Katie and the Mustang, Book 4 (2 page)

We headed southwest to find the Sweetwater River, then followed it, keeping enough distance between the parties to let the dust settle a little. It was terrible. Sometimes it was so thick Mrs. Kyler would loan me a linen kerchief to tie over my mouth and nose. We'd wet the cloth. It helped, but our eyes itched and watered constantly from the grit. The wagon canvas turned brown with it; it rimmed the Mustang's nostrils.

He and I had it better than most. I could walk away from the wagons to where the dust thinned out a little. I pitied the wagon drivers. And I pitied poor Mary Taylor most of all. I could hear her coughing at night.

The Sweetwater River had clean, clear water that was cold in the mornings and still cool in the hot afternoons. With the good water, there was better grass. I kept the Mustang grazing every second of the day that I could. He was thinner, but seemed fresh and ready to travel every day at dawn, calling to the mares when I led him away from our little half circle of wagons. We didn't have enough to make a full circle anymore.

“You keep an eye out for snakes,” Mr. Kyler warned me one morning.

I looked at him. “Rattlesnakes?” I asked. There had been some in parts of Iowa, I knew. But I had never seen one.

“The rattlers get thicker as we go, a man at Fort Laramie told me. They like the sage and the rock.”

I swallowed hard and nodded. Snakes. Why hadn't I thought about it myself?

“A big enough rattler can lame a horse so's he needs to be shot. It'd kill you. I wish Hiram and Annie could have come,” he added, as though thinking about snakes somehow led to it. I knew what he meant, though. He liked me, but I was one more child to worry about, and he had no time to look after his own granddaughters the way he wanted to. If Hiram and Annie had come, Hiram would have been responsible for me.

“I'll be all right,” I said evenly.

He smiled wearily, then Mr. Silas shouted his name and he turned to go see what was wrong.

Sixty long, sun-stricken miles along the Sweetwater River, traveling through brittle grass and leathery sage, brought us to Independence Rock, a shapeless mound of brownish stone. The boys and men swarmed over it like ants on spilled sugar, looking for places to carve their names.

I led the Mustang closer, reading the letters gouged into the rock with knives and chisels and pry bars. There were messages that made my heart ache.
“Margaret died,”
one said.
“I am going home.”

Others were almost funny.
“Oregon, by gum”
someone had written. The first
“O”
was four times as big as the other letters. I wondered if the person who inscribed it had started off with big intentions, then realized how hard the rock really was and made the rest of the letters smaller.

I could hear voices coming from all over the rock, people were reading inscriptions aloud, calling out names and places, reading messages left for relatives and friends.

After Independence Rock we came to a pair of stone gates—or so it looked to my fanciful mind. The Sweetwater had worn a narrow opening in high cliffs of stone. People called it Devil's Gate. We couldn't go through it; there was no bank along the riverside to follow. We went around it instead, and soon saw the tracks of those who had come before us, marking the way. The ground was rough and sloped.

Coming back up the hill on the far side, one of Andrew's herd mares slid sideward and fell, squealing in pain. She struggled back upright, then stood, trembling, holding one back leg at an odd angle, her hoof not touching the ground.

When a horse ruins a leg, it is impossible to save its life. It cannot heal, and it will only be in terrible pain as it starves to death, unable to walk and graze. I know that is a terrible thing to say, but it is true, even on a farm when there was not the pressing need to keep moving that we had.

I remembered my father shooting a horse because it had broken its leg, and as much as it upset him, that's what Andrew Kyler had to do.

I led the Mustang away when I saw Andrew walking back to his wagon for his gun, running as fast as I could over the rocky ground. By the time we heard the shot, it was dimmed by distance. I still flinched. I saw Andrew later that day, and his eyes were deep and sad. The mare had been a favorite of his, a sweet-natured animal.

After the Devil's Gate was behind us, we passed onto a sage desert so dry that my lips dried, then cracked. I had a fissure in my lower lip that broke open and bled a little most mornings when I yawned.

The earth beneath the oxen's hooves turned to sand as we traveled. There were rocky ridges, steep-sided ravines and bluffs as far as the eye could go—and beyond that, almost at the horizon, were bluish mountains peaks jutting skyward. We all stared. None of us had ever seen mountains.

It just seemed impossible to me. How could dirt and rock get piled up like that? I was amazed at how the peaks got a little bigger with each day's progress, too. One day we could see clearly that the tops were white.

Miss Liddy noticed my staring at them one day during dinner break. I had eaten, and I was leading the Mustang past her camp to go look for grass.

“It's snow,” she called to me.

“Not in the middle of July,” I corrected her. I stopped a good ways back, uneasy being so close to her camp.

She smiled and nodded without coming nearer. I was grateful. “What else could it be, Katie?”

I shrugged. “White rock? Or salt? Like the lake where the Mormon people are building their city?”

She grinned. “Want to bet?”

I shook my head, flushing. “Betting wasn't allowed in my family. No kind of gambling was.”

Miss Liddy laughed aloud. “But you're taking a big risk coming west. That's a gamble—you're betting that everything will come out all right.”

I shrugged, knowing my parents would scold me for even talking about gambling. It seemed to me that Miss Liddy was right in a way, though. Anyone who came west was willing to take chances or they would have stayed home.

“They all say the worst part is the last,” Miss Liddy said quietly.

I had heard the same thing. The Mustang was holding up, healthy and sound. But looking around at the heat shimmers already rising off the dry soil, I wondered if we would all make it to Oregon. Some days I was so weary and discouraged that I wondered if any of us would.

CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“
N
ever saw a stallion as tame as that one is,”
N
Mr. Taylor called to me one morning as we broke camp.

I looked at him. “He's not all that tame. He just trusts me, I guess.”

Mr. Taylor shrugged. “You ought to let one of the men break him so you could ride. He wouldn't be much burdened, a little thing like you.”

“I don't mind walking,” I said, and I meant it. I was so used to walking that when I did have to ride in the wagon for a stretch, the jouncing made my stomach sick. I told him that.

“You'd like riding a horse better than being in the wagons,” he said, laughing.

I smiled at him so that he wouldn't think I was rude, but I wanted to walk away because I had just noticed Grover on the far side of the wagon, walking with his head down. Was he listening? I watched him for a few seconds; he wasn't looking in my direction as he went back to his chores.

“Would you look at that,” Mr. Taylor said, smiling, and he waved one hand at Miss Liddy's wagons, then walked off to help his wife finish reloading their wagon.

I followed the direction of his gesture and saw Miss Liddy McKenna, mounted on the huge mare, riding astride in her trousers, without bit, bridle, or saddle. I stared. I had seen her ride the big mare this way many times now—everyone had. It never lost its charm for me, to see the horse cooperating out of respect and love like that, not fear of leather whips or metal bits. I sighed. Riding a horse like that, with trust and respect…

I touched the Mustang's cheek, and he turned toward me as he usually did, to nuzzle my shoulder. “Would you
let
me ride you?” I asked him, then blushed when I heard Grover laugh out loud.

“Nooo, I doooon't want you to ride meeee,” he answered, making his voice into a quavering whinny sound. His face was twisted into a taunting grimace.

I led the Mustang away without a word to him. I was furious with myself. The truth was that I
did
talk to the Mustang like he was a person. I was so much in the habit of it that I didn't even realize I was doing it.

“I have to be more careful,” I said to the Mustang, then I blushed and glanced around.

Polly and Julia were together as usual, standing near Polly's parents' wagon, sorting through a basket of berries they had picked along the river the day before. Polly's tiny mother was sitting on a log, mending, her needle flashing in the early sun.

No one was looking toward me. They rarely did. Nothing had changed. They weren't ever mean to me. It was more like I was invisible to the Kyler girls. I slid my hand beneath the Mustang's mane and felt the warmth of his coat against the palm of my hand.

I had thought about it a lot. I knew part of the reason none of them had bothered to become my friend was that they had one another. They had all known one another all their lives, and they were as close as peas in a pod.

Another reason was that I was rarely without the Mustang at my side. I had to take care of him—not play silly games. From the time I'd met them, I'd had to spend most of every day finding grass for the Mustang. I couldn't race between the wagons or have contests to see who could find the most firewood or buffalo chips. I couldn't play hide-and-seek on our dinner stops, either. I was busy helping their grandmother make supper, then clean up. Their mothers let them go play together before bedtime. That was when I was helping Mrs. Kyler ready the wagon for morning, repacking the jockey box and getting the stallion settled with the mares and Andrew's horses for the night.

The Kyler girls were playing and giggling less than they had at the beginning of the journey, though. They were tired in the evenings, wrung out by the heat of the day. We all were. The searing hot sun was affecting everyone's spirits.

As the days dragged past and the weather got hotter and hotter, sometimes you couldn't hear anyone talking at all in our evening camps. Some nights, people just ate, then stared into the flames for five or ten minutes and went along to bed without saying a word to anyone.

Once in a while, Mrs. Kyler would notice that her granddaughters were ignoring me, and she would repeat her offer to speak to them on my behalf. I always begged her not to. I wasn't sure I wanted them for friends at all—but even if I did, having her say something to them would hardly help. If anything, it would make them dislike me.

I envied all the Kyler girls. None of them had lost their parents and a sister like I had. None of them had ever had to live with cruel strangers. The closest misfortune had come to any of them had been Annie's accident. And as awful as that had been, Annie was probably on the mend, and she had Hiram's love to see her through. As always, when I thought of Hiram and Annie, I hoped that they were both well and that Annie's burns were completely healed.

“I hope I can see them again someday,” I whispered to the Mustang. He breathed along the side of my neck, and his breath smelled like sage.

I glanced back at the wagons. No one could hear me talking to the stallion. “The Kyler girls have to be called over and over for supper,” I said, and I knew it sounded like a petty and ridiculous complaint. But it bothered me when they chased back and forth through the camp, giggling, when I was helping Mrs. Kyler fix supper. They had no sense. One night Hope had kicked dirt into the bean pot. Mrs. Kyler had used a spoon to get most of it out, but I could feel it gritting between my teeth when we ate.

Toby, the McMahons' little boy, was better behaved. So were all the Taylor children. The Kylers all doted on their daughters, and they weren't exactly spoiled, but they were kind of silly-headed, maybe because nothing bad had ever happened to them.

That thought bothered me. I didn't
want
anything bad to happen to them. “Maybe I'm just jealous,” I said aloud, and the Mustang flicked an ear to hear me better.

I led the Mustang farther away, settling into my everyday routine of grass finding. The Mustang wasn't pulling a heavy load or working, but neither were most of Andrew's horses, and they were all getting thinner.