his boot, raising a cloud of horse hair and dust. Then he noticed my face. “¿Estás bien, Cassie?”
I was sure my frustration reeked, like stink off a dog that’s rolled on a carcass.
I studied my boot tops awhile more, mulling over how to say it. “Worst thing ever,” I finally spit out.
“Worst ever?” Jasper shook his head like he doubted me. He led Tigger into the corral and slipped off her halter. “Come in the barn while I soap my saddle.”
I plopped down on a straw bale in the barn aisle and watched Jas dip a fat sponge into a pail of water and run it over a tan bar of saddle soap. It smelled like pine tar and summer.
“Well?” he asked, rubbing the sponge over the smooth leather seat of his saddle. “What’s got you so wound up?”
“Like I said; worst thing ever.”
He stopped rubbing and tilted his head, his eyebrows raised.
I took a deep breath and dived in. “Pa says there’s no way to get our cattle down from the mountains before winter, what with him being laid up, and we’re out of money and we have to sell the cattle where they are and give up the ranch and move to the city so he can work.”
There; I’d said it out loud. The awful reality of it hung in the air, jumbled with the dust and the smell of soap and leather and hay and the delicious warmth of animals well cared for.
Jasper’s mouth hung open. “¡No es posible!”
“Yep.” I stood up, already feeling closed in, caught in a trap. I paced in and out of the sunlight falling like bars across the barn floor.
“You and me, we have to think of something, some way to raise money to hire help to bring down the cows, or pay the mortgage, at least until we can get the herd down, or … or … I don’t know, something.” I kicked the straw bale with the toe of my boot and raised more dust, like more questions floating through the air.
Jasper picked up the sponge, dipped it in the bucket again, and rubbed it on the soap. He picked up a stirrup leather and ran the damp sponge over it slowly, up and down, up and down, both sides of the strap, not saying anything.
“Well?” I nearly shouted. “What are we going to do?” I wanted him to get as mad as I was, to rage and stomp around and agree about how unfair it was. But I knew my friend. That wasn’t his way.
Finally, he seemed satisfied that the strap was clean and soft and supple. He dropped the sponge back in the bucket and leaned his elbow on the saddle on its rack.
He said, “Why don’t we just go get the cows, you and me?”
I laughed in spite of my anger and frustration. “What? You and me ride off on our own into the mountains and bring back the whole herd of cattle?”
Jasper nodded.
“You and me and Rowdy and Tigger up in the mountains with the bears and cougars and winter coming on?” I paced back and forth in the barred sunlight. Jasper kept nodding.
“You’ve been up there, Jasper. You know how rough that country is, all cliffs and gullies and trees so thick you can’t see through ’em. Think how many things can go bad and no one around to help if one of us falls or gets snake-bit or we get snowed in or lost … a million things could go wrong!”
“Yep,” he said. “You got another idea or you want to go home and pack for your move to town?”
“Just you and me bringing down the herd, no grown-ups? I thought you’d come up with a real idea.”
I kicked the straw bale harder this time and the twine popped loose and the bale burst and the straw tumbled across the barn floor.
“We’re twelve,” I reminded him. “Our parents would never in a million years let us go.”
“We don’t tell them, we don’t tell anyone. We’ll say we’re going on a field trip for school or something. Maybe I can tell my folks I’m staying at your place and you tell your pa you’re with me. We could do it over a weekend, be home by Sunday night.”
“Right,” I shook my head. “What if our folks come looking? It’d never work.”
“Hey,” Jasper stepped in front of me, stopping my pacing. “You’re the one who fought off Carl when we stole the horse, and you’re the one who helped me and Willie rescue Ginny from the wildfire. So you don’t tell me we can’t do it.”
He picked up his bridle and sponged Tigger’s grassy spit off the bit, then he went on: “Even if our folks figured out we weren’t where we said we’d be, they couldn’t catch us. Like you said, that’s big, rough country up there, miles and miles of it. And we’d have a head start.”
Something loosened in my mind, hope muscling aside despair. “Might work,” I conceded. “And what could they say when we brought them home?”
Jasper grinned. “We’d come riding in with the whole herd trotting along ahead of us. You could keep the ranch. We’d be heroes!” His eyes flashed bright. “How many head are we talking about? A hundred, hundred and fifty?”
I considered for a minute, remembering back to last spring when we’d sorted out which cows would go. “Only about forty cow-calf pairs, I think.”
“We can do it, Cass.” He said it so simply, as if it were already done. “Look.” He held up his lucky horseshoe charm on its chain around his neck. “We can do it,” he repeated.
I stared out the barn window at the fields stretching away, the mountains starting to color pink with sunset, like I’d find the answer there.
And I did.
“Guess we’ve got nothing to lose if we try,” I finally said, “and everything to lose if we don’t.”
I stuck out my hand and Jasper took it and we shook on it. We had a plan.
Chapter 4
Cassie, are you with us?” Mrs. Norton’s voice roused me out of my daydreams. I sighed, hating to let go. Seemed like there was so much to think about. I’d been packing my saddlebags in my head, thinking of all the things Jasper and I would need when we set off early next Saturday morning: food, of course, and water for us; the horses could drink from the streams and ponds, but I wasn’t going to take a chance on getting beaver fever, bedrolls….
“Cassie, would you please tell us the significance of blah blah blah….”
I couldn’t, of course.
“No, not really,” I admitted. “Um, could you repeat the question?” Tittering laughter around me and a bigger cough-laugh from the back of the room.
“Please move to the front row, Cassie. We’ll see if you can hear me better from there.”
I gathered up my books, slow trudged up to the front, and plunked myself down at an empty desk. Mrs. Norton started up again: blah, blah, blah and I drifted back to my saddlebag packing: wire cutters, hoof pick, leather gloves….
I’d been doing a little better in school since Jasper and I had stolen the horse. The importance of getting an education sunk in a layer. I’d seen what dropping out of school had done to Carl McCarthy, the horse’s owner, how he’d turned into a criminal. After that, I studied harder, read more, paid attention in class … sometimes.
But nobody could expect a person to think about algebra and history when she’s getting ready to ride into the mountains and bring back a herd of cattle almost single-handed.
Of course, nobody knew about the plan but me and Jasper, so I could hardly use it as an excuse. Maybe when we came back as the heroes who saved the ranch I’d be excused for doing so poorly in school this week.
Maybe. I didn’t really care.
Jasper and I worked