Paul tried to capture the rhythm of her muscles. He leaned back, gripping with his thighs, pushing inward and backward with his knees, turning and twisting with her, writhing like a corkscrew.
The crowds watched, horrified. This was the thrill they had come to see.
Maureen hid her face in her hands, listening. She heard the earthquake of hooves as the Red Demon headed for the tree, heard a man’s voice rasp out, “He’s going to get hung up in that pine!” She waited for the crash, but there was none. Stealthily she peered between her fingers. They were not going to crack up! The wild pony was swerving around the tree and Paul was making the spine-wrenching turn with her. He was still on!
Now the weight of Paul enraged Red Demon. Birds and flies could be removed with a swish of the tail. But no mere swishing would remove this clinging creature. There had to be violence. She brought her head and shoulder to the ground, then jerked up with a sudden sharpness. The boy’s head jounced down and shot up in unison.
A woman shrieked.
Maureen grabbed the back of her own neck. She felt as if it had been snapped in two.
“Hang on!” she screamed. “Hang on!”
Red and glaring, the hot sun struck down on the two wild things. It seemed to weld them together like bronze figures heated in the same furnace. They were all of one piece. The boy’s arms were rigid bands of bronze, and his hair did not fly and toss with the rocketing of the pony—it hung down, sweat-matted between his eyes, like the forelock of a stallion. It was hard to tell which was wilder, boy or pony.
“Fourteen seconds . . . fifteen seconds,” the voice over the loud-speaker blared.
And still the two figures were one, the boy’s arms unbending, his legs soldered in place.
That lone tree at the end of the corral! It seemed to bewitch Red Demon. Again she rushed at it, head lowered as if to gore it with her devil ears. A thousand throats gasped as she whiplashed around it again, and then once again, each time missing by a wink.
And still Paul held on.
“Twenty seconds . . . twenty-one seconds . . . ”
The power of the sun seemed to strengthen as the seconds wore on. Now it fused the two wild creatures, making molten metal of them. In fluid motion, horse and boy were riding out the fire together. Together, they dipped and rose and spurted through space, now part of the earth, now part of the sky.
Maureen felt her knees giving way. “Please! Please! Someone stop them! Oh, stop them!” She tried to brace herself against the fence to keep from falling. The beat of Red Demon’s hooves continued to pound hard and steady in her ears. She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them.
Something was happening! The molten mass was bursting in two. Everything went black before her eyes. When next she opened them, Paul was lying beside her. Then they were both picking themselves up, laughing feebly. Paul was no longer the bronzed rider on a bronzed horse. He was a dirt-streaked, pale-faced boy in faded jeans.
All about them half-frenzied visitors were swarming over the fence rails, men and women laughing and crying both, asking questions and answering themselves. And over and above the noise, the voice on the loud-speaker never stopped. “Thirty-three seconds! Thirty-three seconds! Paul rode her dizzy. The ten dollars goes to Paul Beebe.”
Chapter 9
OFF IN A SWIRL OF MIST
PAUL SPOKE in breathless jerks as they edged away from the crowd. “I’m going to give the ten dollars—to Mr. Van Meter—to see that Misty has some carrots each day,” he told Maureen.
But Mr. Van Meter refused the money. “We’ll see that Misty gets her carrots, Paul. You save your money for something very special,” he said with a wise look.
“What would that be?”
“I don’t know, but something special always turns up when my youngsters have ten dollars saved. Now you two better go home. You’ve had a hard day.”
The sun was throwing long shadows by the time Paul and Maureen arrived back at Pony Ranch. There was not much talk during supper that night, and afterward the boy and girl were too tired to enter Watch Eyes or Trinket in the night races to be held at the Pony Penning Grounds.
Paul helped Grandpa water the ponies while Maureen sat on a chicken coop drawing pictures of Misty. She worked with quick strokes because Misty seldom remained still. While the pony was drinking at the water barrel, Maureen drew a side view of her, the side with the map of the United States on it. And while she tagged after Paul, Maureen sketched a funny little back view—the softly rounded white rump and the long tail that swished from side to side when she walked. Maureen laughed aloud as she tried to put the swishes on paper.
Paul and Grandpa came to look over her shoulder.
“By smoke! I’m a jumpin’ mullet if there ain’t a strong favorance to Misty!” Grandpa said.
“It’s not bad,” Paul agreed.
“Don’t she look like a little girl wearing her grandma’s long dress?” Maureen giggled. Then her face sobered.
Paul was staring at the pictures, at all of them. “You can make me some—if you like,” he said in a low voice.
Misty went back to the water barrel for another long, cooling drink, then stood quite still watching Maureen sketch and erase and erase and sketch. The evening breeze was stirring. Soon Misty would settle down to the business of grazing by moonlight. But right now, when it was neither night nor day, she was content to snuff the winds and to look about her.
She came over to Maureen and breathed very softly down her neck. She nudged the bread board on which the drawing paper was tacked. Then, as if she were posing, she turned her head slightly, looking out over the marshland, waiting for night to close in.
Maureen sketched on. The pricked ears, the blaze on her face, the soft pink underlip with its few lady whiskers, the mane lifted by the small wind.
At last she had four pictures for Paul and four for herself. She started to say good-night to Misty, but Grandma was watching from the doorway.
“Let’s see what you’ve done, Maureen,” she called out. “As a girl I was always one for drawing, too.”
Maureen showed Grandma the pictures and smiled at her praise. Then she put the ones for Paul on a shelf in his room and went to her own room. There she laid her page of sketches on her pillow, and fell into a deep, exhausted slumber.
Toward morning, sounds pecked at her sleep. She dreamed she was riding Red Demon on an oyster-shell road, and the tattoo of hooves pinged sharper and sharper in her ears.
She awoke to the sound of hammer strokes. With sudden anxiety she was out of bed, dressing, hurrying to join Paul and Grandpa. The hammer strokes could mean but one thing. They were building a crate for Misty. She must get to them quickly—to see they built it big enough, strong enough.
“If I don’t have to eat any breakfast,” she pleaded with Grandma, “I’ll make up for it tomorrow. Honest I will.”
To Maureen’s astonishment Grandma agreed. “No griddle cakes this morning,” she said. “They’d stick in your throat and lump in your stummick. Only this tiny glass of milk.”
Instead of an everyday glass tumbler, Grandma was pouring the milk in the ruby-colored glass, the one her own grandmother had left her. Maureen somehow managed to drink all of it.
When she burst out of the house, the floor of the crate was already built.
“Maureen!” Grandpa called to her. “You hurry down marsh and gather driftwood. Paul, you look in that bunch of scantlings. See if there’s anything we can use. I’m a-danged if lumber around Pony Ranch ain’t scarce as two-headed cats.”
The finished crate was an odd-looking object. Uprights had been splintered from an old gate, laths taken from a deserted chicken roost, and driftwood from who knows where; but so much care and measuring had gone into the making of it that to Paul and Maureen and Grandpa it did not look rough-made at all.
“Snug, ain’t it?” said Grandpa, forcing a smile. “And Paul’s gathered a big enough bundle of salt grass to last her the hull day.”
/> “ ’Member when we readied the stall for Phantom?” asked Maureen very softly. “Readying a crate is not . . . is not . . . ”
Grandpa snapped his fingers. “Consarn it all!” he sputtered. “I plumb forgot the pine shatters. Paul and Maureen, you gather some nice smelly pine shatters from off’n the floor of the woods. Nothin’ makes a better cushion for pony feet as pine shatters. Besides, it smells to their liking. Everything’ll smell to her liking—salt grass, driftwood, pine shatters.”
Taking the wheelbarrow and an old broom, Paul and Maureen headed for the woods.
“Grandpa can think of more things for us to do!” Maureen scolded as she swept the pine needles in a heap.
“It’s just his way of putting our winkers on, Maureen.”
Scarcely were the pine needles dumped onto the floor of the crate than Grandpa pointed to the sky.
“Be that winged critter a gull or a plane?”
The beat of engines was the answer. A silver plane came sweeping down on Pony Ranch, now circling it. now banking, now turning into the wind, landing, taxiing right up to the gate!
Barnyard creatures flew screeching into the air. The older ponies ran snorting for their shed. Only Misty stood her ground. She had seen this strange silver bird before. She had snuffed it carefully from its big nose to its twin tails. There was nothing at all to be afraid of.
Mr. Van Meter and Mr. Jacobs jumped out of the cockpit. They nodded a good-morning to Grandpa, then came right over to Paul and Maureen.
“It makes it easier,” Mr. Jacobs hesitated, then tried again. “It makes it easier,” he said, “knowing you two want to share Misty with boys and girls everywhere. Van and I were saying this morning—if we didn’t know we were going to make thousands of children happy, we certainly wouldn’t make two sad.”
“Maureen!” commanded Paul, and there was something of Grandpa’s tone in his voice. “Here’s some corn kernels. You stand by the crate and slip your hand between the boards.”
Maureen did as she was told.
“Now hold out the nibbles and call to her.”
Maureen’s voice faltered, “Come along—little Misty,” she sang brokenly, “come—along.”
Misty hesitated only an instant. Then she stepped onto the friendly pine needles and walked into the crate.
It took Grandpa and Paul, Mr. Van Meter and Mr. Jacobs, and the pilot, too, to load the crate onto the plane.
Maureen stood watching, looking and thinking and trying not to do either.
Suddenly she felt a pair of warm arms folded close about her. She turned and buried her face in Grandma’s broad bosom. “Oh, Grandma,” she sobbed, “I feel just like a mother who has borned many children. But Misty is my favorite. And it hurts to have her grow up and leave us . . . without even looking back and whinkerin’. She’s—” Maureen burst into tears, “she’s even eating her grass!”
“She don’t understand, honey,” comforted Grandma. “She’s just a young ’un, all excited in her mind. Children and ponies both get all excited with traveling and their boxed lunches. They seldom cry when they go off. It’s the ones left behind does the bellering. Now blow your nose good and don’t let Paul see you cry.”
After the crate was safely stowed inside the plane, the men came back out and looked from one silent face to another.
“Now we will say good-bye to you all,” Mr. Van Meter said quietly. “We will do everything we can to keep Misty well and make her happy. She has a big job in life now. She’s got to be a sea horse more than ever, leaving a little trail of happiness in her wake wherever she goes. She’s got work to do!”
“Please,” asked Maureen, “always each night whisper in Misty’s ear that we’ll be here a-waiting for her when she’s ready to come home.”
“Think of it!” said Paul with a crooked smile. “Misty’s the first one of the family to see our islands from the air.” He turned to Mr. Van Meter. “Do you suppose you could point out the White Hill to her from the air so’s she could see where the Spanish galleon was wrecked?”
“I think we could, Paul.”
“Then you could tell her how brave her great-great-great-great granddaddy and mammy were; how they swum ashore from the wrecked galleon in a raging storm.”
“We’ll tell her that, Paul.”
“Gee willikers,” Grandpa’s voice cracked, “git agoin’ afore we changes our minds and hauls Misty back out.”
Mr. Van Meter nodded. He signaled to the pilot to start up the engines. Then he and Mr. Jacobs stepped inside the plane.
“And be careful,” bellowed Grandpa above the noise of the engines, “ ’bout letting big chunky kids ride Misty too soon. Recomember she’s a young ’un yet.”
The plane nosed the wind and roared along the narrow spit of land, the sound of its engines deepening as it climbed. It passed over a lone, wind-crippled pine tree, then up and up and out across the channel, away into the blue distance.
“She’s over the White Hill!” shouted Paul into the wave of silence that broke over them.
They watched until the plane was swallowed in a white cloud of mist.
“Now ain’t that just like a storybook?” Grandpa crowed, while he rubbed the bristles in his ear. “When Paul fust seed her she was all tangled up in a skein of mist, and now she leaves in a sudden swirl of it. Don’t it ease the pain of her goin’?”
There was no answer. None at all.
“Don’t it?” he insisted, pulling his hat down low over his eye. “That is, somewhat?”
Chapter 10
ALL ALONE AT TOM’S COVE
FOR THE space of a few brief moments, the little huddle of those left behind stood rooted. Whether they still heard or only imagined they heard the purring of the plane, no one knew.
Grandpa let out a sigh that seemed to come from his boots. “Hmpf! You folks can stand here a-moonin’,” he said at last, “but as fer me, I got to hyper along to the Pony Pennin’ Grounds. This be one of my big days. Some of the strangers from over on the main may want to buy a partic’lar pony with a partic’lar markin’, and might be I’ll have jes’ the one fer ’em. Come along, Paul and Maureen.”
Paul shook his head. “If you don’t care, Grandpa, I don’t believe I want to see any ponies today.”
Grandma cleared her throat. “Clarence,” she said, “I promised the Ladies’ Auxiliary to bring some oysters to the Pony Penning Dinner this noon and to fry ’em myself. If you can spare the children, I’d like to have them take the little boat and gather some Tom’s Cove oysters for me. I want to be sure they’re good and plump and right fresh out of the sea.”
Listlessly Paul and Maureen followed Grandma to the house. They put on their high rubber boots. They took the flannel gloves and the baskets she offered.
As they walked to Old Dominion Point, they stared blindly at the familiar sights. The beach was deserted now except for the little white striker birds tippeting along the shore on their red feet. The milling crowds of yesterday were gone. They were at the Pony Penning Grounds.
In silence the boy and the girl climbed in a small boat with an outboard motor. Paul cast off the mooring line. He started the motor. It sputtered and stopped. He tried again. This time it chugged evenly.
They were sculling the waves now, heading across the inlet. Paul looked dead ahead. He saw a fishhawk strike the surface of the water in front of the boat, then rise again with a fish so large he could hardly fly with it. He saw the lighthouse of Assateague, like some giant’s dagger stuck in the island to keep it from floating out to sea. A circle of buzzards wheeled low over Tom’s Cove, making a racket that could be heard above the beat of the motor. Idly Paul pointed to them.
Maureen nodded. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Likely something dead. A shark, maybe,” she called to him.
“Something’s alive, too,” he called back. “It’s keeping the birds from swoopin’ down.”
Now they were so close to Tom’s Cove they could distinguish the shrill chirring of t
he hawks and the high whistle of the osprey. Paul’s indifference was gone.
“The live thing’s a baby colt!” he cried.
He shut off the motor and beached the boat. He made a sun visor out of his hand. And there, not a hundred yards away, standing quiet, was a spindle-legged foal. It had a crooked star on its forehead. And as it stood there with its legs all splayed out, it looked like a tiny wooden carving against a cardboard sea.
Maureen spoke Paul’s thoughts. “He’s like the little wooden colts Mr. Lester makes for Christmas.” Then she looked down at the quiet thing lying in the sand. Her voice fell to a whisper. “It’s not a shark that’s dead.”
“No,” said Paul, “it’s his mamma.”
They started out of the boat, but when the foal heard the plash-plash made by their rubber boots, he gallumphed away, fast as his toothpick legs would carry him.
“Don’t go after him, Maureen. He’s afeared. Stand quiet. Might be he’ll come to us.”
Paul’s plan worked. When no one gave chase, the foal minced to a stop, then turned his wild brown eyes on them. The crooked star on his forehead seemed to widen the space between his eyes. It gave him an expression of startled wonder.
A quiet stillness lay over Tom’s Cove. Even the circle of birds had stopped their screaming. Paul and Maureen made no move at all. They stood as still as the wooden stakes that marked the oyster beds.
Cautiously, as a child who has lighted a firecracker comes back to see if it will explode, so the foal came a step toward them. Then another out of wild curiousness, and another. When Paul and Maureen still did not move, he grew bold, dancing closer and closer, asking questions with his pricked ears and repeating them with his small question-mark of a tail.