Penny Read online

  Just then, my ears flicked back toward a crackling sound in the woods. I spun around so fast that the rope tangled around my legs, tripping me.

  The sound got louder. Something big and fast-moving was snapping and crunching its way through the darkness toward our camp.

  Buckeye Jack jumped to his feet and grabbed the rifle from where it leaned against the side of the tent. He aimed it at the silhouette that took shape between two trees.

  “Steady on the trigger!” said a voice from the darkness. The figure took shape to become a man wearing a white shirt and a black vest with shiny brass buttons. Even I could see that his clothes were fine, like city folks’, but his shoes and trousers were wet and muddy.

  Buckeye Jack lowered the rifle.

  “I sure am glad I spotted your campfire,” said the man. “I lost sight of the trail two days ago, and I’ve been wandering these hills since.”

  Buckeye Jack waved the stranger over to the fire. “Come and sit a spell,” he said while Jesse got up and untangled the rope from my legs. I relaxed and lowered my head but kept a wary eye on the man as he sat himself down on a split log. In my experience, any animal skulking about after sundown was bad news.

  “What brings you to these parts?” asked Buckeye Jack. “You look more like a merchant than a miner.”

  “I was a tailor back in Chicago,” the stranger replied, smoothing his muddy trousers like a bird preening its feathers. “I’m on my way to San Francisco. My sister and her husband started a music parlor that’s turning a good profit. I’ve got no wife nor other family myself, so she invited me to join them. Name’s Cal Clifton, by the way.”

  Buckeye Jack introduced himself and Jesse. “You hungry, Cal?” he asked. “What we got wouldn’t fill the belly of a mouse, but you’re welcome to share it.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got all the provisions I need,” said Cal. He took a small silver flask from his vest pocket, uncapped it, and took a long swallow.

  He offered it to Buckeye Jack, who shook his head.

  “You dig any pay dirt out of these hills yet?” asked Cal, taking another swallow.

  “None yet,” Buckeye Jack replied. “But tomorrow’ll be the day. I can feel it in my bones.”

  Jesse snorted.

  “You a betting man?” asked Cal. He put away the flask and pulled out a battered deck of playing cards.

  Buckeye Jack’s eyes lit up. “I’ve been known to play a hand of blackjack in my day,” he said.

  Jesse sighed.

  Cal reached into his vest pocket again and took out a glass bottle filled with glittering gold dust. “Six ounces,” he said. “A ways back, I ran into a man who needed a suit for a wedding at any price.”

  “If you’re a tailor, how come you ain’t got any sewing needles and fabric and such?” Jesse asked suspiciously.

  “I did, up until the last stream I crossed,” said Cal, shaking his head with regret. “Now there’s probably a few beaver dams lined with the finest English tweed and French silk that money can buy.”

  Buckeye Jack stared at the bottle of gold the way a hungry coyote looks at a clover-fattened rabbit.

  “We ain’t got nothing to bet,” Jesse said sharply. “All we got in the world is what you see here—an old tent, a rifle, and a couple of tin pans.”

  Cal looked around the nearly bare campsite. Then his gaze rested on me. “That’s a pretty painted filly,” he said. “Worth at least a hundred dollars cash, I’d say.”

  Buckeye Jack shot a sidelong glance at Jesse, then lowered his gaze. “She’s come a long way with us,” he said. “Don’t think the boy would be keen to part with her. Maybe we should call it a night.”

  But Cal turned the bottle of gold dust this way and that so it glittered even more brightly in the firelight. “Must be hard to keep a horse in good condition in a rugged place like this,” he said. “Can’t imagine you folks have much grub to spare.”

  Buckeye Jack nodded slowly, his eyes still fixed on the gold.

  “Tell you what—I’ll wager my six ounces of gold against your golden filly,” said Cal. “Best three out of five games decides it.”

  Cal held out his hand. Buckeye Jack hesitated for a moment, then shook on it.

  “Aw, I don’t believe it,” said Jesse. “You’re gonna lose the only thing we got out here that’s worth more’n a handful of rusty nails.” He got up from the fire and stalked off to the tent.

  Buckeye Jack dragged over a flat section of log to serve as a table. Cal shuffled the cards in a high arc, and then quickly dealt two hands.

  The men played late into the night. I watched with interest at first but gradually dozed off. When the hoot of a screech owl woke me with a start, the fire had died down to embers. Buckeye Jack was gone, and Cal was cocooned in a blanket on the ground, snoring loudly.

  Next morning, Cal was up before the birds, whistling as he stoked the fire. A while later, Buckeye Jack slunk out of the tent like a dog that’s been caught in the henhouse. Cal cheerfully accepted the plate of flapjacks that Buckeye Jack cooked up for breakfast.

  The smell of cooking drew Jesse out of the tent. He took one look at Buckeye Jack, then grabbed his fishing pole and disappeared into the woods without saying a word, a dark scowl on his face. I didn’t understand what he was so nettled about until Buckeye Jack slipped on my bridle and handed the reins to Cal.

  “You’ll treat her right, won’t you?” asked Buckeye Jack in a husky voice, resting a chapped hand on my neck.

  “Like a Kentucky blue blood,” Cal promised. He led me over to the stump that they had used as a card table the night before. He climbed unsteadily onto it and grabbed a handful of my mane. Before I knew what he was about, he landed on my back with a jolt that rattled my spine.

  “Giddyup!” he said, flapping his elbows and digging in his heels.

  So I giddyupped—all the way to the fork of the Feather River. Cal wasn’t, strictly speaking, my passenger at that point, but he caught up eventually. After I threw him, he was unable to find another convenient stump from which to mount, so he ended up leading me for some days until we reached Coloma. Here, hundreds of men were camped in a kind of tent city. Instead of panning for gold, they blasted it out of the hillsides with jets of water.

  Cal played cards with these miners, too. He won enough gold to fill ten glass bottles. The men only let him stop playing when he promised them a chance to win back their gold tomorrow.

  But in the middle of the night he snuck over to my hitching post with all his winnings. This time he mounted more cautiously, and we slipped away before anyone noticed our departure.

  We traveled for several more days until we reached another camp, about ten miles upriver. Again, Cal stopped for a hot supper and worked around to the same question: “Are you a betting man?”

  One of the men had found a gold nugget the size of his fingernail. The cards came out and the men began to play. It looked like the owner of the nugget would soon be parted from it. Then one of the miners let out an angry shout.

  “He’s playing crooked! I saw a card up his sleeve!”

  Quicker than I’d have thought he could move, Cal took off like a shot across the campsite. He flung himself and his stuff onto my back without the aid of his usual tree stump. So great was my surprise that I took off at a brisk gallop, leaving the angry miners in the dust.

  We didn’t find another camp that day, so Cal made a fire by the side of the trail. He cooked up a mess of flapjacks, drenched them in molasses syrup, and left them on a tin plate to cool while he hauled a bucketful of water from the river.

  The smell of the syrupy flapjacks made me lick and chew with anticipation. Not that there was much to look forward to. Cal never shared a single crumb from his supper with me. But why should that be so? I was the one who carried his flour and his frypan and his cast-iron camp stove. Before he returned, I took the
liberty of helping myself to fair payment for my services as a pack animal.

  When Cal saw me licking the empty plate, he dropped his bucket and ran toward me with a shout of rage, pelting me with pinecones.

  Well, it was plain enough that I wasn’t wanted here. Cal’s cries of anger soon turned to desperate calls for me to return. But I didn’t even flick back my ears. They were pitched toward the horizon while my sensitive nose sniffed out a familiar path. I was going home!

  Without Cal flopping on my back, I reached the far bank of the river in just a few days. I spotted Buckeye Jack in the water, wearing his hip-high rubber waders. As usual, he was swirling a pan filled with pebbles and sand. He looked up when he saw me swimming past. His cry of surprise brought Jesse running, and the boy was waiting for me when I reached the bank.

  “Back like a bad penny, are you?” he said. He fished the last wrinkled apple from the burlap sack and fed it to me.

  “A bad Penny,” he repeated, and suddenly he laughed the way I’d seen other children do. And so, at last, I was named.

  Jesse slid silently down from my back and crouched in the grass. He aimed his rifle at a rabbit nibbling on some greens. The rifle cracked once, then Jesse hurried over to collect his quarry. He skinned the rabbit quickly with his pocketknife and carried it by its feet to where I was waiting.

  I didn’t like the smell of the freshly killed game. I sidled away from Jesse as he approached. “Aw, settle down, Penny,” he said, holding out his hand to coax me over. “People gotta eat just the same as rabbits, and we can’t live on grass and wild lettuce.”

  But instead of letting him sweet-talk me into carrying that dead rabbit, I turned and trotted away. With a growl of frustration, Jesse followed. He might have left me to wander back to camp on my own, except that I would be carrying his supplies.

  I pushed through the brush and brambles until I reached an old streambed that sloped steeply upward. It must have been a waterfall once, but now it was dry. I scrambled up the slope, stones cascading from my hooves. Behind me, Jesse was panting as he climbed. This was an amusing game—even more fun than sneaking up silently behind him while he panned at the river’s edge, and then blowing suddenly in his ear.

  At the top of the hill I looked back and saw that Jesse had stopped chasing me. He was staring at something cupped in his hand…. It was one of the rocks I had shaken loose with my hooves.

  But it was no ordinary rock. It was a gleaming gold nugget the size of a wild turkey’s egg.

  * * *

  —

  Five years later…

  I stood dozing in the patchy shade of a cypress tree in the stable yard. On the ranch-house porch nearby, Buckeye Jack sat in his rocking chair, whittling a scrap of wood. The house was long and low with white stucco walls, built to stay cool during the hot summers.

  Even in this parched, dusty weather, a feeling of ease and luxury enveloped the ranch. Acres of freshly whitewashed fence crossed the landscape. Although the drought had dried the grass golden-brown, the flower beds in front of the house and stable bloomed with color. Buckeye Jack watered them every day. I often sidled over to the fence to remind him that I, too, would appreciate a sprinkling of cool water.

  It still amazed me that the nugget of shiny rock I had kicked loose by accident had bought us all this. That whole streambed had been full of gold—the mother lode that Buckeye Jack had spun so many tales about around the campfire.

  Jesse came breezing out of the ranch house, a glass of ice water in one hand and a book in the other. He paused on the porch to talk to Buckeye Jack, and they both looked up at the cloudless sky with concern. Then Jesse bounded down the steps and slipped into my corral. “How’s our Lucky Penny?” he said, holding out an ice cube on his palm. I crunched gladly on the treat, bobbing my head at the frozen tingle that spread across my lips and tongue.

  Truth be told, I was as fat and idle as a prize piglet before a county fair. Now that I was “Lucky Penny,” I hardly could lift a hoof without Buckeye Jack or Jesse appearing to smooth the way. Sometimes I longed to join the lean, purposeful ranch horses that moved the cattle across the valley, but I was too valuable to risk being gored by one of the longhorn cattle or bitten by a rattlesnake in the grass.

  My ears perked up at a distant rumbling on the horizon. Was a storm coming at last? A golden cloud rose up, but it wasn’t a raincloud. It was dust raised by hundreds of trampling hooves. The herd had returned to be grain-fattened for a few weeks before the fall market.

  I circled restlessly in my paddock while the cowboys and ranch horses drove the cattle into one of the large fenced-in pastures. I wanted to be out there, working, feeling the wind in my mane and the crush of the cattle around me!

  The cowboys camped in the field that night. I drifted to sleep as I listened to their songs, which rose as high and mournful as the call of a wolf pack. I woke up later to the lingering smell of their fire. It was early morning, still dusk.

  But no—the air wasn’t thick with darkness, it was thick with smoke. And the fire was crackling and spreading across the dry grass of the valley!

  Shouts filled the air. The cowboys had seen the fire, too. One of them galloped his bay ranch horse, Diego, to the stable yard and started furiously working the handle of the water pump. But the well was nearly dry, and the water barely trickled out of the spout.

  Buckeye Jack and Jesse came running out of the house, both of them still pulling on their regular clothes over their nightshirts.

  “We’ll have to drive the cattle into the creek,” cried the cowboy, mounting Diego again. “It’s the only way to save them!”

  Jesse grabbed a saddle from the stable and cinched it onto my back in a flash. Following close behind Diego, I raced across the smoky plain toward the herd.

  The cattle milled in random, fearful patterns at the far end of the pasture. As the blaze crept closer, one of them plunged through the fence in desperation. The rest of the herd began to stampede, racing out of control across the valley.

  Hurry, we’ve got to head them off before they reach the ravine! Diego called to me. The cattle were headed toward the red granite cliffs that rose sharply from the valley floor, too steep and smooth to climb. If we could get the herd to turn off before they reached the narrow pass to the cliffs, we might get them safely to the creek. But if they went into the ravine, they’d be trapped like grasshoppers in a slick-sided jar.

  Diego’s cowboy swung his lariat and roped one of the stampeding cattle, trying to force it to turn toward the path to the creek. But as fast as we galloped and as hard as we nipped and nudged the panicked cattle, we couldn’t make them see sense.

  The fire crackled like a wild animal at my heels. I felt like at any moment my tail might burst into flames. The cowboys shouted, the horses pressed against them, and…

  The herd barreled into the narrow pass, knocking one man off his horse. Jesse spurred me over and leaned low to help the fallen cowboy. His horse ran wild after the cattle and did not heed my whinny of warning. Jesse swung the fallen cowboy up onto my back, behind him.

  The fire choked my lungs with smoke and filled my ears with its deadly crackling.

  It was too late to save the cattle. We had no choice but to turn off toward the creek and seek safety in the thin trickle of water.

  Diego hung his head low, his breath rasping from the smoke. It was my job to keep the cattle safe, he said. All the ranch horses stood slumped and dispirited in the water while the fire burned itself out around us.

  By the time we got back to the ranch, the house and the stable were nothing more than a blackened pile of rubble. The fences were darker lines of ash on the scorched ground.

  Buckeye Jack and half a dozen neighbors were crowded around the remains of the house, still smothering small fires with feed sacks they’d soaked in a tub of water.

  Jesse climbed stiffly down from my back and led
me over to Buckeye Jack. Their faces were streaked with ash, and their eyes were bloodshot from the smoke. “The cattle are gone,” said Jesse, his voice hoarse from yelling. “We tried to get them to the creek, but they turned off into the south ravine.”

  For a moment Buckeye Jack’s face seemed to crumple into itself. Then he set his jaw and straightened his hunched back. “Just so long as you’re safe,” he said. “That’s what matters.”

  “But what will we do now?” said Jesse hopelessly, looking around the smoke-filled valley.

  “We’ll live off our wits, just like we’ve always done,” said Buckeye Jack. He stood between us and put one hand on Jesse’s shoulder and the other on my neck, leaving a smudge of ash on my gold-and-white coat. “And we’ve still got our Lucky Penny.”

  But was I really lucky? As quick as the flash of a coin flipping from heads to tails, our fortune had changed again.

  Buckeye Jack sold what was left of the ranch and used the money to pay the cowboys their season’s wages. The three of us moved to the city of Sacramento, where Buckeye Jack took whatever work he could find, from hauling water for the silversmith to raising beams for a new general store. Jesse washed dishes and ran errands for Mrs. McTavish, the owner of the boarding house where they slept.

  I was rented out to the livery stable across the street from the Silverado Saloon. The saloon had a picture of a rearing horse on the sign. The horse looked wild and proud, but that was not the life of a workhorse in Sacramento. From sunup till sundown, I hauled everything from pianos to coal through the crowded streets. My legs and back ached from the strain of pulling such heavy loads. The stable was drafty and damp, filled with bold city rats that didn’t even wait for cover of darkness to steal the oats from my bucket.