Midnight Lady Read Online Free PDF Page A

considered it fine to drug her into a feeble stupor! Kirstie looked daggers at him as he exchanged words with Chuck Perry then hurried back into the barn to see if Midnight Lady was ready to be fetched.
    “Don’t shake your head like that,” Donna told Hadley. “I know you think Leon’s way of working is a little—what shall we say—direct—”
    “… Old-fashioned,” Hadley interrupted. “Guys were working that way with horses, sacking them out, hobbling them, wearing them down with fear, when I was a kid. I thought it had died out over the last few years, so it beats me where young Leon learned to do it.”
    “Way out in Wyoming.” Donna warned them to move aside as her manager led a lethargic Midnight Lady into the yard.
    The horse was still heavily doped and unsteady on her legs, hardly aware of what was happening when the briskly businesslike shoer stood alongside and lifted each of her legs in turn. He matched metal shoes against her hooves, gave his forge an extra blast of heat from the canister of gas connected to it. Flames belched out, making Midnight Lady flinch and stagger.
    “That’s where Leon worked before I hired him for Circle R earlier this year,” Donna explained. “He’s known horses all his life, lived on a ranch way out on the state’s eastern plains. The sacking out method’s been handed down from generation to generation, and Leon reckons it works much better than any of the modern, horse whisperer stuff.” She pointed to the corral where TJ and Jesse were dismounting from Skeeter and Moonpie. “And there’s the evidence in front of our very eyes!”
    “B-but!” Lisa grimaced as Chuck hammered the red-hot shoes onto the gray mare’s feet. There was the smell of singed hoof, the grating sound of a metal rasp.
    “Shh!” Kirstie warned. There were giant
buts
in her own mind, too, yet she had just realized the sense of not openly challenging the ranch owner. Donna Rose might look and sound like a fragile flower, easily swayed, but Kirstie detected a hard edge, too.
    “Look at it this way,” she told them. “It’s a battle of wills. Man against horse. And the horse is twelve-hundred pounds of muscle with a brain the size of a can of corn. What are you gonna do? Match him pound for pound? No way. Like Leon says, you use your superior brainpower to fool him into thinking you’re the boss. Tactics is what it’s all about.”
    “Hmm,” Hadley said again. He tilted his hat back.
    “You want him to show you?” Donna was more than willing to prove her point once more.
    “Right now?” Kirstie frowned.
    “Sure. Leon’s planning another session before sundown. Why not watch while Chuck shoes Moonpie and Skeeter?”
    Before they could object, Donna went ahead and made arrangements with Leon.
    “I’m not sure I want to see this,” Lisa whispered to Kirstie as the ranch manager led a groggy, newly shod Midnight Lady into the corral.
    “I
know
I don’t!” she hissed back. Secretly she prayed that the horse would disprove Leon Franks’s cruel theory by fighting back. Yet that would lead to pain. So no, she hoped Midnight Lady would submit. Oh, but that would be sad, to see a beautiful creature’s spirit broken!
Confrontation. Battle. Winners and losers.
Her mind whirled; she squeezed her eyes tight shut and wished for it all to go away.
    But when she opened them, there was Leon Franks in the corral with ropes and tarps. Midnight Lady was already tethered to a post as he tied a corner of one square of tarpaulin to the end of a rope. The sight sent the mare kicking and rearing, plunging this way and that. The veins in her neck swelled up, her eyes bulged.
    Whack!
Leon flung the tarp over her hindquarters. It landed with a heavy smack.
    Midnight Lady pulled away as if her life depended on escaping from under the tarp. She butted and bit, kicked and bucked.
    He dragged it clear, stooped to pick it up, threw it again.
    Once more the horse went crazy.
    Lisa turned away. Hadley