During Sally's last days on the ranch, Mel tagged after him, helping him with whatever chore he was doing, sometimes just standing and staring at him.
“Stop looking at me like that. You're gonna make me cry,” Sally said.
Tears immediately brimmed in Mel's eyes.
“Oh, for Pete's sake,” he said. “You'll be fine, girl. It's going to work out right.”
“Not without you,” she said.
“You pay attention to your schoolwork and do what you've been doing around the ranch, and you'll be too busy to miss me.”
“But what about Cheyenne?”
“See if Jeffries will let you over-winter him with the other mustangs down there. You asked him yet?”
“No. And even if he lets me, how do I get to see Cheyenne down there?”
“You'll figure something out, Mel,” Sally said. He looked embarrassed, as if he were ashamed not to be more helpful. “Meanwhile, you wormed that horse yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I got some paste ready here. You want to mix it with a little molasses so he don't spit it out. He'll take on some weight and be healthier if you worm him. My guess is he's gotten so used to carrying around a bellyful of worms he don't even notice he's got them.”
Dutifully, she prepared the worming paste and squirted it into the top corner of Cheyenne's mouth. He put his ears back and shook his head in surprise as he backed away from her. “What did you do that for?” his expression said.
“For your own good,” she told him. “Because Sally says you need it.” She put her cheek against his neck as she stroked him. His thick winter coat was coming in early, a good thing, too, because when the snow came down heavy and temperatures slid below freezing, he'd need it. Even if Mr. Jeffries let Cheyenne stay in his pasture and didn't charge her much for his winter feed, the horse was going to miss her. Getting five miles down a mountain road and back without transportation after school and before dark in deep snow would be hard, maybe impossible. By spring Cheyenne probably wouldn't even recognize her. He'd be a wild horse again, unused to human companionship.
Mel couldn't stop brooding. Sally was leaving and as if that wasn't bad enough, she was in danger of losing Cheyenne. Besides, another school year had started, another year of struggling to learn material so she could spew it back on tests and avoid embarrassing herself by outright failure. Denise was there for her at lunch, but not in any of her classes as it turned out. They didn't even ride the same school bus. The bus Mel took to the regional district schools was packed with chattering elementary school kids. Her homeroom teacher ran a strictly quiet, business-only first fifteen minutes of the day. Mel had tried smiling at a couple of her less intimidating female classmates, but so far, no one had done more than smile back briefly. She told herself it was just as well, that she wasn't in the mood for socializing. She needed to figure out what she could do about Cheyenne. Denise had offered to let Mel keep Cheyenne in her small paddock, but Ty had pointed out that the paddock was barely big enough for one horse, and if Cheyenne chose to, he was powerful enough to kill Lily.
Dawn had an afternoon off and wanted to take Mel to the mall, thirty miles away, to buy her some new school clothes.
“I don't need any,” Mel said. “I just wear jeans and a sweatshirt anyway, and the ones I've got are good enough.” They were standing in the lobby of the dining hall by the registration desk. Now that the season was about over, the stuffed deer heads on the walls looked down on a deserted room that loomed too large.
“Looking like a homeless kid in worn-out clothes isn't going to help you make friends in school,” her mom argued.
“New clothes aren't going to make kids here like me any better,” Mel said.
“Maybe not, but you're getting some even if I have to buy them without you trying them on.”
“You'll be wasting your money, Mom,” Mel said.
“Can't think of anyone I'd rather waste it on,” Dawn told her cheerfully. “I'll see you at dinner. I'm going to the mall.”
“You buy anything pink or baby blue and I won't wear it,” Mel warned.
“Expect I know that much about you,” Dawn said and walked outside.
The growl of the car engine started Mel thinking. Jeb and Sally kept telling her to talk to Mr. Jeffries about Cheyenne. Mr. Jeffries was rich. Would he care if she couldn't afford to pay Cheyenne's board and feed bills? Maybe she could impress him with how she'd tamed his wild mustang. If he saw what a good horse Cheyenne really was—
On impulse that afternoon, Mel went to the barn, picked out a light-weight saddle, a blanket, and a bridle and carried them to the small corral. She was going to do it. She was going to ride Cheyenne on the road down the mountain. “It'll be all right,” she told herself out loud. “Cheyenne knows me. He trusts me, and I trust him. I rode him in the ring and nothing happened. Why should walking him five miles down the road to Jeffries' ranch be a problem?”
Of course she could lead Cheyenne on foot the five miles down to Jeffries' ranch. She could do that, but what was she proving then about how well trained he was? Jeffries had to see that Cheyenne behaved himself, at least with her he did. Risk. Sally said you had to take risks. Okay. She'd take one more.
Cheyenne raised his head at her approach and whinnied as if he were asking what she was up to now.
“No more medicine. Don't worry. Today, we're going on a long ride,” she told him as she went about saddling him. “Remember how we walked on the road? And cars went by and you didn't get upset or anything? Well, today I'm going to ride you the same way, but further. All the way to Jeffries' ranch.” Her heartbeat was registering her fear, and she fought to keep it from ruling her judgment. Just once, she told herself. Just once she would ride Cheyenne five miles down the mountain to show Mr. Jeffries how good a horse he was. She only had to do it once.
If anything, Cheyenne seemed eager to leave the arena. She could feel his muscles tensing with enthusiasm as she tacked him up. His ears poked forward. He kept his head high and faced the gate expectantly. She hoped he couldn't sense how shaky her legs were, how her muscles had turned to jelly. She chattered to him, as much to calm herself as to keep him interested in what they were doing.
“You must get awfully bored alone all day in this little corral, huh, Cheyenne? You miss your buddies? Feel like a little horsey companionship now and then? You might like spending the winter with your friends, especially while I'm in school all day. There's kids here in this school that care about horses, some of them have their own horse. I can talk about you, and they listen like they're interested. Well, of course, anyone would find you interesting.”
Mel opened the gate. She led Cheyenne outside and closed the gate behind them. For a minute, she waited to see how Cheyenne was going to react to the car trailing a scarf of dust from the dirt road as it rattled toward them. Cheyenne barely turned his head to watch it pass. “Good boy,” she said, and with one deep breath, she swung up into the saddle and started walking Cheyenne along the shoulder of the road.
No one was there to watch them pass by the ranch except the kitchen helper who was mowing the lawn, probably for the last time this fall before the first snow fell. He waved, and Mel waved back. Cheyenne bent his neck to grab some long grass edging the road, and Mel pulled his head up.
“No, sorry.” She would have liked to allow him to nibble, but they needed to concentrate on getting to Mr. Jeffries' pasture without delay. The sooner this experiment was over with, the happier she'd be. Cheyenne ducked his head disobediently to nip at more grass heads. “No, Cheyenne,” she said more firmly. “Cut it out.”
He tossed his head then and proceeded for a while, contentedly munching on the bits of weed he'd managed to snag. She was glad the sun shone strong in the azure sky because the temperature had already dropped to where she could have used a jacket over her short-sleeved T-shirt. Cheyenne stepped along smartly, obviously glad to be going somewhere, anywhere, on such a crisp afternoon. Nothing about his behavior alarmed her.
Still she rode stiffly, scarecrow in the saddle again, aware of her heart beating too fast and her fingers cramped on the reins. “Don't let anything happen. Don't let anything happen,” she muttered like a mantra.
Finally, they turned off the dirt road from the mountain onto the more level stretch of asphalt main road in the valley, and Cheyenne quickened his pace without her urging. Sitting his smooth jog was so easy that Mel told herself riding him really was fun, if only she could stop worrying that something might go wrong. A few minutes more and they'd reach Jeffries's ranch.
Then from behind her she heard a loud rumbling. Mel looked back over her shoulder. A huge, gray dirt truck was speeding toward her churning up loose rocks with its enormous wheels. It seemed to be taking up more than its share of the road, too, like a hulking monster that had nothing to fear from anyone. Surely the driver must see her! But the truck came lunging on toward Cheyenne as if it had no intention of slowing down for the sake of a horse and rider.
The awful noise increased to a roar. “Steady, Cheyenne,” Mel yelled as she pulled him off the shoulder of the road toward the line of pine trees where the woods began. That was all she had time to say before the massive iron vehicle was upon them. Cheyenne was walking as the truck roared past. But that wasn't enough. He jerked his head around to see what was going on, and that would have been that if the truck hadn't hit a bump. A huge clod of dirt came flying out of the open back straight for them. Mel ducked, but she felt the impact of the clod as it hit Cheyenne's rump. He screamed and reared. Suddenly Mel was flying through the air. Before she blanked out, her head banged hard against something.
* * * *
When Mel woke up in her own bed, her mother was sitting beside her. “What happened?” Mel asked.
“You got knocked unconscious when you fell off that mustang. Why did you ride off on him without even telling anybody where you were going? Do you realize that you could have been killed?”
“Where's Cheyenne? Is he all right?”
“Mr. Jeffries put him in his pasture. He was the one who found you. He took you to the doctor and called the ranch. You were lucky it happened near his place.”
“That's where I was headed.” Mel tried to sit up, but her mother wouldn't let her.
“You have to keep still. The doctor says we need to make sure you don't have a concussion. He doesn't think you broke anything. Jeb was right about that horse. He is too dangerous. I told Mr. Jeffries to keep him. I don't know if you'll get any money back, but even if you don't, you're not going to ride that beast ever again.”
“It wasn't Cheyenne's fault, Mom. He got hit by a bomb, a dirt bomb from a stupid dump truck that was speeding. Naturally he reared. I mean, what else was a horse to do? It was so sudden. And it hurt him.”
“No, Mel. I know you think you tamed the animal, and maybe you did partway. But he can't be trusted.”
“Mom, you didn't hear me. It wasn't his fault. And you had no right to hand him over to Mr. Jeffries. He's my horse. I paid for him. Anyway, I was paying for him.”
“We'll talk about this later.” Her mom left her lying there, fuming, until she fell asleep again.
In the evening, her mom brought her a tray with soup and pizza that the cook had sent. “You've got a visitor.”
“Sally?”
“Sally came by earlier. He left this for you.”
Sally's gift was a hand-tooled black leather belt with turquoise worked into a silver buckle on it. “Wow!” Mel said.
“That man really is fond of you,” her mom said. “He made the belt himself, but he must have paid plenty for the buckle.”
Mel nodded, too overcome by Sally's gift to speak.
“So do you want to see Mr. Jeffries?” her mother asked.
“What's he doing here?”
“I guess he came to see how you are. You better thank him for picking you up off the road.”
“Mom!” Mel protested. “I do know some things.” Enough to be polite, she meant.
“Not as much as you think,” her mom replied.
Despite his white hair and wrinkles, Mr. Jeffries looked trim in a pearl-buttoned western shirt and fitted jeans. His belt buckle was almost as beautiful as the one Sally had given her. It was silver with inlaid red, black, and turquoise stones in what Mel recognized as a Zuni Indian design. Sally's head appeared unexpectedly at Mr. Jeffries' shoulder.
“Can I come in, too?” Sally asked.
“Sure,” Mel said. But there was barely enough room for both men to squeeze in. Sally fitted himself into a narrow space next to the dresser. Mr. Jeffries stood at the foot of the bed, his tan felt hat in his hands.
“So how are you feeling?” he asked.
“Okay,” Mel said. “How's Cheyenne? Did that dirt bomb that hit him cut him?”
“Huh? The horse was fine. Did something hit him?”
“Yes, that's why he reared. It was a big chunk that fell off a truck. I bet Cheyenne's bruised bad even if it didn't cut him.”
“Well, no signs of any damage on that feller. You should have seen him when I showed up. That horse was standing over you like he wanted to help and didn't know how. If he'd had hands, he'd have been wringing them. And I've never seen a sorrier expression on a horse. He looked like a kid who's done something he's ashamed of. I didn't know a horse could feel shame, but that one sure did.”
“It wasn't his fault.” She explained again so that everyone would be sure to understand. “He reared because of that stupid dirt truck driver.”
“Yes, well, don't you worry about Cheyenne. I'll keep him in the field with the other mustangs until you're ready to take him back.”
“I don't know if I can take him back,” Mel said. “That's what I was coming to talk to you about when the truck got us, Mr. Jeffries.”
Sally cleared his throat. “Umm, I spoke to Jeb. He's holding to his offer. If you want to take my place next season and lead trail rides on Cheyenne—just the family rides, the easy ones—you've got the job.”
“Uh huh,” Mel said without enthusiasm.
“You can do it, Mel,” Sally said. “You ride a horse like you been doing it for years.”
Mel shook her head. “I told you, Sally, every time I ride, something happens.”
“Not much use owning a horse unless you plan to ride him,” Mr. Jeffries said.
“You have those horses just to look at, don't you, Mr. Jeffries?” Mel said.
“Well, in a manner of speaking. But I enjoy riding, and I use my favorite horse for that.”
“I can't,” Mel said. “If something happened to Cheyenne—”
Mr. Jeffries cleared his throat and said, “I think I'm in over my head here. What I wanted was to tell you how impressed I am by what you've done with that mustang. You rode him most of the way to my ranch, which says to me that you've got him pretty well trained. So my idea is, I'll take over the rest of the loan from the ranch and you can pay me off as you can, whenever you can, even if it takes years. Would that be helpful?”
“Yes, very,” Mel said. “Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Jeffries.” She sat up and smiled at him. “And thanks for rescuing me on the road.”
Me’s mother came back in the room after Mr. Jeffries left. Mel was fingering the belt and telling Sally how beautiful it was.
“So I take it we're back to owning an outsized pet dog?” Dawn said.
“No,” Sally said. “Mel's going to ride him.”
Mel waited until her mother had left the room before she said, “I'm not, Sally.”
“You don't have much time to change your mind. Saturday's my last day, and I'd hate to leave knowing my girl's a quitter. You said that horse didn't mean to throw you, Mel. If that's true, you got no reason to be scared to get on his back.”
“But things happen, Sally. Every time. Something happens. This time it was just to me, next time—” She turned her face into her pillow to stifle her whimper.
“You want to play it safe, Mel? Never take a risk? Is that the way you want to live?”
“Why not?” She raised her head to glare at him.
Sally frowned. “Because those folk that spend their lives playing it safe, in the end they get cancer or their house burns down anyhow. Things happening makes life interesting. Besides, you're too gutsy to play it safe.”
She pulled the pillow over her head and stayed under it until she heard his footsteps as he left the room.
* * * *
Later in the moonlight, Mel got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She couldn't really see more than the dark outline of her features. Scarecrow. Yes, that's what she looked like. And what was going to happen to her? If she couldn't earn any money, she couldn't invest in a stable with Denise. That was just a crazy dream. She could be a horse trainer, but a horse trainer had to be able to get on a horse's back. So did a wrangler. She thought of what Mr. Jeffries had said, that Cheyenne had acted ashamed of himself. But it hadn't been the mustang's fault. It had been an accident. Trouble comes in clumps, Denise said, and then everything goes right for a while. But how was Mel supposed to know if the clump that hit her had been the last one? No answer appeared in the mirror, and after a while, Mel gave up seeking one and retreated to her bed.