Run Away Home (8 page)

“This won't take long,” Sam promised.

She wasn't going to whitewash Jake's face. The snowball was falling apart even as she looked both ways, dodged a car backing up, and went after him.

Jake's hair was finally long enough again to be pulled back with a leather thong. It hid the collar of his denim jacket, and she aimed the snowball just below the straight line of his black Shoshone hair.

He dropped the books he'd been carrying and turned smiling, braced to scoop up a snowball of his own, until he saw her. Then, Jake's face blanked out. Just like that, it was expressionless.

“Hey, all I want's a friendly little snowball fight,” she yelled.

She marched closer to him, holding her arms wide, making herself a perfect target, but Jake just bent, picked up his books, and brushed the snow off the bottom one.

“Your friend ain't here no more,” Jake said.

Then he climbed into his truck, slammed the door, and carefully drove away.

“W
hat happened?” Jen demanded, taking her backpack off the seat she'd saved for Sam and tugging her down to sit beside her. “If you'll pardon me,” Jen hissed, “you look totally devastated.”

“I'm not devastated,” Sam said, though she felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach. “Jake's just being a jerk.”

“What's wrong with him?” Jen asked.

Your friend ain't here no more.
His words echoed in her head. Why would he say that?

“Who knows? It doesn't matter. What
does
matter is that yesterday, right after I left you, that black helicopter came back and it was herding two amazing stallions.”

“Why would it go after two stallions—bachelors, I'm guessing, right?—when, for the same cost per helicopter hour, they could bring in a herd?”

“Jen,” Sam said, about to accuse her friend of being heartless.

“I'm not saying that's what they should do,” Jen pointed out. “I'm just looking at it as a mathematician.”

“Or a BLM bureaucrat,” Sam agreed, “like Norman White.”

If he was going to reduce the horses on the range by half, that would mean gathering whole herds.
But please not the Phantom's,
Sam thought,
or New Moon's
.

“Are we still going riding?” Sam asked suddenly. She'd love another look at Yellow Tail. Something about the young stallion intrigued her.

Jen gave a little bounce in her seat.

“Yep, and if everything goes right,” Jen said, brandishing two hands worth of crossed fingers, “will I ever have news for you!”

 

Melting snow dripped off the barn when Sam went out to hug Tempest before she grabbed her tack.

Dallas stood just inside, staring up at the roof, checking for leaks.

“Filly seems to be doing fine,” Dallas said. Then, without lowering his gaze from the barn roof, he added, “Better than you, by that frown you're wearing.”

“I'm okay,” Sam said.

Dallas gave a nod.

“Your Gram gave me that wooden horse that got broke and I'm fixin' it.”

Sam blinked. She didn't even remember where she'd put the carved horse, and yet Gram was looking out for her by asking Dallas to repair it.

“Thanks,” she said. “It just fell in the wind, and…”

Dallas touched the brim of his hat. Then, with typical cowboy tolerance, he left her alone with her filly, understanding she didn't want to talk.

And she really didn't. Not about feeling sorry for Tempest because she'd been separated from Dark Sunshine. Not about Brynna, who was inside the ranch house driving Gram crazy by insisting she was going to clean the entire attic instead of just helping Gram bring down the Christmas decorations. Not about Spike and Yellow Tail and evil black helicopters. And certainly not about Jake.

Sam slipped inside Tempest's stall and wrapped her in a hug.

“I love you, baby,” she said, nuzzling the filly's cottony mane. She sighed and the tension of the day eased away a bit.

The filly put up with Sam's human affection until she noticed her gloves.

With a snort, Tempest butted her black muzzle against Sam's hands.

“You've never seen me wear gloves before?” Sam asked.

Laughing, Sam backed up, gently batting at the
filly as she tried to nip the gloves off. Tempest was persistent, pursuing Sam around the stall, until both the filly and Sam were startled by the blasting of a horn.

“Samantha!” Dad shouted.

“What now?” Sam whispered at the filly. “Can I just hide in here?”

Taking advantage of Sam's distraction, Tempest caught the tip of one gloved finger and tugged.

“You little imp!” Sam said as the glove slipped free of her hand.

Tempest held her head high, flapping the glove as she lifted her knees in a proud prance.

Sam chased the filly, caught her around the neck, and pried the glove from her teeth.

“Yuck, horse spit,” Sam joked, but Tempest probably couldn't hear the insult over the single prolonged blare from outside.

Sam knew she'd kept Dad waiting too long.

“Later for you, cutie,” Sam said, kissing Tempest's face. The black filly pulled away and made one more openmouthed feint, but Sam escaped, happy and smiling as she wiggled her fingers back into her glove.

Dad's new gray truck sat right outside the barn.

“Hi!” Sam greeted him.

Dad reached across the cab and shoved open the passenger's side door. “Get in.”

“I can't,” Sam said. “Where are you going?”

“
We're
going to Darton.”

“I can't,” Sam repeated. “I'm meeting Jen for a ride.”

And she's going to tell me a gigantic secret,
Sam thought, but she kept that to herself. Dad would be far more sympathetic to a broken promise than chitchat.

“Nope, you're going to the Department of Motor Vehicles to test for a hardship driver's license.”

“What? A driver's license? I only…” Sam gestured through the ranch gates toward the range.

A couple of weeks ago she'd driven this truck about six miles with Jake and Singer in the back. She hadn't known what she was doing. Jake had given her rudimentary instructions, but she'd killed the engine a bunch of times and been too afraid to drive it over the bridge.

Sure, they'd all arrived home safely. And yeah, Dad had practiced driving with her twice since then and it had turned out she was a natural at shifting from one gear to another, but the engine almost always died after she came to a stop. She'd thought the lessons were just for fun.

“Get in,” Dad insisted. “We'll talk about it on the way.” He tilted his head to look out the window at the sky, instead of looking at the clock on the truck's dashboard. “Not much daylight left and they close at five.”

Sam's shoulders drooped. The grin Tempest had
put on her face sagged, too, but she could tell there was no sense trying to talk Dad out of this. His mind was made up.

“Can I at least call Jen and let her know?” Sam asked after she'd climbed into the truck and fastened her seat belt.

“Your Gram's taking care of that,” Dad said, and they were off.

 

Although Sam was aching to hear Jen's news, she comforted herself with the possibility that maybe whatever it was hadn't become “final” yet, as Lila had cautioned Jen to expect.

A hardship driver's license. Sam turned the words over in her mind. Hadn't Jake had one of those? She couldn't remember, but she felt scared, rather than eager to get one.

“Kind of sudden, I know,” Dad said, glancing over at her. “But I just thought, if you were alone with Brynna when she went into labor with the new baby…” Dad's voice trailed off.

“I'd be able to drive her to the hospital,” Sam finished.

“Legally,” Dad added. “You can read that.”

Dad pointed to a handbook on the seat between them and Sam flipped through it. Though she shivered at the prospect of all the highway miles between home and town, and the likelihood of oncoming traffic, stop lights, and cars zooming up behind her and
then passing in the other lane, she nodded.

Anything was better than being helpless, and she had to admit a swell of pride was almost choking her. When she'd come home to River Bend two years ago, she never could have guessed Dad would trust her with such a huge responsibility.

They'd driven for about ten minutes when Sam said, “Rachel Slocum's going back to England and she said Ryan's going to be running the ranch.”

“Huh,” Dad responded.

“Do you think he's cut out for it?” Sam asked.

“Not for me to say.”

Of course not,
Sam thought, feeling defeated.

After another mile, though, Dad added, “Jed thinks he could make a go of it.”

Wow, was that the closest Dad had ever come to gossiping? Sam grinned.

“Did you talk to him about it?” Sam prodded for details.

“I saw his truck at Clara's when I checked on the buckskin.”

“Sunny was okay, wasn't she?” Sam asked.

“Seemed to be,” Dad said. “Jed was in havin' coffee.”

Sam pictured Jed Kenworthy, foreman of Gold Dust Ranch, at Clara's on the day after Linc's arrest. Everyone who stopped in for bacon and eggs or the local newspaper would see Jed as an expert on Linc's financial woes. Stopping at Clara's for coffee was the
same as asking to be pumped for information.

“What did Jed have to say?” Sam asked. She tried to sound casual, but she hoped she'd get a hint of Jen's secret in this roundabout way.

Dad flashed her a don't-press-your-luck look, but answered, “Linc's gonna go down for this. No question. When a man builds his fortune on other folks' bad luck and hooks up with shady characters, the whole house of cards don't take long to collapse.”

Sam nodded. Even though she'd never seen a house of cards, she imagined flimsy paper rectangles fluttering down, then blowing away.

 

Sam passed her written test with a score of 99 percent, still unsure how a driver should angle the car's wheels when parking on a hill. She didn't do as well on the driving portion of the test, but Dad swore to the examiner that Sam would only drive with a licensed driver in the next seat for months, or maybe years, to come, so Sam walked out of the office with a brand-new driver's license.

“I'd like to stop and celebrate, but I'm kinda antsy to get back home,” Dad said, looking apologetic.

He didn't mention the coming baby, but Sam knew that was why, so she said, “Me too,” though she felt a little melancholy at the thought of driving straight back as if they'd only been to town for groceries.

“There's a fast-food joint with a drive-through,” Dad said as they left the Department of Motor
Vehicles' parking lot. “Guess we could get some milk shakes.”

Sam turned toward Dad so quickly, her seat belt grabbed at her shoulder.

“You hate drive-throughs. Have you ever been in one?” she gasped.

“Don't like that closed-in feeling,” Dad said, “but this one time probably won't kill me.”

 

They were halfway home when Dad sucked in a breath between his teeth and shook his head.

“Almost forgot.”

Sam closed her eyes and squeezed the paper cup with three pink sips left at the bottom so tightly, it crushed in her hand. She really, truly wasn't up for another surprise.

“There in the glove compartment is something from Trudy Allen. And Preston.”

If it was something from Mrs. Allen, who'd opened the Blind Faith Mustang Sanctuary to rescue “unadoptable” mustangs the BLM would otherwise have destroyed, it couldn't be that bad, Sam thought. And though she'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Phineas Preston because he thought she'd stolen his palomino police horse, Sam had to admit he'd become kind of a hero to her.

Sam unfolded a piece of stiff gray paper. In a glance, she figured out she was holding a rough draft of a flyer Preston and Trudy planned to use for Blind
Faith Mustang Sanctuary's new program in which city people would pay to work with wild horses.

“Wild Horse Eco-Vacation,” Sam read aloud from the typed portion of the page.

Dad made a weird sound and when she glanced at him, his mouth twisted as if he tasted something sour.

“I think that means ecology,” Sam explained, then decided to read everything else silently.

Dad was an old-school rancher. To him, this idea smacked of a dude ranch.

It wasn't. Blind Faith Mustang Sanctuary needed money to pay vet bills and farriers, and to feed the captive wild horses. But Dad didn't see it that way. He thought of Mrs. Allen's Deerpath Ranch as a cattle operation and he'd known her husband, a serious cattleman like himself. Though Dad liked Preston and Trudy, and hoped they had a nice marriage, he couldn't see why anyone would take on caring for mustangs when they could mostly take care of themselves.

Sam turned the paper sideways to read notes made in Mrs. Allen's handwriting.

Deerpath Partners? Sanctuary Side-kicks? Wild Horse Helpers?

Apparently Mrs. Allen felt none of the names had the right ring for marketing to the public, because she'd put an
X
through each one. Sam had to agree. Maybe over winter break, she could help Mrs. Allen come up with some better ideas.

“Sorry I didn't show that to you sooner, seein' as how they need you Saturday.”

“That's okay,” Sam said. Going over to Mrs. Allen's house to help with the brochure would take her mind off the unpleasant things that seemed to be piling up around her.

“Trudy hasn't gotten much help. Preston's supplied some money and he's working on fences…”

Sam stared out the truck window as the landscape slipped by. She was interested in Mrs. Allen's program and what Dad had to say about it, but she couldn't escape thoughts of Norman White, helicopters, and Jake's voice saying,
Your friend ain't here no more.

“…high moisture content…good for the well…reinforce fence posts so the snow doesn't break it down…”

Sam nodded as Dad talked, but she was picturing the captive wild horses reacting to a helicopter overhead. Would they flash back to the day of their capture when the sky had been filled with a giant whirring insect? Could fence posts set in water-logged ground be shoved over by the horses' charge for freedom?

“So even though they got the school district to help out, loaning them the bus and Pinkerton as driver and whatnot, for their pilot program—”

“Pilot?” Sam interrupted. The word snagged her attention.

“You know, sort of a first try,” Dad said, as if she were simpleminded. “
That
kind of pilot program.”

“Oh,” Sam said with a sigh.