Scarecrow on Horseback (13 page)

“I know, and tempt him with apples. Kind of
like Eve in the garden.”

“Stop teasing the child, Philip,” Mrs.
Jeffries said.

“Jeb says you're good with horses,” Mr.
Jeffries said. “He tells me you got a natural feel for them. That
you can even doctor them and they let you.”

She nodded, holding her breath.

“That mustang, the one you favor, is the
wildest,” Mr. Jeffries said. “He nearly kicked out the side of the
van when they shipped him here. Maybe you ought to settle on one of
the other two.”

“But he's the one I want,” Mel blurted out.
Her heart was beating so hard she was sure they could all see it
thumping against the inside of her chest.

“What's good about him besides that he's big
for a wild horse?”

“He likes me.”

“Well, now, that's something. But how can you
be sure that he likes you enough to want to be yours?”

Mel jumped up in her eagerness. “I'll show
you,” she said.

The three adults followed her out to the
pasture. This time she entered it through the gate. The others
stood outside the six-foot high wooden fence watching as she walked
a ways into the field. She hadn't gone more than twenty feet before
Cheyenne, who was at the far end of the pasture with the other
horses, looked up and began watching her. She approached him, then
stopped and waited. Cheyenne walked obliquely, toward her and yet
off to one side. She backed away from him. He stopped, then changed
direction and ambled toward her again. She drew nearer to him until
she was about ten feet away. Then she stopped and began brushing at
her pants, not looking at him. Cheyenne stepped closer. She held
her hand out, palm up. He ducked his head, stretched his neck out,
and sniffed her fingers.

“Well, I'll be,” Mr. Jeffries said.

“Cheyenne,” she said. “I don't have an apple
for you today, but you know what? I'll come by and bring you one
pretty soon. Okay?”

Bending his head and nibbling, the horse
moved away from her. But not far. He stopped a horse's length
away.

“Don't touch him,” Mr. Jeffries warned.

“I won't,” Mel said. “Not yet.” She waited.
Cheyenne came back again, close enough to sniff at her shirt. “Hi,”
she said. “It's me all right. How you doing?”

Then the horse did something that startled
Mel and made the others laugh. He took the end of her ponytail in
his teeth and tugged. “Ouch! Stop that.” As if he had pulled off a
great joke, Cheyenne whinnied, turned and romped back across the
field.

“Well, I never saw anything like
that
in my life,” Mr. Jeffries said.

“He's her horse all right,” Mrs. Jeffries
said. And she laughed with delight.

“How about that?” Jeb said. “That's some
weird horse. You sure he's a mustang?”

“Far as I know,” Mr. Jeffries said. “That's
what I bought him as anyways.”

“He's a tease,” Mel said. “But he's the best
horse I've ever met.”

“So you want him, eh?” Mr. Jeffries
asked.

“Oh, yes, I want him.”

“Well, I guess you're the one should have him
seeing as the admiration appears to be mutual.”

“Really?” Mel asked. “Really? You'll let me
buy him?”  She hugged herself to try and contain her joy.
“When can I bring him up to the ranch?”

“You got to work to earn him first,” Jeb
said.

“I'll do anything you want me to, except I
really, really hope you won't make me ride some horse I don't
know,” Mel said. She looked at him pleadingly. If anything happened
to another horse now because of her, she couldn't bear it.

“She's as loco as that horse,” Mr. Jeffries
said. But he was smiling. “I'd say the two of them are made for
each other.”

* * * *

Fortunately, for Mel, two horses went lame
that week and her services as an assistant vet were in demand. Mr.
Davis decided that she had cared for enough sick horses, shoveled
enough barrels of feed and loads of horse droppings, swept out
enough stalls, and readied enough horses for trail rides so that
she had earned at least a down payment on Cheyenne.

“I'll bring the horse up to Little Creek
Ranch tomorrow so's you can spend more time taming him,” Jeb
said.

“I told you Jeb is basically a nice guy,”
Dawn told her smugly.

Mel shrugged. “He's okay, I guess. At least,
he's been okay to me lately.” And she decided that if Jeb really
brought Cheyenne up to the ranch tomorrow as he'd promised, she'd
start forgiving him for taking Lily and Hojo and Colby away from
her.Tomorrow she'd see.

Chapter
Fourteen

The horse that Jeb and Sally released from
the van Sunday morning was not the Cheyenne Mel had fallen in love
with. A crazed animal, screaming a war cry, careened into the small
arena on the other side of the stream. He was to be left alone
there, which was a good thing because he clearly meant to kill
anyone who dared come near him.

For an hour, Cheyenne bucked and reared and
raced around the corral, smashing himself into the fence, which
shook but held fast. His eyes showed white and his nostrils flared.
Wranglers and even the kitchen and office staff came running to see
what was happening. A guest registering for the week asked if
someone was being murdered.

Mel clutched her cheeks and asked herself
what she had done to her horse. Cheyenne frightened her now, but at
the same time she pitied him. He was being imprisoned once again,
but now he lacked even the comforting familiarity of the horses
that had been captured with him. Alone in a strange place, he was
as terrified as he was terrifying.

When Cheyenne finally wore himself out and
stood shuddering in the ring, Mel's sympathy got the better of her
caution. She started to duck under the railing into the corral, but
Sally caught her by her belt and pulled her back.

“You crazy? You can't go near that horse yet,
Mel.”

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,” Mel said.
Struggling not to burst into tears, she stood between Sally and
Jeb. “I didn't know how much he'd hate moving.”

“Don't worry. He'll calm down,” Sally said
just as Cheyenne rose on his hind legs and shook his front hooves
at the sky, trumpeting his rage again. “May take him some time
though.”

“Yeah, a week or a month or forever,” Jeb
said. He looked shaken as he wiped the sweat off his face with his
sleeve and resettled his hat on his head. “We should have sedated
him before tying him up. That maniac kept trying to kick out the
back door on the way up here.”

“Anyhow, we got him here,” Sally said. “Keep
away from him for a few days, Mel. Give him time to get used to the
place.”

She nodded. He needed to get used to the
little corral, but would he ever? He was a wild horse and she had
penned him up. Would he forgive her for doing that to him? Ripples
of fear ran down her back. She might just have made the worst
mistake of her life.

* * * *

Two days later, Mel was crouching in a
shadowed stall using duct tape to hold a dressing on the haunch of
a horse that had been bitten by another. She heard an angry bellow
that no doubt was Cheyenne. She finished comforting the wounded
animal, put away the first aid supplies, and hurried out of the
barn and across the bridge. Cheyenne had better calm down by
Saturday morning because that was when the ranch put on a guest
rodeo in the small corral. It was meant to be fun and a way to show
off the skills the guests had learned during their stays. Parents
and children had to direct their horses around poles and ride them
across the field carrying eggs aloft on a spoon. Children tied
their kerchiefs on the calf's tail in relay races. The littlest
kids rode the sheep from the petting zoo like rodeo riders, which
was why, Mel had decided, the sheep were so unfriendly. On
Saturday, Cheyenne would have to be moved out of that arena for the
day, another new situation for him to adjust to, and he didn't seem
very adjustable.

He had ignored Mel when she stood outside the
fence talking to him. He'd ignored every treat she'd offered. Any
progress she'd made in getting Cheyenne used to her had been lost
in the move. Guiltily, Mel stood outside the fence again and asked
him, “Are you still mad at me? Aren't you ever going to forgive me
for getting you up from Jeffries' field? It was nice there, I know,
maybe not as nice as running free on the plains, but at least you
could find grass in the field. I'm sorry, Cheyenne, really, really
sorry. ”

Cheyenne stopped on the far side of the bare
corral, hung his head, and gagged. His neck was sweaty from all his
exertions. Mel moaned, feeling so bad for her horse that she
considered opening the gate and letting him loose. But where would
he go? He'd get hit by a car on one of the roads, or if he headed
up a mountain, he'd starve. In the vast forests of pines and spruce
and aspens, intertwining branches kept out the sun so that no
underbrush or grass could grow. Despite her sympathy for Cheyenne's
frenzied fight against his imprisonment, she couldn't think of any
way to help him now.

Mel was up at dawn the next morning to bring
Cheyenne feed and refill the water barrel set out in the arena for
him. For a long time, he avoided the feed bucket. Then he kicked it
over. It took another whole day before he stopped bucking, heaving
himself about, and banging into the fence. When he'd finally calmed
down, what he wanted was to drink. He drank half the barrel of
water dry while she brought him another bucket full of feed. He
shook the drops from his wet muzzle and looked at her with wounded
eyes, his front legs spread wide, his never-shod hooves big and
clumsy as hiking boots.

“I'm sorry, Cheyenne. I didn't mean to
torture you,” she said. She was so ashamed of bringing him low just
by wanting him to be hers that she went to Jeb and asked him to
cart Cheyenne back to Mr. Jeffries' field. “He was better off
there,” she said.

Jeb laughed at her. “He's a horse. They don't
have much brain. He'll get used to it here so long as we feed
him.”

“But if he doesn't get used to it—”

“Yeah, well, I'm not about to try getting him
back in that horse trailer anytime soon. I'll tell you that
much.”

Then on Friday, as if he'd decided resistance
was hopeless, Cheyenne quieted. Mel ventured into the corral with
him. He let her touch him and didn't fight the halter when she put
the lead rope on him. One small part of her felt bad to see him
defeated. But mostly she was relieved that he'd given in. On
Saturday morning, Cheyenne allowed Mel and Sally to lead him from
the small arena to the big one without much fuss. He was on his way
to being domesticated, so quiet that Mel dared spend most of the
day with Denise as usual.

“I'm just a bad luck charm for any horse that
likes me,” Mel confided to her friend. They were sitting on the
back steps of Denise's house, shucking the dozen ears of corn that
Denise's artist father was going to serve them for supper along
with barbecued spare ribs.  On Saturdays Ty did the
cooking.

“I think bad luck comes in clumps,” Denise
said. “And then it's all good for a long time after. Like the year
when Ty lost his teaching job and my mom found a lump in her breast
and they lost the baby they'd been trying to have. But then we
moved here, and now Ty's paintings sold out at his last show, and
Mom's tests came out fine, and I found you, and we're happy
here.”

“But how can you know when you're luck's
going to turn?” Mel asked.

Denise shrugged. “I guess you just keep
testing it.”

“What you mean is there's no way to know?”
Mel asked.

“You need to believe things will go well,”
Denise shrugged. “Do you want to see the painting Ty did of Lily?
It's on the wall over my bed.”

“Sure.”The painting was of Lily looking like
a dream horse in the moonlight, and Mel admired it
enthusiastically.

* * * *

Between the hours Mel spent working as a
wrangler taking care of horses and doing the scut work Jeb set for
her, and the hours she put in each day with Cheyenne, August had
sped by in a blur of activity. In September, school would begin.
Already mornings were chillier and pierced with the rasping songs
of insects. In the afternoons, the sun grew huge and gleaming
overhead, but its heat barely reached the ground. Lazy clouds
flocked the high blue skies, and occasionally the clouds piled up
and brought afternoon thundershowers.

Mel was relieved to see that Cheyenne took
storms in stride. Even a crack of thunder like a storefront window
shattering didn't throw him. She had progressed from touching him,
to currying him, and rubbing his mahogany colored hair until it
shone. He let her lift his hooves and use the pick on the dirt
crusted in them. One day he stood steady while she put a bridle and
saddle blanket on him. He accepted the weight of the saddle and
only turned his head back to watch her as she tightened the cinch.
Then he followed her docilely around the ring.

“Cheyenne,” she'd call. He'd prick up his
ears and come to her, nudging his long head against her, poking at
her pockets to see if she had a treat he could steal. Training him
had suddenly become easy.

One Saturday she tacked up Cheyenne and led
him out of the cramped corral and back across the brook to the
road. She walked him down the mountain on the road past the ranch,
almost to the turnoff for Jeffries', and then she led him back,
grinning with pride that he had cooperated so well. Her mother, who
had stepped outside the office in the main building for a breath of
fresh air, saw her leading her well-groomed horse home in
triumph.

“Looks like you got yourself an expensive dog
to walk,” Dawn said.

“So far I've paid for less than half of him,”
Mel said.

“You ever planning on riding him?” her mother
asked.