Read Gib and the Gray Ghost Online
Authors: Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Gib and the Gray Ghost
The Gib Series (Book Two)
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
To the memory of three Joes
A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder
A
S CAESAR AND COMET
trotted down Lovell Avenue, Gib couldn’t help turning to look back. Leaning out over the buggy’s spinning wheels, he almost forgot to breathe as he watched time and distance shrink the Lovell House Home for Orphaned and Abandoned Boys down to size. All the way down from an evil fairy-tale castle, into a big old ugly mansion house, and finally to nothing more than a dwindling shadow. And then no more Lovell House. Never again, for good and always.
For good and always? Gib took a deep, shaky breath, thinking—well, maybe. Maybe, except for the fact that the whole thing had happened once before.
“What is it, boy?”
It wasn’t until she spoke that Gib noticed that Miss Hooper was staring at him. And probably had been the whole time he’d been watching the orphanage fade away to nothing.
“What is it?” she asked again. “Not happy? Not happy to be leaving that dreadful place?”
Gib smiled. “Mighty happy,” he said. “And I surely do thank you for ... His grin widened. “I surely do thank you and Hy for coming to get me.” His eyes moved to where his saddle lay on the seat beside Miss Hooper. “And for saving my saddle too. For talking Miss Offenbacher out of selling it.” He shook his head then in a kind of wondering surprise that Miss Hooper had managed to stand up to old Offenbacher and get her to back off.
He was happy. If he’d sighed it had only been because he was remembering how it had all happened before. How he’d left Lovell House that first time heading for a new life with the Thornton family on the Rocking M Ranch. But then it had come to an end, and he’d been sent back to the orphanage. And now the whole thing was happening all over again, just like before. Here he was in the Thorntons’ stylish buggy behind the same matched pair of high-stepping bays. The big buggy looked as smart and shiny as it had back then, and Caesar and Comet were as high-stepping as ever, but outside of the team and the buggy there were some important differences.
Of course the biggest change was that when it had happened before, he hadn’t known the man who’d come to get him. All he had known was that a man named Henry Thornton had come to the orphanage looking for a particular boy. A ten-year-old boy named Gibson Whittaker.
But this time Gib knew the people in the buggy well. Both of them. Right there beside him on the driver’s seat was good old Hy Carter, who had once been foreman of the Rocking M Ranch, but who was now, at least to hear Hy tell it, nothing more than a bum-legged old handyman. Hy’s wrinkle-gullied face and tumbleweed hair looked just about the same as when he and Gib had shared not only his rickety old cabin, but also all the farmyard chores at the Rocking M.
The other buggy passenger was, of course, Miss Agnes Hooper. Thin, sharp-edged Miss Hooper, who had been Mrs. Julia Thornton’s friend and companion since she was a little girl—and who was, as of today, Gibson Whittaker’s rescuing angel. Gib grinned and when Miss Hooper raised a questioning eyebrow, he said, “I was just thinking as how it was probably the first time anybody ever won an argument with Miss Offenbacher.”
Miss Hooper’s answering glare didn’t scare Gib a whole lot. From long experience he knew that she wasn’t nearly as fierce as she looked. Gib’s smile widened as he remembered how Miss Hooper’s fierce looks used to put him in mind of Bessie, the Thorntons’ good-natured old milk cow, who liked to shake her horns at you when you came into the milking shed, seeing if she could spook you some by pretending she was a real dangerous animal.
The buggy was just turning onto Fairfax Street when Gib realized that, in spite of his having two old friends there in the buggy with him, there was a feeling in the pit of his stomach that wasn’t entirely comfortable. A feeling that things were changing awfully fast and that he, Gibson Whittaker, had no idea what had caused the change or where it was taking him. It was a scary mixed-up sensation, half hope and the other half dread, and it was a lot like it had been on that other day so many months before. But that time Gib had not even known where he was heading and Mr. Thornton, closemouthed and frowning, surely hadn’t been looking to answer any questions.
There had been a lot of questions that Gib had wanted to ask Mr. Thornton back then. And now, on a cold and windy November day in 1909, only a few weeks before Gib’s twelfth birthday, there were once again a lot of things he really needed to know. The first question, the one he had to think about for quite a spell before he could make himself come right out and say the words, was about Mr. Thornton himself.
His voice wobbled some when he asked, but Miss Hooper’s answer was no-nonsense quick and sharp. “Yes, Gibson, he certainly is. Been dead since the first of last month.” She looked at Gib curiously. “But you surely knew, didn’t you?” Her ordinary scowl, the one Gib had learned not to take too much to heart, changed into something a lot more serious. A glare that made Gib think of the tight-skinned, flat-eared look of a horse that was about to take a good hard kick at something.
“Do you mean that Offenbacher woman didn’t even let you know about Mr. Thornton’s death?” Miss Hooper shook her head in a disbelieving way. “Didn’t she give you the letter Julia sent you?”
Gib shook his head. “No, ma’am, she didn’t tell me. But I knew something had changed, all of a sudden. I heard tell it was maybe ’cause someone had died. And I recollected how Mr. Thornton had been so sickly last spring, so I kind of wondered. But I wasn’t sure about—about anything—”
“Changed?” Miss Hooper broke in. “In what way did Mr. Thornton’s death change things for you?”
Gib swallowed again and, trying not to make too much of it, he almost managed a smile as he said, “Well, things just got a little bit harder for me a couple of weeks ago. Like a paddling or two, and then my saddle ... He paused, struggling to keep the way he felt about his saddle from messing up his voice. “Miss Offenbacher said she was going to sell it.” He could tell his voice wasn’t cooperating but he went on anyway. “When Mr. Thornton brought me back he got Miss Offenbacher to promise that I could keep the saddle. And she did promise. I heard her promise him, but then all of a sudden she was going to sell it...
He stopped then, noticing the strange way Miss Hooper was staring at him, and how Hy had turned and was looking too.
Miss Hooper muttered something almost under her breath and then went on more loudly. “My fault and Julia’s, in a way. She’d been writing the checks and I’d been mailing them, but then when Henry died so suddenly things got neglected for a bit, and ... She shrugged angrily. “That evil woman must have decided that, with Mr. Thornton gone, no one would pay them off anymore, or check up on how you were being treated.”
Miss Hooper made a fierce snorting noise and turned suddenly to look toward the orphanage as if she was considering going back to tell Miss Offenbacher a thing or two. Gib didn’t say anything, but just thinking about a really angry Miss Hooper marching into Offenbacher’s office helped him to swallow the lump in his throat and even grin a little.
“And Mrs. Thornton and Livy?” he asked, and then corrected himself. “Olivia, I mean. How’s Miss Olivia?”
Miss Hooper huffed a couple more times before she answered, “Well, it’s all been very hard on Julia, of course. And on Olivia too.” She sighed. “Olivia felt quite close to her father when she was younger, in spite of—” She broke off, paused, and then went on, “But now that the funeral is over and things are getting back to normal, I expect they’ll both be doing much better.”
Gib nodded and said he surely hoped so, before he went on to the next question. The one that had been bumping against his teeth ever since he got into the buggy. Turning toward Hy, he asked, “And Black Silk? How’s Black Silk?”
Hy grinned. “The mare’s fine,” he said. “Getting purty fat and sassy, though, with nobody on the spread who’s up to givin’ her a real good workout. I saddled her up once or twice since you ... He paused and cleared his throat before he went on, grinning, “since you got the boot, but cain’t say I give her much of a ride.” He sighed, patted his bad leg, and started going on about all the things he couldn’t do a first-rate job of anymore without “really payin’ fer it afterwards.” He was still describing what a long ride on a live one like Silky did to his “aching old bones” when Miss Hooper interrupted.
“Hyram Carter,” she said, “could you forget about your aching bones long enough to ask that lazy team to step it up a little? At this rate we’ll all be frozen solid before we get back to the ranch.”
Hy grinned at Gib and, as Hy shook the reins ever so slightly, Comet twitched his left ear and Caesar flicked his tail. Gib swallowed a laugh, noticing how the old bays were giving Hy notice that they were at least considering his request. Considering, maybe, but not doing anything much about it. On the buggy’s backseat, Miss Hooper went on grumbling and tucking herself into her blankets, and Gib drifted back into silent amazement at the sudden new direction his life had taken, and to wondering what it would all mean in the long run.
A
T SOME POINT DURING
the long ride from Lovell House to the Rocking M, Gib noticed that his brain was beginning to feel like a mouse in a grain barrel. Like a poor old mouse he’d seen once, spinning one way and then the other without a hope in the world that it’d ever find a way to get out. And it never would have, either, if Gib hadn’t given it a little boost with a grain scoop. That had been one confused and scared little rodent, and there were times during that long ride when Gib felt pretty much the same way.
He’d been on some dark and worrisome spins that had to do with Mr. Thornton’s death, and with wondering how anybody, especially a person as strong-minded and important as Mr. Henry Thornton, could be right there one day, and then suddenly gone forever. Could be sitting at the head of the dinner table every night reading his newspaper, and driving his new Model T into Longford to the bank each morning, wearing his spiffy gray suits, running the bank and all that was left of the Rocking M Ranch, and then—nothing. No one in his chair at the table, or behind the Model T’s steering wheel. No more Mr. Thornton, not ever. Gib had never been able to settle the idea of death into a comfortable place in his mind, and when someone he knew just up and died so suddenly, it seemed especially hard to deal with.
But in between the dark, scary spins, there were some pretty cheerful ones. A lot more cheerful. Like suddenly realizing he might never see Miss Offenbacher again, or Mr. Harding and his paddle. And even better was the spin his mind kept coming back to—the almost certainty that he’d be seeing Black Silk again before the day was over. Over and over again Gib’s mind circled around how he’d walk into her stall, watching to see how surprised she’d be, and listening for her welcoming nicker. That was the best spin of all, but there were some others that were almost as good. Ones that had to do with the other horses, and with Mrs. Perry’s great cooking, and with seeing Mrs. Thornton again. Mrs. Julia Merrill Thornton, who had been his own mother’s friend, and who, according to Miss Hooper, had wanted to really and truly adopt him, way back when he was only six years old and a brand-new orphan.