Crazy Horse (8 page)

It was only when they drew within fifty yards of the ranch house itself that Kirstie looked up and paid any attention to her surroundings. It was a quarter after four on a dull, gray day, dirty snow on the ground, the ranch-house chimney smoking, the kitchen door swinging open…

“No!” Kirstie let out a sudden groan. There, parked close against the porch steps, was a pale blue, beaten-up car. Its fender was bent and hanging off, the body was dented and deeply encrusted with dirt.

“That’s Matt’s car!” Lisa gasped. She stood still and let Kirstie run ahead.

“What happened? Where’s Matt?” Kirstie flew into the house to find her mom sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. “Did he skip his exam?”

Sandy took a long time to look around. “No, he took the test. But he wants to quit college.”

Kirstie took a deep breath. She couldn’t look her mom in the eye.

“You knew?” Sandy stared accusingly at Kirstie.

“I didn’t…I wasn’t sure.”

“You suspected?”

“Mom, what happened? Where’s Matt now?”

“Charlie tried to talk to him, but he stormed off.”

“Let me try. Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. But honey, it’s no use. The mood he’s in, Matt won’t listen to anyone!”

Kirstie found her brother sitting on the fence of Red Fox Meadow, his back to the ranch, facing the herd of horses feeding from the racks of hay that Charlie had just delivered.

There were Lucky and Rodeo Rocky, the inseparable twosome of the palomino and the bay. There was dainty, skittish Jitterbug, and solid, easygoing Moose. Johnny Mohawk broke from the group and galloped the length of the field for the heck of it, his black mane and tail flying, his hooves kicking up frozen snow.

“Hey,” Kirstie said quietly as she climbed the fence to join Matt.

He blinked without turning his head, his gaze fixed on the black horse.

Something in his posture told Kirstie how much he was hurting. His shoulders were hunched, his hands gripping the top rail of the fence. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He seemed to be staring at the herd, trying to believe that Cadillac and Crazy Horse were still there, that this whole thing had been a terrible mistake…

But there was no sleek, white gelding challenging the black half-Arab to a race, no light brown, stumpy-legged follower clowning along at his partner’s heels.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he muttered. His face was pale with shock, his eyes dark.

Though he would deny it, would rant and rave and go crazy with anger rather than admit it, she could see his heart was broken. Slowly, painfully, she began to tell him the whole story.

It was forty-eight hours since Crazy Horse and Cadillac had been stolen.

The family had talked through the crisis all through Tuesday evening, helping Matt to come to terms with the loss of his two horses, looking at his future as calmly as they could.

“I want you to graduate as a vet,” Sandy Scott had told him. “Whatever you think now, however badly you feel, I still want you to finish college.”

He’d said it was waste of time, his heart wasn’t in it, he wanted to work at Half Moon Ranch to take some of the load off her.

“If Dad was around to help, like he should be, I wouldn’t feel this way,” Matt had insisted.

Kirstie’s own heart had been squeezed when he said that.
If Dad hadn’t left us…if he hadn’t found a new woman, a new life…

“But he isn’t,” Sandy had said emptily, finally.

“Then it’s up to me. I’ve gotta do it!” Matt had brought the argument full circle.

They’d reached a compromise. Matt had said he had one and a half days before his next exam. Sandy had agreed he could stay at home until then, help in the search for Cadillac and Crazy Horse, then drive back to Denver to finish the tests.

“After that, we’ll talk again,” she insisted. “Short-term, you can stick around. I understand you need to do everything you can to find the horses. And Kirstie, me, Charlie, and Hadley, we’ll all do our bit to help get them back. But long-term, we’re not deciding anything right now. OK?”

Grudgingly, Matt had agreed.

“Thirty-six hours!” Kirstie sighed now as she went to her bedroom window and looked out across the meadow. “Forty-eight since it happened. Thirty-six to mend Matt’s broken heart.”

The moon shone bright in a clear sky. The whole valley was lit by a weird silver light that picked out the shapes of the cabins on the hillside, the stands of aspen trees, the jagged horizons.

In Red Fox Meadow, the horses stood still and alert. They were listening.

Kirstie opened her window and leaned out. She saw the horses lift their heads and turn their faces in the direction of Five Mile Creek.

An indistinct figure appeared on the bank of the river. It plodded slowly, unevenly, toward the ranch, emerging from shadowy trees, weaving unsteadily and sometimes losing its footing to plunge knee-deep into the icy water. Then the horse would stagger, regain his balance, climb up the bank, and walk slowly on.

Flinging on a jacket and boots, flying downstairs, Kirstie ran out of the house. The door banged against the wall, her feet clattered on the wooden deck, then she was plunging into the dark, racing for the footbridge, gasping for breath as she sprinted to meet the weary traveler.

“Crazy Horse!” She wrapped her arms around his neck. He lowered his big, ugly-beautiful head.

The pale, tan horse was quivering from head to foot. His coat was caked with mud, his blond mane matted and tangled. And there was a burn mark on his neck where a rope had tightened and rubbed—a long, open sore that had cut through the skin, bled, and congealed.

“Oh, gosh, where have you been?” Kirstie gasped. “What did they do to you?”

He shook his head free, walked on doggedly toward the house.

Matt appeared in the doorway, his lean figure silhouetted in a square of yellow lamplight. For a moment, he stood stock-still. Then he sprang toward Kirstie and Crazy Horse. Across the yard, a light came on in the bunkhouse. The door opened, and first Hadley, then Charlie came out to see what was going on.

It was Matt that Crazy Horse needed to see. He staggered with Kirstie as far as the corral, where his owner stood, stopping again in disbelief, looking from one to the other and eventually walking slowly toward the horse.

Matt reached out to touch Crazy Horse’s cheek. The horse leaned his head toward him, his eyelids drooped, he breathed a long, drawn-out sigh.

“He must have walked miles!” Sandy Scott was as overjoyed as Matt and Kirstie at the return of the steadfast horse. She’d lifted his legs and examined his feet, found them cut and sore, the shoes packed with dirt and sharp stones.

Hadley had told Matt to take Crazy Horse into the stable and bed him down on fresh straw. The old ranch hand advised drink but no feed until the exhausted horse had begun to recover from his ordeal.

“You’re so smart!” Kirstie drew a blanket over his back. “You worked out a way to escape and came all the way home!”

Crazy Horse stood in his stall, head lowered, still shivering under the warm blanket.

“How far do you reckon he traveled?” Charlie wanted to know as he raked more straw into a comfortable bed. “To me, it looks like he walked a heck of a long way.”

“Who knows?” Sandy was taking a closer look at the rope burn on Crazy Horse’s neck. “Maybe I’d better call Glen Woodford,” she muttered.

But Matt stepped in. He examined the broken skin and asked Charlie to fetch water and soft, clean cotton rags. “It’s a superficial cut,” he explained calmly. “Our problem is dirt around the wound. I’ll clean it up and use antiseptic cream. Let’s keep an eye on his temperature. If it shoots up by morning, we’ll know there’s an infection that needs to be treated with antibiotics. That’s when we bring in a qualified vet.”

Kirstie watched her brother work on the wound as he talked. She saw Crazy Horse quiver as Matt rubbed the dirt out of the wound and reached out to soothe him by stroking his nose and cheek. “You’re a hero!” she whispered. “A star!”

“Maybe.” Hadley broke into her imagined picture of how it must have been, of Crazy Horse defying his captors to break loose and escape. “Then again, maybe the rustlers dumped him.”

Charlie took him up. “You mean, once he’d served his purpose of luring Cadillac out of Red Fox Meadow, they drove till it was safe, then let him go?”

The old wrangler nodded tersely. “More trouble than it was worth to truck him down to a sale barn.”

Kirstie frowned. “What do they know?” She stroked and hugged and made a fuss of the brave horse. But mention of Cadillac had distracted her. She sidled up to Matt, who was working white cream into Crazy Horse’s neck wound with gentle, circular movements of his fingertips. “Now that he’s back safe, it just leaves us with the problem of finding Cadillac,” she murmured.

He nodded.

“I was thinking about it and came up with a plan.”

“Which is?” The urgency in Matt’s voice made her whisper.

“I’m gonna do what Sheriff Francini should have done right away, and that’s call around all the sale barns.”

“To ask if anyone has tried to sell Cadillac?”

To Kirstie, this sounded good. “He’s a pretty unusual horse. The sale-barn managers are bound to spot him.”

Matt put the top on the tub of cream, then wiped his hands. “I don’t care if I have to call every horse sale barn in the country; if that’s what it takes, I’m gonna do it!”

It was Hadley again who put in the warning note. “Maybe it ain’t gonna be that easy. You’re supposing that every guy in every sale barn is a regular, honest joe: you ask them a question, they give you a straight answer.”

“Why would they lie?” Kirstie demanded. “If a manager learns that Cadillac’s been stolen, won’t he turn him over to the cops?”

Hadley’s thin, wrinkled face creased into a look of stubborn doubt. “Not if there’s a few thousand dollars resting on the deal and a good percentage to the guy who runs the sale.”

“You saying we shouldn’t even bother to call?” Matt was winding himself up, ready to argue.

Sandy wanted everyone to leave Crazy Horse’s stall so that the exhausted horse could get some sleep. Matt’s raised voice was disturbing him. She ushered them all out into the passageway and turned out the light.

“I’m saying be glad Crazy Horse made it,” Hadley insisted. He led the way out into the dark corral.

“And forget about Cadillac?” Matt challenged.

“You got one horse back. I’d guess that was one more than was likely.” The wrangler’s gravelly voice refused to back down. “And those guys had plans for the pedigree before they even rustled him—plans that they ain’t about to let you spoil.”

Kirstie turned to appeal to her mom. “We’re not gonna listen to that!”

“We’re paying attention,” Sandy said steadily. She nodded good night to Charlie and Hadley, then headed inside the house. As Kirstie careered in after her, falling over herself in her rush to protest, her mom turned around and took her firmly by the shoulders. “I can’t dismiss what Hadley just said. After all, he’s been around sale barns all his life. He knows what he’s saying.”

“But…C-Cadillac…!” Kirstie stammered.

Sandy nodded. “I know. I want him back as much as you and Matt.” Pausing to think ahead, rubbing her forehead, she finally decided what they should do. “Matt, you make those phone calls first thing in the morning. We owe it to poor Cadillac to at least try!”