Gib Rides Home (14 page)

Black Silk’s bridle was made of top-grade black leather and studded with time-tarnished silver stars.

“Stars,” Gib said, “like on the sidesaddle.”

“That useless thing,” Hy grunted. “That was just so she could dress like a lady. Miss Julia grew up ridin’ in plain old trousers here on the ranch, and one of them divided skirts when she went into town. But after she got married she started using that thing. Guess the boss thought it was more fittin’, her being a banker’s wife and all. Had that lopsided contraption on Silky the day ... Hy glanced at Gib then and kind of ran down.

“On what day?” Gib asked. But Hy only shrugged and said, “That there saddle you been usin’ is the one Miss Julia’s pa had made for her when she wasn’t much older than you are now.”

Black Silk was very mannerly about being saddled up, taking the bit without any struggle and not even humping her back when the cinch was pulled tight. “See there,” Hy said, patting the shiny black neck, “sweet-handlin’ as a lamb. Like I always said, not a mean bone in her body.” He looked at Gib. “But’s that not to say she’s an easy ride. Full of fire, she is, and bustin’ with energy. And she’ll be specially full of it today, not having been worked for so long. Think you better lead her over to the corral afore you mount up, and then keep her walkin’ till you feel her settlin’ down.” He smiled and nodded. “You’ll know when,” he said. “You’ll feel it.”

Gib did feel it. Right at first, riding Black Silk was a lot like sitting on a big jackrabbit. High-stepping and full of bounce and fire, she danced around the corral like she was just playing with gravity. Like she could have climbed right up through the air if she hadn’t been held back by the bit in her mouth. She was soft-mouthed, though, and quick to obey the reins as long as the hands holding them knew how to make them talk. And after the talking had gone on for a while, the dancing settled down and the two of them moved smoothly together, around and around the corral at a sensible walk, a trot, and then a controlled, rocking-chair gallop. But all the while Gib could feel the hot-blooded urge to run surging just under the surface of all Hy’s good training.

“Good girl, good girl,” he kept crooning softly. “Easy now, take it real easy.”

Busy as he was keeping a lid on all that hot blood, it took Gib quite a while to remember to see if Livy was watching. But as soon as he did he looked up, and there she was, sitting on the roof just like before. And behind her, at the open window, he could just make out another face, or maybe two. Turning Silky back, he rode her up close to the fence. Sure enough, the faces behind the window belonged to Mrs. Thornton and Miss Hooper. When Gib waved, they both waved back, and so did Livy. As if feeling Gib’s excitement, Silky came up against the bit dancing and tossing her head, and it took him halfway around the ring to settle her back down. Later, when Gib was cooling out the mare and rubbing her down, he could still feel the dancing in his own bones.

That night, as they were going in for the evening meal, Hy stopped Gib and said, “I wouldn’t talk about riding Silky if I were you. Leastways not unless anybody asks you.”

Gib was surprised. “You already told me about that,” he said. “About not talking at meals unless somebody asks me something.”

Hy nodded, chuckling. “I know,” he said. “Just thought you might think to say somethin’ this once, it being sort of a special occasion and all.” He stopped smiling then and shrugged. “Just thought you ought to know that it wouldn’t be a good idea to mention it when the boss is around.”

“Doesn’t he know?” Gib asked. “Doesn’t he know I rode her?”

“Oh, I reckon he knows, all right,” Hy said. “But I got a feeling he wouldn’t want to hear about it. Mare’s kind of a sore point with the boss.”

During supper that evening Mr. Thornton read his paper, as usual, and didn’t look at Gib at all. Mrs. Thornton and Miss Hooper didn’t say anything to him either—not with words, at least. But they both gave Gib looks and smiles that said a lot. Livy, though, had gone back to pretending she didn’t know he was alive.

S
UMMER CAME ON FAST
that year, the sun rising hot and clear before Gib had even finished the morning milking. Working in the garden, harvesting now as well as hoeing and watering, Gib wore a big old ten-gallon hat, but even so the skin on his face went from pale palomino to pretty close to bay in no time at all. As for exercising the horses, Silky one day and Lightning the next, he took to doing that mostly after supper. Trotting and galloping around the corral as the sun sank below the horizon and the long, slow summer twilight faded into night, he sometimes wished he could ride right on through till morning instead of going back to try to sleep in the sweltering cabin.

The sun, beating down through the long summer days, turned the whole cabin into an oven, especially the loft. Gib took to bringing his blankets down the ladder and making a bed on the cabin floor. Which was some cooler but a lot noisier, what with Hy’s sighing and snoring and moaning just a few feet away.

Hy’s moaning worried Gib some, and sure enough it turned out that his busted leg wasn’t healing up the way it ought to. Halfway through July Mr. Thornton took a day off to take Hy into Harristown to the hospital, and when they came back Hy had a new cast on his leg.

“Durn thing was healing up crooked,” he told Gib. “Doc had to break it again and start all over.”

“Break it again.” Gib’s hair prickled at the back of his neck at the notion of breaking someone’s leg on purpose—did they do it with a hammer, or maybe just stomp on it? It was something that didn’t bear thinking about. “How’d they do that?” he asked Hy warily, his face squinched up against the pain of hearing about it. And at the same time trying to shut his mind to the selfish thought that now he wouldn’t have to worry about being sent away because he wasn’t needed at the Rocking M. Not for a while, anyway.

Hy didn’t want to talk about how they’d done it. Instead he just asked how Silky had behaved that day, and Gib was glad to change to a new subject. Particularly when the new one was Black Silk.

“She was just fine,” he told Hy. “Oh, she frets a little when we’re galloping. Trying to talk me into letting her run, I guess. You think I could let her go full out soon? Just a couple of turns round the corral? I think I could handle it.”

Hy shrugged. “I ain’t worried about you not being able to handle it. I knowed all along that you had a good ear for horse lingo, Gibby, but I been right surprised the way you’ve gentled that mare into doin’ whatever you ask her to. But about lettin’ her run, it’s just that the corral’s hardly big enough for her to really stretch herself. Needs a real racetrack, she does. It’s what them hot-blooded horses are bred for.”

Gib had heard about the mare being from Kentucky before. “Did she really come from Kentucky?” he asked.

“Surely did. Old Dan Merrill, Miss Julia’s pa—” He paused, grinning. “—the missus’s pa, that is, promised her a Kentucky Thoroughbred as a weddin’ present. But the one he was dickerin’ for didn’t work out, and then Dan died, and things got put off some more. Warn’t till three or four year later that the mare finally turned up. Just a yearlin’, and no more than halter-broke, but just about the prettiest thing I ever did see. Easy to train, too. Smart as could be and full of fire, but right out front about it. Not a bit mean or sneaky.”

Hy’s eyes had that backward stare to them and his voice had an inward drift, as if he was just talking to himself. Gib sat very still, not even allowing his mouth to twitch or his eyes to blink, for fear that if Hy noticed how curious he was, he’d clam up again and not go on about the training of Black Silk—and maybe about what she’d had to do with Mrs. Thornton’s accident.

But it didn’t work. Suddenly Hy blinked, nodded, and started in about horses he had known that really
were
sneaky, and how a “big old rawboned sorrel I owned once’t always was tryin’ to edge you up to a fence where he could snag your leg on the barb wire.” Gib was disappointed. Hy’s horse stories were always interesting, but some were a lot more so than others. Particularly the ones that were about Black Silk.

By August, Hy was letting Gib take Black Silk out onto the prairie, where he could let her show what she could do. But only after they’d been out for a while, trotting and galloping and “takin’ the edge off,” as Hy put it. Even so, running the black mare was an experience like nothing else Gib had ever done.

The split second he loosened the reins and touched her ribs with his heels, she shot forward like a cannonball. Her run was sweet and smooth, and faster than the prairie wind. Leaning forward to cut the wind, Gib thrilled to her speed and strength, but even more to the feel of the mare’s glory in doing what she was born to do.

Gib gloried in the running too, but after it was over the feeling it left was more a kind of quieting. In riding Silky, whether out on the open prairie or in the corral, Gib found a quieting he couldn’t seem to find anywhere else, not even in the midst of one of his best daydreams. He didn’t know why. Part of it was just the way he’d always felt about any horse, but multiplied over and over again by Black Silk’s beauty and strength and courage. And multiplied another time by the way the mare related to him and accepted what he asked of her, even when it was just to line herself up against the corral gate quickly and neatly, so he could lean down and reach the latch.

One afternoon in late August Gib saddled up earlier than usual and headed for the corral. His free time was starting early that day because he didn’t have to wait to take care of the team when Mr. Thornton came home. At breakfast that morning Mr. Thornton had said, “By the way, Hy, the team won’t be back this afternoon. I have business in Harristown today and if it lasts until dark I’ll likely have to stay in town for the night.”

Mr. Thornton had been talking to Hy when he said that, even though Gib was standing right beside him and it was Gib who actually took care of the team. It was always that way. Mr. Thornton gave Gib his orders by talking to Hy, and then Hy would tell Gib what the boss had said. Gib didn’t know why, but it kind of looked like Mr. Thornton didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Then again, maybe it was just because he thought Gib was too young to remember. You couldn’t be sure about things like that.

Either way, it was all right with Gib. And having the extra time off that afternoon was more than all right. It was a nice day, warm but not blazing hot, and he was looking forward to a fine time riding, first in the corral and then maybe out on the prairie. But just as Gib and the eagerly dancing black mare reached the corral gate he heard voices and turned to see Miss Hooper and Mrs. Thornton. Mrs. Thornton was in her chair and Miss Hooper was pushing it across the barnyard toward the corral.

Wondering if something was wrong—he’d never seen either of them in the barnyard before—he was turning Silk toward them when Miss Hooper called, “Go on in. Take her on into the corral.” She pointed then and said, “The chair.”

Gib took her meaning right away. Silky could be real spooky about large objects that didn’t stay put—like wheelbarrows, for instance—and she’d probably feel the same way about a wheelchair. So he opened the gate, went on in, and started putting Silky through her paces. The two women came slowly and quietly across the yard to where they could get a good view between the rails of the corral fence. Gib took Silky around the ring, showing off her gaits and the way she responded to the reins, turning on a dime and backing straight and true.

It wasn’t until they’d been around the ring a few times that he began to notice a difference in the way Silky was behaving. The difference was that every time they got anywhere near the two women Silky turned toward them, testing the air, flipping her ears, and edging in their direction. Finally Gib pulled her to a stop a few feet away and said, “She wants to come over there, ma’am. Shall I let her?”

“Yes, yes, let her,” Mrs. Thornton said quickly, and the moment Black Silk heard her voice her ears flicked forward and she nickered. And when Mrs. Thornton put her hand through the fence Black Silk ran her velvety lips over the hand and went right on nickering, a soft, low sound that Gib had never heard her make before. Gib heard Mrs. Thornton say some gentle, crooning things, but suddenly her voice kind of stumbled and she said, “Take me back, Hoop. Take me away.” Miss Hooper quickly pulled the chair back and pushed it toward the house. And Gib could see that Mrs. Thornton had her hands over her face and her shoulders were shaking.

There were only five people at supper that night. Olivia had gone to visit a friend in Longford, so there were only Hy and Gib and the three women, Mrs. Perry, Miss Hooper, and Mrs. Thornton. The food was great, as always, but nothing else was quite the same. For one thing, there was a lot more talking. Miss Hooper and Mrs. Thornton chatted a lot about the old times, when Mrs. Thornton was Julia Merrill, the Rocking M was the biggest ranch in the county, and Miss Hooper had come to live at the ranch to be Miss Julia’s teacher and governess.

There was also some talk about Gib himself. About how he, as Mrs. Thornton put it, “had a real gift with horses. Hy tells me he’s never seen anything quite like it,” she went on. “Almost like you spoke the language.”

Gib felt his face get hot, but it was something he surely liked hearing. “Wish I could,” he said. “I’d like that a whole lot.”

It was right about then that Mrs. Thornton said how glad she was to see someone getting some use out of her old saddle. “Fits you as if it were made for you,” she said, and smiled. “Anyway, Gibson, from now on it’s yours.”

Hy did a lot of talking that night, too. He started out just answering questions about the old days, but before long he was carrying on like he always did back in the cabin. Telling long stories that started out, “Well, that must of took place way back in the summer of ...

Gib wanted to talk about Black Silk. Only he didn’t, because he didn’t want Mrs. Thornton to cry again. But when he and Hy were on their way back to the cabin that night, suddenly, without any prodding, Hy began to talk and talk and talk.