Gib and the Gray Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

from Miss Hooper that Julia Thornton would have adopted Gib right after his mother died, except that Mr. Thornton wouldn’t let her.
    So there had always been all sorts of audacious questions he would have liked to ask Missus Julia, but for some reason he just couldn’t. Not even when they had long talks about other things, like about the old days when her father, Dan Merrill, was alive and the Rocking M was the biggest ranch in the state. Gib particularly liked hearing Missus Julia talk about all the horses she’d owned, clear back to a pinto pony named Dandy her father gave her for her fourth birthday.
    Gib liked hearing about Missus Julia’s horses. And he especially liked the way her face changed when she talked about them. It seemed to Gib that her face had a healthier color to it and her cough got better too when she talked about Dandy or Silky or any of the other horses she’d owned. Missus Julia was easy as anything to talk horses with, but bringing up things like adoption papers was something else again.
    It was with Hy that Gib finally managed to edge up on the adoption question. It was on the second day of the blizzard when the two of them were out in the barn, feeding the stock. Asking Hy any kind of personal question had its good side and its bad side. The good side was how easy Gib felt about asking. The bad side was that, unless the question had to do with horses, Hy probably wouldn’t know the answer. Gib decided to ask anyway, but the only answer he got was, “Well now, Gibby. Seems to me as how you’re askin’ if you’re still just a hired hand like old Hy Carter, or if there’s going to be some paperwork done that says you’re a part of the Thornton family. That it?”
    “No,” Gib said, “not exactly. Well, sort of ...
    And Hy chuckled and said he didn’t see why it mattered. “Not now anyways. Not now we got ourselves a real Merrill back in charge of the spread agin. Don’t matter none that her name’s still Thornton, Missus Julia’s a real prairie-bred Merrill and always will be. And you can bet your bottom dollar that she’ll treat everybody fair and square, jist like her daddy afore her. So don’t you go worryin’ none about what’s put on a piece of paper.” Hy hobbled off then, leaving Gib as much in the dark as ever.
    Miss Hooper wasn’t talking either. Not even when Gib came right out and asked her what kind of paper it was that she’d signed for him that day in Miss Offenbacher’s office. Miss Hooper had let school out early that day, because she had a headache and Livy had already disappeared, so Gib thought it was a good time to ask. But when he did, Miss Hooper said that the only signing she’d done that day was on a check.
    But if no one else would tell Gib exactly what kind of space he was filling, Livy didn’t mind sharing her opinions on the subject. Particularly when she got her dander up over something Gib had done or said. Whenever that happened she could think of things to say that made it pretty clear that, as far as she was concerned, Gib Whittaker was still just an ordinary old farm-out orphan.
    Like the time, during an American history class, when Miss Hooper had gone out to get some tea and Livy asked Gib how he’d answered the “Give me liberty or give me death” question. Gib was pretty sure it had been Patrick Henry who’d said it, but when he said so Livy said that she distinctly remembered seeing a picture of Paul Revere shouting something about death and liberty along with the news about the British coming. So she wrote down Paul Revere and when it turned out that Gib was right, she only shrugged a little and pretended she didn’t care. But a little later she found a way to get even.
    That happened when Miss Hooper asked Gib to explain the difference between renting and leasing. Gib was trying to say as how he’d always thought that renting was something you did by the month, and leasing was when you wanted to keep something for a longer