling.” She smiled. “But seriously—”
“Seriously,” I said, “I agree. You’d need a sledgehammer.”
“Take a close look at how shiny the top is.”
I looked. The dark steel was shiny where it had been flattened by a big hammer. “That only proves what we already knew,” I said. “Someone drove this in with a big hammer.”
“It also proves something else. Tell me when someone drove it in with the hammer.”
It hit me. A shiny spot where the steel had been dented.
“It’s only been here a short time,” I said. “Otherwise the shiny part would have started to rust.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I think we can guess this has something to do with the night Big Boy was killed.”
&nbs
p; “Any other guesses?”
“No,” she answered. “Why would someone have tied a rope to this?”
We couldn’t think of an answer. We didn’t find anything else that was strange or out of place.
When we got back to the ranch house, Mom and Dad still weren’t back from town. I needed to get to Kamloops to study for classes the next day, so we unsaddled the horses as fast as possible. We brushed them down and led them to their stalls in the barn.
Finally we got to Stephanie’s Bronco.
There was a note beneath her windshield wiper.
She opened it.
“Stay away,” she said, reading from the note, “or you will die like Big Boy.”
Chapter Twelve
“Speaking of the War of 1812, here’s some trivia for you,” Mr. Robertson said at the front of the classroom. “Remember, it was Canada and the British against the United States of America.”
Mr. Robertson was tall and wore a tweed sports jacket. He smoked a pipe, which he kept in his jacket pocket. He liked to pretend he was a university professor instead of a high school social studies teacher. In fact most of us knew we would get graded easier if we called him Professor Robertson.
He wasn’t a bad teacher. He tried to make things interesting for us.
“The British fleet actually moved so far up the river into Washington, D.C., that they nearly burned down the White House,” he said. “That’s how it got its name. The Americans used white paint to cover the soot and smoke.”
Normally I would have listened more closely to Mr. Robertson. But my thoughts kept going back to the night before. After finding the threatening note, Stephanie insisted we talk to Ernest.
Only trouble was, Ernest wasn’t in the bunkhouse where the ranch hands stayed. Neither were any of his clothes. Ernest had vanished. That only created more questions.
Big Boy was dead. Stephanie’s Champion was dead. Two other bulls of Locomotive’s bloodline were dead. Who was killing cattle? Why? And what did Ernest have to do with any of it?
I glanced at the clock. Eleven fifty-three. Seven minutes to the end of class.
“Furthermore,” Mr. Robertson was saying, “the American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ starts Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? The writer, Francis Scott Key, was referring to the American flag. He had watched from a ship through the entire night of the British invasion. He thought the American flag would not be standing at dawn. Still, against overwhelming odds—”
“ THESE ARE TODAY‘S ANNOUNCEMENTS,” the intercom interrupted. “ANNOUNCEMENT ONE: JOSH ELLROY IS REQUESTED TO REPORT TO THE OFFICE AT NOON. ANNOUNCEMENT TWO: INTRA MURAL BADMINTON WINNERS ARE—”
I didn’t hear the rest. I’d never been called to the office before. Was I in trouble? Had an emergency happened at the ranch?
As soon as the bell rang, I hurried to the office. The secretary handed me a message. I read it once. I read it again.
Then I ran to a pay phone down the hall.
Chapter Thirteen
“Dad,” I said into the telephone, “glad I caught you at the house.”
“Actually,” he said, “I picked up the extension in the workshop.”
I could picture where he was standing. The workshop was a big heated building behind the barn. On a ranch as big as ours, there is a lot of equipment—trucks, tractors, and a small bulldozer. We had a full-timemechanic who had plenty of repair work to keep him busy.
Dad would be standing at the front of the building, near the large tool bench. The old-fashioned black telephone had a dial instead of numbers to punch.
“Where are you?” he asked. “I hear strange noises in the background.”
“At school.” The strange noises were the regular sounds of students laughing and talking as they moved down the hallway.
“I’m sorry you wasted a quarter to call,” he said. “We don’t know much more than we did last night. There’s still no sign of Ernest. Lloyd says he didn’t even collect the pay we owe him.”
Lloyd is the ranch foreman. Dad lets him do most of the hiring.
“But I’ve got our accountant trying to find out more about Ernest,” Dad said.
Despite my news, I was curious. Last night, Dad had agreed Ernest might have had something to do with Big Boy’s death. Dad had promised to let me know what he could find out about the man.
“Accountant?” I asked.
“Not too many people can get through modern life without leaving a paper trail,” Dad said. “Credit reports, charge cards, all that stuff. An experienced money person can find out just as much about a person as a detective.”
He paused. “By the way, hang on to your quarters. I promise as soon as I learn anything I’ll call you.”
“Dad—that’s not why I called,” I said.
“Is everything okay? You haven’t gotten into a car accident, have you?”
I laughed. “Am I speaking to my mom?”
“Very funny. So why did you call?”
“Coach Price left me a message,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I called him. He told me the Buffalo Sabres want me to play a few games with them in the National Hockey League.”
“What!” He sounded like we had just won a lottery.
I felt the same way.
“It’s true,” I said. The Buffalo Sabres had drafted me at the end of last season. Because I was having such a good season, they had called Coach Price this morning. “The Sabres have a good lead in the race for the play-offs right now, and they want me to experience a couple of NHL games.”
Dad gave a rodeo yell into the telephone.
I wanted to do the same back. But there were too many kids in the hallway.
“I’m proud of you, Josh. When?”
“Saturday. They’re going to fly me from Vancouver to Los Angeles Saturday morning for the game against the Kings.”
“This Saturday?” he asked.
“This Saturday,” I said. “The day after tomorrow. It’s part of their road trip to the West Coast. Sunday is a day off. On Monday I’ll play with them against the San Jose Sharks in a televised game.”
Another rodeo yell. “That’s great news,” he said. “Wait till I tell the boys out here.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “Do you want to tell Mom? Or should I?”
“You tell her. Call tonight. I’ll do my best to keep it a secret so you can surprise her. And by then maybe I’ll know more about Ernest.”
He chuckled. “I love it. Saturday night you’ll be playing in the NHL. Think you can take good care of yourself until then?”
“I sure do,” I said. Of course, at that moment, I didn’t know what Stephanie Becker had learned.
Chapter Fourteen
Afternoon practice did not seem like a regular afternoon practice. Besides my dad, I’d only told Gordie Penn about my chance to play in the NHL. From him, though, the news had spread like fire through dry grass.
As I walked into the dressing room, guys high-fived me. Others slapped my back. It nearly brought me to tears, seeing how happy they were for me.
Luke Zannetti, though, made a point of keeping his head down as he got into his hockey gear. It made me sad, in a way. I hoped I would have been glad to see him get a chance to play with the Montreal Canadiens. We were both on the same team. We had both been drafted into the NHL. I didn’t think we had a reason to be jealous of each other.
I sat at my bench and pulled off my cowboy boots. I leaned back and listened to the chatter of the dressing room. Then I got nervous thinking about my first NHL game.
Here, at least, I knew I fit in. These guys were my friends. With the Buffalo Sabres, I’d just be a kid among strangers. Just as my dreams were coming true, I was afraid of them. In my mind, I gave myself a kick and told myself to stop worrying.
Five minutes later, I was on the ice, skating in circles to warm up.
Five minutes after that, we were in t
he middle of a three-on-two passing drill, where three forwards rushed down the ice and tried to score on two defensemen. One winger cut to the net. The other winger dropped back to split the defense. And the center decided to pass or shoot.
Coach Price had kept Luke and me on the same line. In five rushes, Luke had passed four times to the other winger and had taken one shot. His moves, of course, were his decisions. But three times I’d been so wide open for a pass that I could have taken a nap after getting the puck and still had enough time to score.
It didn’t surprise me on the next rush when Luke lifted his stick to take a slap shot instead of passing to me. I was wide open—again—but I’d figured out Luke was doing his best to ignore me. I wasn’t going to let him think I cared. I kept skating hard, telling myself all I could do was my best. If I started worrying about Luke, I would be giving him power over me.
Luke snapped his stick downward. As he was taking the monster slap shot, he turned his hips and shoulders and aimed at me instead of the net.
He rifled the puck at my head. Bang! It dinged my helmet just above my ear. I fell sideways and slammed to the ice. For a second, all I saw was black. I blinked a few times, and all I saw was white. I realized I was staring at the ice right beneath my nose.
I groaned and pushed myself back to my feet. I staggered over toward Luke. Some of the guys moved away, expecting a fight. Coach Price, at the other end of the rink, started skating toward us.
“That’s twice,” I said to Luke. It’s one thing to be a team player. It’s another to let someone push you around. “If there’s a third time, I’m coming after you. I won’t even stop to warn you. I’m just going to take you down.”
Luke’s reply?
He switched grips on his hockey stick. Holding it like a bat, he swung downward with full force against my leg. His stick broke across the side of my thigh.
I jumped him.
He fell backward.
I brought my fist back to hammer him.
Someone grabbed my arm.
“Enough!” It was Coach Price. He was roaring with anger. “Enough!”
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