Spirit Riding Free--The Adventure Begins

  Cora also stood. “Father, you can’t mean that Lucky is to move out West?” She wrapped an arm around Lucky’s shoulder. “Surely you can’t send her to that wild place. She must stay here, in the city, where she’s safe and can continue her education.”

  “Of course I’m not sending my granddaughter out West. Do you think I’ve gone daft?” James Sr. asked. Lucky felt Cora’s arm relax. “I agree that the West is too wild and dangerous for a young girl. Lucky’s health and safety are my highest priorities.”

  Jim frowned. “You expect me to move across the country without my daughter?”

  “No,” Lucky said, sliding away from Cora and tightly grabbing her father’s hand. “I won’t stay here without my dad!”

  James Sr. slowly rose to his feet. Then his voice boomed, commanding the attention of everyone, including Mr. and Mrs. MacFinn, who’d been eavesdropping from the other room. “No granddaughter of mine is going to live in the wilderness!” No one said a word, for James Sr. was as inflexible as one of the iron rails that had built his fortune. “Lucky will stay here, and that is final!”

  7

  Lucky wrapped a quilt around her shoulders and sat in the darkness of her bedroom, trying to fight back tears. She’d been sent upstairs so the adults could talk about her in private, but she could clearly hear their voices. A battle of wills had erupted in the parlor; tempers seemed as hot as the flames in the fireplace.

  “Will you two listen to me for once? Leaving the city might be good for her,” Jim argued. “The West will give her space to run and explore. She won’t be cooped up in that uppity school.”

  “That uppity school costs me a small fortune!” James Sr. bellowed. “I’m giving my granddaughter the best education money can buy.”

  “Jim, be rational,” Cora pleaded. “I know you don’t want to leave without Lucky, but think of all the dangers out there. How can you supervise her and take care of her if you have a railroad to build? Surely that will require all your time and attention. What’s a young girl to do, alone in such a savage wilderness?”

  “Exactly so,” James Sr. agreed.

  “She won’t be alone,” Jim said. “I’m her family and that’s where she belongs.”

  “We are also her family and she also belongs with us. I won’t hear any more of this nonsense! The West is no place for a young lady.” This statement was followed by the stomp of a boot. “She stays!”

  “She’s my daughter,” Jim said. “I’m the one who’ll make the decision.”

  “She’s my niece and I’m looking out for her best interests.”

  “She’s my granddaughter and my word is the law in this family!”

  Despite the warmth building beneath the quilt, Lucky shivered. Her fate was being batted back and forth like a ball in a tennis match. Stay. Go. Stay. Go. And she didn’t have a say in the matter. Whom did she belong to? Who had the right to decide her future? After a few more heated words, the arguing stopped. The front door slammed. Lucky shuffled to the window and peered down at the street. Streetlamps cast a yellowish glow upon James Sr.’s overcoat as he stormed to his waiting coach. Aunt Cora followed close behind, hatbox swinging from her hand. Once they were seated, the driver gave a flick of the reins, and Daisy, the old Prescott mare, began to pull the carriage down the street. Lucky watched until it disappeared from view.

  She was desperate to run downstairs and ask her father what was going to happen tomorrow morning. But for the first time in her memory, Lucky didn’t feel like running. She curled tighter into the quilt, as if the cotton batting could protect her. As if the tight and perfect stitches, placed there by her grandmother years ago, could hold her world together. Was she going with her father to a new and dangerous place, or was she staying in her comfortable, civilized world without him? The answer frightened her. James Prescott Sr. was a powerful man, and she’d never heard of him losing an argument.

  Jim didn’t come upstairs, not for a long while. Lucky’s eyelids grew heavy, but she didn’t allow herself to drift off to sleep. She reached out and picked up the framed photo she kept beside her bed—the one she looked at every night before going to sleep.

  In the photo, a man and a woman stood side by side, holding a baby. It was Lucky’s favorite photo of her father and her mother, Milagro. She’d stared at her mother’s face countless times. She and Milagro shared the same skin tone and the same dark hair. But people often said that Lucky took after her father. Surely she’d inherited more of her mother than just coloring. Surely she took after her mother in some other way. But how?

  “Lucky?” A soft knock on the door startled her. The door creaked open a bit. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  Jim entered the room. “Your aunt bought this for you.” He placed the hat ribbon on the dresser, then sat on the edge of Lucky’s bed. His usual cheerfulness was faded, as if the argument with James Sr. had drained him. “Lucky, I—”

  He’d come to deliver news, and, clearly, it was bad. Lucky was too angry to cry. She clenched her fists and said the only word she could muster, “No!”

  “Lucky, sweetheart, it’s going to be okay.”

  “You’re leaving me! How can that be okay?”

  “Just listen…” He tried to hug her but she pushed away. The quilt tangled around her legs as she moved to the other side of the room.

  “I’m not staying here without you. You can’t leave me here. You can’t!”

  “Please listen to me.”

  Her anger turned to desperation. “Don’t take the job, Dad. Have someone else do it. Tell Grandpa you’re not feeling well. That you’re sick. Tell him you’re dying if you have to. Just don’t go!”

  “I wish it were that simple. But if JP & Sons doesn’t complete this project, we’ll go belly-up. We’ll lose everything. Do you understand?”

  Lucky understood. There’d been a girl at Madame Barrow’s whose family had “lost everything” because the father had gambled away his fortune in a series of card games. The poor girl had to leave school. No one knew where she lived now. There was a rumor she’d been seen in one of the tenement houses, in the bad part of town.

  Of course, Lucky didn’t want her grandfather to lose the business he’d built. JP & Sons was an immense source of pride. Their railroad laid tracks that carried people across the vast continent, to new homes, to new jobs, to new opportunities. What used to take months of dangerous travel now took only days.

  “But Grandpa doesn’t want me to go.”

  “He’s only trying to protect you. The town of Miradero is way out West. It’s a fairly new town with a small population. And your aunt Cora is right; the frontier is not a safe place. It’s full of wild, dangerous animals, and dangerous people, too.”

  Lucky scowled. “Aunt Cora thinks everything is dangerous.”

  “Both your aunt and grandfather believe you should continue to live here. This has been your home for most of your life. Your friends are here, your family is—”

  “You’re my family!” Lucky couldn’t hold back her tears. The quilt dropped to the floor as she crumpled onto the bed, her face pressed into her pillow. Lucky wasn’t prone to tears. The last time she remembered crying was last summer, when she’d broken a toe. But this was a different sort of crying—it came from a much deeper place.

  A moment later, her muffled sobbing was interrupted by laughter. “Lucky, you’re not letting me speak,” Jim said. Lucky raised her head and glared at him. Why did he sound so happy all of a sudden? “You’re getting all worked up, and I haven’t even told you what I came up here to say.” He laughed again. “You’re coming with me.”

  “What?” Had she heard correctly?

  “There’s no way I’d go without you. Never. We’re a team, you and I. And your mother, rest her soul, would never forgive me if I left you.”

  Lucky threw herself at him. With her arms wrapped around his shoulders, she buried her face in his neck. The tears kept coming, but this time they were happy tears. “Thank yo
u.”

  After she’d dried her eyes and Jim had dried a few tears, too, they gazed at a poster that was mounted on the wall. The focal point of the poster was a young woman balancing on one leg atop a horse. Her long brown hair flowed behind her. The poster read: EL CIRCO DOS GRILLOS STARRING MILAGRO NAVARRO. This was Lucky’s mother, and Navarro was her maiden name. The horse had ribbons in its mane, and Milagro wore a lovely dress and a pair of brown-and-red cowboy boots that were decorated with flames running up the sides. “Would you like me to tell you the story?” Jim asked.

  Lucky nodded. She wasn’t a baby anymore, so there was no need for bedtime stories, but this one was special. This story didn’t have sea monsters or underwater submersibles or trips to the center of the earth. This story was about her mother, and that’s why it was her favorite.

  “When I was a young man,” Jim began, as he always did, “I told my father that I wanted to leave home and seek adventure. He wasn’t very happy about my decision, as he wanted me to get started working in the family business right away. But I had made up my mind, so he bade me good-bye.” Lucky used to wonder why her grandfather hadn’t just asked Aunt Cora to work in the family business instead. But she’d come to learn that, while working in the family business was acceptable and expected of the men in the Prescott family, it had never been so for the women.

  “I didn’t have a plan. I had some money in my pocket, some extra clothes in a bag, but the whole world was open to me. Should I hop a ship and travel across the ocean to a new world? Or should I go out West where a wilder adventure lay, ripe for the picking?”

  The rest of the story went as follows. Jim had heard the tales of gold, but those were not of much interest to him, for he’d grown up with riches. There were tales of careers to be made in the fur trade, but he couldn’t quite imagine himself killing creatures for money. But then he saw an advertisement. Cattle ranchers were looking for ranch hands and were willing to train the new hires. Cowboys, they were called. The job required long days in the saddle and long nights under the open sky. The pay was decent, but the applicant had to have his own horse and saddle.

  So Jim rode a JP & Sons train out West, bought himself a horse and saddle, and landed a job at a cattle ranch. The Corral, as it was called, was owned by a nice older couple. They kept a few hundred steer that needed watching over. Riding wasn’t as easy as it looked. Jim ended up with saddle sores and some pulled muscles, but he eventually got the hang of it. He didn’t mind the simple food—beans, potatoes, biscuits, and always plenty of beef. And he didn’t mind the long hours of work. There was the occasional danger of a cattle rustler, but for the most part the cowboy life was quiet—crickets in the morning, banjo in the evening. So different from the life of privilege he’d lived, where he had to dress in his waistcoat for dinner and dance on weekends with the daughters of wealthy families.

  All was going quite well for Jim until they drove the cattle to auction.

  The auction took place in the town of Winslow. There was a lot of time to kill while waiting for the auction to begin, so after securing the cattle in a pen, Jim and the other cowboys headed over to a circus tent to watch the show. A spider monkey handed out tickets and a parrot told everyone, “Show’s gonna start. Show’s gonna start.” Jim and his fellow cowboys got seats in the front row. For the most part, Jim enjoyed watching the acrobats, magicians, and jugglers. But then a young woman rode on horseback to the center of the ring. Jim perched on the edge of his seat. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. When their eyes met, he forgot how to breathe.

  Lucky always thought that part of the story was a little corny. But she also secretly liked it.

  The circus ringmaster, a gentleman in a tuxedo, hollered to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the magnificent Milagro! Such dangerous feats of daring you have never seen. Watch and be amazed!” The crowd hushed as Milagro began to ride slowly around the ring. Suspenseful music arose from the corner, where a man played the organ. With astonished gazes, the crowd watched as Milagro stood upon her horse’s back. Around and around they went, Milagro balancing perfectly, a smile on her face. Then, as the music reached a crescendo, she jumped into the air, did a backflip, and landed gracefully on the ground. The onlookers broke into wild applause. Jim was so enamored, he forgot to clap.

  Even though the other cowboys teased him about being lovestruck, he waited after the show to meet Milagro.

  “The night I met your mother was the luckiest night of my life,” Jim said as he tucked Lucky into bed.

  Even though she knew the answer, she asked anyway. “Why was it the luckiest night of your life?”

  “Because if I’d never met her, I’d never have you.” He kissed her forehead. “You’d better get some sleep. We’ll have to get up bright and early to pack for our adventure.”

  Lucky couldn’t believe this was happening. A real adventure, just as she’d longed for. But this was all so quick. While her head began to fill with all sorts of questions, her eyelids grew heavier and heavier. She yawned. “Okay. Night.”

  As her father left the room, Lucky turned toward the window. A few stars twinkled. A sliver of moon hung above the street, looking as if someone had taken a bite out of it. And that’s exactly how her heart felt, too. She was going with her father, but she was leaving the only place she’d ever called home.

  8

  The stallion lay beneath the starry sky. This was not the time of the full moon, so the prairie was hidden in darkness. A wolf howled in the distance, but not close enough to bring concern. Some of the herd were asleep, others merely resting. The stallion’s sister slept nearby.

  It had been a perfect day. During grazing, they’d found a lovely patch of dandelions, a real treat. Bees had also found the flowers, but that didn’t stop the stallion. While the others trod cautiously, the stallion impatiently plunged in, pulling the dandelions with his teeth, roots and all. The flowers were so delicious, he didn’t mind the few stings on his ankles. This was the herd’s favorite time of year, for the tender grasses were plentiful—not as in winter, when dry shrubs and tree bark kept them fed.

  This time of year, with mountain snow melting, water was also plentiful. It filled the rivers and branched into smaller streams. It spilled into ponds and creeks, attracting all sorts of critters. For the stallion, there was always something interesting to find along the riverbank—a family of rabbits or a fox den. The streams were a great place for games of chase, which the younger horses enjoyed, especially when they were splashing through water.

  There was great joy in the spring. The days were simple—graze, sip water, run, and play.

  And sleep.

  The stallion’s eyelids felt heavy. The contented, deep breaths of the herd were like a lullaby. He folded his front legs and rested his head. As a sliver of moon appeared in the sky, the stallion closed his eyes and drifted into the happy depths of sleep.

  Tomorrow would be a new day. And a new adventure.

  Part Two

  9

  Despite feeling under the weather, Mrs. MacFinn insisted on making a special bon voyage breakfast of French toast with maple syrup. She sniffled the entire time, half due to her cold and half due to the emotions of the situation. She’d look at Lucky, then choke back a sob. “I’m not dying,” Lucky reminded her.

  “Aye, lassie, bless yer sweet soul tha not be tha case. But what will I be doin’ without you and Mr. Prescott to watch over?”

  Mrs. MacFinn was a nice lady, and Lucky was sorry to upset her. “Why don’t you come with us?” Lucky asked.

  “And who’ll be watching over Mr. MacFinn if I go wit ya? I cannae be leavin’ him on his own, now, can I?”

  Years ago, the MacFinns had traveled all the way from Scotland. The sea voyage had been a terrible time, with sickness and disease making their way around the ship. Some of the travelers didn’t survive. Upon setting foot in this new land, Mr. MacFinn was so grateful to be alive that he swore to himself and his wife that h
e’d never go anywhere again. Jim had tried his best to persuade Mr. MacFinn to join them on the new frontier, arguing that train travel was quicker and far less dangerous than sea travel. But Mr. MacFinn said he never went back on an oath. It was too bad, really, because Mrs. MacFinn made the best French toast and scrumptious meat pies. Jim told Lucky that the MacFinns were probably better off staying in the city since they were getting quite old and were comfortable with their daily routines. Such dramatic change would be unsettling for them.

  Unsettled was exactly how Lucky felt that morning. She swallowed one last bite of toast, then yawned. She’d spent the night fretting and tossing with such vigor that the pillows and quilt had ended up on the floor. With the first ray of dawn, she’d given up trying to sleep, slid out of bed, and began packing. She had no idea how long she’d be in Miradero or what kind of weather to expect, so she decided she might as well take all her clothes. Except for the school uniform. Good riddance!

  Two trunks were stuffed to the brim, and she had to sit on them to get them closed and latched. The third trunk she filled with personal items—her grooming supplies, including her alabaster brush and hair ribbons. She selected some of her art supplies—a set of pencils and a book of paper. She wasn’t the best artist in the world, but she liked drawing, and it would be something to do during the long train ride. She picked up the photo of her mom and dad and wrapped a scarf around it to protect it from scratches. Then she took the framed poster off the wall, wrapped it in her grandmother’s quilt, and set it into the trunk.

  She stood in front of her bookshelf.

  There was very little room left in the last trunk. How could she leave her beloved books behind? Would there be a bookstore or a library in Miradero? She hoped so. She’d spent countless hours reading about adventurers who set forth into the unknown. Those tales had always seemed so exciting, but now that the unknown was staring Lucky in the face, she wished she could just turn the page or close the cover and make it go away. But this wasn’t a story. It was her life. She sighed and grabbed the book Emma had given her.