Ranch Hands (6 page)

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Jeannie said. “It’s their job; they can do it.”

“But they would have done it all wrong, just to spite me,” Kate said. “I know.”

“Then they would have done it again until they did it right,” Jeannie said. “They’re supposed to learn to carry their own weight on a working ranch. What you did teaches them that they can get away without carrying anything.”

“Oh,” Kate said, knowing full well that Jeannie was right and feeling as though she’d just let everybody down. She was in the middle of figuring out how she could make it right—make Larry and the other kids do an extra chore just to stress Jeannie’s point about everybody carrying his or her own weight—when a shriek came from the henhouse. Jeannie dropped the pot she was scrubbing, Kate flung down the dish towel, and the three kids in the dining room abandoned the salt-and-pepper roundup game to see what was going on.

What they found was Carole, holding her wrist and obviously trying to hold back some tears. She was the
one who had screamed. Kate and Stevie ran over to her and asked her what had happened.

“She bit me!” Carole yelled loudly.

The first thought that entered Stevie’s head was that Carole meant that Lois had bitten her, though Stevie knew perfectly well that Lois had been with her in the onion patch. Then she realized Carole meant she’d been bitten by a hen.

Carole held out her wrist for her friends to inspect. It was swollen and bruised. The skin was broken, and there was a small bead of blood.

“She hurt you that badly over one measly egg?” Stevie asked.

“Oh, they can get pretty feisty sometimes,” Eli said. Carole could have sworn there was a little smirk in his tone—as if he’d known it and hadn’t realized he’d have to tell an Eastern dude something so simple and so obvious.

“At least I got the egg,” Carole said, holding it up triumphantly for everyone to see. What they saw was a fresh egg with a big crack in it. “It should be okay if we eat it today or tomorrow.”

“And scramble it,” Larry whispered loudly. Lois and Linc laughed. So did four or five other kids who were standing nearby. It didn’t make Carole feel any better.

“Are there any bandages around?” Carole asked.

“Sure,” Eli said. “They’re in the bathroom in the main house. Help yourself.”

The look on Carole’s face told her friends that right then she was incapable of helping herself. Both Stevie and Kate volunteered to go with her. They looked to Eli for permission. “I guess so,” he said. “But hurry back, we’re going for a ride soon.”

Carole handed the egg to Eli, and she and her friends headed indoors. The last thing they heard before they stepped up onto the farmhouse porch was one of the L-ions asking the other two: “How many English riders does it take to put on a Band-Aid?”

The girls didn’t wait to hear the answer. They simply fled to the bathroom.

“This isn’t going well, is it?” Kate asked, putting words to the question that was on all of their minds.

“Not as far as I can tell,” said Stevie. “And from the look of this cut, Carole and the hen would agree with that.”

“I feel so stupid,” Carole said, looking more closely at the cut. “I just never thought the hen might not like it.”

“You had no way of knowing,” Kate reminded her. “You’ve never collected eggs before.”

“I’ve read about it in books. I’ve seen it in movies. The way they show it, it’s always the kid in the family who does it. I sort of thought that meant it wasn’t hard or dangerous. I guess I was wrong. I just feel stupid.”

“Me, too,” Stevie said. When Kate and Carole
looked at her questioningly, she explained about not knowing the difference between an onion and a weed. Kate then told her friends about the kids who’d wangled her into doing their job.

“I don’t think we’re quite the stars here that we were hoping to be,” Stevie said.

“And I don’t think we’ve fooled anybody,” said Kate. “The kids all seemed to have this gigantic expectation about how wonderful we were and look at what we’ve done.”

“Yeah,” Carole agreed. “I got the impression that Eli and Jeannie have spent the last couple of days telling the campers we’re geniuses. We’ve let them down, too.”

“Cheer up, guys,” Kate said, finding a bright side of the situation. “Eli and Jeannie certainly never told anybody that we were geniuses at weeding gardens, wiping tables, or collecting eggs, did they? They told them we were geniuses at horseback riding and that’s what we’re about to do. It’s the perfect chance for us to redeem ourselves.”

Stevie and Carole were quiet for a minute. That was partly because Stevie was trying to choose the best way to put the bandage on Carole’s cut. It was also because they were considering Kate’s observation.

“Think so?” Stevie said after a while.

“Definitely,” Kate said.

Stevie decided Kate’s certainty was good enough for
her. There were definitely better times ahead. Carole believed it, too. Stevie admired her handiwork on Carole’s wrist, crumpled the bandage wrapper, dropped it in the wastebasket, and said, “Let’s go riding!”

The girls met up with the campers and Eli at the large paddock where Eli was showing them how to cut out the horses they wanted to ride for the day. It was a job that Kate had watched Eli do a hundred times at the Bar None, and she knew how to do it almost as well as he did. Obviously Eli had been expecting her to help with this job because he’d already saddled up her horse.

She hopped over the fence and mounted up. Eli gave her a welcoming smile. Eli hadn’t ever been much of a talker. A smile from him said more than a thousand words. It gave Kate the confidence she’d been lacking ever since she’d blown it on cleanup duty earlier.

“I’ll work on the left side,” she suggested. Eli nodded. Kate went to work.

Eli was cutting about twenty horses. The herd was more than fifty, and the routine at High Meadow seemed to be about what it had been at Bar None. Each day they’d take some of the horses out for use that day. Others would get a day of rest. Eli certainly knew the herd. It had always been part of his job at the Bar None to judge which horses would be good for
which riders. As he chose the horses to cut out of the pack, Kate just made it her job to see to it that that horse stayed cut out. The two of them had the help of Eli’s dog, Mel, a caramel-colored mixed breed and the smartest working dog Kate had ever seen.

When the day’s twenty horses were clear of the herd, Eli and Mel brought them over toward the campers and began assigning each child to one horse. Kate guarded the rest of the herd, so that they stayed away from the day’s horses. She looked around for the best way to do that. There was a gate in the fence behind her. It opened into a smaller paddock where a lone horse grazed, apparently oblivious to all the activity around. The easiest way to keep the horses separate would be to herd them all into the smaller paddock, at least for the time being while the day’s horses were being saddled. She lifted the latch on the high gate, swung it open, and began to shoo the horses into the smaller paddock.

It took her only a few minutes. She rode back to where Eli, Carole, and Stevie were helping the young riders put the saddles on their assigned horses. Everything looked just the way it should. It felt good to Kate to know that, finally, she and her friends were being helpful.

“I put the rest of the herd into that smaller field,” she reported to Eli, who looked up from his work to see what she was talking about.

“Can’t do that,” he said.

“I just did,” she said. “Why not?”

“That there is Arthur,” he said, pointing to the horse who’d been in the field by himself. “He belongs to the man who owns this farm. Man’s devoted to the creature, though I don’t know why. Every time Arthur gets in with other horses, he’s trouble. Got to get the rest of the herd out.”

“Can’t I just take Arthur out?”

“Nope.”

Kate sighed. Getting thirty horses into a paddock with one other horse was easy. Getting thirty horses out of a paddock, leaving just one, wasn’t easy. She was annoyed with herself. She should have asked Eli where to keep the rest of the herd. She had made the mistake, and now she had to correct it.

It took Kate a while to get the herd rounded up and out of the paddock. There were plenty of fenced areas around the farm so figuring out where to put them wasn’t hard. Keeping Arthur in and getting the herd out proved to be more difficult, but she did it. By the time she finished, all the campers were in their saddles and waiting for her. She didn’t enjoy riding back to the group as they sat there, watching. It felt very humiliating. She decided to rise above it.

“Let’s go for a ride!” she said brightly. Eli clicked his tongue and nudged his horse. The ride began.

*  *  *

T
HAT NIGHT
,
WHEN
Eli announced a camp-fire cowboy sing, Kate, Carole, and Stevie begged off, saying they were still tired from their plane trip. Nobody believed them, but nobody stopped them either. The girls figured the campers were glad to be rid of them. They didn’t know what Eli and Jeannie thought. They weren’t sure they cared.

“Last one into her pajamas is a rotten egg,” Stevie declared. She was already in her pajamas by then so she had an unfair advantage. While Carole and Kate followed suit, she made use of the time by building a little fire in their potbellied stove. They weren’t going to sing cowboy songs, but Stevie thought there was a good chance they would sing the blues.

Once in her pajamas, Carole flopped into one of the folding chairs and watched the flames flicker to life in the stove.

“At first, I thought the low point of the day was when the hen bit me,” she said. “But then it actually came when I fell off the horse.” There was a moment of quiet, and then she repeated the words as if to be sure they were true: “I … fell … off … the … horse.” It didn’t sound any more real the second time, but it was just as true.

During the trail ride, Eli had asked Carole to bring up the rear. That was a compliment. In general on trail rides, the best rider was in the front and the second best in the back. There had to be a strong rider
at the rear to be sure everybody was safe and to be in charge if something happened. Considering her track record since she’d arrived, Carole was pleased that Eli had asked her to take that position. Apparently, he didn’t hold an angry hen against her.

Being in the saddle and on a trail ride had seemed like exactly the right thing to heal all the humiliation of the previous events. Carole had often felt that being with horses made everything else better. She’d been content. She’d not only been riding, but she’d also been able to talk about it. One of the campers—not one of the L-ions—had asked her about the differences between English and Western riding, and it was an opportunity to explain something. She loved explaining things. Her friends sometimes teased her that she gave twenty-five-cent answers to nickel questions, but Carole was, nevertheless, happy as she shared her knowledge with the younger rider.

Then the trail had begun leading upwards. Eli had passed the word back to remind all the riders to lean forward, compensating for the change in balance as the trail got steeper. Carole, however, was so involved in her explanation that she wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t lean forward far enough, and the next thing she knew, she’d slid right out of the saddle and onto the rocky trail. She’d felt like a total idiot. Her horse stopped patiently, as if he’d had plenty of experience waiting for dumb dudes, and she’d gotten right
back into the saddle, but not before everybody had noticed, and most people had laughed—especially the L-ions.

Eli had then suggested that Kate take up the rear, saying he wanted to be sure Carole hadn’t hurt herself. He was obviously just being nice about the fact that he couldn’t trust her at the rear anymore.

“Carole, it could have happened to anyone,” Stevie said.

“Sure, it could have. I fell off a horse once,” Kate added.

“Right. When you were about eight years old,” Carole said numbly.

“At least you didn’t put thirty horses in the wrong paddock,” Kate said, remembering her own worst moment.

“Or be laughed at for not knowing an onion for a weed,” Stevie chimed in.

All in all, it had not been a wonderful day.

There was a knock at the door. The girls turned, wondering who on earth would want to be anywhere near them. It was Jeannie.

“Can I come in? I don’t think I can stand another verse of ‘Home on the Range.’ It makes me think of that stove.…”

She was making a joke about all the cooking she’d been doing. The very idea of making a joke after the dreadful day they’d had seemed totally weird.

“Are you okay?” Stevie asked.

“More or less,” Jeannie said. “I haven’t had a minute to talk to you girls and tell how glad we are you’re here.”

“You are?”

“We sure are,” she said. “See, we’ve had a problem with the staff. Four campers dropped out at the last minute and never paid us anything. We had two counselors signed up, but we had to let them go because we didn’t have enough income. We’re really relying on you three for a lot and asking you to do an awful lot of work for us. I just wanted to let you know that it’s going to be tough.”

“I guess we know that and we don’t mind,” Kate said. “I’ve seen how hard my parents have had to work to keep the Bar None going. I also know how much you and Eli helped them. I want to be of some use to you guys with High Meadow.”

“Me, too,” Stevie said. Carole nodded agreement.

“Well, thanks,” Jeannie said. “I guess I’d better get back to my home on the range—the stove, I mean. I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to make for breakfast. See you,” she said, and she was gone.

“We’re letting them down,” Stevie said. “That was a pep talk, wasn’t it?”

“Sounded like it to me,” Kate agreed.

“We can help. We really can,” Carole said. “We
just have to figure out how and to stop doing stupid things, like falling off horses.”

“We just have to try harder,” Stevie agreed.

They all knew that was true, but so far their trying hadn’t done much good. How much harder could they try? And how much good would it do?