Penny

by Whitney Sanderson

  HORSE DIARIES

  #1: Elska

  #2: Bell’s Star

  #3: Koda

  #4: Maestoso Petra

  #5: Golden Sun

  #6: Yatimah

  #7: Risky Chance

  #8: Black Cloud

  #9: Tennessee Rose

  #10: Darcy

  #11 Special Edition: Jingle Bells

  #12: Luna

  #13 Special Edition: Cinders

  #14: Calvino

  #15: Lily

  #16: Penny

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Whitney Robinson

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Ruth Sanderson

  Photograph credit: © Bob Langrish (this page)

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sanderson, Whitney, author. | Sanderson, Ruth, illustrator.

  Title: Penny / Whitney Sanderson ; illustrated by Ruth Sanderson.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] | Summary: Penny, a blue-eyed palomino paint mare, narrates her experiences with her owner, Buckeye Jack, and Jack’s grandson, Jesse, during the 1850s Northern California gold rush.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010442 | ISBN 978-0-525-64478-1 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-525-64479-8 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-525-64480-4 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Palomino horse—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Palomino horse—Fiction. | Horses—Fiction. | Gold mines and mining—California—Fiction. | Frontier and pioneer life—California—Fiction. | California—History—1850–1950—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ10.3.S217 Pen 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525644804

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

  a

  To my dear friend Morgan Mathis

  —W.S.

  For Whitney, in memory of Thor

  —R.S.

  Contents

  Cover

  Horse Diaries

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Luck’s End

  Chapter 2: Uninvited Guests

  Chapter 3: A Betting Man

  Chapter 4: Crooked Cal

  Chapter 5: Lucky Penny, Unlucky Penny

  Chapter 6: Orphans Preferred

  Chapter 7: The Mail Must Go Through!

  Chapter 8: The Iron Horse

  Chapter 9: Miz Alice

  Chapter 10: The Wild West

  Appendix

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  “Oh! if people knew what a comfort to horses a light hand is…”

  —from Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell

  As soon as we reached Luck’s End, I knew we shouldn’t have split off from the wagon train. Not that we had any wagons. They’d been abandoned at the eastern edge of the mountains weeks ago, too heavy to pull up the steep slopes. The slow, plodding oxen could have made the climb, but there was nothing to feed them. People had just turned them loose.

  Unlike them, I was quick and surefooted, able to forage for myself. I never strayed too far from camp, though, because the mountains were filled with strange predator tracks and smells.

  I wasn’t sure what my owner, Buckeye Jack, was looking for out here in the wilderness. But I didn’t think we’d find it at Luck’s End. The town was just a single row of wood-frame buildings, all huddled close like a herd of cows in a snowstorm. Buckeye Jack tied my reins to a hitching post and lifted his grandson, Jesse, down from my back. The boy’s freckled face was sunburned and smudged with dust.

  “We’re here?” he asked, looking around the nearly empty street. “This is where the gold is?”

  “Not here in town, Jesse, but in the riverbeds of the valley,” said Buckeye Jack. “As soon as we get a few supplies, we’ll set up camp.” He left us and walked into a building with a false front that made it look bigger than it was. On the porch, two men with long white beards were playing a game of checkers.

  Jesse sat down next to me at the edge of the wooden boardwalk. Across the street, a couple of men were loading a pile of feed sacks onto the back of a long-eared pack mule. As soon as one man hoisted a sack onto the mule from the left, the animal reached around to the right and grabbed the bag in its big teeth, slinging it back onto the pile. The men were so busy arguing about the proper way to load a mule that they didn’t notice.

  Jesse would have laughed at this once, but now he just sighed and rested his chin in his hands. I reached down to snuffle his rust-colored hair. Poor Jesse…. Both his parents had died in the cholera outbreak on the wagon train some months back. Now the only family he had left was his grandfather, Buckeye Jack. And me—I tried to keep a watchful eye on him, as mares in a wild herd will do for an orphan foal.

  Buckeye Jack came stomping out of the building with a bulging burlap sack slung over his shoulder. He looked even unhappier with his load than the mule did. “That shopkeeper’s as good as a thief!” he said angrily to the men on the porch. “Thirty-six dollars for a shovel that’s not worth fifty cents, and two dollars for a single egg.”

  “True enough,” drawled one of the men. He tilted his chair and spat a brown wad of tobacco juice over the edge of the porch. “But what can we do? Ain’t no other place to buy supplies within fifty miles.”

  Jesse jumped to his feet, his eyes wide and anxious. “Will we starve?”

  Buckeye Jack forced a smile onto his face. “A couple of Ohio wildcats like us? No, sirree. The shopkeeper gave us enough credit for a good canvas tent, a couple of tin pans, and enough vittles to last a few weeks. By then we’ll have plenty of gold to buy every barrel of pork and pickles in the place.”

  “And I can hunt,” said Jesse. “Papa showed me how before…” He swallowed hard.

  Buckeye Jack heaved the sack of supplies onto my back and fixed it in place with a rope wound around my belly. The sharp edge of something dug into my ribs. “We’d best make tracks to stake a claim before dark,” he said as Jesse scrambled up in front of my cargo.

  “I thought I’d outfoxed the other goldbugs by heading north instead of south to Sutter’s Mill, where everyone expects to find another windfall,” said Buckeye Jack as he led me down the dusty street. “But it seems that plenty of others had the same idea.”

  “Is there any gold left for us?” asked Jesse.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Buckeye Jack. He gave me a friendly slap on the neck. “This gold-and-white filly is our good-luck charm, remember? I knew it the minute I set eyes on her at Fort Kearney. And I won her from the maj
or in a single game of blackjack, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but…we haven’t had very good luck since then, have we?”

  Buckeye Jack didn’t reply. The town disappeared behind us as we followed an overgrown path into the foothills. The sun burned low and orange in the sky, like the remains of a campfire, and the day’s warmth was fading fast.

  As we trekked across a narrow ridge, a pile of rocks gave way under Buckeye Jack’s boots. He let out a yell and tumbled down the hillside, slabs of loose shale raining after him.

  Jesse called out, but there was no answer. He turned me off the ridge and urged me down the steep bank. It was hard to keep my balance with the heavy pack swaying from side to side. I sat back on my haunches and held my front legs stiff in front of me as I slid.

  At the bottom, I regained my balance and shook my head to clear away the dust. I spotted Buckeye Jack getting stiffly to his feet nearby. His clothes were torn, and his hands were scraped raw. But he didn’t seem to notice. He was gazing out across a small clearing that stretched before us. At its edge, a river flowed around scattered gray rocks.

  “Home, sweet home,” said Buckeye Jack.

  “We’re camping here?” asked Jesse, looking doubtfully around the bare clearing. It didn’t seem to offer much in the way of comfort.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” said Buckeye Jack. “We’ve camped in worse. And no one seems to have staked this spot yet. Why don’t you gather some kindling so we can start a fire?”

  Buckeye Jack wrapped the scraps of an old shirt around his scraped hands. Then he unpacked the supplies and began untangling the mess of stakes and flimsy canvas. Glad to be free from the awkward load, I started to trot after Jesse, who had disappeared into the woods.

  “What are you, my shadow?” he said, shying a stone in my direction. “Go on, git lost.” But he didn’t really mean it. At least, I didn’t think so.

  When I first joined the wagon train, Jesse had seemed to take a shine to me. Every night after the wagons made camp, he curried the mud and trail dust from my coat with an old corncob. He even stole his mother’s hairbrush to comb the tangles from my mane. I remembered how his face lit up when Buckeye Jack said, “That lieutenant major never told me the filly’s name. How ’bout you pick a new one for her?”

  Sometimes Jesse would look at me and whisper words out loud: Buttercup, Duchess, Sunshine. But he always shook his head a little, as if they weren’t quite right, and I never heard them again.

  After his parents took ill and died, Jesse stopped fussing over me. He didn’t whisper names anymore. Everyone on the wagon train mostly called me “that durn filly”—as in, “that durn filly got into the molasses again.” (I have to admit my guilt in this matter. The diet of tough, dry prairie grass was no treat, and molasses barrels are a cinch to open if you know the trick to it.)

  Jesse filled his arms with dry branches, moving deeper into the woods as he searched. I trailed behind him, nibbling at tender grapevines wrapped around the tree trunks.

  Along with the sharp scent of pine needles and the tangy sweetness of grapes, I smelled something musky and oily. It made my muscles tense and my hooves step light and quick. Jesse didn’t smell it. He was whistling to himself.

  I broke into a jog, whinnying in warning. My hooves sank deep into a soft patch of mud. The smell was stronger here…. I lowered my head to sniff the ground and saw an animal track as big as the hoofprint of a draft horse, with five toes ending in claw marks.

  A little ways ahead, Jesse stopped dead. He frowned at a purple stain that had appeared on his overalls. Another sticky clump landed on his head. Jesse looked up into the treetops, where a shaggy brown animal was gobbling up clusters of ripe grapes.

  My nostrils flared and I snorted whoosh, whoosh in alarm. Growing up wild on the Nebraska plains, and later as a scout horse for the army, I had never seen such a creature before. I tried to remember the different forest animals that the New England draft horses from the wagon train, Bonnie and Belle, had told me about.

  Bigger than a wolf…brown and shaggy…small round ears and a long snout…It was a bear! Belle had said bears mostly kept to themselves but would attack a horse or a human if they felt threatened.

  This bear didn’t seem threatened. It didn’t even glance down at Jesse as it chomped on another cluster of grapes. But it wasn’t nearly large enough to have made the track I had seen….

  A noise behind me started out low and crackling, like green wood on a campfire. It rose to an unmistakable roar of anger. I whirled on my haunches and saw a bear twice the size of the one in the tree. And this one looked not threatened but angry!

  The mother bear let out another roar and charged. I didn’t think twice; I bolted, ripping through the dense underbrush. But after a few strides, I stopped. The bear wasn’t chasing me.

  As the mother bear thundered toward Jesse, he backed flat against the trunk of the tree where the baby bear was gorging on grapes. Jesse stood frozen with fear as she rose on her hind legs and swiped at him with a massive paw. The bundle of kindling in his arms snapped like matchsticks.

  A horse’s first instinct is to run from danger, but we fight to protect our young, too, if we have no choice. I slapped my ears flat back against my head and charged at the bear, skipping off to the side as I got within a few paces. She snarled in my direction, then dropped to all fours and chased after me.

  I crashed blindly through the woods without a thought to where I was going. Suddenly the ground dropped away in front of me, and I saw the river foaming around jagged rocks. I skidded to a halt as loose pebbles rained over the bank and splashed into the water.

  I spun to face the bear. She shook her shaggy head from side to side, moving slowly but deliberately toward me. There was nowhere to run. If I took one step back, I’d fall into the river and break my bones on the sharp rocks.

  I reared up on my hind legs, slashing the air with my hooves. But my defenses were no match for a bear’s strong jaws and daggerlike claws.

  Crack! A gunshot split the air. Buckeye Jack stood twenty paces away, his rifle held up to his shoulder. Jesse stood a little ways behind him, his face pale and scared.

  The bear seemed confused. She let out a growl that sounded halfway between a threat and a question. In the woods behind us, her cub scrambled down from the tree and dropped heavily to the ground. It called to its mother with a shrill, yipping cry of distress.

  Buckeye Jack fired another shot into the air. The mother bear took a wary step back, then another. She turned and loped away toward her cub, herding it in front of her with her snout. Soon the only sound was the distant snapping of twigs as they disappeared into the forest.

  Jesse let out a shuddering sigh. “I thought for sure I’d end up as that bear’s supper,” he said. He walked slowly over to where I stood, sweating and trembling. He stroked my nose and smoothed my tangled forelock. “It was the filly that saved me—guess she’s good for something besides eating up our molasses, after all.”

  Buckeye Jack lowered his rifle. “Glad I didn’t have to shoot them,” he said. “I’m not sure this old rifle could have done the job. And it’s hard to blame a mother for defending her young. To the wild critters here, we’re uninvited guests.”

  The wind whipped back my mane, carrying all the strange forest smells. A new feeling stirred inside me. I kicked up my heels and galloped and bucked in circles.

  These mountains were wild and untamed—but so was I!

  Buckeye Jack and Jesse sat in front of the campfire, warming their hands over the blaze. Three months had passed since we’d settled here, and I had discovered the reason for our long journey. Believe it or not, it was rocks. Yes, the two of them spent their days standing in the middle of the icy river, swirling tin pans filled with gravel, looking for bits that shone more brightly than the others.

  So far, they didn’t seem to be finding much of it.
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  “Any coffee left?” Buckeye Jack asked hopefully.

  Jesse got up and lowered our sack of supplies from the tree where he’d hung it for safekeeping. “Nothing but a little flour and a couple of mealy apples,” he said, peering into the bag.

  An ember from the fire landed on my hair with a sizzle. I snorted and danced to the end of my tether. I didn’t like being tied at night, but Buckeye Jack was afraid of my wandering too far from camp. He had no choice but to let me forage for myself during the day and hope that I’d return. I always did come back, as far as I might wander. I reckon that Buckeye Jack and Jesse were the closest thing to a herd that I had.

  After supper, Buckeye Jack whittled a scrap of wood with his pocketknife while Jesse read haltingly out loud from a book with a red cover. He held the page close to his face and squinted to see the letters in the flickering firelight.

  “I have since often ob…observed how in…in-con…”

  “Incongruous,” said Buckeye Jack. “Means something ain’t like what it seems.”

  “…Observed how in-con-gru-ous and ir…irrat…Aww, what’s the point?” Jesse slammed the book shut. “There ain’t no schoolhouse out here.”

  “You need to keep up your learning for when we get back to civilized places,” said Buckeye Jack. “I promised your mama that you’d get a proper education.”

  “We ain’t never going back to civilized places,” snapped Jesse. “We’ll be out here digging like raccoons in the mud till we starve to death. Or freeze,” he added, shivering. The nights were getting colder, and the ground was hard and frosted over in the mornings.

  “Just you wait,” said Buckeye Jack. “Soon we’ll find the mother lode.” His eyes gleamed with an almost feverish light as he stared into the fire. “And we’ll live like kings in a house with glass windows and feather beds.”