Tracks by Diane Lee Wilson

Author:Diane Lee Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Twenty

The first thing I saw upon stepping outside the cabin on a workday morning late in June was a couple dozen of the Celestials lingering beside their cooking fire, lazing like it was a Sunday. Almost to a man they were watching the goings-on of that peculiar gambling game, the one with the cup and the dried beans. Squawks and yelps marked their play. Why weren’t they heading to their work?

Even more odd was that another of them was boldly hiking off toward the stream with a fishing pole balanced on his shoulder, and yet another was methodically stringing a hammock between two trees, obviously intending to nap. The malingerer.

Where was Ducks? He had a hand in this. I knew that as surely as I knew that Mr. Sikes was going to have his hide and all their yellow hides for not taking up their hammers and drills. I scanned the strange scene again, but as far as I could tell Ducks was nowhere in sight.

Oh, well, I didn’t really care a rap about their unusual mischief. I had my own work to tend to, and so I set off with Brina toward the horses’ shed in order to harness Blind Thomas for the day. That was a task I looked forward to each and every morning, a task that popped me out of my bunk no matter the weather, and it was wholly due to that horse’s greeting.

All right, I’d gone soft, admittedly—soft to the point of red-faced mortification if anyone were to learn how much I looked forward to his morning welcome. But I did; his call made me feel special, and already I was listening to my boots crunch on the gritty path, knowing he was listening too. Any second now he’d release an enthusiastic nicker that started deep inside his chest and rippled up the scale like dawn’s trumpet, quickening my heart and my step.

And then the loony depths of my affection for this horse would be further revealed. Because I’d begun answering Blind Thomas in his own language. Meaning that, yes, I whinnied back.

Casually now I glanced over my shoulder to make certain the path was empty; I was taking no chances of being found out. Patrick and Jesse and now Collin were always looking to lord the advantage over someone exposing a weakness, the most recent example of that having occurred one night last week. Ethan was back, and he’d been feeling low because he missed cradling his infant son, hadn’t seen him in weeks, he moaned. So what did Patrick do? In the dark hours before sunrise he fashioned a bib around his neck and planted himself in Ethan’s lap, wailing to raise the devil and waking us all, just like an infant.

Precisely because of those pranksters, I made a point of being the last one to the horse shed each morning so I could have my time with Blind Thomas in private. It was the best part of my day. I could

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