Gib Rides Home (22 page)

As he shoved Gib through the door he said, in between puffs and gasps, that he’d see him again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after.... Then the door slammed and his voice faded away, mingling with the sound of his retreating footsteps. Gib sank down to the floor, coiled himself up into a ball, and buried his face in his arms.

I
T WAS COLD IN
the Repentance Room. Gib’s back and legs ached from the beating and the rest of him ached from the cold. As suppertime came and went and the hours crawled by, Gib thought mostly about what he had done—and why. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever done before. Always before he’d pretty much gone along with whatever seemed necessary. Not because he was afraid, but mostly because it didn’t seem to matter all that much one way or the other. But this was different. He didn’t know why, but this was really different.

It wasn’t until sometime in the middle of the night that he gave up on trying to understand why he’d done what he did and began to think some more about why Miss Offenbacher had changed her mind about letting him keep the saddle. Buster had said something about her not getting some money she was expecting. Everyone knew that the orphanage was short of money, but it didn’t seem likely that what they could get for one old saddle was going to make that much difference.

But that got him to thinking about the other things Buster had said, and it wasn’t until then that he came up with a strange and shocking idea about what might have happened.

Buster had said that Offenbacher wasn’t going to get the money she was expecting because somebody had died. So what if that somebody was Mr. Thornton? Mr. Thornton, who had like enough promised Miss Offenbacher more checks if Gib kept writing letters saying he was doing just fine.

Right at first Gib couldn’t believe it could be true, but the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Other memories came up. Memories of how Mr. Thornton had come home sick so often last summer, and of how bad he’d looked that day in the Model T when he stopped to take his medicine.

It was a strange and worrisome thing to think about there in the lonely darkness of the Repentance Room. There he had been, Mr. Thornton, the banker, Mrs. Thornton’s husband, Livy’s father, and Hy’s boss, a part of everybody’s life at the Rocking M. Gib could bring him to mind as clear as day, reading his papers at the kitchen table, driving Caesar and Comet or the Model T to work every day. And now he was gone forever.

After a while Gib tried to make himself feel better by remembering all the hard, mean things about Mr. Thornton. How he had not wanted to adopt Gib and had not even wanted him as a farm-out until he had to, because of Hy’s broken leg. And how he managed not to see things or animals or people he didn’t like. But Gib’s mind kept slipping around to how Mr. Thornton had let him keep his saddle, even though he’d had to pay Miss Offenbacher something extra to get her to say yes.

But that brought up why Gib was where he was at the moment—back in the Repentance Room. It looked like Miss Offenbacher must have decided that now that Mr. Thornton was dead, nobody else had enough interest, or maybe enough money, to do anything to help Gibson Whittaker. It was a bitter thing to think about, but it did seem to be the sorry truth.

By the time a sleepy-eyed, grumpy Buster came to let him out, Gib had decided that whatever happened, he could not give up. Now more than ever he couldn’t let them take away his saddle. Jacob, who had waited up for Gib as usual with a chunk of dried-out bread, was shocked when Gib told him. “You can’t mean that, Gibby,” Jacob said. “They’ll beat the life out of you. You’d have been better off to have just up and run away.”

“Maybe so,” Gib said. “I thought about it. Yesterday when I went up to get the saddle, I really did think about just walking out of here. But with winter coming on and ... He stopped and they both sighed, and Gib knew they were both thinking about Georgie.

“But what you’re doing won’t do any good,” Jacob said. “They can find your old saddle if they really set out to do it. They must know it’s here in the building. You didn’t have time to take it anywhere else.”

Gib nodded. “I know,” he said, “but what matters is that I can’t just give it up to them. I can’t just hand it over, like it was their right to have it and decide what happens to it. It’s like—it would be like I might as well give up on living.”

So Jacob threw up his hands and said he
gave up
on trying to save Gib’s neck, and stomped off to bed. And sure enough, the next morning they had hardly finished eating breakfast when the monitor came in with a notice for Gib to report to Miss Offenbacher’s office immediately.

Gib went down the stairs to the grand entrance hall of Lovell House slowly, keeping his mind on what his feet were doing so he wouldn’t be able to think too far ahead. Just one foot in front of the other, until he came to the office door, knocked, went in—and saw that there were two people in the room.

Another person, a woman, was seated across the desk from Miss Offenbacher. Her back was to Gib and she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but her voice was strangely familiar. And even before Gib’s eyes told him who it was, he suddenly felt himself grinning.

“Good,” the woman was saying. “I’m glad we’re beginning to understand each other.”

Miss Offenbacher’s flushed and scowling face didn’t look all that understanding. “I won’t—you can’t—I did not say that I would allow—”

“Oh, but I’m sure you will,” Miss Hooper interrupted, “when you consider what Mrs. Thornton’s continued patronage can do for Lovell House.” She turned then and said, “Run and get your things, Gibson. I’ll be waiting out front in the buggy.”

A few minutes later Gib walked back down the grand marble staircase and out through the wintry air to where Miss Hooper and Hy were waiting in the buggy. Hy in the driver’s seat and, back in the buggy, Miss Hooper, wrapped in a heavy cloak and lap robe. Gib was putting his saddle on the backseat when Miss Hooper handed him a package and an envelope. There was a heavy mackinaw in the package and Gib put it on before he climbed up to sit with Hy.

“Storm coming?” he asked, looking at Hy’s bad leg, and Hy rubbed his knee and grinned and said how it surely was beginning to feel that way.

Gib opened the envelope then and took out a bookmark. Another narrow piece of heavy cardboard with a picture painted on it, much like the one Livy had given him for his birthday. Only this time the picture wasn’t just of a black horse’s head. Instead it was a really well-done painting of the whole horse—and of a rider who was sitting on its back. The rider hadn’t turned out quite as well. The arms were too long and seemed to bend in the wrong places and the face was a kind of lopsided circle. Could have been a picture of most anybody, except for the long brownish yellow curls that corkscrewed out from the lopsided head in every direction.

Down at the bottom in little tiny writing it said, “We missed you.” Gib was still looking at the bookmark when Caesar and Comet trotted smartly into a sharp turn and picked up the pace as they headed toward home.

William Solon Keatley 1878–1955

Gibson Whittaker’s history is not the same as that of my father, but many of the events in Gib’s story were inspired by tales my father told of his early life in a Nebraska orphanage and as a farm-out on neighboring ranches. Required to do a man’s work when he was eight years old, beaten, mistreated, and, yes, sent out into a blizzard without his mittens, causing his hands to be so severely frostbitten that they very nearly had to be amputated, he survived to become a kind-hearted, patient man with an unquenchable sense of humor and an uncanny ability to communicate with horses.

But while he spoke only sparingly and with an amazing lack of bitterness about his terrible childhood, my father would talk endlessly about his life as a wrangler whose job it was to green-break wild mustangs fresh from the open range. Roundups, stampedes, rustlers, and rattlesnakes played minor roles in a continuing epic whose major theme was horses he had known and loved. I grew up loving his stories, his horses, and him, and
Gib Rides Home
is my tribute to his memory.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Zilpha Keatley Snyder (b. 1927) is the three-time Newbery Honor–winning author of classic children’s novels such as
The Egypt Game
,
The Headless Cupid
, and
The Witches of Worm
. Her adventure and fantasy stories are beloved by many generations.

Snyder was born in Lemoore, California, in 1927. Her father, William Keatley, worked for Shell Oil, but as a would-be rancher he and his family always lived on a small farm. Snyder’s parents were both storytellers, and their tales often kept their children entertained during quiet evenings at home.

Snyder began reading and telling stories of her own at an early age. By the time she was four years old she was able to read novels and newspapers intended for adults. When she wasn’t reading, she was making up and embellishing stories. When she was eight, Snyder decided that she would be a writer—a profession in which embellishment and imagination were accepted and rewarded.

Snyder’s adolescent years were made more difficult by her studious country upbringing and by the fact that she had been advanced a grade when she started school. As other girls were going to dances and discovering boys, Snyder retreated into books. The stories transported her from her small room to a larger, remarkable universe.

At Whittier College, Zilpha Keatley Snyder met her future husband, Larry Snyder. After graduation, she began teaching upper-level elementary classes. Snyder taught for nine years, including three years as a master teacher for the University of California, Berkeley. The classroom experience gave Snyder a fresh appreciation of the interests and capabilities of preteens.

As she continued her teaching career, Snyder gained more free time. She began writing at night, after teaching during the day; her husband helped by typing out her manuscripts. After finishing her first novel, she sent it to a publisher. It was accepted on her first try. That book,
Season of Ponies
, was published in 1964.

In 1967, her fourth novel,
The Egypt Game
, won the Newbery Honor for excellence in children’s literature. Snyder went on to win that honor two more times, for her novels
The Headless Cupid
and
The Witches of Worm. The Headless Cupid
introduced the Stanley family, a clan she revisited three more times over her career.

Snyder’s
The Changeling
(1970), in which two young girls invent a fantasy world dominated by trees, became the inspiration for her 1974 fantasy series, the Green Sky Trilogy. Snyder completed that series by writing a computer game sequel called Below the Root. The game went on to earn cult classic status.

Over the almost fifty years of her career, Snyder has written about topics as diverse as time-traveling ghosts, serenading gargoyles, and adoption at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, she lives with her husband in Mill Valley, California. When not writing, Snyder enjoys reading and traveling.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

978-1-4532-7191-9

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com