Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West

by Marguerite Henry

  “Friend Hobo,” I said, leaning over so my face could rest on his neck, “you helped save a world of mustangs tonight.”

  The sweet grindy-chewy sound stopped. An ear swiveled my way.

  “I’m mighty proud of you, Hobo. If Pa hadn’t rounded you up years ago, and if you hadn’t bucked me off when I was a baby, we might neither of us be here nuzzlin’ in the moonlight.”

  Our dogs, Nip and Tucker, joined us, and were ranging in circles, sniffing good earth smells and yelping, bent on their own business. I saw the light go off in the barn and on in the kitchen. I knew that Charley would be making a pot of coffee. He was used to my night wanderings.

  “Go on out and count the stars, Annie,” he’d say. “It’ll ready you for sleep.”

  But tonight I wasn’t thinking of my own sleep. I was thinking of how a lot of tired mustangs in the hills could be sleeping without any fear of those murdering things from the sky.

  “Hobo,” I said, “you were at that meeting tonight, as sure as if you’d been sitting there on your haunches.”

  An owl whiffed by, and the wind made a whisper through his feathers. Neither of us shied.

  “Isn’t it funny, Hobo, how lovin’ one horse critter can trigger off a lot of love . . . enough for all horsekind?”

  I felt so good I wanted to fly. Suddenly I grabbed two fistfuls of mane, nudged Hobo in the ribs, and we flew for home, fast as wind . . . that is, fast for an old horse, and for me who hadn’t barebacked in a long time.

  I did sleep that night, and next morning the whole world seemed to sing. It was a bright clean decent place for living again.

  The June days skipped by like happy children. Life was good. Each morning when I drove to Reno, I knew there’d be no truckload of bleeding horses ahead.

  The summer bloomed and faded. October set in. And one noontime as I was crossing the bridge to return a book to the library, I spied the rangy figure of Attorney Richards coming towards me. I was glad to see him. Now I could really thank him for his help at Virginia City. The sun shone on his crinkled white hair and made the creases in his face sharp as knife edges. I noticed a pile of magazines under his arm and noticed, too, that he seemed deep in thought, and somehow sad-looking.

  “Mr. Richards!” I startled him out of his daydream. “I just want to say hello and thank you for speaking up at the meeting.”

  The lean figure spun about. “Why, it’s Annie!” he said in slow surprise. And with his free hand he shook mine the way Pa did when he called me Pardner. And there was the same look in his eye. “But why thank me?”

  “Because you explained my pictures, and helped our side to win.”

  “But, Annie, are you satisfied with that puny victory in Virginia City?”

  “Puny victory!”

  “That’s what it was! Nothing but a sugar pill for a big sickness. What good is it,” he asked almost fiercely, “if we stop the cruel air roundups in one county? Why, the fliers and the slaughterhouses will just move on to the next. Some have already.” And in the same breath he added, “You on your way to the library?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, let’s go over there so I can set down my bundle.”

  When we reached the wide steps he unloaded his magazines in relief. “Annie,” he said, “I’ve been fighting for years, and I know when I’ve won and when I got to stand up and fight again.”

  I could see across the river, see Mr. Harris returning to the office. I knew I should be hurrying back, too. Instead, I stood rooted. “You mean we’ve got to fight the whole state?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. In my own time a hundred thousand mustangs have been slaughtered in Nevada alone. Today I doubt if there are twenty thousand left in all America.”

  I was silent, letting the truth soak in.

  “The cruelty I’ve seen, Annie, I can’t ever crowd out of my mind.”

  “I can’t either. I dream about it nights.”

  “We think alike,” he smiled. “Years ago, your father had the best Mustang Express around here, and you and I grew up on mustangs.”

  “You did? Somehow . . . ” I blushed.

  “Somehow what, Annie?”

  “I always thought of you with books and courtrooms. Not horses.”

  His laughter came from deep within. “You didn’t know I used to be a miner? Why, in those days I had a true mustang for a pack-and-saddle horse. Because I was a miner I named him Major. Oh, I was a wag in those days, Annie. Major was a tough little buckskin, and I was a tough young buck myself. Many’s the time we split the sage and washed our faces with wind.”

  My mind took off. I was on Hobo, galloping bareback across the range, his mane whipping my face.

  “And now when the mustang needs me,” Mr. Richards was saying, “I’m not going to stand by and let people like Gomez and Burger sign his death warrant.”

  He slid a magazine out from the pile. “Here, look at this, Annie. Right on the cover. ‘Mustang Murder!’ There’s enough ammunition here to shoot holes through any argument—by sheepmen, cowmen, rendering plants, or even the Bureau of Land Management. I bought every last copy.”

  I felt a sharp, tingling excitement. A war coming on. And here, looking right at me, was the general who would lead us to victory. Maybe he’d let me work behind the lines. Then I could keep my promise to Mr. Harris.

  “I’m going to send this to each legislator.” Mr. Richards was pounding the magazine with his fist. “And a fiery letter besides, just bristling with facts. And next on the docket I’ll persuade Senator Slattery to sponsor a bill to stop air pursuit everywhere in the state. What do you say to that, Annie?”

  “Wonderful! I want to help!”

  “Maybe you can. I understand you type a lot of words a minute.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Suddenly he fell silent, And when he spoke again he seemed years older. “You see, Annie, I have to measure out my time like a miser. I don’t want it running out before my work’s done. Somehow I’ve got to get this bill through before I die.”

  Then he brightened. “And do you know how I’m going to do it?” He was talking more to himself than to me, and looking off into the deep purple mountains and even beyond.

  I waited for him to go on.

  “We must trust the people, the everyday people, Annie. We’ve got to believe in them. They are the lawmakers! You saw how it happened in Virginia City when they were aroused. Now it’s got to happen in the whole state of Nevada.”

  I longed to say something big, to show I understood. But before I had a chance, Mr. Richards held out his hand in good-bye.

  “I’m depending on you, Annie,” he said, with a sparkle suddenly in his tired eyes.

  I trotted on air every step of the way to the office. What an honor to be taken into the confidence of this great man. My library book was still clutched in my hand; I’d completely forgotten my errand!

  The next day Mr. Richards was found dead at his desk.

  13. The Mustang Bill

  AND THE next thing I knew, the bundle of magazines with the “Mustang Murder” article was on my doorstep. For a long moment I didn’t even stoop to pick them up. I stood looking at them, tied loosely with a piece of raveled cord, as if someone, now gone, had done it hurriedly.

  I stood there afraid, feeling that I was too young, too weak to move the battle lines forward. The battle lines that the old warrior had drawn up with his last fighting breath.

  “I’m depending upon you, Annie.” Dear God, why had he said that? How could I break faith with this dear, dead man who had spent all of his life fighting for freedom and justice?

  I remembered how he looked that day with his eyes on the faraway mountains. The mountains. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” How often Grandma Bronn had said it. Did it have true meaning? I gazed at the mountains, seeing the purple shadows upon them. And was there something walking in the shadows?

  My heart began to pound. Something seemed
to be speaking to me from the living shadows and across the miles of sage. Yet very intimate and close. Perhaps it was the wind that breathed a voice so gentle and strong and without words. But somehow I knew. Knew that, weak and young as I was, the battle was mine. There could be no retreating now.

  Then the strength of the mountains was within me. My mind was thinking fast and clear. “We must trust the people, the everyday people, Annie. They are the lawmakers.” Mr. Richards was right. But how could I get to them? Not a ghost of a chance. No? The idea flooded my brain.

  For that ghost of a chance was a ghost writer, a person who wrote speeches and books for other people, thinking and talking just as they did. Books and speeches. Why not letters? Letters from the old dead warrior? Ghost-written, by me?

  I looked again at the distant mountains. The shadows were still now, with nothing walking among them. I closed my eyes and bowed my head, with my heart crying: Thank You, out there. Oh, thank You.

  • • •

  Before I could write like Mr. Richards I had to learn to think like him. Every day that week I went back to the library during my lunch hour, and every time I stood there on the steps, even for a second, I could see him, white hair shining in the sun, and I could hear his voice. Then I’d run inside, and I’d hurry to the nearest table and go to work. It was exciting how I could slide over into his mind, easy as sliding into Hobo’s saddle.

  I found fierce joy in being Mr. Richards’ ghost writer. He had cared about the wild horses, and I cared. Dead or living, we’d fight the battle together.

  And so I wrote as though he were dictating: “Are you going to stuff cotton in your ears and wear blinders so you can’t see and hear what’s going on? So you can’t see a horse chased to his death, hear the scream of the stallion, and the neighing of his mares, and the colts whinnering when a plane roars down on them?”

  In our quiet Washoe Library I riffled through Mr. Richards’ notes and wrote hot, racing words, and I listed the times and places where cruel, illegal roundups had taken place. That’s how I spent my noon hours.

  At night, Charley and I turned our kitchen into a mail room. While I typed up the letters, he printed the labels with a big black crayon and then rolled up the magazines, with my letter inside. Just before midnight we stuffed all the bundles in our saddlebags and rode off to our little postoffice in Wadsworth. Of course, I could have mailed everything in Reno the next morning, and things would have gone out just as fast. But I was never one for waiting, once a letter was licked shut. Besides, Charley and I liked jogging along in the crisp moonlight. The bigness of night, and the moon shining on the mountains, and our saddles creaking, and our horses snortin’—well, it sort of loosened up our brains so we could think free and big again.

  When the last of my letters had been mailed, we knew that now someone must draw up a mustang bill. “Why don’t we do it ourselves?” I asked Charley. “It’d be cheaper than hiring a lawyer.”

  “Sure,” Charley agreed. “And we’ll leave out all the whereases and heretofores.”

  But we were green hands at this and so we got Tex Gladding, the postmaster, to help us.

  Working far into the winter nights, sometimes around our open fire and sometimes around the pot-bellied stove in the postoffice, Tex would say, “You got to work longer and harder when you’re on the learning end, eh?”

  One night when we seemed to be getting nowhere, I sank exhausted on our couch and covered up with Mom’s warm afghan. Soon I fell asleep, and I dreamt that Mr. Richards was the great Thomas Jefferson with a copy of the American Constitution in his hands. He looked up from the print and said in a voice that went round the earth: “We the people . . . ” It was so real that I awoke in startlement, with Mr. Richards’ real-life words all mixed up with the Constitution. “We the people must trust the people; they are the lawmakers.”

  I grabbed a pencil and in ten minutes I wrote our bill:

  We, the people, say it shall be unlawful for any person to hunt wild horses, mares, colts or burros by means of airborne vehicles of any kind, or motor vehicles of any kind. It shall also be unlawful to pollute water holes in order to trap such animals.

  Luckily our state senator, James Slattery, lived just up the canyon from us, and the very next evening Charley and I rode over to his ranch.

  As we tied up our horses at the hitching rack, our arrival was announced by a joyous chaos of seven barking dogs and two pups, who with much yelping and tail wagging took us to the family entrance. The door burst open, and Hi-Line, the hired man, greeted us with a wide-toothed smile. He’d earned his name because he was pretty much an expert on high—power lines.

  “Come on in, folks,” he drawled, leading us into a cavern of a room that somehow made us feel right at home. It was lighted only by a ruddy, spitting fire, and everywhere were signs of comfortable living—newspapers and magazines spread all about, roasted piñon nuts heaped in a bowl, a basket of apples on the mantel. And deep in a red leather chair, with his feet stretched out on a hassock, sprawled Senator James Slattery. Like some graceful tiger he untangled himself, rose up to his full six-feet-two, and welcomed us with a grip so hearty I wriggled my fingers afterward to see if they were still usable.

  “Hello, neighbors!” he said in a softly rugged voice. “Come! Anchor down right here.” He pushed a mess of papers off the couch, and with a grand wave of his hand invited us to sit. As we made ourselves comfortable, Hi-Line clumped in on his spiked boots and poured us the blackest coffee you ever saw.

  The Senator went back to his big chair and settled in again. “My wife’s in the other room fussin’ over one of her animal welfare projects.” He chuckled at the thought. “Would you believe it if I said we have a sow in the bathroom?”

  I spoke up quickly. “Yes, I would.”

  “And a bunch of pigs, too?”

  “Yes. I’d believe that.”

  “And you’d be right,” he said, and he bellowed with laughter. “It beats me, Charley,” he added, wiping merry tears from his eyes, “how we put up with these girls of ours who are forever gathering in the halt, the maimed, and the blind.”

  Charley nodded in hearty agreement.

  “Right now, Kathryn’s watching over Shovel—nose, our prize sow.”

  “Shovel-nose!” Charley’s laughter boomed. “Why can’t I think of good names like that? I’d probably have called her Droopy Ears or Curly Tail or Mrs. Grunty.”

  “Our son did the naming,” Mr. Slattery said with a touch of pride. “He still rides her, so of course we can’t have anything happen to her.”

  “Is she sick?” I asked.

  The Senator shook his head. “Not now. But she had a hard time farrowing, and she’s not the best mother in the world. Has to be watched constantly or she rolls over and crushes the little pigs.”

  He threw back his head and let out a meadow-lark whistle. It brought Mrs. Slattery on the run. She stood in the doorway a moment, adjusting her eyes to the dimness. She was wearing what people in storybooks would call a “tea gown,” but on her feet were barn boots.

  “You’ll have to excuse my mixed-up appearance,” she said. “Jim has probably told you of the brand-fire new little pigs. They are so absolutely adorable they’ll not be going to market for a long time. Hi-Line,” she called in the same breath, “why don’t you bring in some of that good coffee cake?”

  While the others ate and talked crops and weather, I sat restlessly stroking a cat that was smoothing his whiskers against my sleeve. I wanted to get on to the real thing! At last Mr. Slattery brought it up himself.

  “Got your letter, Annie, the one about the mustangs.”

  I leaned forward so suddenly the cat whiffed away in fright.

  “By the way, how does it feel to know you’ve grounded all those flyin’ mustangers?”

  “Oh, but we haven’t! That was just a puny victory; Mr. Richards told me we’ve got to fight for a state law.”

  The Senator pulled out a big cigar, and fumbled for a match.
“Did you know that he and I tried for a save-the-mustang bill last year?”

  “Yes, he told me all about it, and how it died a-borning. But his last wish was to start again, and this time win.”

  “Annie feels she’s got to carry on for Mr. Richards,” Charley explained, pulling our precious bill out of his pocket. “The letter she wrote is the one he intended to write. And here’s the bill she hopes you’ll sponsor.”

  Without a glance at it, the Senator laid the bill face down on the table beside him.

  The sudden quiet was startling. He rolled the cigar between his fingers, regarding it as if he’d never seen one before. Then he slipped off the gold band, and leaning toward his wife, who was sitting on the hassock, he placed it on her ring finger in a kind of ceremony. Not until he’d slowly lighted the cigar and taken the first long puff did he speak. “Of course I will!” he said with conviction. “Even without reading it, I know it’s right.”

  My mouth opened in amazement.

  “Do you think Kathryn and I want to see any animals tortured? Why do you suppose we let a sow have her five little porkers in our house? But . . . ” he hesitated.

  “But what?” I asked.

  “There’ll be a lot of hurdles built up by big cattle and sheep men. You see,” he went on, “the committee who must approve the bill may not be members of yours and Kathryn’s humane society.”

  “Who will they be?”

  “I don’t know. Most likely it’ll be the Livestock Committee, and they won’t clap hands at the idea of protecting the mustangs. Come to think of it, I’ll try to get it into the Public Morals Committee. They’re so used to correcting injustices to people, it might have a chance there.”

  My heart turned a quick somersault. Again, here was a big public figure who would take on the mustang war!