A Tale Out of Luck Read Online Free PDF Page B

you
girls
had guard duty last night?”
    Jay Blue pointed toward Skeeter’s bunk, but when he looked, he only saw Skeeter pointing back at him.
    “It was your night,” Skeeter said.
    “You said you’d cover it for me!”
    The argument ended there as Jay Blue’s father reached for the nearest culprit, and that was Skeeter. But Skeeter was quick when he was scared, and he ducked aside, hurdled the broken door, and escaped with the foot speed of a cottontail rabbit.
    Jay Blue saw his father descend on him next. He rolled off the mattress as the ex-Ranger pounced. Landing on the old puncheon floor, his ribs and his head flared with pain from last night’s scuffle. Under the bunk, he could see daylight through the open doorway, so he rolled that way under the bed frame, avoiding his father’s next attempt to grab him. Once on the other side of the bunk, he sprang to his feet, ran right over Long Tom Merrick’s shins, and burst outside into the gray light of the morning.
    He saw Skeeter duck into the barn and thought that was a good place to grab a horse and skedaddle.
    Behind him, he heard Policarpo Losoya, the ranch foreman: “
¿Que pasa, Capitán?
”
    Then the roar of his father: “Somebody stole my mare!”
    Jay Blue stopped just inside the door to the barn, his father’s announcement sinking into his brain. Skeeter had been trying to saddle a horse, but he had heard the captain, too, and now he was just standing there with his mouth open. He looked toward the empty corral where he had left the mare the night before, then back at Jay Blue. “Oh, shit!” he said.
    “Hell’s bells, Skeeter!” This was even worse than Jay Blue had imagined. He was in deep enough trouble for sneaking off to town—but the loss of that mare . . . His father might kill him. Well, okay, he wouldn’t literally kill him, but right now Jay Blue was almost wishing he
was
dead.
    “She was there when I went to sleep,” Skeeter said.
    “Christ almighty!” Jay Blue grabbed a bridle. “We’ve got to get her back, or we’re dead.”
    Skeeter nodded as he went back to saddling the pony. “
Seguro que sí.
Even worse than dead.”
    The captain stormed into the barn just then, and both Jay Blue and Skeeter had to quit everything in order to climb the railings into the adjoining corral, staying just out of the captain’s reach. Skeeter hid behind a trough as Jay Blue kept the horses between himself and his father.
    “Come out of there and face the music, damn it!” The angry rancher was working the outside perimeter of the corrals, trying to catch sight of the boys. Jay Blue managed to stay hidden behind the moving horses in the corral, but lost track of where Skeeter had gone. As he played hide-and-seek with the most dangerous ex-Ranger in Texas, Jay Blue heard Policarpo giving orders, in a rather low tone of voice, to some of the other cowboys: “Saddle those boys two mounts so they can get out of here. Tonk, come look at the tracks around the mare’s pen with me.”
    Jay Blue hoped his father, who had gone a bit deaf, might have missed all that. He was well winded from hiding behind the moving horses by the time Policarpo called out to Captain Tomlinson: “
¡Jefe!
You better come look!”
    Under the bellies of the horses, Jay Blue watched his father break away from the barn corrals and stalk over to the circular bronc-busting pen. “Skeeter!” Jay Blue hissed in a loud whisper. “Now’s our chance. Where the hell are you?”
    Skeeter dropped from the loft into the barn corral. Crouching with Skeeter, Jay Blue caught his breath as he peered between the corral rails at the foreman, the captain, and the captain’s trusted Indian scout, Tonkawa Jones—known as Tonk. Policarpo had pulled on some pants, but was still barefooted. Tonk wore his moccasins and a nightshirt. They were all studying and discussing the evidence on the ground around the mare’s pen.
    Jay Blue heard Policarpo talking to his father: “Tonk says one horse