Gib and the Gray Ghost (17 page)

At Appleton’s Livery, Ernie staggered out with Lightning and Silky all saddled up and ready to go and, after he’d checked the cinches, Gib headed back to pick up Livy. The ride back to the Rocking M was okay. The horses were eager to get home and Livy was eager to talk about being back at school. It wasn’t until after the evening chores, dinner, and homework in the library that Gib had time to ask himself how the day had really been. How going back to Longford School had been for Gibson Whittaker.

It had been, he decided, both good and bad. The worst part had been the whack on the head and the warning it had given him about Rodney and his plans for the future. And the best part? Well, along with the long rides on Silky, it just might be the fact that the eighth-grade bell ringer had called him cowboy. Not orphan or farm-out, but cowboy.

T
HE NEXT FEW WEEKS
were more of the same. More wintry weather, spells of heavy snow, and more riding to Longford School five days a week. One thing that was definitely changing for the better, however, was Hy’s health. The next time Dr. Whelan came to see Missus Julia, he pronounced Hy well on the road to recovery. Hy was out of bed now and, except in the very worst weather, out of the house, and even doing the morning milking. Which made getting to school on time a lot easier. But one thing Hy wasn’t doing much of was riding Lightning. Hy did take his cow pony out a few times on weekends, but only for a very short ride around the barnyard. “Old ponies like Lightnin’ need a couple of days off now and agin’,” was the way Hy put it.

But he also said he wasn’t complaining. When Gib asked him how he felt about Livy riding Lightning to Longford every day, he just grinned and said, “ ’Bout time that old uneducated critter started goin’ to school.” Later on, Gib heard him tell Missus Julia, “I got to take gettin’ back into the saddle slow-like, myself. Give my old bones time to git used to it. So don’t you worry none about Miss Livy ridin’ Lightnin’ to school, Missus Julia. She’s mighty welcome. Leastways till the school year’s over.”

But then, one night after supper, Gib overheard another conversation between the two of them on the subject. He’d fallen asleep on the library sofa and when he woke up he heard Missus Julia saying, “I know, Hy. But Lightning is your horse and it’s just not right that he’s in Longford every day when you could be using him.”

Gib rolled over to let them know he was awake but they didn’t seem to take notice. Instead Hy went on talking, a deep rumble that Gib couldn’t quite make out, but then it was Missus Julia again. “I agree. Black Silk is still too much horse for her, and besides the mare is pretty much ... The rest of it trailed off but Gib thought she might have said that Silky was pretty much his. Gibson Whittaker’s. It was a thought that really woke him up, but before he could decide whether that was what he’d actually heard, they went on talking. He couldn’t make out all of what was being said, but it seemed to be about Livy. Something about Livy and a good-natured Welsh pony.

Gib didn’t say anything to Livy about the pony. For one thing, he wasn’t sure if he’d heard it just right, and besides he had no idea what she thought of Welsh ponies. If it turned out that she hated them he didn’t want to be the one to tell her she was going to get one. But a few days later, during a streak of almost springlike weather, Mr. Appleton showed up at the Rocking M riding his jug-headed sorrel and leading a pretty little pinto gelding. The pinto was small but not as short-legged as most ponies, with a head and neck that hinted at a touch of Arabian blood. Gib guessed right off that Livy wouldn’t be able to resist him, and he was right.

Gib had just gone out to take the two horses, Mr. Appleton’s sorrel and the pinto, to the barn, when suddenly Livy was right behind him. Behind him and then running past him saying, “Oh, oh, oh.” When she was just a couple of feet from the pinto’s nose she stopped and stared for a moment before she said, “He’s mine, isn’t he? Isn’t he, Mr. Appleton?”

Gib didn’t know if she was just guessing or if she’d overheard something. He knew how good Livy was at overhearing. Or if it really was, as Livy told him later, that she took one look at the pinto and knew she’d been waiting for him all her life, even way back when she’d thought she hated horses. And she also knew his name was Dandy, after the pinto pony her mother once had.

Livy was kind of bouncing around on the tips of her toes and her face was lit up like a Christmas tree. For a moment Gib was afraid she was going to start waving her arms around and maybe even throw them around the pinto’s neck, which might have spooked even a good-natured Welsh pony.

“Livy,” Gib said, using the tone of voice he’d have used if he’d been trying to quiet an excited Thoroughbred. Before long she glanced his way, giggled, and stopped bouncing. She reached out then quiet and slow, like he’d taught her, and let the pony sniff her hand before she began to pat his face and neck.

It was the very next day that Livy started riding Dandy to school and Lightning went back to being Hy’s and nobody else’s. And before long Livy was out there in Dandy’s stall every spare minute, before school while Gib was doing the morning chores, and even in the evening when they were supposed to be doing their homework.

Dandy turned out to be a great little horse. He was gentle and biddable, but not a bit lazy. He was good to look at too, with that delicate Arabian head and a splatter of sharp-edged black spots on his mostly white hide. Livy said he was just as beautiful as Black Silk, and he’d be even more beautiful once she got him the expensive black saddle and bridle she’d picked out in the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

The weather stayed pretty predictable through February and March and Gibson Whittaker’s life at Longford School was downright predictable too. Some of the people in Miss Elders’s fifth and sixth grade still called him orphan or farm-out, and even when they didn’t, Gib could tell that was what they were thinking.

Most of the time he’d managed to stay one jump ahead of Rodney and Alvin’s ambushes. Every now and then he jumped over a foot that was meant to trip him, and once he’d ducked a baseball that got pitched at his head instead of his bat. But there were a couple of times when he did sit down on a tack that someone had put on his seat. Rodney, it seemed, owned a lot of thumbtacks.

And one rainy day Gib opened his lunch pail right there on his desk and found a very dead rat on top of his sandwiches. So Rodney’s war game was still going on, and as far as Gib could tell, not many of what Graham called “the other players” were lining up on Gibson Whittaker’s side. Nobody warned him about the tacks, for instance, or smelled a rat in time to keep him from opening that lunch pail right there in front of the whole giggling and snickering class.

His grades were more or less predictable too, good ones in English and history and fair to middling in just about everything else. But if there’d been letter grades for “civilized socializing” his probably wouldn’t have been much better than D minus.

Miss Elders talked to him about it once. It was at the end of a school day and Gib was heading for the door when she called him up to her desk. For a minute he thought he was in trouble but it turned out she only wanted to suggest that it might be a good idea if he “made an effort to enlarge his circle of friends.” After she’d finished Gib told her he’d try, but what he was thinking was that he’d already tried about every way he knew how. He wanted to tell her that he’d spread his socializing loop every place he could think of, and nobody so much as put a hind foot in it. Except for Bertie and Graham, of course. And now and then Livy. Livy, usually, when he least expected it.

The thing with Livy was that she was one part of Gib’s life that never had been predictable and probably never would be. She could be mean as sin one minute and sweet as maple sugar the next. Like one day she hadn’t been speaking to Gib for most of the morning, but when Clyde Binghampton called him orphan, Livy told Clyde to shut his big mouth. She also said, “You’re a fine one to talk, Clyde Binghampton. You’re probably an orphan too, and your folks just aren’t telling you.”

“What you talking about?” Clyde said. “What call you got to say a thing like that?”

Livy had turned her back on him, but she looked over her shoulder to say, “Because all the rest of the Binghamptons are smart and good-looking. Isn’t that the truth, Alicia?” Alicia giggled and said she thought so too.

It wasn’t until a Saturday morning early in April, one of the first days that really felt like spring, when Mr. Morrison showed up again at the Rocking M. Gib and Hy were both out in the barn at the time. Gib was shoveling out stalls and Hy was pushing the wheelbarrow out to the manure heap every time it got full, and sitting on a feed bin the rest of the time, telling stories about the olden days.

He was telling one about a ranching family named Higgins who used to do some small-time rustling by branding early calves with their sign, no matter what brand their mamas were packing. “Them Higgins brothers,” Hy said, “were countin’ on them calves bein’ weaned by roundup time, like as not. But most of them little fellers didn’t see it that way. So roundup comes along and all the reps from other outfits begin to notice all them half-grown Lazy-H calves trailing around after mamas who belonged to other outfits.”

Hy was just telling how the whole Higgins clan made a speedy out-of-state migration just before the sheriff got around to paying them a visit, when Morrison loped into the barnyard. But not on Ghost. On that April day he was still riding his big old buckskin.

Mr. Clark Morrison was duded up pretty good in silver-studded chaps and a brand-new Stetson, but he wasn’t looking particularly cheerful as he tied Bucky to the hitching rack and came on into the barn. Gib leaned his shovel against the side of the stall, wiped his hands on his trousers, and came out to say howdy.

Morrison was grinning as he shook hands with Hy and thumped Gib on the shoulder. But the grin faded when Hy asked, “How’re things shapin’ up out at that fancy spread of yourn?”

“Not too well, I’m afraid,” Morrison said. “Seems like I had an awful lot of winter kill during that big storm. And then there were a bunch of early calves who didn’t make it through.”

And when Gib asked about Ghost, Morrison looked even more down in the mouth. Shaking his head, he said that the gray was still making a real nuisance of himself.

When Hy asked what kind of a nuisance Morrison said, “Oh, throwing his head and rearing. Still bolts too. Gets the bit between his teeth and takes off.” He was looking a little bit sheepish as he went on, “And not just when I’m riding him. He gives everybody else as much trouble as he gives me.” He looked at Gib for a moment. “You know, Gibson, I think you said that he seemed to be settling down pretty well when you were riding him. Isn’t that right?”

When Gib agreed that it was, Morrison went on, “So—I was just wondering if you might ... He turned and looked at Hy. “And you too, Hy, if you’d like to. If the both of you could come over and size up that rascal, I’d really appreciate it.” And that was how it happened that the very next morning, a sunny Sunday morning in April, Gib met up with the Gray Ghost again.

R
IGHT AT FIRST HY
turned down Morrison’s invitation to visit the Circle Bar, even though he hadn’t been over that part of the range since Mr. Thornton sold it. “I surely would like to ride out and see your spread,” he told Morrison. “Gib’s been telling me what a fine layout you got there. But I promised the ladies I’d drive them in to church tomorrow.” He put his hand on Gib’s shoulder. “But Gib here could ride over if he’s a mind to.”

But the next morning Missus Julia wasn’t at breakfast and Miss Hooper said her cough was worse and she wasn’t feeling well enough to ride that far. So there’d be Bible reading in the library instead, the way there was in bad weather. And Hy was free to ride to the Circle Bar with Gib after all.

When Gib headed for the barn that Sunday morning it was to saddle both Silky and Lightning, and right after breakfast he and Hy started off. Even now, when mud and slush had replaced ice and snow, the ride seemed like a long one. On the way Gib’s mind kept going back to January, when he’d last seen Ghost, and even farther back to when the wild-eyed, bloodied-up dapple gray had shown up in the midst of that awful storm. And now, Gib realized, right now in April, he had no idea what to expect where Ghost was concerned. Halfway talking to himself, he said, “Wouldn’t be too surprised if Ghost’s gone back to being as bad-acting as he was when he first showed up.”

“Bad-acting?” Hy asked. “What kind of bad you talking about, boy?” Gib had almost forgotten that Hy had never been told what Ghost had really been like back then. When he started trying to explain Hy interrupted him. “Why didn’t I know about that?” he demanded. “I’d never have give you the say-so to handle a bad actor like that all by yourself.” Hy’s voice was getting louder and angrier. So angry that Lightning turned his head to look back at his noisy rider, flicking his ears and showing the whites of his eyes.

Gib grinned. “That’s why you never heard about it,” he said. “Because you’d have been out there in the barn in a minute, no matter how sick you were. Miss Hooper told me I wasn’t to tell you anything that would get you upset, so I didn’t. Besides, Ghost isn’t an outlaw. It was just the beating that ...

Gib bit his tongue. He’d done it again. This time Hy pulled Lightning to a stop and right there, halfway to the Circle Bar, Gib had to tell all about the bloody whip marks that had streaked across Ghost’s silvery hide the day he drifted in out of the storm. As he listened Hy kept muttering under his breath and when Gib finished the telling he just sat there steaming like a hot teakettle. At last he said, “Any man who’d take a bullwhip to a poor critter like that ... He fumed some more before he went on, “Like I been sayin’, that Lou Dettner shoulda been strung up years ago.”

They went on riding, but every few minutes Hy went back to scolding Gib for not telling him the truth about what was going on out there in the barn back in December.