Run Away Home (13 page)

S
am glanced at her watch. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. She decided to jog for ten minutes, which would be a pain in these boots, but that should put her, even in the snow, about a mile past the bus. Or wait, no—she'd keep going until she reached that stand of five trees up ahead.

Then she'd stamp an SOS in the snow and roll out the yellow tape and weight it with rocks. She'd keep walking, but surely she'd see someone by then.

She didn't. It was as if everyone between Oregon and California detoured around the state of Nevada.

Sam was muttering and puffing so loudly, at first she didn't hear the horn. Then she looked back, as she'd been doing about every ten steps anyway, and
there sat Mrs. Allen's truck, like a tangerine-colored pup next to the orange bus.

Sam turned around and started jogging back.

She heard the helicopter and saw it hover over the crash.

Running and shouting at the same time, Sam yelled, “Get away!”

She heard other voices doing the same, ordering the helicopter to get away because it would terrify the injured horse. At least she hoped that was why, Sam thought, panting. She hoped they weren't beckoning the helicopter to land and help Mr. Pinkerton or Darby.

The chopper pulled up and headed her way. As it swooped overhead, Sam saw someone give her a thumbs-up and she was really afraid it was Norman White.

Oh, please,
she thought,
let someone else come for the injured mustang. Not him
.

The sun turned the snow the color of golden sand and the five trees cast blue shadows, pointing back toward the bus. Sam felt light-headed and she told herself off for being a tenderfoot.

She should have eaten something before setting out for Alkali, or at least had a sip of the bottled water that was shrink-wrapped in the back of the bus near the emergency door. She hadn't even realized she'd seen it until now.

She swallowed and kept moving, but her ankles
felt like rubber by the time Preston stomped out to meet her. Gray-haired and athletic, looking every inch a cop—and not a retired one, either—he called out, “Doin' okay?”

“Fine,” Sam said, but she probably would have been more convincing if her right foot hadn't crossed in front of her left and tripped her.

Gloves flat on the snow as if she were doing a push-up, Sam was struggling to her feet when Preston reached her.

“Rest a minute,” Preston said.

It was a good idea. Sam's spinning head took a few seconds to return to normal. Eventually she pulled herself into a sitting position and asked, “Are they all okay?”

“Pinkerton and the kid are fine,” he said.

“The horse?”

Preston shook his head. “We need Dr. Scott to check her over. I don't see why she's not up and gone. Must be that girl….”

“Darby?” Sam coaxed.

“I know her name. It's what she's doing that's got me stumped.” Preston stopped talking to let out a whoosh of air. “In police work, I've seen people who claimed to be psychics, who pretended to channel spirits—human and animal—but they were all frauds. This kid—Sam, what's the deal with her?”

Okay. Now it was time to get up and see what was going on. Darby had been a little weird, but not
outlandish enough to baffle an experienced cop.

Sam looked past him, but she couldn't believe her eyes, so she walked closer, joining Mrs. Allen and Mr. Pinkerton, who were both keeping their distance from the filly.

The horse was still down. She was covered with a blanket that rose and fell with her breathing. So Darby had scrambled back inside to get the blanket. That was good thinking, but not strange.

Sam shook her head and looked around, scanning the area for Darby.

“I don't understand,” Sam said as Preston moved to stand beside her, but then her mind registered what she'd seen.

Sam looked back.

The blanket was spread over the horse, but at the very edge of it, she'd glimpsed something else.

Lying in the snow beside the stallion, barely covered with an edge of blanket, lay Darby.

“Is she okay?” Sam asked Preston without looking away.

“Fine, except that she pretty much growled at the rest of us to get back.”

Growled,
Sam thought. It was a strong word, but she thought of the Phantom, unconscious and burned in a range fire. Jake had been forced to drag her away from him.

“It's been a while since my kids were that age, and I haven't done much work with abnormal juveniles,”
Preston went on, “but I'm pretty sure she's…” Preston shook his head and Sam wondered if he was reconsidering the pitfalls of the Dream Catcher program.

“Different?” Sam put in.

Preston answered, but Sam had stopped listening. All her attention focused on Darby.

The twelve-year-old was curled up, knees to chest, no more than five feet from the mustang's head.

No, she must be even closer,
Sam thought, because one of Darby's small hands was outflung toward the filly, and vapor fogged the inches between the hand and the chestnut filly's nostrils. The horse breathed in and out, learning her scent, eyes watching her with something other than fear.

Would I try that with the Phantom?
Sam asked herself.
Maybe, but he's my horse.

Darby's weird jabbering about a Hawaiian horse charmer in her family tree hadn't made any sense, but neither did the bizarre scene before her.

“Did she say she'd had some kind of, shoot, I don't know,
experience
working with a vet or, uh, there was nothing in her application, but has she worked with abused animals?” Preston asked.

“She didn't talk much,” Sam admitted, “but she told me she'd never ridden a horse in her life, only read about them. I think she reads a lot.”

“Hope she's read about hypothermia, because that's what we'll be treating her for, soon as we can
get her up and out of here,” Preston muttered.

He stared across the snow, rippled now from the afternoon winds, as a white BLM truck came toward them.

“Norman White?” he asked Sam, and when she nodded, his mouth quirked in a half-smile. “Let's see if Trudy can handle him as well as she said she could.”

It turned out Mrs. Allen handled Norman White just fine. She persuaded him to have the filly sedated and trucked to Deerpath Ranch, with the understanding that she'd be getting two orphan foals as well.

“We take all the care we can,” she'd heard Norman say nervously, “but the herd we just brought in, well, some of the foals didn't mother up.”

“Which herd?” Sam had asked. “What did they look like?”

“Not your precious white stallion's bunch,” Norman had said, patting her shoulder.

Not the Phantom, but more wild horses had been taken from their homes and shoved into crowded corrals.

Sam began shivering, then edged away from Norman White and squatted close enough to talk to Darby. The girl was half turned away, using her inhaler, but when she was finished, she started whispering to Sam.

“All I could think to do was tell her stories, because I didn't want to sound like I was being all
sorry for her, you know? So I told her some of the Hawaiian tales from my mom and she seemed to like them, as long as I didn't try to touch her head.”

It was on the tip of Sam's tongue to ask Darby if she was loony or magical, but she was too humbled to do either.

“You did great,” Sam said.

The mustang tossed her head at the sound of Sam's voice. Golden lips pulled back, she bared her teeth until Sam retreated a few steps. Then the filly let her head fall and she huffed loudly until Darby returned and lay quietly beside her once more.

Unbelievable,
Sam thought. After everything settled down, she couldn't wait to go over to the ranch, sit down with Darby, and hear how she'd done it.

 

Because there wasn't room for her in the tangerine truck, Sam waited with Norman White and Mr. Pinkerton until a huge tow truck arrived that winched the bus out of the ditch and back onto the highway.

Mr. Pinkerton turned down Norman's offer of a ride to the county hospital in favor of sitting next to the tow truck driver who promised to drop him off for a late lunch at Clara's coffee shop.

But Sam had no choice. She had to allow Norman to drive her home.

They rode along in silence. She didn't know what he was thinking about, but Sam knew Brynna
and Dad would hate thanking Norman for his neighborliness.

He was so quiet, Sam thought he was probably equally uncomfortable, too. Usually, she'd be polite and summon up words to smooth over the awkwardness. But not this time.

When Sam thought of Norman's single-minded desire to cage Nevada's wild horses, she didn't even try.

 

In her restless dreams, Sam wore huge thigh-high boots, carried a heavy backpack, and hiked in deep snow, passing Darby on the golden filly, Kit driving a carriage pulled by Witch, and Jake following them and falling behind because he was carrying Brynna, but dropping her time and again because somehow, in this nightmare, Jake was the one with a broken arm.

Vaguely, Sam realized she was really home in bed. Sometimes when she half woke, her face felt hot, and she remembered Gram saying that she'd gotten sunburned from the glare off the snow. Other times she surfaced enough to feel Cougar burrowing under her covers. He wasn't purring. He pushed at her shoulder, ribs, and ankles, making places for himself as if this was one big cat bed and he'd like her to move out.

The next morning a faint dusting of snow covered the ranch, but it felt warmer than it had the day before. It took only minutes to crunch up the ice that covered the animals' water, and as Sam walked out to
check the river, she thought she'd carry the digging bar over her shoulder, just for practice.

The instant she tried to raise the bar to shoulder level, the muscles she'd strained tumbling through the bus screamed in protest.

Bad idea,
Sam thought, and though she'd glossed over the accident as much as she could, she knew Gram would be on the phone this morning with Mrs. Allen. The good news was that Dad was staying close to the ranch and keeping an eye on Brynna. He wouldn't be stopping by Clara's and run into Mr. Pinkerton, who'd probably be brushing off the cut on his head as no big deal while he talked about the crash. At some point that would all come up, and Sam would explain everything as well as she could, but right now she wanted to get back to normal.

The morning was serene and she was following the delicate vee of bird tracks, wondering if birds' little feet got cold, when she was distracted by the paw prints of some small animal with a tail. Curious and determined to unmask the mystery animal, Sam was stepping as carefully as she could, accommodating her sore muscles and the iron bar, when the snow prints ended in a splatter of blood and a blot of wings.

“A hawk got something,” Sam told Blaze, who'd followed her this morning, but she couldn't stop staring at the story in the snow.

Had the pawed creature heard the hawk coming? Had its head jerked up at the faint whistle of wind in
feathers just before the impact?

She looked back over her shoulder. Obviously she had nothing to fear from a hawk, but she was thinking of the cougar that had attacked her. She hadn't heard it coming, but in a split second before it crashed into her back, she'd caught a smell just like dirty laundry.

There was nothing behind her. Blaze would have alerted her if there had been, but Sam was convinced that once you'd been stalked and set upon, been the prey instead of the hunter, you never got over it.

When Sam crossed the river, hurrying toward breakfast, she saw Ross using a square-nosed shovel to chip at the icy ruts over the bridge.

Ross was the biggest cowboy on River Bend Ranch, and the quietest. Although he and Sam had become friendly when he'd swept Jen off to the hospital after she'd been gored by a bull, and after Ross had shown Sam poetry he'd written about the Phantom, the big cowboy was still painfully shy.

Now, for instance, he looked up as if he'd done something wrong when Sam said, “I'm supposed to do that. Not that I had my heart set on shoveling.” A smile struggled to form on her frozen face.

“Bored,” Ross told her. “Wyatt said not to ride out.”

“Oh. Well then”—Sam felt a celebration coming on—“thank you!”

With a nod, Ross returned to shoveling and Sam would have skipped back to the house if every mus
cle fiber in her body hadn't warned against it.

That job would have taken her at least an hour, and now she'd have more time to spend with Tempest—although the filly didn't seem heartbroken over her mother's absence.

Maybe, Sam thought, she should do something nice for Ross. After all, he must feel lonely with Christmas coming on and his family far away.

Too bad Pepper wasn't here, Sam thought, stamping her boots on the porch. Not only would he have filled out the bunkhouse Christmas, but yesterday's mail had brought something he'd absolutely love to see.

Inez Garcia, the Hollywood horse trainer who'd brought her stallion Bayfire to River Bend, had sent the Forsters the long, uncut first version of the movie that had been partially shot in Lost Canyon.

Okay, only an hour of it had been shot in Lost Canyon, but it starred Ace and Violette Lee.

Sam only cared about Ace, but Pepper had had stars in his eyes from the moment Violette Lee had arrived. Even when the actress proved to be stubborn and full of herself, Pepper didn't care. He'd called it the luckiest day of his life when he'd been on the spot to carry the actress off a plateau and drive her to the hospital for a checkup on a sprained wrist she'd incurred by being a
primadonna
.

But love really was blind, Sam had decided, because when Dallas had joshed with Pepper, asking
if he'd trade the experience for a million-dollar lottery ticket, he'd said, “Nope.”