The Wild One (2 page)

B
OARDS RUMBLED UNDER
Dad's tires as he crossed the bridge over the water that gave River Bend Ranch its name. Sam breathed the scent of sagebrush as they rolled under the tall wooden rectangle marking the ranch entrance.

A brown dog ran barking toward the truck.

“That's Blaze,” Dad said. “He sleeps in the bunkhouse most of the time, but it looks like he's come to welcome you.”

A cowboy yell split the summer silence.

Sam glanced left. She saw only a huge grassy pasture and horses grazing peacefully.

“Come on, now!” the same voice shouted again.

To her right, Sam saw the ranch house, white with green shutters. White curtains billowed from the upstairs window of her bedroom.

But all the racket was coming from a round corral, straight ahead.

As Dad pulled up next to the corral, Sam heard thudding hooves. She climbed down from the truck in time to see her old buddy Jake fly over a horse's buck-lowered head. Jake cartwheeled through the air and skidded to a stop on the seat of his jeans. Dust rolled around him.

Sam peered through the log fence rails, then planted one shoe on the lowest one and climbed until she saw over the top.

A sassy paint mare stamped and snorted in the corner. Her intelligent eyes studied the rider she'd thrown. Then she blew a whuffling breath through her lips.

Jake ignored the mare and looked toward Sam. The instant after she realized he'd turned handsome, Sam remembered how Jake used to trick her, tease her, and stare down his nose as if she were a lower life-form.

And she'd deserved every bit of bullying. Jake lived on the nearby Three Ponies Ranch and only put up with her because he liked riding. Jake was the youngest of six brothers. At home, the oldest boys had dibs on fun chores, like working horses. As the youngest, Jake would have to collect hens' eggs and mend wire fences. So he chose to ride over to River Bend each morning where Dad let him train young horses.

Something about Jake just brought out the pest in her. There he sat, bucked off before her very eyes.
Sam was usually speechless around cute guys, but she couldn't resist teasing him.

“Oh Jake, what's wrong?” Sam said in a singsong voice, like the little kid she'd been.

Dad slouched against the fence rails beside her and chuckled. “I'd say you just missed a good chance to keep your mouth shut, Sam.”

Behind her a screen door closed. Hens scratched and cackled. The scent of cooking wafted on the wind.

When Jake stood up, he looked a lot older than sixteen. He was almost smiling as he whomped his cowboy hat against his leg, knocking off dust. Then he resettled it on the Indian black hair he'd pulled back with a leather shoelace.

“Indian black” wasn't just an expression. Jake Ely was half Shoshone.

“Well, if it ain't Samantha.” Jake walked toward the fence. He wore chinks, fringed leather leg coverings like short chaps. “Still skinnier than a wet weasel, aren't you, Sam?”

How weird that Linc Slocum's respectful “little lady” made her bristle and Jake's insult made her laugh.

“Jake, you leave Sam alone 'til she's had a chance to catch her breath.” Grandma Grace slipped around the side of the corral. She wore a denim skirt with a pale blue blouse. Sam noticed its pattern of little red hearts, just before a hug closed around her.

“Gram.” Sam's throat felt tight, but she fought back tears. She didn't need to look like a wimp already.

Gram hadn't missed a week of writing to her in San Francisco. Almost all the news Sam received from the ranch came from Gram.

“Besides, Sam looks like a nice young lady. Not a weasel.” Gram touched Sam's hair, reminding her of the mistake she'd made cutting it. “You'll see that for yourself, Jake, when you've showered up for dinner and washed the dust out of your eyes.”

Calling the midday meal “dinner” instead of lunch was one more thing Sam had forgotten.

When Dad hefted her backpack and duffle bag, Sam wished he'd put them down. She could wait to get inside the house. She could wait to breathe the remembered smells of woodsmoke and coffee and to fling herself down on the patchwork-quilted bed she knew Gram had kept ready for her. She could
not
wait to see her horse.

“Where's Ace?” she blurted.

“Let me drop these inside and I'll show you.” Dad shrugged the backpack higher up his shoulder and walked toward the house.

“You're givin' her Ace?” Jake shouted after Dad.
“Ace?”
Jake yelled again, but the screen door had slammed closed. “You gotta be kidding.” Jake rubbed the back of his neck, then faced Sam. He looked her over for just a second too long. Then said,
“Ace's smarter than you and me put together.”

“Then he and I ought to do just fine.” Sam looked down at Blaze. Since the Border collie was begging her to rub his ears, she did.

“Yeah? You're quite some rider, are you, Zorro?”

Sam looked up. She thought Jake's eyes clouded with something like worry, but she must have misread his look. Jake's joke had been aimed at her black tee shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers.

“Excuse me.” Sam placed a hand against her chest and pretended to apologize. “Guess I've been in civilization so long I just plumb ran out of cowboy duds.”

She didn't mention she'd only ridden four times in two years, and all four times had been in a stable's riding ring. She sure didn't tell Jake he'd hit on the one thing she was really worried about.

“You kids knock it off,” Dad said as he returned from the house. He sounded amused, though, not a bit mad.

“I was only telling Sam how glad I am to see her.” Jake's arm circled Sam's shoulders. Although his voice brimmed with sarcasm, Sam felt a genuine warmth in Jake's hug.

This might turn into her best summer yet.

 

Ace was runty. Fourteen hands at best, he stood alone.

When Sam came to the fence, the other horses lifted their heads and swished their tails with faint
interest. A little grass fell from their lips before they went back to grazing.

Not Ace. If a horse could put his hands on his hips and look as if he were asking “And what do
you
want?” that's exactly what Ace did.

His hide glowed a nice warm bay and he had neat white hind socks, but a scar made a long line of lighter hair on his neck.

“Ace!” Sam held out a hand and smooched to him.

For a heartbeat, Ace was a horse transformed. His tiny head tilted sideways. His back-cast ears pricked up, black tips curving in. He pranced forward with the fluid grace of a dressage horse—until he saw that Sam's hand was empty.

Ace planted all four legs with a stiffness, which showed he was insulted.

“Told you he was smart.” Jake laughed.

“I wasn't trying to trick him!” Sam said. “I just wanted him to come over and let me rub his ears.”

From the ranch house porch, Gram clanged something metal against a triangle. She
didn't
shout “Come and get it,” but they all hurried in for lunch. Except for Sam.

She stalled, thinking Ace might come to her if the others left. She was wrong. Ace looked at her, shivered his skin as if shaking off a fly, and yawned.

 

Mashed potatoes sat next to a mound of green beans fragrant with onions and bacon. Dad plopped
a slab of beef on Sam's plate. All this for lunch.

Sam glanced around the kitchen. White plastered walls and oak beams made it cozy and bright at the same time. She wondered about the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall.

“I know he doesn't look like much, Sam,” Dad said. “But Ace is a great little horse.”

Before she answered, Sam noticed Jake kept a sidelong glance aimed her way as he reached for a platter piled with biscuits.

“I'm sure he's super,” Sam said.

It wasn't that she minded Ace's size. She was barely five feet tall, herself. She could mount a small horse more easily. But that scar. And his
attitude
…

“What about that mark on his neck?”

“The freeze brand?” Jake held his butter knife in midair, and Sam knew she'd surprised him.

Sam looked from Jake to her father.

“That's what it is,” Dad agreed. “Ace is a mustang. He used to run with the herd you saw today.”

Gram made a hum of disapproval, but Sam didn't try to decipher it.

“After wild horses are rounded up and vaccinated, they're branded with liquid nitrogen,” Dad explained. “That freezes the skin temporarily, the horse's fur turns white and—”

“Really? He was wild?” Sam's mind replayed the gelding's attitude. Ace hadn't been rude. He just had pride.

A stab of disloyalty deflated Sam's excitement as she remembered her lost colt.

“I wonder if he could've known—” Sam hesitated. “If he could've run with Blackie.”

“That's a fool thing to say.” Jake rocked his chair onto its back legs.

“It's not, is it?” Sam appealed to her father.

Dad blew his cheeks full of air and shook his head.

“Jake, put all four chair legs back on the floor, if you please,” Gram ordered.

Jake's chair slammed down, but his face was flushed crimson. Did he hate her for losing the horse they'd worked so hard to train? Or did Jake's blush mean what Linc Slocum had implied: some folks blamed Jake for Sam's injury?

It didn't matter. The accident had happened years ago. She wanted to know where Blackie was
now.

“What about that stallion we saw turning the herd away from the helicopter?” Sam's hands curled into fists. She kept them in her lap. “That was the Phantom, right? What if Blackie's running with the Phantom?”

Were they just going to let her babble until she ran out of breath?

“Now, Sam, first off, there's no such thing as the Phantom. There's been a white stud on this range as far back as I can recall. Dallas—you remember Dal, our foreman?”

Sam nodded, but her fists tightened with impatience.

“Well, he claims sometimes, when he's up late playing the guitar in front of the bunkhouse, he's seen a shadowy horse just across the river. He thinks it's the Phantom, drawn by the music.” Dad shrugged, but Sam felt chills at the picture his words painted.

“Folks always call him the Phantom. But it's not the same horse year after year. He's a…” Dad put down his fork and rotated one hand in the air. “You know, like a local legend.”

I know that,
Sam wanted to interrupt, but Dad was trying to be nice, so she just listened.

“There's fast blood in one line of light-colored mustangs, that's all,” Dad continued. “They haven't been caught because they run the legs off our saddle stock. Not because they're ‘phantoms.'”

“But aren't white horses unusual? I mean, maybe it
is
the same horse. Maybe he's really old.” Sam cut a green bean into four neat sections.

“Remember Smoke, Blackie's sire?” Dad asked. “That old cow pony was a mustang and he was dark as Blackie when he was a yearling. He turned gray by age five, but he was snow white by the time he died last spring.

“That's the way it is with most white horses, if they're not albinos, and that's all there is to this Phantom.”

So quick that it startled them all, Gram stood up. She lifted the coffeepot, poured a cup for Dad, and set it before him.

“Who wants dessert?” Gram went to the counter and came back with a pie. She placed it on the table.

“I don't know.” Sam wondered if she could eat another bite.

“No excuses, young lady.” Gram's thick-bladed knife split the golden crust. She served Sam along with everyone else.

“And second, Sam,” Dad watched her over the top of his coffee cup, “we've watched for your colt and haven't seen him. With all the trouble these horses are into—”

“And Linc bein' loco to catch the Phantom,” Jake added.

“What he thinks he'll do with that stud is beyond me,” Dad said, shaking his head.

“Wyatt, it's clear as glass what he intends.” Gram sat down with her own pie. “Linc Slocum moved out West to play cowboy. He bought a ranch. He hired men to teach him to ride and rope. He bought clothes to look the part of a working buckaroo, but he only looks like he's wearing a costume.

“Folks still see him as an outsider,” Gram said, mostly to Sam. “So he wants a wild white stallion that stands for everything he
can't
buy.”

“Capturing the Phantom won't change what folks
think of him,” Jake said.

“And it'll land him in jail if the Bureau of Land Management finds out,” Dad added.

Sam fidgeted with her napkin. Linc Slocum gave her the creeps.

“If Blackie joined a herd headed away from here, it would be for his own good,” Dad said, then swallowed his last bite of pie.

Sam thought for a minute, counting up the years. Blackie would be almost five by now. A stallion. With his mustang bloodlines, he could survive in the wild.

“Blackie's got a herd of his own, now,” she said and crossed her arms. “That's what I think.”

 

By the time Sam left the table, the snap on her jeans was pushing against her stomach. She felt stuffed and a little sleepy, but she could hardly wait to go ride Ace. Still, she tried to be polite.

“Want me to wash dishes?” she offered, then crossed her fingers. Please let Gram refuse.

“No, you better go try out your horse.” Gram stacked the dishes.

Sam knew it wasn't fair to leave Gram indoors, while she, Dad, and Jake escaped into the June afternoon.

“Maybe I'll unpack first.” Sam fidgeted near Gram's elbow.

“Don't do that.” Gram slipped the plates into a
sink full of soap suds. “It'll just be a waste of time.”