Wild Horses (35 page)

Sadie stood by her horse’s head murmuring, when she heard Reuben’s short, “Shhh!”

She raised her head and froze when she saw two men standing close to the tree line watching them. Her hands dropped away and her arms went numb as she watched them approach. They were dressed in black, one much larger than the other.

“Sadie, let’s run!” Reuben hissed.

Sadie shook her head. She blinked her eyes and squinted into the shadows.

Could it be?

Yes. It was.

Richard Caldwell.

She felt the tension leave her body, then smiled when he threw up a hand.

“Hey, Sadie.”

Reuben came over to stand very close to her, and she welcomed his nearness.

“Richard Caldwell! This is a surprise! What brings you up here?”

Paris and the brown horse stood alert, their ears forward. The large black stallion was back farther, his head held high, his nostrils quivering, ready to bolt.

Richard Caldwell stopped, his hand indicating the smaller man at his side. Sadie watched warily as he stepped forward.

“I’m Harold Ardwin of Ardwin Stables.”

“Yes?” Sadie was puzzled. She had never heard of this place, and why should she? What was he doing up here with Richard Caldwell? She thought she could trust Richard. Now he had blown her secret, and this would be the last evening of her life with Paris.

Richard Caldwell stepped forward.

“Harold Ardwin is the owner of the ranch where all the horses were stolen.”

“Oh. So…”

“We’ve been watching you and your brother for close to an hour.”

Sadie’s face flushed, and she looked down at the toe of her boots, her long lashes sweeping her tanned cheeks.

Reuben coughed self-consciously.

No one spoke.

Harold Ardwin looked at the horses. He looked at Sadie and Reuben. He cleared his throat. “I believe I’ve found my horses.”

Sadie kept her eyes on her boots and bit her lower lip. The bottoms of her denims were frayed and torn, her skirt dirty and dusty. She blinked hard. She swallowed. She tried to look up, but if she did, she knew the men would see her misery, so she kept her gaze on her boot tops.

She heard Harold move away, his highly polished boots with the intricate design moving through the grass with a soft rustle. His shoulders were powerful beneath the black shirt, his waist trim for a man she guessed to be close to 60 years old.

“This is Black Thunder of Ardwin Stables, the sire of our finest colts,” he said firmly. The black stood as if carved in stone. He trembled, then turned and bolted, but only a short distance.

“Sadie, can you get him back?” asked Richard Caldwell.

Reuben nodded, and Sadie walked after the black. She touched his nose with her outstretched hand, then cupped his chin, murmuring as she did so.

Harold Ardwin blinked and blinked again. He sniffed, then cleared his throat. He watched in disbelief as Sadie came back, the black following, a faithful pet who was as obedient and helpless as a kitten.

“Come here, boy! Don’t you know who I am?” Harold Ardwin asked, his voice thick, his eyes misty.

Black Thunder whinnied. He had found his owner. You just couldn’t deny the recognition between a man and a horse.

This was a different kind of relationship than Sadie had with the big, black stallion. The black horse knew and respected Harold Ardwin, but Sadie had a hunch there was a stable boy at Ardwin Stables who spent more time with the horse than the wealthy owner did.

“After all this time. This is amazing,” Harold kept repeating.

Finally he turned to the remaining two horses. “Butterfly and Sasha,” he said, nodding toward them.

Sadie’s heart sank. She had been foolish beyond belief. She had known this time would come. Paris was never hers. Never had been.

She felt old and weary then, and she wanted to run down the hillside without saying one more polite word to anyone. She wanted to get away where she could hold her sorrow and loss all by herself, stoic, accepting, and dry-eyed.

Reuben scuffed his foot against her boot.

“Answer, Sadie.”

She raised her head.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“I asked, had you named the horses?”

“Only one. The … the palomino.”

“Sasha?”

Sadie could only nod.

“Your riding is impeccable. I have never seen such a display of trust between a horse and a rider.”

“Thank you.”

Reuben grinned and grinned until Sadie elbowed his ribs slightly.

Richard Caldwell saw every emotion as it took control of Sadie’s features—the horrible despair upon learning these were Harold’s horses, the blaming of herself for getting too attached to Paris, the courage she had tried to muster when answering Harold, and how she failed miserably. It was every emotion he remembered feeling as he wrapped the body of his beloved dog in the pink towel and laid it gently in the cool, wet hole in the earth.

Courage was admirable, but sometimes your heart was so crumpled by pain that you couldn’t really hold all the fragments together. Sometimes a broken heart couldn’t be helped.

But not this time. Not if he could help it.

“We’ll pay a visit to your house this evening, Sadie,” he said, too tersely even to his own ears.

She nodded. There was nothing else to say, and besides, talking just didn’t work around a lump in your throat. So she turned and walked down the hillside, Reuben at her heels.

S
ADIE STORMED INTO THE
kitchen perspiring, her hair a mess, her
dichly
falling off her head. She flung herself down on a kitchen chair, a layer of dust and bits of grass trailing after her. Reuben went to the laundry bathroom and stayed there.

Mam looked up from the bowl where she was sifting flour.

“My goodness, whatever happened to you?” she asked.

“Oh, Mam,” Sadie wailed, then launched into the events of the afternoon, pouring out all the heartsickness that clogged every part of her being.

“And to make matters worse, they’re coming here tonight. What for? Whatever in the world would they want here?”

Mam considered the situation for a moment, slowly wiping her hands over and over on the underside of her apron. “Well, whoever that Harold Arken…”

“Ardwin.”

“… Ardwin is, he must be very wealthy. And now he is going to enter our humble dwelling. Richard Caldwell, too. If an important person arrives, we offer him the highest seat, and if a poor one enters, he always gets the lowest, but this is not good in Christ’s eyes. So we’ll not get flustered, and instead we’ll light our propane lamp and serve them these apricot cookies and coffee, same as if Jack Entan arrived.”

Sadie glanced at her mother, caught her glint of humor, and smiled wryly. Jack was the town’s junk-hauler who lived in a less than appealing environment, in spite of everyone’s best efforts to reform him.

“Mam!”

“I’m serious. They’re only human beings, wealthy and important or not.”

Sadie frowned. She straightened her legs, stared at her frayed denims and dusty boots, and stood up abruptly.

“I’m going to my room.”

“Oh, there’s a letter for you. It’s on the hutch.”

Mam returned to her baking, and Sadie went to the cupboard for the letter. She recognized the handwriting instantly.

Eva.

Oh good, she thought.

Sadie and Eva wrote constantly. Letters were their regular way of communicating. It was always a joyful day for Sadie when one of Eva’s letters arrived.

Sometimes they would plan a time to be at their phone shanties and have a long conversation, but that had its drawbacks, especially in winter. Phone shanties were cold and uncomfortable, so telephone conversations were kept to a minimum. Sadie supposed the whole idea for having that church rule about phone shanties was because women were prone to gossip, and telephones were definitely an aid to that vice. Therefore, the less convenient a phone was, the less women would be gossiping on it.

Sadie ripped open the plain white envelope, unfolded the yellow legal pad paper, and eagerly devoured every word.

Dear Sadie,

You will never guess what! My darling husband-to-be is allowing me to travel by train to spend a week with you. Are you sitting down? So I’m thinking of spending Christmas with you!!! Are there enough explanation points for that sentence?

Our wedding is not until April, and he really wants me to do this before the wedding because he knows how close we are and that we haven’t seen each other in years!

Oh, Sadie! I am so excited. I won’t be traveling alone because Dan Detweiler’s parents are coming, too. Maybe if we can get enough people to come, we’ll hire a van and won’t need the train.

Sadie chuckled at Eva’s two sheets of questions about the trip. It was so typical of Eva and so dear. They shared everything, every little detail of their lives, including Mark Peight, the ranch, Dorothy, Richard Caldwell, Mam’s mental illness. They held nothing back, which was why they had a continuing friendship that began when they were little first-graders in the one-room school they both attended
.

Sadie sighed as she replaced the papers in the envelope. It was a long time to wait. Christmas seemed far away—another time, another world.

She heard Reuben unlock the bathroom door and walk into the kitchen to Mam.

“Why, Reuben, where were you? I had almost forgotten about you.”

“In the bathroom,” Reuben said in the gruffest, manliest voice he could possible muster.

“You’ve been in there awhile then.”

“Yeah. You know we’re getting company tonight?”

“Sadie told me.”

“They shouldn’t come here. All they want is our…those horses anyhow.”

Mam nodded.

“We’ll see, Reuben.”

Mam tidied the kitchen while Sadie and Reuben informed Dat about the company. Mam made a pot of coffee and arranged her famous apricot cookies on a plate. The cookies were not filled with apricots but with apricot jam mixed with other things. They were soft and sweet and crumbly and delicious, and no one made them the way Mam did.

Eventually a large silver SUV wound its way up their driveway. No one was very thrilled at the sound of its tires on crunching gravel, although no one said as much. It wouldn’t be polite, and certainly not a Christian attitude to be inhospitable to company.

Dat greeted the two men at the door, invited them in, and introduced them to Mam. She shook hands with them, welcoming them into their home.

Richard Caldwell was even louder than usual, nervously talking nonstop, his face flushed, his eyes bearing a certain excitement. Harold Ardwin was very professional, smiling only enough to be polite. Mustaches did that to a person, though. A heavy mustache just sort of lifted up or settled back down, covering any smile that might be underneath it. An Amish man’s beard wagged a lot when he talked, and his smile was bare and unhampered so you knew if he was sincere or not.

“Where are Sadie and Reuben?” Richard Caldwell thundered.

Sadie imagined Mam wincing, not being used to those decibels of sound.

Sadie moved out to the kitchen. She had showered, changed clothes, combed her hair neatly, and pinned her white covering perfectly in place. She had chosen a navy blue dress, which she fervently hoped would make her seem older.

“Hello,” she said quietly.

“You clean up well, Sadie,” Richard Caldwell said, laughing.

Harold Ardwin said nothing.

They talked about the weather, the price of beef, the logging industry, the carpentry trade, anything but the horses.

Dusk was bringing shadows into the room, so Sadie got up and flicked a lighter beneath the mantle of the propane gas light. With a soft pop, it ignited, casting the room into a bright, yellow light.

Richard Caldwell was impressed, telling Dat so, but Harold Ardwin watched the soft hissing mantles carefully. He was clearly uncomfortable with his first encounter in an Amish home without electricity. Sadie stifled a giggle as he moved his chair farther away from the oak stand that contained the light.

After the light was lit, Mam and the girls served coffee. Both men drank their coffee hot and black and ate a countless amount of Mam’s cookies. Richard Caldwell was profuse in his praise of her.

Then, as suddenly as the light popped on, Harold Ardwin said, “We watched your son and daughter this evening—late afternoon, really—riding the wild horses, which …are mine.”

Dat blinked, listening carefully.

“I’m sure you know plenty of the local people have always felt these horses weren’t mustangs.”

Dat nodded.

“Horse thieves are notorious in our region. We still don’t have all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, but I do know that Richard Caldwell here contacted me, told me the story of your daughter and her wild horses, and led me to her. It’s impressive, what she’s done.”

There was a pause. No one breathed, it seemed.

“So, as a reward to her—to all of you—for finding Black Thunder, I give Butterfly and Sasha to you. One is for Sadie, and one for Reuben.”

Sadie wanted to say something but couldn’t. She tried. She even opened her mouth, but it sort of closed on its own and not one word escaped. She was shaken back to reality by Reuben’s very loud and very sincere, “Thanks a lot. Thank you!”