Gib Rides Home Read online

  Hy always got that backward-looking drift in his eyes when he started thinking about all those beautiful, brave horses, snorting and squealing and showing the whites of their eyes. After he’d drifted awhile he’d chuckle and say something like, “Some of them ponies was just real determined to learn the hard way. Hard on them, and hard on my poor old bones, too.” And then he’d start pointing out all the breaks he’d had and what year the accident had “took place.” Gib liked listening to Hy’s stories about his days as a rip-roaring wild-horse wrangler, but at the moment he was also concerned about the rip-roaring weather that looked to be headed right in their direction.

  At breakfast that morning Hy broke his rule about not talking unless he was spoken to and tried to help Mrs. Thornton convince the boss that he’d better not try to go into Longford. But Mr. Thornton wouldn’t listen. He especially refused to listen when Mrs. Thornton tried to remind him what the doctors at Harristown Hospital had told him. “Nonsense,” he said sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with my health.” He went to the window and said, “See, there’s not a breath of wind at the moment. And if a storm should blow in during the day, I’ll just put up overnight at the hotel.”

  So Gib harnessed up the bays as usual, and Mr. Thornton went off into the stiffening wind, but without Livy, of course. And sure enough, he didn’t get back until two days later. In the meantime it was Gib’s eleventh birthday.

  Just getting to the big house that second night of the storm hadn’t been easy. The blizzard was going full blast by then and the wind-driven snow bit into your cheeks and blinded your eyes. Leaning forward, propped up against the wind, Gib and Hy clung to each other and plunged toward the glowing windows of the big house. Once into the snowshed Hy had set up around the back door, they beat the snow off each other the best they could before they staggered into the kitchen—and into a real birthday party.

  It must have been Mrs. Thornton who’d spilled the beans, because Gib hadn’t told anybody it was his birthday, not even Hy. For some reason he didn’t want anyone to know. He wasn’t sure why, although it might have been because it seemed like he wouldn’t care so much when nobody mentioned his birthday if the reason was that they just didn’t know about it. But Mrs. Thornton must have found out somehow.

  Not that a nothing birthday would have been all that much different from the way it had been at Lovell House. Except that Miss Mooney always kept track of birthdays and asked everyone to be extra nice to the birthday person all day long, as a kind of gift. Often as not, that was all the gift you got. But that night when Gib, half frozen and still pretty well coated with snowflakes, pushed open the kitchen door, the first thing he saw was the crepe-paper decorations and the Thorntons’ good china on the table.

  There were presents, too. Miss Hooper gave Gib a fancy leather jacket she’d cut down from a man-sized one she’d inherited from a dead uncle. And Mrs. Thornton gave him a new book, a copy of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Hy had made him a bootjack, and even Livy had a present for him, a cardboard bookmark on which she had painted a picture of a horse’s head. A beautiful head with flaring nostrils, wild, white-rimmed eyes, and a black mane that flowed out right to the edge of the cardboard. And down at one end of the table was a big chocolate birthday cake that turned out to be Mrs. Perry’s present.

  Everybody talked and talked that night, mostly about old times when the Rocking M Merrills had owned three thousand acres and run their herds on a lot more land besides. And in between the olden-days stories they stopped to listen to the raging wind and talk about the weather. It must have been talking about the blizzard that made Mrs. Perry bring up the subject of the awful storm they’d had a while back—“when old Jebidiah Bean sent that boy out into the cold without his mittens and—”

  “Don’t!” Livy cried, and when they all looked at her she had her hands over her ears and a tragic expression on her face. “Can’t you talk about something more cheerful?” she said.

  Mrs. Thornton looked puzzled. “Why, of course we can, dear,” she said. “But I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it. As I recall, you talked about it a great deal last winter.” Livy only ducked her head and, without looking at Gib, said, “That was because I didn’t know then how—how sad it was.”

  When Gib realized what Livy was doing, he thought it was like she wanted to give him another present, besides the bookmark, by keeping anyone from talking about something that would make him feel bad. But when he tried to give her a look that said he understood, she only tossed her head and looked away. And later, when he tried to thank her for the bookmark, she did the same thing.

  Lying in bed that night in Hy’s loft, under five or six extra blankets, Gib watched Bobby eating birthday cake crumbs, listened to the muted roar of the snow-choked wind, and thought about the birthday party.

  The day, in a lot of ways, had been just about the best one of his whole life. The chicken-and-dumplings supper, the chocolate cake that had been made especially for him, and the presents were very much like one of his old hope dreams come to life. Only better. Back then, he never would have been able to even make a dream picture of anything quite so good as that cake. What he’d told everybody as he and Hy were getting ready to head out through the storm was the absolute truth, for sure and certain—that it had been the very best birthday he’d ever had.

  But birthdays were one thing, and girls were something else again. Where girls were concerned, at least where Livy Thornton was concerned, there didn’t seem to be anything you could call “for sure and certain.” It seemed to Gib that just when you thought you had a girl figured and pretty much knew where she was going to head next, she shied off in some other direction entirely.

  Thinking about Livy always seemed to bring up problems that, unlike long division and fractions, didn’t have any one right answer. Problems without any right answer had always given Gib an uneasy feeling, but as his cold feet warmed up and his thoughts began to drift toward sleep, he came up with a comforting answer. The answer was that not being able to understand girls wasn’t really his fault.

  After having lived so long at Lovell House, where even laying eyes on a girl was a rare event, it wasn’t surprising if the first one he really got acquainted with turned out to be pretty mysterious.

  Chapter 27

  THAT NIGHT, THE NIGHT of the big blizzard and birthday party, Gib had gone to sleep thinking about how changeable females could be, and a few hours later, when the raging storm wakened him, he found himself thinking about other puzzling changes. Like, for instance, how much everything changed when Mr. Thornton was away from home.

  Anytime the rest of them, Gib and Hy and any of the women, were in the kitchen together, things were very different than when Mr. Thornton was there too. Gib wondered if Mr. Thornton had always been so stern and silent and busy with his newspapers, or if having Gib there was what made him act that way. But if he really hated having Gib around, why had he come to Lovell House and signed the papers to take him out of the orphanage?

  Perhaps the hatred had come later, after Gib had arrived at the Rocking M. But what had he done to cause it? Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could go around asking about. Mrs. Thornton would know the answer, of course, but asking her was out of the question.

  “Mrs. Thornton,” he imagined himself saying, “could you tell me why your husband hates me?” Not likely. And asking Livy ... ? Probably not, unless she happened to be in a question-answering frame of mind. Gib went back to sleep wondering how you could tell if a girl was in a question-answering frame of mind. He would, he decided, keep his eyes open and try to find out, and if the opportunity arose, he would ask Livy to tell him why her father hated him.

  But the opportunity didn’t arise right away. Christmas came and went without much change in Gib’s life. The Thorntons had two Christmas dinners, one in the kitchen, as usual, and one in the dining room with a bunch of banking friends. Gib thought the kitchen dinner with its roast chickens and pumpkin pies was
fine enough to suit anybody, but Livy had insisted on telling him what the menu would be for the company dinner and sneaking him into the dining room just before the guests arrived so he could see how grand the table looked with its china and crystal and silver candlesticks. Gib was impressed all right, and just a little bit envious. After all, eating was one of his favorite occupations.

  But when the guests began to arrive he was too busy to care about it. And when all the barn visitors, nine extra horses that day, were unharnessed or unsaddled, rubbed down, fed, and watered and Gib and Hy stood in the central corridor, looking at the almost full rows of stalls, they grinned at each other.

  “I guess it almost looks like the old days, huh?” Gib asked.

  Hy laughed and agreed. “Mighty close,” he said.

  “Looks good,” Gib said, and Hy agreed with that too.

  After Hy went back to his cabin Gib stayed in the barn a while longer, getting acquainted with each of the visitors and then spending some time with Lightning and Silky so they wouldn’t feel left out. It was a real good Christmas afternoon.

  Miss Hooper’s Rocking M Institute of Higher Learning went right on operating through January and February. And even during an early thaw in March, Livy went on studying at home, which, according to Miss Hooper, wasn’t how it had been in other years. In fact, she complained about it from time to time. About how hard being a teacher was and how she was getting to be too old for the job.

  One day when Livy and Gib had just had a long argument about President Taft, Miss Hooper really got fed up. Livy said she would have voted for Taft if she’d been old enough, and Gib started quoting an article he’d read about some of the dumb things Taft had done and how he had to have a special bathtub built when he moved into the White House because he was too fat to fit in a regular one. When Livy wound up not speaking to Gib again, Miss Hooper threw up her hands.

  “I give up,” Miss Hooper said with a fierce frown. “I give up on both of you. And you, missy,” she said to Livy, “weather’s not been too bad. Thought you’d be back full-time at Longford School by now. Don’t you miss seeing all your school friends?”

  Livy shrugged and said she got to see all the ones she liked when she spent weekends in town at Alicia’s. “Besides,” she said, smiling the too-sweet smile she sometimes used to get forgiven for being particularly hardheaded, “you’re a much better teacher.”

  “Don’t use your wiles on me, Miss Thornton,” Miss Hooper said. “I don’t think my teaching has anything to do with it. What I think is that you just like being around our friend Gib here.”

  Gib wasn’t pleased. It was clear that Miss Hooper was teasing Livy. Trying to get a rise out of her. And he didn’t appreciate being part of the teasing. But Livy surprised Miss Hooper—and Gib too. Instead of getting mad and saying how wrong Miss Hooper was, Livy just shrugged and said, “That’s right. I like arguing with Gib. No one at Longford School is nearly as much fun to argue with.” Then she went back to not speaking, to anybody this time, and Gib went back to wishing that girls weren’t so hard to understand.

  So Gib continued to be a part of the lessons in the library, at least when no outdoors work needed to be done. During spells of better weather he took some time off in the middle of the day to exercise Silky. And now and then he and Hy, who was riding Lightning again nowadays, took both the horses out onto the prairie.

  Those early spring rides with Hy were real workouts for Gib and Silky. Hy would locate a herd of Herefords, mostly cows and calves belonging to the Lazy L, a spread that included a lot of the land that had once belonged to the Rocking M. And then there would be a different kind of school, a stock-handling school with lessons in cutting and roping. Both Gib and Silky had a lot to learn.

  With her quick starts and fantastic speed Silky could overtake a calf in no time, but when it came to cutting him out of the herd and heading him in the right direction, Lightning could beat her all to pieces. And as for roping, even though Gib had been doing some extra practicing in the barn, he still had a ways to go. Watching Hy snake out his lasso and catch a steer by his front feet, Gib wondered if he’d ever get the hang of it.

  It did occur to Gib now and then to wonder why Hy was bothering to teach him how to be a ranch hand. If the Rocking M were still running cattle, there’d be a reason for it, but as it was ...

  They were on their way back to the barn one day when he asked Hy about it. Hy nodded and grinned, but they’d reached the gate by then, and Hy pulled up to watch how well Silky lined herself up so Gib could lean down and reach the latch. It wasn’t until they were through the gate and riding side by side again that Hy said, “Cain’t say as I blame you for askin’ about that, seein’ as how being a crackerjack stock handler don’t cut much ice on a spread that’s down to one old milk cow and a bunch of chickens.”

  They both laughed, but Hy’s wrinkled face sobered down in a hurry. “Don’t exactly know why I’m pestering you with all this cowhand stuff ’ceptin’ it seems to me it’s still a mighty useful thing to know. You gettin’ tired of it?”

  Gib quickly said, “Oh no, I’m not tired of it. I won’t be tired of it until—” He grinned. “Until I’m the best cowhand in the whole world.”

  Chapter 28

  LIVY WENT RIGHT ON studying at home until the snow had melted and the bare leafless trees began to show soft green nubs where leaves would soon be sprouting. Gib was still studying in the library, too, even though he hadn’t been able to spend as much time there since work had begun in the greenhouse.

  He and Hy were planting the sprouting beds so all kinds of vegetables would be up and ready for transplanting as soon as the danger of frost had passed. According to Hy, the greenhouse was mostly Mrs. Perry’s idea. Besides being a great cook, Mrs. Perry was practically famous for the blue ribbons her vegetables always won at the county fair. “Her vegetables,” Hy snorted sarcastically. “Well, they’re her blue ribbons, I reckon, but look who has to do the work.”

  “I’m looking,” Gib said, just barely managing to keep a straight face, because Hy was sitting at the end of a row of tomato plants at the time, and had been for an hour or so. As a matter of fact, Hy spent most of the day sitting around grumbling about how disgraceful it was for a top-notch wrangler to wind up scratching in the dirt like a dangbusted gopher, and in the meantime Gib did most of the scratching.

  But it was easy work actually, and Gib didn’t mind it so long as it left him time to keep up with other things. Like ancient Rome, for instance. It was a test on the Roman Empire that he and Livy were taking one day in late April, when Mr. Thornton came home early and unexpectedly.

  It was very quiet in the library. Miss Hooper was reading a book and Gib and Livy were bent over their essays when the library door opened and Mr. Thornton came in. Gib looked up, surprised and shocked. Mr. Thornton came home early now and then when he wasn’t feeling well, but he’d never before arrived without the warning clop of hooves and jangle of harness as Caesar and Comet came down the long driveway to the house.

  “Well, well. Hard at work, I see,” Mr. Thornton said to no one in particular as he took off his overcoat and hung it on the back of a chair.

  “Yes, indeed,” Miss Hooper said, looking almost as surprised as Gib was feeling. “Finishing up an essay test.” She turned then and looked out the window at the hitching rack. “How did you ... ?”

  Mr. Thornton’s gray beard split open on his thin smile. “No, not in the buggy,” he said. “Mr. Appleton was taking a trial run in a new Model T Ford. Dropped me off out by the gate.”

  “A Model T?” Livy asked quickly. “Alicia says her folks might be getting a Model T.”

  “Is that so,” Mr. Thornton said. “Well, it’s an amazing machine for the price. And a much more comfortable ride than that outdated old Packard Appleton’s been trying to sell me. Quieter, too.” He turned to Miss Hooper and asked, “Did you hear anything? A car motor out on the road?”

  Miss Hooper shook her head. “Not a thing,�
�� she said. “But then I wasn’t listening for a motorcar. Not after what happened the last time one paid us a visit.”

  Of course, Miss Hooper was talking about how the team had spooked and run over Hy, but Mr. Thornton only shrugged. “Nonsense,” he said. “Can’t afford to go on living in the nineteenth century just because of an accident caused by a couple of poorly trained horses. Besides, Caesar and Comet are getting quite used to the sounds of progress. Mr. Appleton’s had one of his men working on them while I’m at the bank every day. Getting them used to being around all kinds of motors.”

  Mr. Thornton walked right past Gib’s end of the table and over to the window. “Edgar will stop by shortly to take me back to town,” he said over his shoulder. “I told him to come right on down the drive.”

  Gib had been trying to catch Miss Hooper’s eye, hoping to make his face ask, “What now? Am I in trouble or not?” When he finally did, Miss Hooper seemed to think not; at least she frowned back in the phony fierce way that said that as far as she was concerned, the whole thing was pretty amusing. But Livy’s face was harder to read. Right at first, when her father suddenly appeared in the library, she’d only shrugged and looked bored, but now, as she went on staring at his back, her eyes began to widen excitedly.

  “Papa,” she said in a whispery voice, “are we going to get a Model T?”