Katie and the Mustang, Book 3 (5 page)

“I'll keep it forever just because you made it,” I said, without knowing I was going to say it. It sounded silly, the way it came out, but Mrs. Kyler smiled, and I knew she had understood it the way I'd meant it.

“The Mustang is holding his weight,” I said after a minute, to change the subject. “I try real hard to find him extra grazing every day.”

Mrs. Kyler nodded approvingly. She was a horse-woman, after all. “So are ours so far,” she said. “Andrew manages to let them graze every few hours, then he'll trot them hard to catch up. The rest of the boys have been running the spare oxen closer to the wagon.”

I smiled. When she said “the boys,” she meant her grown sons. They had only granddaughters so far.

“Mary?”

Mrs. Kyler looked up. Andrew's wife was standing at the edge of the firelight. She had baby Rachel on her hip. “Yes, Hannah?” Mrs. Kyler answered.

I glanced up. It was almost light out. I could see Rachel's pouty little mouth and her big round eyes.

“What is it?” Mrs. Kyler asked, and her voice was full of concern.

It was only then that I looked at Hannah instead of her baby and saw that her face was tight and angry.

“Remember Snow? The white cat the girls brought along?”

Mrs. Kyler nodded. “Of course. She came from one of our barn cat's litters.”

Hannah let out a long breath. “She's been running around a while every night. They just open the box and let her roam around a little.”

Without speaking, Mrs. Kyler pulled the skillet off the fire and went to knock gently on the side of the wagon. Inside, Mr. Kyler woke and turned over, then got up. We could all hear the wooden wagon bed creaking as he stood up to stretch.

“I am hoping you aren't going to tell me that a coyote has gotten the cat,” Mrs. Kyler said, turning back.

Hannah took a deep breath. “Well, they couldn't find it last night. They looked for an hour or more before Ellen could get Polly to go to bed. Once she was quiet, Julia and the little ones gave up, too.”

Hannah glanced at me, and I lowered my eyes for a moment, then lifted them again and met her gaze. I didn't want her to think that I had had anything to do with the cat being killed.

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Kyler said. “That sounds like a coyote.”

Hannah shook her head. “No. That would be better. It would at least make sense.”

Mrs. Kyler tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

Rachel started to fuss, and Hannah shifted her from one hip to the other. When she looked up again, her eyes were shiny with tears. “We found Snow this morning, dead. The girls are all crying and devastated. But the odd thing is that there wasn't a tooth mark on her. A rock killed her.”

Mrs. Kyler was filling the tins now, and she looked up. “A rock?”

Hannah nodded. “Yes, ma'am. Someone threw a rock.”

My stomach went tight.

“It's just so odd,” she said. “We found the bloodied stone right beside her. Someone killed the poor thing for no good reason at all. Why in the world would anyone do that?”

I eased in a long breath, and the boy's name came into my mind. Grover. His friend in Des Moines had called him Grover.

CHAPTER SIX

 

 

 

I
started leading the Mustang toward the back of the wagon line to graze every morning once Mrs. Kyler was packed and we were ready to go. That meant I had to pass all the Kyler wagons, which meant I had to nod and smile at Polly and Hope and Julia and their parents, but I didn't care anymore. I still didn't have it all quite straight, who was related to whom—I didn't care about that, either.

What I wanted desperately to do was avoid seeing Grover. I wanted to think that he might have just been fooling around trying to scare the cat, that it had somehow been an accident, but I was pretty sure it hadn't been. I didn't want any trouble with him. All I wanted was to get to Oregon. It seemed safest to see him only from a distance and only when I had to.

The days slid past like the grassland we were traveling through. The Mustang and I walked from daybreak to late afternoon every single-bingle day, and my chores lasted start to finish and beyond. Everyone's did. As the oxen plodded on endlessly, it sometimes felt to me like we were standing still and the land was rolling beneath our feet, around and around, making the wagon wheels turn.

We made fair mileage almost every day, Mr. Teal said. Three wagons had stained one wheel spoke with India ink. Those families always had someone watching, someone counting how many times the spoke came past the top of the wheel. Then they would multiply the measurement of the wheel's rim by how many times it had turned around, and figure up how many miles from that.

I would never have been able to do it—I couldn't stare at anything for hours as a time without forgetting what I was doing. I was grateful that someone could, though. Every evening, the word of how far we had come spread through the camp, each person who heard it telling a few others. Our first day we had come only eleven miles. The second day we'd come nearly eighteen. We made twenty miles some days.

The best family for wheel watching was the Taylors. They had five children older than ten, and they all took turns so none of them got too cross-eyed from staring. Everyone appreciated it. It lightened everyone's hearts to know that the miles were passing, that a few more had been taken from the total of two thousand.

On the days when broken wheels or missing milk cows or any of the thousands of things that could go wrong
did
go wrong—the tiny mileage at the end of the day made us all resolve to work harder, to make better distance the next day.

Every evening after supper, I led the Mustang as far from camp as I had to in order to find fresh, un-grazed grass. I kept him out until dusk. Some places, grass was hard to find. It all depended on how many wagon parties had used that route before us and how big they had been. All the children around my age worked at herding the stock, competing for the best grass in places where there wasn't much.

I brought the Mustang back over the wagon tongue and into the circle of wagons every evening as soon as Andrew Kyler brought his horses in.

Once the mares were there, the Mustang was easy to settle for the night. He was always so glad to see them. He greeted them like it had been a month of Sundays since he had seen them last. He circled, snuffling in their breath, rubbing his muzzle on their shoulders, standing close. Midnight and Delia seemed happy to be near him, too.

I was so glad Hiram had sold the mares to Andrew so they had ended up coming on the journey. It was like having a little bit of Iowa and home with me, in a way. And as cruel as Mr. Stevens had been to me, he had been even worse to his animals. The mares were better off with Andrew Kyler any day.

Thanks to the mares and the Mustang's affection for them, I nearly always slept through until morning without worrying much about him now. The Mustang was so important to me. He was about as good a friend as I could ever remember having.

I spent nearly every waking hour walking with him. I talked to him more and more as the days passed. There were things that worried me, things that wore out my patience, and things that scared me. I was glad to be able to complain to someone who wouldn't think less of me for it.

I had been walking a little ways apart from the wagons from the beginning, and now I was hanging back to keep from having any contact with Grover. I had to make sure he had no reason and no opportunity to hurt the Mustang. The very thought of it made me so angry that my fists would ball up and my throat would ache.

We kept following the Platte River. It was strange, a mile or two wide in places and rarely much over six inches deep. Mrs. Kyler tried to wash a batch of shirts in it one morning and they ended up caked with sandy mud.

“Too thin to plow, too thick to drink,” people were saying. I laughed the first few times I heard it. After that we had all learned how true it was, and it was no longer funny.

The Platte River wound around in great, sweeping arcs beneath a sky so blue that it looked painted. Mr. Teal kept us moving, following the river. When the grass looked better on the other side, we crossed, if there was enough hard sand on the bottom to make it possible. Then a few days later, we'd cross back.

We could see mountains on the westward horizon some days. They grew steadily bigger as the oxen plodded toward them. I remembered the name from listening to Mr. Barrett. The Rocky Mountains. The Rockies. That would be a hard part of the journey, I knew. Seeing them made me uneasy, but I pushed the thoughts from my mind.

One sunny morning a few days later, we saw Mormon families at a distance, traveling on the south bank of the Platte. We could tell them from all others two ways: some of the wagons were towing cannons, and we could see the man-pulled carts among the wagons.

When we passed anyone, Mr. Teal always raised a hand in greeting—many others did, too, but there were a few who glared in the direction of the Mormons and called them devil worshipers. It was such a terrible thing to say about anyone that it took my breath away.

Not everyone had gone to church on Sunday back home. The Stevenses never had. We'd had to sit and listen to Mr. Stevens read the Bible in a voice so dull and so boring that it was like hearing a list of farm chores recited. But my parents had been churchgoers, and many of the neighbors were, and no one ever really agreed about what the Bible meant on every subject.

Still, they had all gotten along more or less. No one had been afraid of anyone like people seemed to fear the Mormons. I couldn't see why. They all just looked like any old Iowa farm family to me.

“I'd like to talk to a Mormon one day,” I said to the Mustang one morning. He lifted his head and then ducked his muzzle to avoid a buzzing deerfly. It looked like he had nodded. Then he shook his mane like he was disagreeing.

I laughed aloud. “I would, though. I bet they are the same as everyone else any way that matters much.”

The Mustang lowered his head and rubbed his ears on my shoulder so hard it hurt. I looked at the fly welts on the thin skin at the base of his ears. Deerflies and no-see-ums were hatching. The mosquitoes were getting bad at night, too. The Platte was so shallow and flowed so slowly that bugs thrived along the banks.

“You walking at the back now?” Mr. Kyler said to me that evening. I nodded.

“Any particular reason why?”

I shrugged, hoping he wouldn't ask twice. I couldn't prove what I thought about Grover.

Mr. Kyler sipped at his coffee and looked up at the darkening sky. “Probably best not to get too far from the wagons.”

“It's been hard to find good grass this whole past week,” I said, defending myself. “I've had to take the Mustang farther and farther from the track to find anything much.”

I waited for him to blow on his coffee, then sip it again. Then he looked at me. “Jack Taylor says he saw some Indians this morning.”

I caught my breath. “He did?”

“Not long after we started out. They were mounted, a line of fifteen or twenty of them at a great distance. They just watched us go past. They value a good horse, people say.”

I blinked. “You think they'd steal the Mustang?”

He shrugged. “Or just pester you to trade him away. Best not to be caught out on your own. Jack had no idea which tribe it was. Just stay closer, Katie.”

I swallowed hard.
Indians.
I knew perfectly well that most people going west met Indians. There were stories about the Indian men helping at river crossings, giving widows food, being neighborly in most every way. Still, the idea scared me. They were just so...unknown.

“Most folks trade with them for food or stock,” Mr. Kyler was saying. “We brought beads and mirrors. Mr. Teal told us he brought a few steel knives for that purpose. I suspect they'd want good knives more than anything.” He sighed. “The guidebook said to bring beads and mirrors.” He reached out and patted my head, and it made me think of Hiram. “You stay close, hear me?”

“I'll be careful,” I said aloud. “I will.”

Mr. Kyler nodded. “See that you do. No one has time to mind any of you children like should be done.”

He leaned over his coffee cup again. I couldn't tell if he was finished talking. He reminded me a little of my father that way. Pa hadn't talked a great deal, but when he had, people would stop and listen; then he'd go quiet again.

I thought about my father, and, for an instant, I couldn't quite picture him. Almost, but not exactly. I turned away from the fire as though I was turning to warm my backside, but I was really hiding tears. My mind went spinning in circles like creek current. Why couldn't I see my father clearly in my mind? What had his ears looked like, his nose, his hands?