by Terri Farley
“Want to drink it here? It’s not like we’re going to die of dehydration,” Sam said.
Jen pressed an index finger to the bridge of her glasses and cleared her throat as if Sam’s words might come back to haunt them.
Sam rushed on, “All we have to do is take the trail back down to the road. If we don’t see the horses by then, someone will drive by.”
When Jen didn’t agree, Sam grabbed the jug and swished it around. Then, as if to seal a promise, she gulped half the water, and handed the jug to Jen.
“Here’s to you, partner,” Jen joked.
She drank, wiped her wet lips with the back of her hand, then flattened the empty jug, folded it, and slipped it inside her backpack.
Stomachs sloshing and backs draped with gear, the girls started downhill.
Sam kept her eyes fixed on the trail ahead.
She would not look back. It was melodramatic and stupid to think that the vultures were stalking them.
And if they were, she didn’t want to know.
Chapter Two
Sam and Jen trudged down the hillside, trading the big iron skillet back and forth.
“This is my school project and I chose to bring that heavy pan, so let me carry it,” Jen protested, when she caught Sam trying to adjust her backpack to the weight of the skillet.
“You didn’t see me turning down those delicious biscuits,” Sam said. “This is fair.”
Jen didn’t say anything, and a single sidelong glance told Sam that her best friend was settling into one of her moods. Because Jen was so smart, she was used to being in control of her life. When she wasn’t, she turned gloomy.
“Hey,” Sam said. “I still don’t get why you’re doing this report on turkey vultures.”
Jen hefted the straps of her backpack, tossed each braid back over her shoulders, and glared at Sam. She wasn’t fooled by her friend’s attempt to distract her.
Sam blew air up under her bangs, then resolved not to do that again. Her breath was too hot to make the gesture much of a relief.
“Okay, I agree that they’re misunderstood and they’re just doing what vultures do, but how can you do a biology report on that? That has more to do with people than—”
Jen cut her off. “That’s not what I’m studying. There’s evidence that if vultures eat something that died from sickness, their digestive system actually kills the destructive germs. Neutralizes them,” Jen emphasized.
“Really?” Sam asked.
Jen nodded and walked a few steps in silence before she continued, “Think of that. What if science could figure out how they do it? We could help humans and animals resist harmful germs.”
They kept plodding along. Jen wore that weird, wondering smile for a couple miles and Sam tried not to brood over the realization that they’d gotten an awfully late start for the miles they might have to travel.
It was past noon, later than either of them had thought, and dust roiled up from each footfall. It was impossible to breathe without taking a whiff of the powdery gray stuff.
Sam coughed, then took one hand away from the straps of her backpack and cupped her hand over her nose and mouth.
Wasn’t this just great? Sam’s mind grumbled. On her first real escape from the ranch in nearly a month, she was in trouble again.
Her pulse kicked up at the thought of Ace trotting over the bridge to River Bend Ranch. Someone would look up at the sound of hooves, expecting to see her returning. Instead, they’d see a riderless horse.
Sam shuddered. Such a sight would make any rancher’s heart stop.
Sam trudged along faster, spurred on by the hope that she and Jen could find the horses before they ran home.
“Where did they go?” Sam yelped about an hour later.
“Who?” Jen asked, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.
“The hoofprints,” Sam said, pointing at the dust before them. She whirled and looked back, then wet her lips and shook her head. She couldn’t see any tracks. “I was following them, but Ace and Silly must have veered off the trail.”
“I didn’t notice,” Jen said. She sounded embarrassed as she fanned the totally-un-Jen-like beige shirt she’d worn so that she wouldn’t shock the turkey vultures with her usual brightly colored wardrobe. “I hate to admit it, but you know who we could use right now, don’t you?”
“No,” Sam said, walking faster.
“Sam,” Jen said, stopping to roll the stiffness from her shoulders. “You know what my dad said about Jake?”
“I can’t hear you,” Sam called back, but Jen’s rapid downhill footsteps caught up with her.
“‘That boy could track a bee through a blizzard,’” Jen drawled, imitating her dad.
Sam shook her head, clearing her ears of the remark. She didn’t want to think about Jake right now. She wanted to find her horse, shuck off her boots, and take a nap. “But why would they do it?”
Jen knew Sam was still talking about the horses, and quit teasing her.
“Something spooked them, of course,” Jen said. “Much as I love horses, I sometimes wish their primitive little brains didn’t scream ‘Run!’ at the first sign of trouble. I understand that they developed in a world where there weren’t any barbed-wire fences, cars—”
“Or canned biscuits,” Sam muttered.
“Yeah,” Jen said, sounding gloomy again.
As they crab-stepped down a side hill, Sam tried not to tense up. Even when her boot soles slipped on rocks tiny as gravel, she kept her knees from locking. All she needed was to slide down this slope on the seat of her jeans.
Sundown came and the girls were still walking, not riding.
“We should be coming to another road pretty soon,” Sam said. “I’m really—”
“Quit apologizing,” Jen ordered.
Sam pressed her lips together, but she couldn’t stop feeling guilty. She’d insisted they sit for an hour, then two, by the last dirt road they’d crossed.
“It made sense,” Jen assured her. “And it was a good place for a lunch break.”
“Really, this summer when I drove up that road with Ryan—” Sam started.
“Sam, quit it.”
“—we saw Karl Mannix driving on it with the Hummer and then I drove back up there with Sheriff Ballard. That’s three trucks traveling on that road in one day. I don’t know why, today, we didn’t see a single, solitary car, truck, or minivan….” Sam’s voice cracked.
Jen gave Sam a quick, one-armed hug before grabbing her by both shoulders and turning her so they faced each other.
“Samantha, honey,” Jen said with forced sweetness. “You need to shut up now. No one’s expecting us back until tomorrow morning, we know what we’re doing, and horses have been taking care of themselves for the last million years or so.”
Eyes locked, the girls had a staredown.
Sam lost.
“Your glasses are really dirty,” she said.
“I’ll scratch the lenses if I polish them with my shirt,” Jen replied.
At last, Sam sighed. “I guess you’re right. And if the horses don’t go home, I’m not in trouble.”
She tried to sound like that would be a good thing, but she didn’t want Ace and Silly running loose in tack that could endanger them in the wild.
“We can go without water for at least another twenty-four hours, and by then we will have encountered some sort of civilization.”
Sure, Sam thought, if one of us doesn’t twist an ankle, or get bitten by a rattlesnake.
“And we’re not lost,” Jen said adamantly.
“Did I say we were?”
“Just don’t go veering off this path,” Jen said.
“Why would I do that?”
“Well, if you saw the Phantom—”
“He’s too smart to be out on this hillside where anyone could see him,” Sam insisted.
“But look down the hill at all that vegetation,” Jen said. Then, she added, “I’m thirsty. I wish we hadn’t eaten those biscuit sandwich
es.”
“Not me,” Sam said. Though the biscuits stuffed with cheese had been salty when you had nothing to drink, they’d tasted great and Sam knew those calories had helped keep them going all day.
“Did you hear that?” Jen asked. She grabbed Sam’s arm and held her still.
Sam winced at the strength of Jen’s grip.
The ground beneath their boots had hardened. Off to their left was a grove of cottonwood trees. That meant they were near water, but Sam didn’t hear it flowing. Even when she concentrated with her eyes closed, she heard nothing but a breeze and maybe the far-off howling of coyotes.
“This way,” Jen said. She shrugged her backpack into a more comfortable position and stepped off the path.
“Wait! You were the one—”
Jen peered through the darkness, then strode off through the short, crunchy grass.
“Uh-uh,” Sam said. “No. We can’t leave the trail.”
“Just for a few yards,” Jen called back.
“I bet that’s what the Donner party said,” Sam muttered.
“What?” Jen asked, but her steps didn’t slow and the blond braids bouncing against her back finally faded from view.
Should she follow Jen? Half her brain said there was no sense in both of them getting lost. The other half reasoned that since it was full dark now and they had their sleeping bags, it would be a good idea to make camp off the trail and keep searching for the horses at dawn.
Besides, Sam thought as she hurried in the direction she was pretty sure Jen had taken, she was a loyal friend.
Brush cracked underfoot and she was looking down, trying to be careful where she set her boots, when Jen’s outline loomed up in front of her.
Automatically, her hands came up to keep from running into her friend.
“Sam!” Jen whispered urgently. “Listen.”
Finally Sam heard it. The melody could have been made by waving branches and soprano winds, but the sounds recurred in patterns. A bit lower than the other sounds, a human voice was singing.
Chills drizzled down Sam’s neck.
I’m not going over there.
She’d already opened her mouth to warn Jen that this was too weird, when she heard a stamp and a familiar snort.
“That’s Ace,” Sam whispered.
Suddenly her feet didn’t hurt and she’d changed her mind about going on. She slipped past Jen and rushed through the blackness as if magnetized to her horse.
Jen followed so closely, Sam hoped she wouldn’t stomp on her heel and make them both fall. But neither of them stumbled and the grove around them began showing more clearly. Sam saw bark and leaves as they crept up on their horses.
After a few more steps their mounts’ silhouettes took form. She could tell that the horses were still saddled.
Silly’s flaxen mane and Quarter Horse conformation showed first, but Ace was there, too. Silly blocked most of the firelight, but a bit of brightness touched Ace’s bay coat and the white star on his forehead.
Sam sucked in her stomach and held her breath as she stepped over a rock.
Jen moved so quietly, Sam couldn’t even hear her. With only a few more yards left between them and the horses, there was no reason for their silence. The horses didn’t seem to care that they were coming.
Ace and Silly must be tired, hungry, and ready to be caught, or they would have bolted. They had to have sensed the girls’ approach, but both horses kept their heads high, ears pricked toward the singing cowboy or camper or whatever he was.
And it was a he. Sam could hear that much.
Just a few more steps. Then she could grab Ace and go.
But gooseflesh prickled all over her body as Sam realized something eerie was going on.
Ace was a mustang. Once he escaped, he was not this easy to recapture. Why was he just standing here?
Sam clamped her hand on the right rein, near the bit. She had him!
Ace lifted his chin a mere inch and flicked one ear her way.
Sam rubbed the bay’s neck. It was cool beneath the sweat-stiff hair. Maybe he was just worn out.
Sam tried to back her horse, but he resisted.
She clucked her tongue for him to come along. He didn’t.
Then she glanced in the direction her horse was staring and caught her breath.
No, Sam decided, her horse wasn’t exhausted. He was spellbound.
Chapter Three
Smoke twisted up from a campfire. By its light, Sam saw a painted cart pulled onto a grassy strip next to a stream. A pinto horse stood nearby and a young man sat beside it, playing a violin.
He’s serenading his horse, Sam thought. And who could blame him?
The mare might have stepped out of a fairy tale.
Thick forelock veiled a face that was half dark and half light. The mane draping her to the shoulder could have been a swath of night sky with a beam of starlight white running through its middle.
Tall and thickly muscled, the mare still looked cute, not intimidating—maybe because of the fuzzy black tufts showing inside her ears or the white hair curling soft and fine above those massive hooves.
One of her hooves wouldn’t fit inside my hat, Sam thought. It would flatten it.
The mare’s sloping shoulders promised a smooth ride, and Sam pictured the horse carrying a runaway princess. In fact, the big black-and-white paint could carry a princess and a prince on her broad and gleaming back.
What a great horse, Sam thought, and gave Ace a guilty pat on the neck, just in case he read her mind and felt jealous.
The mare watched the musician’s bow stroke haunting music from his violin. Then, as the tempo built in liveliness, the paint nodded instead of clapping along.
The words of the song weren’t easy to make out. Some might have been in another language, but after two repetitions, Sam could have sung along with the refrain.
“Gypsy gold does not clink and glitter, oh no. It gleams in the sun and neighs in the dark, ah yes.”
He really was singing to his horse, and the feeling he put into the words made Sam shiver. She cast a quick glance at Jen, but the firelight reflected on the lenses of her glasses made it hard to tell what she was thinking.
Was she as taken in by the music? Ace and Silly were, that was for sure, but Sam spotted one creature that wasn’t captivated.
The colt was no more than six months old. His compact body and sturdy legs looked tawny dun.
When a breeze plucked sparks from the campfire and spun them over the colt’s head, he snapped at them. When they drifted out of reach, he sneezed and switched his short tail in boredom, but an instant later he was darting around the paint mare, past the musician and out of the ring of light.
What had gotten into him? The colt was about Tempest’s age and Sam knew that sometimes a jolt of high spirits just made young horses run for the joy of it.
Not this time, though.
Sam’s eyes followed the colt as he crashed toward shifting shadows on the other side of the campfire.
Animals, Sam thought. Lots of them.
She caught the flow of manes and the flash of startled eyes.
Mustangs?
Fingers of firelight stretched far enough that Sam was pretty sure she made out coats of blood bay, black, and roan.
She could hardly believe her eyes. The Phantom’s band was clustered in the cottonwood grove.
It wasn’t that the herd was out of its territory. The horses had ranged between the La Charla River and Cowkiller Caldera before. But they were so close. The whole herd clustered no more than two dozen yards away from this stranger.
Sam’s mind grappled with surprise while her eyes kept searching. She sorted through the forms of mares and half-grown colts until she found him.
The stallion stood apart from the others. If a drop of moon dew had fallen through the branches to land glowing in the grove, it wouldn’t have been brighter than the Phantom. He shone silver in the dark woods.
Sam’s breath caug
ht, and without meaning to, her hand rose to press against her chest. Could extra blood surge through your heart at the sight of the horse you loved? To her, it felt like it could, but she didn’t call to him. All she wanted was to watch him.
Tense, with every nerve alert, the silver stallion was poised to run, but he’d turned one ear toward the music.
Did the melody stir memories of the years he’d lived as a captive horse? Was that why he wasn’t afraid of the stranger?
It wasn’t the pinto mare that had lured the stallion. If it had been, he would have been staring and snorting. Instead, he listened.
Protector of his band, wild with his tangled mane and predator’s eyes, every inch an untamed beast, the Phantom still couldn’t resist the soaring notes.
Sam remembered Dallas, their ranch foreman, saying that when she’d been away in San Francisco, he’d sat on the bunkhouse steps at night, playing his harmonica. Sometimes, if he squinted just right, he’d seen a lonely horse listening as the music floated across to the wild side of the river.
Sam knew the horse had been the Phantom. The stallion was so drawn by music, she’d once called him to her by singing an off-key and trembling Christmas carol.
The musician at the fireside gave no sign that he’d noticed his audience. He played on while the adventurous colt sidled among the mustangs. Then the enchantment ended.
Irritated squeals and snapping teeth drove the colt away. Hooves tramped, horsehide struck bark, and the little dun gave a high-pitched whinny.
“Poor baby,” Sam whispered.
Clumsy in his sad retreat, the colt bolted beyond the mustangs’ reach and veered toward the campfire.
Watch out! Sam’s eyes had widened, but she hadn’t managed to yell a warning when the violin bow slid screeching across the strings and the musician’s out-flung arm blocked the colt.
Spooked, the colt wheeled away from the campfire and bucked, flinging his heels at the night sky. The mustangs trotted away, disturbed but not terrified. The pinto mare seemed quietly amused.
Without halter or hobbles, she stepped back from the colt’s commotion and swung her heavy head to face Jen and Sam.