Son of the Black Stallion (7 page)

“Got him, Alec?” It was Henry.

“He’s quieting down. Coming out in a minute.” Alec untied the lead rope and slowly turned the colt
around in the van until he faced the door. Then, still holding him close, Alec led the colt forward, down the ramp, and stopped in front of the barn door. Henry closed the van, signaled to the driver, and the truck left, rolling slowly down the driveway and through the gate.

“I’ll see if everything is okay inside,” Henry said.

“I got the stall ready this morning,” Alec told him. “We’ll put Satan in the same one the Black used, right next to Napoleon.” As Henry disappeared inside the barn, Alec pressed his head close to the colt’s. “Your pop used it,” he said softly, “… and now it’s yours.”

Henry reappeared at the door. “Okay,” he said. “Bring him in.”

Napoleon pitched his gray head over the stall door as Alec led Satan into the barn. Pricking his long ears forward, Napoleon neighed and watched the black colt eagerly.

Satan stopped in his tracks, refusing to go forward. Tossing his head, he whistled and bared his teeth. As he stood there, tense and rigid, his blazing eyes were fixed upon old Napoleon.

“Guess you might be wrong, Henry,” Alec said. “He doesn’t seem to be taking to Nap.”

“He doesn’t seem to be takin’ to anybody,” Henry growled; then he muttered half to himself, “Those strange, creepy eyes …”

Alec tried talking to the colt, but Satan moved restlessly, his eyes still on Napoleon. Suddenly the colt wheeled, staggered as Alec’s weight threw his light body off balance, and, recovering, screamed again.

Napoleon’s eyes were upon him all the time, soft and wondering.

At last the colt was still. Alec tried to move him forward, but Satan kept his legs rigid. Stroking him, Alec turned to Henry and started to say something. Then, quickly, the colt leapt forward, screaming, carrying Alec with him.

Henry moved fast as Satan, his teeth bared, rushed toward Napoleon. Coming between them, the old man’s hand descended heavily upon Satan’s muzzle. The blow stunned the colt, and as he drew back upon his haunches, Henry closed in upon his head.

When it was over, and Alec and Henry both had hold of the quivering colt, the old man said angrily, “It’s goin’ to be like raisin’ the devil himself. Let’s get him down to the end stall, Alec, away from Napoleon.”

“Maybe he’ll get used to Nap,” Alec said hopefully. “Then it’ll be like it was.”

“Mebbe,” Henry muttered. “Mebbe.”

They didn’t have any trouble moving the colt down the barn, and Alec held him while Henry went into the end stall. Finally he came out and said, “Ready now, Alec. Gave him some hay, too. Mebbe that’ll help some.”

Alec led Satan into the stall and then stood beside him, his cheek pressed hard against the colt’s head. “It’s all strange to you, boy.… I know it is. You can’t help acting the way you do, leaving all you’ve ever known so far behind you. But it’ll be different in a short while, honestly it will. You’ll like it here, Satan.… Your father did, you know. And you’ll get to like Napoleon, too, and he’ll understand why you were excited tonight. We all love you, Satan … you’re
ours
 … you’re what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Comin’, Alec?” Henry asked.

Alec’s hand trailed along the colt’s side as he left the stall.

And as they left the barn, they could hear Satan moving restlessly within, his hoofs occasionally striking the sides of his stall.

They walked in silence until they reached the gate, then Alec said, “I won’t see you tomorrow, then.”

“It’s a five o’clock flight. You’ll be sleepin’.” Henry paused, then added, “I’ll try to get back inside of ten days, Alec. Don’t suspect I’ll have any trouble with Boldt … not if I handle him right.”

“Hope not, Henry.”

“You’ll speak to your father?”

“Tonight or tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow would be better.”

Henry placed his hand on Alec’s arm. “Use your own judgment, Alec. It’s good, an’ you’re carrying the ball now.”

“Yes,” Alec said thoughtfully, his gaze on the house across the street, “it’s my ball, all right.”

Henry’s fingers pressed into Alec’s shoulder, and he mumbled something about seeing the missis; then he shuffled up the street toward the big house on the corner. Alec watched him for a moment, and then started across the street.

Alec watched as his mother rose from her chair and began cleaning off the kitchen table. She had reached the head of the table and her hand was on his dad’s empty plate when, hesitating, she turned to Alec. “I believe I’ll leave his setting, and keep the food warm,” she said. “He may not have eaten.”

Alec smiled, trying to relieve the deep concern he saw in his mother’s eyes. “He’ll be along any minute now, Mom,” he said, getting to his feet. And as he helped her carry the dishes to the sink, he added, “He might have had trouble finding a veterinary in New York.”

His mother washed the dishes in silence while Alec stood beside her drying them. “Do you think Sebastian might have been seriously hurt?” she finally asked.

“I don’t think so, Mom. Henry said the colt’s hoof just nicked him.”

“You should have kept the colt away from him,” his mother said a little sternly as she dried her hands.

“Sebastian …” Then Alec stopped. His mother was worried enough now without his going into all the details of the accident. “Yes, Mom,” he said quietly. “I know I should have.”

The spring lock on the screen door on the porch clicked and then clicked again as the door shut. In another moment Mr. Ramsay was striding into the kitchen, his face white and tired. “Sorry I’m late, Belle,” he said, turning to his wife, “but it couldn’t be helped.” Then his gaze was upon Alec, and the boy felt uneasy until the sternness left his father’s eyes. “Seb will be all right in a couple of days, Alec,” he said slowly. “Doctor Hancock thinks he was just stunned by the blow, but he’s going to keep him around awhile to make sure.”

“Sit down, William, while the food is still warm,” Alec heard his mother say. “You must be hungry.”

Everything was all right now, Alec thought. Sebastian wasn’t hurt; his father was eating hungrily; and his mother was moving busily about the kitchen once more. She poured the coffee into her husband’s cup and said, “We thought you might have tried to find a veterinary in New York.” The tenseness was gone from her voice.

“Decided it would be better taking him to Hancock,” Alec heard his father say. “I figured it wouldn’t take any longer than looking for a vet in New York.”

Excusing himself, Alec left the kitchen, stopped momentarily in the living room, as though undecided where to go, then turned and walked up the
stairs, his hand trailing along the well-polished mahogany banister.

He went to his bedroom, and for a moment stood at the window looking at the barn, a dim, uncertain shape in the darkness. It would turn out all right, he told himself again. Things which started out badly had a way of righting themselves. The colt would come around in time. He was certain of that.

He went over to the bed and stretched out upon it, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He lay there quietly for a few minutes; then his gaze descended to the walls and traveled about the room, dimly lit from the light in the hall. His eyes passed over the Flushing High School banners, stopped at the pictures of the Black, Henry and himself, then went on to the soiled green jockey cap hanging there. Henry’s cap, the same one the old man had worn long ago when he had been riding. And the one which Alec had worn when he had ridden the Black in the match race at Chicago. Finally Alec glanced at the empty wall on the other side of his bed. He was saving that wall for the colt, for pictures of him, for his
own
jockey cap … his
own
colors. His silks would be black, coal black … the color of the great stallion and now his son. Somehow he had known Satan would be black. Alec thought of the white diamond in the center of the colt’s forehead. Maybe he’d add a white diamond to his colors, a white diamond on the right side of his shirt.

Alec’s gaze left the wall and returned to the ceiling. Perhaps, he thought, he was getting ahead of himself. Perhaps the colt would never have the speed of the Black. Or they might have trouble with him. Maybe
everything wouldn’t turn out the way he and Henry thought. Maybe the bad beginning was just an indication of much worse to come. And how well he remembered the words Henry had uttered angrily in the barn, as the colt had attempted to savage old Napoleon: “
It’s going to be like trying to raise the devil himself.…
” Could it be that Henry actually felt that way about Satan? Alec wondered about it as he lay there. That, and other things. How would his father react when he asked him to register the horse in his name? What would his father say when he told him he didn’t want to go back to school? Tomorrow, he decided, would be a better time to talk to him than tonight. Tomorrow, Saturday, when his father didn’t have to go to work, and might not have such a vivid recollection of all that had happened today. Tomorrow …

Alec didn’t know how long he had lain there when he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. He recognized them as his father’s. They were steady and quick, as compared to his mother’s soft, faltering ones.

He heard his father reach the top of the stairs, walk toward his own room, hesitate, go on again, and then stop. It was still enough for Alec to hear the crickets chirping in the field across the street; then he heard the closing of the refrigerator door in the kitchen and the sound of his mother moving about downstairs.

His father’s footsteps reached him again; this time they were coming toward his room! They came to a stop before his half-open door.

“You up, Alec?”

“Yes, Dad.” Alec rose to a sitting position on the
bed as his father entered the room, switching on the light.

“Just thinking?” his father asked.

Nodding, Alec watched his father’s tall frame as the older man walked slowly over to the window and, bending, looked out. Then straightening again, he turned and looked about the room, glancing over the banners, the pictures, and the soiled jockey cap, finally letting his eyes come to rest on Alec. “What are you and Henry up to?” he asked quietly.

It had come much too fast and unexpectedly for Alec. He looked down; but quickly, as though ashamed of his faltering gaze, he looked his father in the eyes again. “We want to race the colt,” he replied, “… eventually.” And the sound of his own voice seemed strange to him.

“Thought it might be something like that,” Alec heard his father say slowly.

He wished that he knew his father better … wished that he could read his eyes as well as he could Henry’s. It would have helped now.

His father walked over to the bed, sat down beside him, and asked, “Do you think he’ll have the Black’s speed?”

More startled than ever, Alec looked at him. His father’s face was still tense, his eyes somber. Yet his voice had been almost casual. “I—I think … hope so, Dad,” he replied unsteadily.

Bending down, his father picked off a long thread from the legs of his brown trousers. “I read somewhere that most Arabian horses, while long on endurance,
were short on speed. And I’ve heard, too, that they’ve been very much outbred by the American and English thoroughbred.”

“Have you forgotten the Black?”

“No, Alec. I haven’t forgotten,” he answered in the same tone, his face unchanging. “Strange, too. He was fast and big. Nothing like him in what I’ve read. They usually mention the
small
Arabian horses.”

Alec smiled as he thought of Abu Ishak’s hidden stronghold in the land east of the Rub‘ al Khali. “Abu never thought much of publicity,” he said. Then he continued more seriously, “Besides, Dad, the Black wasn’t pure Arabian. His dam was pure-blooded, but his sire wasn’t.”

“What was he then?”

“Abu never told us. But Henry heard that soon after he was weaned he escaped and ran wild in the desert and mountains before Abu’s men caught up with him more than a year later. Then a few months after he sired the Black, he escaped again, this time taking the Black with him. It was almost another year before they tracked them down, and then they only managed to catch the young colt, the Black.”

“An interesting story,” Alec’s father said, “… very interesting.”

Alec looked at him. It was strange to be talking this way to his dad. It was almost like talking to Henry. All his life he had thought of his father as someone to admire, to respect … but this was the first time he had looked upon him as a person, a real person who was interested in the same things he was.

“And now you and Henry are going to train the son of the Black for the track. But how about Henry’s job out west?”

“He’s quitting,” Alec told his father. “He’s leaving for California tomorrow morning, but he’ll be back in ten days, he says.”

There was a long silence before his father said, “I’d hoped there wouldn’t be any more of this, as I told you this morning.” Pausing, he added, “But I guess we knew all the time, Mother and I.”

“Dad, it’s …” Alec began, only to have his father interrupt him.

“I know, Alec. I know exactly how you feel, and that it’s your life … the life you’ve chosen.” Then he concluded, his voice a little strained, “Your mother and I have talked it over. We won’t stand in your way if it’s what you really want. And I guess you do.”

“It’s what I want, Dad,” Alec said seriously, “more than anything else in the world. To ride, to train … to be around horses all my life.”

“Don’t know where you get it from, Alec.” His father smiled. “It’s not from your mother’s side, nor mine. City people, all of us.”

“People in the city can love horses, Dad.”

“Yes, Alec, I suppose so.” Mr. Ramsay rose to his feet before adding resignedly, “Well, go to it. You’re on your own again.” He was near the door when Alec’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

“Dad … this time would you go into it with me?” Alec heard his own voice fade into the stillness of the room. And he saw his father’s back straighten as he came to a stiff halt. “I need your help,” he added slowly.