Hidden Truths (13 page)

"If you want, I can finish the other stalls for
you," Rika said. Since she had endangered Cinnamon and let the mustang
escape, the Hamiltons had probably lost what little respect they held for Rika,
so she needed to prove her worth anew. Maybe mucking the stalls for Nattie was
a good start.

Nattie hesitated. "I don't want you to think I'm
unloading the most unpleasant work onto you."

"It's all right." Compared to working in the cotton
mill, mucking stalls was harmless. At least she couldn't lose a finger or get
scalped.

Finally, Nattie nodded. "You saw the manure pile
outside?" She turned and pointed to her left. "That's where you empty
the wheelbarrow. And if it gets to be too much, just come over to the house and
keep me company while I prepare supper. Amy or I can finish the stalls after
supper."

Rika's determination grew. She would finish this task, no
matter what. Her well-meaning action had caused more work for Amy, so the least
she could do was take over this simple task for the Hamiltons.

Pain pulsed through her back as she cleaned two more stalls.
Her arm muscles strained with every lift of the pitchfork. She bit her lip and
pushed the wheelbarrow to the next stall.

It was getting too heavy. A trip to the manure pile was in
order. Slowly, she rolled the wheelbarrow down the center aisle. The
wheelbarrow lurched from side to side. Rika tightened her grip and tried to
hold it steady.

The wheel bumped over the barn's threshold, and the
wheelbarrow pitched sideways. A pile of soiled straw and horse apples
splattered onto the ranch yard.

"Oh, no." Groaning, Rika straightened the
wheelbarrow and forked the manure back into it. This time, she was careful not
to load the wheelbarrow up too high and safely emptied her load onto the manure
pile.

Now on to the next stall. This one wasn't empty, though.
Rika recognized the gray horse that Amy had bought with Phineas's money. When
the horse saw Rika, it hurried to the other end of the stall.

Rika hesitated. "Guess you'll need to stay in a soiled
stall for a little longer." The last thing she needed
was another horse escaping because of her. She also stepped past Snowflake's
stall.

The last stall was empty, and Rika struggled with the heavy pitchfork
as she cleaned it. After what seemed like an eternity, she spread fresh straw
on the floor, making a soft layer for the horses.

When she returned from her last trip to the manure pile, she
noticed that stalks of straw and bits of manure littered the aisle. Her hands
felt as if they were on fire, but she ignored the pain and swept the barn.

Finally, she straightened and pressed her hands to her back.
Despite her aching muscles, a smile crept onto her face.
I bet the Hamiltons
have never seen such a clean barn.

She walked past the rows of stalls, eager to wash up and sit
down for a while. Her stomach grumbled.

A soft neigh stopped her. From a stall she had bypassed
earlier, a spotted head appeared over the stall door. With its white coat and
the reddish dots, the horse really did look like the circus horses Rika had
seen as a child, even if Amy didn't want to hear that, and the red-brown patch
around one eye made Rika smile.

Slowly, as Amy had shown her, she lifted her hand and let
the horse sniff it.

Warm lips rasped over her hand in search of a hidden snack.

"Are you hungry too?" Hadn't Nattie mentioned that
she needed to feed the horses? Rika straightened. This was something else she
could do to prove herself useful. She had seen Amy give oats to the horses this
morning.

At the end of the aisle stood a barrel with oats. Rika
walked over, opened the lid, and scooped oats into a bucket.

The horses started stamping and neighing. Even the shy gray
mare peeked over her stall door.

They must be hungry. I better give them enough.

She grabbed the two feed buckets and carried them to the
horse with the spots and the eye patch. Rika stretched her arm over the stall
door as far as it would go but realized she couldn't pour the oats into the
manger from outside of the stall. When she pulled back her groaning arm with
the bucket, the spotted horse snorted in protest and surged forward to shove
her nose into the oats.

With a shriek, Hendrika jumped back.

The bucket clattered to the floor, and the horse lowered its
nose and gobbled up the oats.

All right, this works too.
Now that the horse was
distracted, Rika found the courage to open the stall door and sneak past the
horse. She filled the manger with oats from the barrel and then proceeded to
the next horse.

Finally, Snowflake and the mare with the eye patch had a
manger full of oats. Rika didn't want to risk opening the gray mare's stall
door, so she just lowered a bucket to the ground. With a nod of accomplishment,
she hurried to the main house to help with supper.

*  *  *

The door slammed shut behind Amy, and she stormed into the
kitchen. "Where is she?"

Nattie turned away from the stove and sent her a startled
gaze. "You mean Mama? She's still with the —"

"Not Mama." Amy barely kept herself from shouting.
"Hendrika!"

"I sent her up to your room to —"

Amy didn't stay to hear the rest of the explanation. The
thought of Hendrika alone in her room added to her inner turmoil. She didn't
like having her space invaded. The stairs creaked as she took them three at a
time, and without stopping, Amy shoved open the door to her room.

"What on God's green earth were you —" At the
sight before her, Amy ran out of steam. The angry words died on her lips.

Hendrika stood in front of the washstand, clad in a pair of
long underdrawers and a flimsy chemise. Wide-eyed, she flinched away from Amy
and jerked her hands up in front of her face instead of covering her body.

Amy whirled around and closed the door behind her. Her body
trembled, and her breath sounded like one of the steam locomotives the
newspapers talked about. She counted to thirty, then named all the horses in
their herd. As a child, she'd used the trick to calm herself, but now it failed
to smooth the rough edges of her emotions.

"What's going on?" Nattie called from the bottom
of the stairs.

"Stay out of this," Amy answered. Her anger
flickered alive again. She turned around and called through the still closed
door, "Are you decent?"

"Yes," Hendrika answered, sounding as shaky as Amy
felt.

Focusing on her anger and nothing else, Amy inched open the
door and marched into the room. A part of her registered that Hendrika was
wearing one of her own dresses, but she shoved the thought away. Just one thing
was important for now.

"What were you thinking? You almost killed Pirate and
Snowflake!" She wanted to grab Hendrika and shake her, but her instincts
warned her not to touch Hendrika right now.

"What?" Hendrika scuttled back and collided with
the washstand. "I-I didn't kill anybody. What are you talking about?"

The confusion in Hendrika's eyes seemed real.

Amy rubbed her forehead. "Did you feed the
horses?"

"Y-yes. They were hungry, and I thought I'd help
out."

"You 'helped' more than enough. You almost killed two
of our best mares by giving them oats."

"But..." Hendrika wrung her hands. "But I saw
you give them oats too."

"A scoopful, not a whole manger! Horses can get colic
or founder when you give them too much oats. If I hadn't come back in time,
they could have died."

Tears welled in Rika's eyes. "I didn't know that. I
didn't know, really."

Part of Amy wanted to say, "It's all right,"
wanted to wipe away the tears that trembled on Hendrika's lashes. Another part
wanted to tell Hendrika to leave the ranch before she did even more damage and
threw their lives into chaos. Caught between those two impulses, she whirled
around and clattered down the stairs.

*  *  *

The cool air of the April evening felt good on Amy's flushed
cheeks. She wrapped her hands around the porch railing and watched the twilight
shapes of the horses move around in the corral.

Just when she felt calm enough to return inside, two riders
approached. A single horse trailed behind them.

Hank and Adam are back.
Amy stepped off the veranda
and hurried over.

When they pulled their horses to a stop in the ranch yard, Amy
realized that the horse behind them was not the mustang stallion.

Cinnamon!
Thank God.
She slid her hands over
the gelding's flanks and legs, making sure he was all right. Still, if they
brought back only Cinnamon, that meant the stallion had escaped and might be
out there, trying to steal their mares.

"You couldn't find the stallion?" Amy asked.
"Did you at least find his tracks?" In the mud, his unshod hoofprints
were easy to tell apart from those of their horses.

The two men exchanged a glance. Hank dismounted and walked
toward Amy.

"We found him," Adam said. He leaned back in his
saddle and bit off a piece of chewing tobacco.

"And you let him get away?" Now they had a
problem. She'd have to ride out with every available ranch hand and keep watch
over their herd.
Oh, Papa. I think I'm making a mess of things.

"Who said we let him get away?" Adam shoved back
his hat with his thumb and grinned at her.

Amy's glance darted to the corral, but of course the mustang
wasn't there. "Then where is he?"

"Amy..." Mud squished as Hank shuffled his feet.

Dread clutched at Amy and squeezed the air from her lungs.
"What did you do?" She glared at Adam.

Adam shrugged. "I shot him."

"It was the only way," Hank said.

Blood hammered in Amy's ears.
The only way?
She would
never believe that killing a horse was the only way. "I told you to catch
him, not kill him!"

"It was a stupid order. You women are too sentimental
to run a ranch." Adam spat out a wad of chewing tobacco. The brown sludge
splattered over Amy's boots. "What would you have done if we had caught
him? Tried to tame him?"

Her fingers tightened into white-knuckled fists.
The
worst thing is he's right.
The mustang might have been too old to tame.
Even if she had managed to gentle him, he didn't fit into the Hamiltons'
breeding program and none of their neighbors would have been interested in
buying him either. "I would have taken him as far away as possible before
letting him go," Amy said.

"He would have been back here before you." Adam
spat out more tobacco. "If you understood horses at all, you'd know that a
bachelor stallion who sees a chance to get some mares for his herd can't be
stopped."

That much was true. Amy had seen them break down corral
fences or free mares tied to hitching rails. "I would have found another
way," she said. "At the moment, I am the one giving the orders on
this ranch, and if you can't accept that, you better leave."

"You can't fire him," Hank said. "We're
short-handed as it is."

"She can't fire me," Adam said. "Because I'm
giving my notice. I'm not letting a damn girl boss me around anymore. Her old
man with his mollycoddlin' horse taming methods is bad enough, so I'm not
waiting 'til he gets back. I'm going."

Amy's jaw tightened. Part of her wanted to shout "Good
riddance!" after him, but what would Papa say when he returned and found
Adam gone? She lifted her chin. "All right. If that's what you want."
Maybe it was better to end it now than to have a struggle for power every day
until Papa got back. "Come over to the main house and we'll settle what we
owe you for this week's work."

Another wad of chewing tobacco landed at Amy's feet.
"Keep your damn money. I'll find better work elsewhere. Hank, you coming
with me?"

Amy's throat constricted as if a loop were tightening around
it. She couldn't afford to lose another man, but she refused to beg. Silently,
she waited for Hank's decision.

Hank hesitated. His glance flitted from Amy to the ranch
that had been his home for a lot of years. His bony shoulders straightened
under a deep breath. "I'll stay," he finally said.

The tension fled Amy's body.

"Coward." A brown brew of tobacco landed in front
of Hank's feet. Adam untied Cinnamon's lead rope from his saddle horn and
picked up the reins of his gelding, no doubt preparing to gallop away and spray
them with mud.

"Stop." Amy grabbed his reins. "The gelding
isn't yours. He belongs to the ranch. Get off the horse."

Disbelief widened Adam's eyes. His face turned the color of
his bright red bandanna. "You want me to slink out of here on foot, like a
dog with his tail between his legs?"

Most ranch hands like Adam refused to walk even from the
bunkhouse to the main house, and asking him to walk all the way to town was an
insult. Amy wouldn't have liked it either. She thought about selling him the
gray mare she'd named "Mouse" but then shook her head.
Who knows
how he would treat her.

She held his gaze without flinching. "Get off the
horse," she repeated.

Adam twisted. Amy thought he was reaching into his vest
pocket for more of his disgusting chewing tobacco. But then he swiveled around
with a revolver in his hand.

Amy's stomach lurched as the muzzle swung around.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," a voice echoed
across the ranch yard.

Amy looked up from Adam's revolver.

Her mother sat on the buckboard, aiming a rifle at Adam.
"If you point that weapon at my daughter, I'll shoot you," Mama said
as calmly as if she were discussing supper. "And you know the women on
this ranch can shoot. I never miss my target."

"Shooting a man is not like shooting a rabbit. You
don't have what it takes," Adam said but didn't lift his revolver any
higher.