Katie and the Mustang, Book 3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

far side of the river, I kept my eyes moving, scanning the trees and the sandy bank, but the boy wasn’t around. I hung back, walking a little way behind the last wagon for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER FIVE

    This seems a good place to me. A herd of horses
could live well here. But the little one and the rest of the
two-leggeds are going on. Perhaps they are looking
for forests and swifter, colder rivers. Maybe they are
going to the country I was born in.
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    F rom the Elkhorn crossing, we went west, then northwest, following the Platte River. The road became ten roads, then twenty paths.
    We crossed a dozen rivers that no one had names for in the weeks that followed. Every river was scary in its own way. Some were deep, some swift, some were both.
    Twice the men caulked the wagon beds and the wagons were floated across, like clumsy boats, pulled by ropes and teams of oxen on the shore. More often, we drove across, the oxen hitched and swimming. We always used a tow rope upstream and a fixed rope on the downstream side, to give anyone thrown into the water a chance to catch on and stay afloat.
    Andrew lost one gelding, and the black dog was washed downstream in a current so swift that he was there one instant and lost in white foam and roaring water the next. The young man who had brought him whistled and called for days, every time we stopped, hoping that the dog had made it out of the river and was following, but he never came back.
    There were dozens of streams and creeks, too. Most of them had no names that anyone of us knew, anyway. All the big rivers were scary, but no one drowned. We were lucky; we all heard many terrible stories of drownings from other travelers.
    Mr. Barrett, the man who Mr. Stevens had planned to travel with, had talked about the Oregon trail, but we began to realize that there wasn’t a single trail, not really—and that not all the rutted paths were good roads. The lay of the land mattered more than anything else. Sometime the best-worn paths led to marshes or creeks that had to be crossed—or couldn’t be crossed—because of early rains.
    Mr. Teal rode out every evening, scouting for the next day, but he couldn’t always go far enough before dark to tell which was the best path to follow. He made his best guess, and we followed his advice. Mostly, he was right.
    As we went, our days took on a pattern. We rose before it was light and fell to our chores, everyone stretching and yawning as they began their daily work. I would run to make sure the Mustang was all right, then hurry back to the Kylers’ camp, shivering and hungry. It seemed like I was always hungry.
    My first morning chore was to rake back the white ash, baring the still-hot coals that had lasted the night. Using twists of dry grass or dead twigs or whatever I had managed to gather the day before, I got the fire going again so Mrs. Kyler could start cooking breakfast.
    I really liked this still-dark part of our days. We usually talked a little, shivering in the dawn dusk, keeping our voices down so that anyone trying to get a few extra minutes’ sleep could do so.
    I kept the fire very small, adding as little wood as I could and still keep it burning while Mrs. Kyler heated coffee and cooked eggs or ham. She was quick. She wasted no time at all getting started on breakfast in the morning. Half the time she had the skillet ready before I had rekindled the fire. I appreciated it. We had to be very careful of firewood. It was hard to find.
    There weren’t many cottonwood trees—they only grew along the creeks and rivers. And even when we saw a lot of trees in a day, there wasn’t much deadwood in easy reach. The easy pickings had been taken by people who came before us.
    It was my job to keep us in wood since I could range around—and make my way into thick copses of trees the wagons had to avoid. I brought back all I could carry, and put it in an old wire hayrick Mr.