Karen's Cowboy

  Again and again I fitted my rubber-tipped arrow into my Karen-sized bow. Again and again I shot my arrow toward a plastic target tied to a tree. I am not bragging, but most of the time I hit the target. Many times I even hit the bull’s-eye! Sometimes I did miss completely, though. Then I just gathered up my arrows and started all over again. I wanted to be as good as Annie Hancock. She was so good that people would come from all over the county just to see her shoot.

  While I was practicing, the clouds grew thicker and darker. Soon it was drizzling. Then it started to pour. The ranch hands put all the horses safely in the barn. I put away my bow and arrows. Upstairs in my room, I wrote in my diary.

  Downstairs, I played six games of checkers with Andrew. He won two. I won four.

  Then Jenny and I sat on the covered porch, watching the rain fall in great gray sheets across the valley. The sky is so much bigger in Colorado than it is in Connecticut. It was beautiful, watching the rain, but a person can only watch the rain for so long. Soon I turned to Jenny and said, “I am bored.”

  “Me too,” said Jenny.

  We went inside to see what the others were doing. Some people were in their rooms, napping. Mommy, Seth, Granny, and Jon were playing cards. Andrew and Phil were playing checkers.

  “Hello, girls,” said Kate from behind the kitchen counter. “What are you up to?”

  “That is the problem,” I said. “We are not up to much. Do you have any ideas about what we could do?”

  “Well, let me think,” said Kate, tapping her finger against her chin. “We have some old jigsaw puzzles around here.”

  Jenny and I said (politely) that we were not in the mood for jigsaw puzzles.

  “Do you girls like to read?” asked Kate.

  “Sure,” I said. “I love books. But I have already read the ones I brought, and Jenny’s too.”

  “I have read mine and Karen’s also,” added Jenny.

  “Did you know we have a library in this house?” Kate asked.

  “Really?” I said. “A whole library?”

  “It is not as big as a regular public library,” said Kate. “But guests often bring books and leave them, and we save those books for the new guests. Why, by now we must have hundreds. Including lots that I am sure two seven-year-old girls would be interested in. Let me show you where we keep them.”

  Kate led us to a room on the second floor, tucked between a linen closet and one of the bedrooms. It was a small room, but it was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling. On the shelves were books and papers and stacks of photographs and magazines and all sorts of stuff.

  “The library is kind of messy,” Kate said. “But finding something interesting will be fun. You can pretend you are on a treasure hunt.”

  “We will!” I said as Kate went back downstairs. This was the perfect thing to do on a rainy afternoon.

  The Real Annie Hancock

  Jenny and I found all kinds of neat things in the Arrow-A library. Life magazines from the 1960s (with pictures of hippies, crew-cut astronauts, and ladies with helmet hairdos). Lots of grown-up books with covers showing bare-chested, long-haired muscle men grabbing women who looked as if they were about to faint. Lots and lots of books by someone named Zane Grey with cowboys on the covers. A stack of ancient (1979 through 1992) National Geographic magazines.

  There were kids’ books too, though most of them were way too old-fashioned. One was called Talks for Girls, by the Reverend Aloysius Roche. It was published in 1932. It was all about how girls should be cheerful, polite, clean, and honest. Really! Who would go around thinking you should be grumpy, rude, filthy, and dishonest? Not even Pamela Harding, my best enemy back home, would say that.

  Finally Jenny found a stack of Nancy Drews. I had read a couple of Nancy Drews already, and so had Jenny. We took down the stack (there were eight of them) so we could read the titles and try to remember whether we had read them before.

  Then I noticed something on the shelf, underneath where the Nancy Drews had been. It was a folder with some old news clippings. One was about Annie Hancock.

  “Look!” I said. “Here is a newspaper article about Jon’s great-grandmother.”

  The clipping was from 1972. The article explained that 1972 was the one-hundredth anniversary of Annie Hancock’s birth. It mentioned how famous she had been for her archery. It quoted some old people who still remembered Annie, and what a wonderful host she had been at the Arrow-A Ranch. Last, it mentioned a man named Horace Brigham, a historian who was researching Annie’s life for an article for the county historical society.

  I looked through the folder. Mr. Brigham’s article was not in it. I wanted to find out more about Annie Hancock.

  “Time to be Nancy Drew,” I said to Jenny.

  “Yes,” she said. “But how can we get that article? Even if we knew where the county historical society building was, which we do not, we could not get there.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows. “Then again, maybe we can.”

  * * *

  “May we log on to the Internet, please?” I asked Kate a few minutes later. “There is a Web site I want to show Jenny. A kids’ site,” I added.

  I was being cheerful and polite. And I was pretty clean. But I was not being totally honest. (The Reverend Roche would not approve.) I did want to show Jenny a Web site. But it was not a kids’ site. I was hoping the county historical society ran a Web site. I knew Kate and Jon were connected to the Web, because I had seen their computer earlier.

  “Sure,” said Kate. “I will help you log on.”

  Kate did, and then she left us alone. I started a search for the county historical society. (Kristy had showed me how to do searches. It is a very handy thing to know.) Bingo! I clicked on the link and called it up. Sure enough, the historical society had put some of its papers on-line, including one by … Horace Brigham! And the paper was entitled … “Annie Hancock Wayne: Pioneer All Her Life.”

  After asking permission, Jenny and I printed out a copy of the article and logged off. Then we rushed back to the library with the printout.

  Mr. Brigham’s article described how Annie had come west with her family from Tennessee when she was nine years old. They had settled on a small plot of land near what is now the Arrow-A Ranch when, one day, little Annie was playing in a cave and picked up a solid silver nugget the size of her thumb.

  That nugget set off a silver rush that brought prospectors from all over the world to this part of Colorado. With the money from the nugget, Annie’s family was able to buy most of the land that now made up the Arrow-A Ranch. As a special present, Annie’s parents bought her a fancy bow-and-arrow set, which Annie had always wanted. Just as Jon had told us, they named the ranch — the Arrow-A, for Arrow Annie — after her.

  Soon after, Annie met Jeremiah Wayne, whose family had come to Colorado in the silver rush. The Waynes had not found much silver, but they had staked out a small ranch next door to the Arrow-A. When they grew up, Annie and Jeremiah married. The two ranches merged, to become the largest ranch in that part of Colorado. It was only years later, when Annie was an old woman, that she was forced to sell off the part of the ranch that had originally been the Waynes’ property, returning the Arrow-A to its original size.

  “Wow!” I said when we finished reading. “That is a great story! Annie herself was the one who started the silver rush —”

  “The same silver rush that brought her future husband’s family to Colorado!” finished Jenny.

  “Hey!” I said. “Maybe that is why she haunts the mine. It is the place where she found the silver nugget and changed her whole life. If she had not found that nugget, she never would have gotten her fancy bow-and-arrow set and become a famous archer.”

  “Her family would never have owned the Arrow-A,” said Jenny.

  “She never would have met her husband,” I added. “I am sure that is it. Annie’s ghost is not sad. She haunts the mine because that is where all her happiness began!”

&nbs
p; The Real Jon Wayne

  After breakfast on Friday, Jenny and I met in the library on the second floor. Everyone had already decided what they were going to do that day: Mommy, Seth, and Granny were visiting a nearby artists’ colony, to see some potters and some silversmiths. Seth is an artist with wood, and Mommy makes artistic jewelry, so they were very interested in seeing other people’s work. The Webbs had taken Andrew with them on a short trail ride. (Mrs. Webb groaned when she got back on her horse, but she did it.) The Nemchinovs headed back to Wayne Junction to do more shopping. Kate had said it was fine if Jenny and I stayed with her. She said she would even go riding with us later.

  “Ready?” I asked Jenny now in a whisper.

  “Ready!” she answered, and we headed into the library. We were about to put our secret plan into action — our plan to help Jon Wayne decide to remain the host of the Arrow-A. Every time he had talked about the ranch during the past week, he had seemed sad, as if he did not know what to do. He was not sure he was living up to his father’s past, and his grandfather’s. He did not seem sure that he should keep the Arrow-A going. Jenny and I had a plan that we hoped would show Jon that he was doing a great job.

  The day before, when we were being Nancy Drew, we had noticed a stack of guest books on one shelf. They were books that went back almost twenty years. In them, guests had written about their visits to the Arrow-A.

  Now Jenny and I read through them, looking for certain things. When we found a certain something, we carefully copied it down in a notebook.

  That took us almost all morning. Then, at lunchtime, one by one, we talked to the other guests at the Arrow-A. We asked them questions and wrote down their answers.

  Later still, Jenny and I went to the stable and asked Punkie and Bill if they would take us riding. While we were riding, Jenny and I interviewed the hands about Jon Wayne. We asked them questions and wrote down their answers. After we got back, we talked to Larry for a long time.

  That evening, Jenny and I holed up in the library until bedtime. Kate had given us some construction paper, scissors, and glue. She had also given us permission to cut pictures out of some old magazines. We worked and worked like worker bees until Mommy and Mrs. Webb told us to get ready for bed. By then, we were just about finished with our secret project. It had taken almost all day, but it had turned out great. Jenny and I made secret signs at each other as our mommies led us away. We would put our plan into action the next day — at the hoedown.

  The Wild, Wild West

  Saturday was our very last full day at the Arrow-A. On Sunday morning we would all board planes again, to take us back to the places we had come from. I knew that no matter what happened, I would never forget my week at the dude ranch — a whole week of being Cowgirl Karen.

  Luckily, Saturday was beautiful and clear. It was a little cooler, as if autumn was finally deciding to settle down here at the Arrow-A. In the morning, my family and I took a nice long ride, saying good-bye to all our favorite places, taking last-minute pictures. I had brought Mud Puddle a whole apple for himself, for being such a good pony.

  Then, after lunch, the party began. First, the ranch hands demonstrated their special tricks, while we guests sat on fence rails and whooped and hollered. Punkie, Larry, and Bill showed us some fancy rope tricks, spinning their ropes and jumping in and out of them and lassoing fence posts over their shoulders. Punkie even threw a tin can in the air and lassoed it before it hit the ground.

  “I am going to have to practice even more,” said Andrew, looking determined. I sighed. I knew that he would be practicing on me as soon as we got home.

  Then four of the ranch hands sang a bunch of songs in a barbershop quartet. That is when four people sing with no music, and make their voices blend and mix in a really neat way. They wore red-striped shirts and bow ties. They were awesome!

  Then it was the guests’ turn. We showed what we had learned during the week — whether it was a song, some dancing, some roping, some fly-fishing styles, or … shooting arrows.

  I have to tell you, I won the prize for most accurate shot. I was so proud! Seth took a picture of me holding up my certificate, which Jon and Kate had filled out.

  After everyone had demonstrated a talent, it was time for the barbecue. The smell of barbecue cooking outside had been driving me crazy all afternoon. Now I piled my plate high, and sat on the porch steps to eat.

  I was hardly finished with my plate of seconds when Kate called out, “Swing your partner, folks!”

  For the square dance, the furniture had been cleared out of the living room/dining room area on the first floor. A five-piece band was set up at one end, with a guitar, harmonica player, bass fiddle, violin, and accordion. The musicians started playing, and the music was so fun and dancey that I felt as if everyone in the world would have to get up and dance to it.

  We wove in and out of our square, going forward and back and around and twirling and dipping and swinging until I could hardly breathe. Granny’s face was flushed, and Mommy was laughing as Seth spun her around. Everyone was smiling and joking and the room was filled with happiness and shining faces. My heart felt as if it would burst.

  Then I saw Jenny motion to me.

  I sidled over to her.

  “Now?” she whispered loudly over the music.

  “Now!” I said. And we set our plan in action.

  Annie and Jon — Happy at Last

  During a break in the music, Jenny and I dashed to my room, where we had stored Jon’s surprise. Then we ran back to the hoedown and found Jon. He was standing by a punch bowl, ladling “Western Brew” (actually it was cranberry juice and club soda) into a cup.

  “Howdy, pilgrims,” Jon greeted us.

  “Jon, we must talk to you,” I said in an important voice.

  “It is critical that we speak,” added Jenny.

  Jon raised his eyebrows. “All right. I can see that you are serious. We should find a quiet place.”

  The three of us went into the study off the main room and shut the door. We sat down.

  “Now, what did you want to discuss?” Jon asked. “You have been having a good time at the Arrow-A, right?” He looked concerned.

  “Of course we have!” I said. “We love the Arrow-A. It is the best dude ranch ever. We are not here to complain — just the opposite.”

  “We know that you are not sure you want to keep running the Arrow-A,” Jenny said. “And we think you definitely should.”

  I handed Jon the folder of guest-book quotations and interviews with current guests and ranch hands. In our best handwriting, we had copied exactly what some guests had said. Things like, “Thanks to Jon, our stay here was terrific!” Or, “Thank you, Jon, for teaching me how to tie a fly.” And, “I was always scared of horses until I came here. Thank you, Jon.”

  The ranch hands had nice things to say too. “Jon was a fine foreman, but he is even better being the big boss,” said Bill. “Jon handles both jobs well,” said Punkie. “If Jon wants to focus on being the dude-ranch host, I will be happy to be ranch foreman,” said Larry. Jenny and I had decorated the folder with cutout pictures of cowboys, cows, flowers, and a sunset. I was tingling with excitement.

  “What do we have here?” said Jon, opening the folder.

  Jon slowly read through all the pages of the folder. I saw him turn to the last page. There, I had written:

  Then Jenny and I had signed our names.

  Jon cleared his throat, then slowly closed the folder. “You girls are mighty sweet to have made this for me,” he said. “And I appreciate what you are trying to do. But the Arrow-A has had its share of sadness over the years. Now, I do not exactly believe that Annie Hancock’s ghost haunts that old silver mine. But I do not exactly not believe it either. I have to wonder if the Waynes would not be better off giving up the land and moving on…. ” His voice trailed off.

  “Jon, you are going to be surprised by what I have to show you,” I said, smiling. I handed him the printout of the article by
Horace Brigham. “If Annie haunts the mine, it is not because she was sad there. It is because that is where she was happiest.”

  Jenny and I waited quietly for a few minutes while Jon read Horace Brigham’s article. “Why, for goodness’ sake!” he murmured.

  Finally he put the printout down. “I never knew that Annie’s archery career got started when she found the silver nugget. And I never knew that the land she sold off, when she was an old lady, had not been part of the original Arrow-A. Somehow that makes it less sad. I think you girls are right. If Annie does haunt the mine, it is because it is the place that made her life the wonderful adventure it turned out to be.”

  Jenny and I smiled at each other.

  Jon said, “Knowing that Annie’s happy memories keep her at the ranch will make me think twice — even three times — about leaving it.”

  “Hooray!” Jenny and I shouted. We traded high fives, then gave Jon a huge hug.

  Back East Again

  The airplane ride home was so, so sad. We were hardly in the air, and I missed the Arrow-A already.

  I did not feel like listening to country music on my little airplane headphones. I did not feel like looking at the pictures Mommy and Seth had taken at the ranch. I did not feel like reading. I did not even feel like pretending to heave into the barf bag.

  Andrew looked sad too. He had wanted to hear wolves howling one more time, but they had not returned to the ranch.

  “I miss Jon Wayne,” Andrew said.

  “Me too,” I replied. I started to tear up a little. “I wish I could live forever at the Arrow-A.”

  Mommy patted my leg. “That sure was a fun week. Did you think so too?”

  I nodded.

  “There will be so much to tell Hannie and Nancy when we get home,” said Mommy.