The Prairie Thief
Page 13
She leaned toward the girls, her eyes twinkling. “Don’t you tell him I said so, but he’s been practicing at tiddlywinks. He’s determined to beat the judge when next they meet.”
The girls laughed. Louisa felt a soaring happiness through her whole being—something like the way it had felt to fly across the prairie on the pronghorn’s back. The brownies had been back in the country for a week, and already Mrs. O’Gorsebush and the girls had met for tea three times: once in the tunnel-house; once in Louisa’s house; and this time, just for fun, in the dear old dugout that had, in a way, been responsible for bringing them all together. Louisa had swept it out, and Pa had carried down a little round table and three kitchen chairs for the occasion. Mrs. O’Gorsebush had pressed him to join them, but he begged off, explaining that her husband had offered to help him repair a hole in the barn roof. Evangeline was getting quite cross about it, the brownie had said—she didn’t like the moon looking in on her at night—and Pa didn’t want to vex her further.
It was strange to see Pa conversing with the brownies as casually as if they were any old neighbors. At first he had been dumbfounded by the full tale of Louisa’s adventures after his arrest, but by the end of her account he was nodding thoughtfully, as if he’d done a tricky sum and the math had come out right.
“That explains a good deal,” he had said, looking off into the distance—seeing, Louisa supposed, a long succession of small mysteries that made sense now, once one got past the shock of the brownies’ existence. All those years, when she and Pa had thought themselves alone, they had really been helped by the keen attentions of their small neighbors.
“I’ve never lost a single animal to illness or accident,” Pa had said. “That’s quite remarkable, when you think about it. I wonder I never thought about it! I suppose . . . I suppose I only noticed what I did lose.”
“Ma,” said Louisa.
“Yep. Mrs. O’Gorsebush tells me her heart near broke into pieces when your mother died. She said she always regretted makin’ your ma promise not to tell me. Said she’d have let her out of the promise soon enough, if she’d lived.”
Louisa had been thinking about her mother’s promise and how that secrecy had taken things in one direction when the whole truth might have taken them in another. Not that Ma might not have died—not even the brownies could cure every sickness—but she and Pa could have been friends with their unusual neighbors all along, helping the brownies as much as they themselves had been helped, and enjoying one another’s company, and Mrs. O’Gorsebush would not have grown so lonely, she almost faded away.
And Mr. O’Gorsebush, too. Louisa understood now that his gruffness was a kind of protective skin he’d grown during those long, brokenhearted months after his wife disappeared. He was still gruff, but Louisa noticed he was spending an awful lot of time at the homestead ever since the brownies’ return from town. Every morning when she went out to hunt for eggs, there he’d be in the barnyard with a full basket in his hand.
“Beat ye again, ye sluggard,” he’d say. If Louisa invited him in for a cup of horseradish tea, he never turned her down.
In the dugout, Mrs. O’Gorsebush produced a basket of dried-berry scones and served one to each of the girls. Jessamine tucked in eagerly, and Mrs. O’Gorsebush clucked with satisfaction.
“We’ll put some roses in your cheeks yet, lass,” she said. “And Louisa, you’re growing so tall, you’ll have to let your skirts down soon!”
“Pa brought me six yards of calico when we sold the harvest,” Louisa said. “I’ll be sewing all winter, I expect.”
“I aim to make Cornelius a new suit o’ clothes while we’re in town. It’s a disgrace, a man o’ his years and stature traipsing about with patched pants.”
“You will come back in the spring, won’t you?” asked Jessamine anxiously.
“Och, aye, to be sure, we will. We’ve got to keep an eye on ye, haven’t we?”
Her tone was light, but Louisa knew that beneath the mirthful retort, Mrs. O’Gorsebush was dead serious. She had taken an interest in Jessamine after hearing her history from Louisa, and she was determined to make sure that Mrs. Smirch treated the child kindly.
“But how?” Louisa had asked.
“I put it to her straight!” Mrs. O’Gorsebush had replied.
“You spoke to her?”
“That I did, and high time. Marched right into her bedroom as she slept, three nights ago, it was. I climbed on her pillow and shook her awake. She nearly died o’ fright when she saw me.” The brownie wife had laughed at the memory. “I told her straight out that I had my eye on her, and if she treated that little girl with anything less than a mother’s kindness, I’d curdle her cream, tie knots in all her thread . . . and put out the word to every louse in the county to pay a visit to her head!”
The echo of those words made Louisa chuckle over her teacup. It was clear they’d made an impact: Jessamine’s hair was neatly brushed and tied with ribbon, her dress was clean and patched, and she had been allowed to come visit Louisa every day. Louisa was teaching her to write, and Mrs. O’Gorsebush had promised to show them both the secret of her famous potato chowder.
“What are you laughing about, Louisa?” Jessamine asked, wiping scone crumbs onto a napkin.
“I’m just happy, I guess,” said Louisa. “It’s nice to have neighbors.” She walked to the door of the dugout and looked at the sunlit path leading to the frame house and the barn, where Pa knelt on the roof beside the brownie, hammering a shingle into place. In the other direction the path ducked around a curve, and all she could see were those billowing fields, snow-speckled, thick with secrets. As she watched, the meadowlark rose up from the prairie, arching its way to the top of the barn roof. The brownie spit something into his hand—nails, perhaps—and commenced scolding the lark for disturbing him at his work. The lark tilted its head and trilled, sounding so uncannily like the brownie—grumble grumble grumble—that Louisa burst out laughing again.
“Now he’ll scold it for impersonating a mockingbird,” Mrs. O’Gorsebush said with a chuckle as she joined Louisa at the door. “Hullo! Who’s that?”
Someone had just come around the curve of the path and was heading directly toward the dugout. Jessamine ran to look too, squeezing beside Louisa.
“It’s a . . . what is it?” she said.
“It’s a coyote,” said Louisa uncertainly. “With . . . with two heads?”
“With two heads, and one of them’s wearing a green hat!” put in Jessamine.
“No,” said Mrs. O’Gorsebush, stepping right out of the dugout onto the path and waving her napkin at the visitors. “’Tis a coyote . . . with a rider. Well, my gracious. That’s a leprechaun, it is, if I am not mistaken. Welcome!” she cried, sounding girlish and merry. To the girls she added, “Och, I’ve not seen a leprechaun in a donkey’s age. Fine, merry folk, they are!”
The leprechaun lifted his green bowler hat and grinned a wide, toothy grin. His hair was as red as Pa’s. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye,” he called. “Me name is Bobbin O’Brien, and this here’s me good friend, Trickster. We’ve heard tell there be fine opportunities fer our sort out this way, and we’ve come to make yer acquaintance.”
Louisa and Jessamine looked at each other. Jessamine’s eyes were sparkling. Pa’s right, Louisa thought. This land is full of possibilities.
She smiled and stepped forward to shake the leprechaun’s hand.
“Might I offer you a dish of cream?
“We’ve heard tell there be fine opportunities fer our sort out this way, and we’ve come to make yer acquaintance.”
Melissa Wiley is the author of Inch and Roly Make a Wish and other books for children, including two series of novels about the ancestors of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She lives in San Diego with her comic-book-writing husband, a half dozen kids, and about three thousand books. She blogs about her family’s reading life at Here in the Bonny Glen (melissawiley.com/blog).
Jacket design by Sonia Chaghatzb
anian
Jacket illustration copyright © 2012 by Erwin Madrid
Margaret K. McElderry Books
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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 products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Melissa Anne Peterson
Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Erwin Madrid
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiley, Melissa.
The prairie thief / Melissa Wiley ; with illustrations by Erwin Madrid.
p. cm.
Summary: In late nineteenth-century Colorado, Louisa’s father is erroneously
arrested for thievery and, while under the charge of the awful Smirch family, Louisa and a magical friend must find a way to prove his innocence.
ISBN 978-1-4424-4056-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-4058-6 (eBook)
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Prairies—Fiction.] I. Madrid, Erwin, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.W64814Pr 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011047642