Sea Star: Orphan of Chincoteague

by Marguerite Henry

Mr. Wimbrow roughed his hand over Paul’s head. “Really should be the other way around,” he said. “The colt saved the mare’s life. He come just in the nick of time. She’s got something to get well for now.”

  Chapter 17

  OPEN THE GATE

  GRANDMA WAS under the pine trees, stirring something in an iron kettle over a fire. She seemed neither ready to go to church nor ready to stay at home. She was wearing her Sunday hat, and over her Sunday dress she had tied a big apron. The smell of chicken steaming with wild onions curled out of the pot. As Grandpa’s truck drove in she stopped stirring and waited for the family to come to her.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” she cried. “It’s good news! Paul’s hair is rumpled as a kingfisher’s topknot, Grandpa’s wearing his hat backside to, and Maureen’s been twisting her curls the wrong way. You don’t need to let out a peep,” she said with shining eyes. “Sea Star’s eating! Now we’re going to eat, too. We’re going to have us a real old-timey Pony Penning feast. You know, you forgot all about breakfast.”

  Paul and Maureen laughed. They had forgotten about breakfast.

  Grandpa rubbed his stomach and smacked his lips in pleased anticipation. “To me it smells like outdoor pot pie, simmerin’ full of goodness.”

  “Might be,” Grandma said.

  Maureen looked into the pot and began stirring. “But, Grandma, what about your Sunday school class?”

  “The Lord understood, and so did Mrs. Tilley. She’s going to substitute teach for me.”

  “Ida!” Grandpa scolded in mock sternness, “I never thought I’d live to see the day when you’d get high-toney on yer own family.”

  “High-toney?”

  “Yep, high-toney. Seems to me that when ye wears yer best hat to a outdoor picnic . . . ”

  Grandma threw her apron over her face and laughed until the tears came. And soon the whole pine grove echoed with laughter.

  “Here, Maureen, lay my hat in on my bed. Then you can take the biscuits out of the oven and dish up the Seven Top turnip greens. Clarence, you and Paul slick up. Oh, I haven’t been so happy in a week! I’ve got a hungry family again.”

  When the picnic table was set and the plates heaped with the chicken pot pie and greens and hot biscuits, they all sat down, Grandpa and Grandma on one bench, Paul and Maureen on the other. Hungry as they were, they did not eat at once. They turned to Grandma, waiting for a word from her.

  Grandpa’s voice boomed his loudest to hide his real feelings. “Ida, I reckon ye can say grace at a picnic jest as well as to any other time.”

  Grandma stood up at the end of the table. Her eyes began to twinkle. “I feel like a colt,” she admitted almost shyly. “You know how choicy they are when first they begin to eat? You give ’em some grasses, and they go picking out certain ones that seem saltier than the others, and maybe they hunt for a little bunch of lespedeza.”

  Paul laughed. “That’s just the way they do, Grandma.”

  “Well, so long as you’re not my regular Sunday school class, I’m going to pull out wisps of goodness from the Good Book here and there. ’Tain’t the formal way to do, I know. But it’s mighty satisfying.”

  Grandma was shy no longer. She looked up beyond the tallest pine tree, right into the deep sky. She waited for the words to form in her mind. Then she sang them out:

  “ ’The angel of the Lord stood among the myrtle trees.’ ”

  Maureen’s and Paul’s eyes met and smiled knowingly.

  “ ’And the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.’ ”

  Grandpa’s hand went up to the bristles in his ears. “Ida,” he chortled, “that’s a hull sermon of itself! I like ’em short like that. If I could be in your class, don’t know but what I’d be first there ever’ Sunday. I’d even brave all them womenfolks.”

  Grandma’s face beamed as she ladled chicken gravy over every plate. Then she sat down.

  No one had to be urged to eat. Plates, wiped clean with biscuits, came up for second and third helpings.

  “A good thing biscuits don’t have pits inside ’em,” Paul grinned, reaching for another. “Nobody can count how many I’ve had.”

  They ate until they could eat no more. And then instead of going off to chores, they stayed a moment as if caught in some spell no one wanted to break.

  “This week is embroidered in my heart,” Grandma said. “Just think of little Misty sending Clarence Lee to college!”

  Grandpa chuckled. “Y’know,” he said, “I kin see the diploma hangin’ onto the parlor wall already, and writ on it as plain as plain is the name, ‘Clarence Lee Beebe, Jr.’ And I’m goin’ to print out Misty’s name alongside it. And that’s all I’ll ever read on it,” he laughed. “College people wastes words.”

  Paul swung one leg over the picnic bench and faced out to sea. A silence washed over them, a cozy silence, not sad at all. And running through it were the tiniest sounds that made it even cozier. The wind riffling the pine needles and rustling along the grasses. A duckling trying its wings. Guinea hens scratching. And deep in the woods a wren spilling a waterfall of notes.

  Grandpa dropped his voice to fit the quiet. “Me and yer Grandma have had a good many head of children,” he mused to himself, “but when each one went off to work or to war, we always got a little dread inside us. Lasted for days. But then . . . ”

  “Then what?” asked Maureen.

  “Always somebody was left behind to stay a spell with us. Even when all our childern was growed up and didn’t need us, then you two come along and the empty feelin’ was gone.”

  Paul let out a cry, cut off in the middle. He leaped to his feet. “Look!” he yelled. “Look what’s coming!”

  Maureen whirled around, almost falling off the bench in her haste. Coming into view at the bend of the lane was a tall, lank man leading a splashy brown-and-white mare. The mare limped a little on her near hind foot, and her head kept turning around as she hobbled along. But it was not her foot that worried her. It was a little brown colt nuzzling along beside her.

  “Ahoy, Paul! Ahoy, Maureen!” yelled Wilbur Wimbrow. “Come get your colt and mare. I got to go down the bay oysterin’ tomorrow. I can’t be wastin’ my time on these two. They’re yours!”

  Paul and Maureen flew to meet them.

  “You—know—what?” Paul asked, a little breathless as he ran.

  “What?” puffed Maureen.

  “Sea Star’s come to adopt us!”

  He called to Mr. Wimbrow. “We’re coming! We’re coming to open the gate!”

  Four miles off the eastern shore of Virginia lies the tiny, wind-rippled isle of Chincoteague. It is only seven miles long and averages but twenty-one inches above the sea.

  Assateague Island, however, is thirty-three miles long. Just as Paul Beebe says, Assateague is an outrider, protecting little Chincoteague from the rough seas of the Atlantic. The outer island is a wildlife refuge for wild geese and ducks and the wild ponies.

  MARGUERITE HENRY is the beloved author of such classic horse stories as JUSTIN MORGAN HAD A HORSE, KING OF WIND, and MISTY OF CHIN-COTEAGUE, all of which are available in Aladdin paperback editions.

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARGUERITE HENRY

  Album of Horses

  Black Gold

  Brighty: Of the Grand Canyon

  Justin Morgan Had a Horse

  King of the Wind

  Misty of Chincoteague

  Misty’s Twilight

  San Domingo: The Medicine Hat Stallion

  Stormy, Misty’s Foal

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, Ne
w York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1949 by Rand McNally & Company

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and related logo are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  This Aladdin Paperbacks edition May 2007

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Henry, Marguerite, 1902-

  Sea Star: Orphan of Chincoteague / by Marguerite Henry; illustrated by Wesley Dennis. —1st Aladdin Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A wild colt rescued by two children is raised by a mare who has lost her own way.

  1. Chincoteague pony—Juvenile fiction. [1. Chincoteague pony—Fiction. 2. Ponies—Fiction. 3. Chincoteague Island (Va.)—Fiction.] I. Dennis, Wesley, ill. II. Title.

  PZ10.3.H43Se 1991 [Fic]—dc20 91-13975 CIP AC

  ISBN 978-1-4169-2784-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-8804-5 (eBook)