Gypsy Gold Page 4

  Once more, he included the horse in the conversation. “But that was the easy part, wasn’t it, girl?” Then he looked at Sam and Jen. “Traveling cross-country must be imprinted in their DNA.”

  “What kind of horse is she?” Sam asked.

  “A Gypsy Vanner,” Nicolas said proudly. “Officially it’s a fairly new breed, but her ancestors have been pulling vardos for generations. First just walking at roadsides, tolerating other horses, riders, and carriages. Then, with the coming of trains, they learned to cross the tracks moments after those loud monsters went by, and finally, they accepted all the racket of cars and trucks.”

  “She has draft blood, doesn’t she?” Jen observed.

  Nicolas nodded. “Gypsy Vanners are a combination of black Shire horses and white Dales ponies, according to my grandmother. My grandfather claims that they owe more to trotters with no names except ‘champion who wins every time I bet on him.’”

  Sam smiled and looked at Ace.

  “So they’re a lot like mustangs,” she said. “A lot of great breeds came together to make one amazing horse.”

  Nicolas turned toward Ace. “He was once wild?”

  “Yep,” Sam said proudly.

  “But not the palomino,” he added.

  “No way,” Jen said.

  Sam took offense, as she always did when Jen acted as if Quarter Horses were better than mustangs, but then Sam thought of the Phantom. He was a mustang more beautiful than any other horse in the world.

  “I’m sorry we scared them away—the wild horses,” Sam said.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I was surprised to have them visit again.”

  Sam didn’t tell Nicolas that the Phantom had probably been drawn by his music. Nicolas seemed like a good guy, but she refused to tell anyone anything that would make the stallion more vulnerable.

  “I admit that’s why I camped here a second night, to see if they’d come back,” he said. “Lace is the only horse I really know, and though she pretends to like my music, I’m always wondering if she’s just being polite because I’m the keeper of the hay.”

  So much for my secret, Sam thought. Nicolas had guessed the horses were drawn to his music.

  “You do play the violin well,” Jen admitted, “and I like the lyrics of your song.”

  “I can’t take credit for that. The tune’s a lullaby my grandmother sings, and the saying is from my grandfather. I kind of put them together. I haven’t written anything down, so it keeps changing.”

  “But the horses like it,” Jen said.

  “They came for the water,” Nicolas said, gesturing toward the stream, “and stayed for the entertainment—the best for miles around,” he joked.

  Just then, all four horses threw their heads high. The colt hid behind Lace.

  “Did you hear anything?” Sam asked the others.

  “No, but it could be a smell.”

  Even as Jen spoke, Sam saw Ace’s nostrils flare wide and he took a noisy breath.

  “It’s the coyotes,” Nicolas said. “Last night I watched them dancing.”

  “Dancing?” Jen repeated.

  “Maybe I was in the mood to see magic after the wild horses came to my camp last night,” Nicolas conceded, “but I saw a female and her pup playing in the moonlight and it looked like they were dancing.”

  Sam grinned. “Give him a break. He’s from Seattle.”

  “Yeah,” Nicolas echoed. “I can take you to where I watched from last night, if you want to take a chance on seeing them again.”

  “I want to see!” Sam said.

  “You can ride double on Lace,” Nicolas offered.

  “If you’re sure she’s not too tired from pulling the wagon,” Sam said, trying to overcome her bounce of excitement.

  “She’s been lazing around camp all day. Besides, I’ve seen her work all day, and then, if she gets excited, jump right off the ground.”

  “I’m sold,” Jen said, then pointed to Sam. “You can drive.”

  While Sam and Jen tethered Ace and Silly, Nicolas slipped a worn leather bridle onto Lace.

  Sam lifted the reins. The connection to the snaffle was instant, but she felt Lace’s attention shift to Nicolas as soon as he began walking away from camp.

  “She knows where you’re going,” Sam said.

  When Nicolas only nodded, Sam heard the echo of her voice and decided she’d better be quiet. Sneaking up on coyotes would definitely require silence.

  Chapter Five

  The yapping of coyotes led them to a ridge that overlooked clumps of sagebrush surrounding small, flat places Sam thought of as deer beds.

  No deer slept here tonight.

  Just as Nicolas had said, coyotes were dancing by starlight.

  Gray-brown fur rippled as the coyotes took turns chasing each other. A mother streaked after a half-grown pup. He hurdled over a rock with something in his mouth. The mother cut around the rock at such a speedy slant, her claws scrabbled to hold her upright. The pup circled back. Tongue flying from the corner of her mouth, his mother sprinted after him, moving so fast, she hardly touched the ground.

  Coyote tag, Sam thought. Even if they weren’t exactly dancing, they played, with no idea humans were watching.

  Panting, the pup dropped what he’d held clamped in his teeth and his mother snapped it up. She ran, dropped it to taunt the pup, then dragged it out of his reach. Snapping, he lunged after her, and Sam got a better look at the prize he couldn’t wait to recapture.

  The thing they tugged and traded was some sort of long-dead, half-eaten creature.

  Yuck, Sam thought. This gave new meaning to the idea of playing with your food.

  Abruptly, their game turned serious. The female stood with forelegs straddling the mangled treasure. Ears back, she bared her teeth. The fur on her muzzle wrinkled and showed white fangs.

  As the pup approached with his head held lower than his shoulders, Sam noticed the light fluffy fur showing like a ruff on his chest.

  Tail wagging near to the ground, the pup pretended to be submissive. Mouth open, head turned to one side, he crept toward his mother on bent legs.

  Don’t hurt me, he seemed to say, but the instant his mother stopped snarling and her upright tail relaxed, he grabbed the scrap. Rejoicing, the pup tossed it into the air.

  Sam’s fingers itched for a camera. How cool would it be to keep these images forever? She was staring harder, trying to engrave the scene on her brain cells, when barking exploded like applause from the brush down below.

  That sounded doggish, Sam thought. In fact, the barks could have been from her dog, Blaze. While she tried to make sense of the sounds, Blaze himself suddenly bounded into the clearing.

  She braced herself for a fight, but that hadn’t been Blaze’s intruder bark. He woofed a greeting at the coyote and her pup.

  Sam didn’t say a word, but suddenly it all made sense.

  She knew where the Border collie had gone all those nights he’d slipped away.

  She knew what he’d been longing for as he howled in the moonlight.

  The adult coyote was Blaze’s mate—and that must be his puppy.

  Blaze trotted to the spot where the pup stood guard over the lump of fur. The pup growled, but Blaze ignored his sassiness and chattered little love bites on his back.

  It was a display of dominance, but in the sweetest possible way.

  It took Jen a few seconds longer to recognize the Border collie, but when she did her intake of breath sounded like ripping cloth.

  Suddenly still, the canines tested the air. Then, though no sign of agreement passed among them, they fled in a rippling run through the night and out of sight.

  “That was your dog playing with the coyotes,” Jen said, marveling at what she’d seen.

  “No,” Nicolas said. “You’re just trying to trick the city kid. He had to be wild.”

  “That was Blaze,” Sam agreed.

  “Wow,” Jen went on, “so the pup must be a coydog.”


  Coydog. Sam turned the word over in her mind, pretty sure she’d never heard it before. It was obvious what it meant, but was a coydog a wild predator or did it come when it was called and lick your face “hello”?

  “I don’t know anything about coydogs. Do you?” Sam asked, and she noticed that Nicolas’s face lost its skeptical look as she consulted Jen.

  Jen was thinking. Hands folded together with only the index fingers sticking up, tapping against her lips. Because she planned to be a vet, Jen studied animal behavior and she remembered everything she read.

  “Not much.” Jen shook her head. “Dad told me they didn’t really exist—but obviously he was wrong.”

  Sam thought about the pup’s markings, the coyotes’ excitement as Blaze popped out of the brush, and the way he’d joined them.

  “Maybe,” Sam began, but no more words came to her. There was just no other way to put those puzzle pieces together. The three were a family.

  “It’s no coincidence,” Jen assured Sam. “I’ve tried thinking about it from different angles, and though Dad told me coyotes would lure dogs away from home by pretending to play with them while the rest of the pack circled up to attack—”

  “That was no trap,” Sam finished for her.

  Lace pawed the dirt in impatience. Sam reached down to pat the pinto’s shoulder. Jen reached back and gave the mare a good scratch at the base of her tail.

  “I don’t mean to brag, but did you notice how she reacted to all that excitement?” Nicolas asked.

  “She’s great,” Sam answered, but she didn’t say much more as they returned to the campsite. She couldn’t stop thinking of Blaze and the coyotes until an unfamiliar word pulled her back into the conversation.

  “…figured out why I feel an affinity with them,” Nicolas was telling Jen.

  “Why?” Jen asked. “Don’t tell me you eat road-kill and howl at the moon.”

  “Jen! Now who’s being rude?” Sam looked over her shoulder and into Jen’s grinning face.

  “Rarely,” Nicolas teased back, “but there’s a European youth group for gypsies called the Coyotes.”

  “Cool. What do they do?” Jen asked.

  While Sam waited for Jen to make another joke, Nicolas strode on ahead, still talking. “Who knows?” he said. “I’d never heard of them until my mom told me not to get mixed up with them. Seeing those coyotes, though…” Nicolas’s voice trailed off and Sam didn’t know him well enough to even guess what he was wishing. “Good thing I’m keeping a journal,” he said with a sigh. “I need to write some stuff down.”

  Back in camp, Sam and Jen unrolled their sleeping bags near the fire.

  “Good night, Ace,” Sam called to her horse.

  “’Night, Silly,” Jen told her palomino.

  “Let me know if you need anything.” Nicolas’s voice came muffled from inside the caravan wagon.

  He’s doing his best to give us privacy, Sam thought.

  She tried not to imagine what Dad would say if he could see her now. Without a doubt, he’d disapprove.

  Not because Nicolas was a gypsy, Sam thought, but because he was a stranger.

  Gram and Brynna would probably agree with Dad, though she couldn’t picture either of them caring that Nicolas was a gypsy either.

  “After all our walking,” Jen muttered as she wiggled down in her sleeping bag, “you’d think I’d be sore, but I’m just sleepy.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, but she wasn’t sleepy. Her thoughts bounced like a ping-pong ball as she wondered how people would react to a gypsy wagon rumbling through Darton County.

  Sam couldn’t guess what Dallas, Pepper, and Ross would think about Nicolas. The cowboys would see him as an outsider, but he was good to his horse. Predicting Linc Slocum’s reaction was easy. He criticized other people, hoping no one noticed he was the real problem. Jake would be cool with Nicolas and so would Sam’s family. Gram’s friend Mrs. Allen liked teenagers. Besides, she was preoccupied right now with her fiancé and their plans for a new program at Blind Faith Mustang Sanctuary.

  Nicolas’s grandparents had warned him about racism, and though Sam wished people had progressed past that, she knew they hadn’t.

  Sam twisted onto her other side, turning her face away from the fire’s heat.

  For most of her childhood, she’d thought all racists were nasty, bad-smelling people, because of one ugly moment. Not long after Mom had died, Jake’s family had taken Sam to the fair. Looking back, Sam knew they were trying to distract her from Dad’s grief and her own confusion, but she’d been having fun. She didn’t even remember Jake protesting when his parents ordered him to hold hands with her so she wouldn’t get lost.

  The trouble had begun when a man tried to cut between them.

  First, Sam had noticed his unwashed smell. Next, his paper plate of greasy food had dropped from his hands. She and Jake had jumped back, looked up at a man’s angry face.

  “I hanker for fried liver all year long, and because of you”—he’d snarled at Jake—“you little red—”

  Sam told herself she didn’t remember what he’d said next, but the man’s head had jutted toward Jake. His eyes had squinted, and his open, sneering mouth made her fear he was about to spit. At them.

  “Sam!”

  Startled, she rolled over to see that Jen had risen up on one elbow. “Are you having a nightmare?”

  It took a few seconds, but finally Sam said, “Yeah, sort of.”

  “You’re okay,” Jen said drowsily.

  Sam sighed, and as she fell asleep she couldn’t help wishing all bad people wore a stink. That way, it would be easier to identify them and keep them out of your life.

  Chapter Six

  The first thing Sam saw when she opened her eyes the next morning was the black-and-white face of Lace.

  Breathing sweet hay breath and plucking at Sam’s hair with her nimble lips, the mare inspected her.

  “Hello, pretty girl,” Sam mumbled, and when she raised her hand to touch the mare’s gleaming black cheek, Lace didn’t pull away.

  The colt beside her did, though, and the skitter of his hooves woke Sam the rest of the way.

  Yawning, she crawled out of her sleeping bag and noticed Jen, standing at the back of the gypsy wagon, watching herself in a suspended mirror as she braided her hair.

  Jen must have caught Nicolas’s reflection as he approached, because she didn’t look away from the mirror as she said, “Ah, he cooks.”

  “No, but I boil water,” Nicolas said as he handed Jen a brown mug, “and my mom believes a strong cup of English tea can put any trouble right.”

  Sam listened to their voices as she sat on her sleeping bag, but she turned her attention to her feet.

  This was the kind of frosty fall morning Gram liked. She said it had “snap.”

  In Sam’s opinion, it had teeth. Cold gnawed through her shirt and jeans. It nibbled on her fingers, making her so shivery and uncoordinated, she couldn’t hold her boot still to aim her socked foot into it.

  Nicolas’s knuckles were red as if he’d scrubbed them, but Sam was more interested in the steam curling up from the mug he offered her. Spiced with the aroma of oranges, the tea beckoned her to drink. Sam almost tipped the mug in her eagerness to grab it.

  She sipped and swallowed. The hot drink thawed her windpipe, fingers, and brain.

  Feeling more awake, Sam set the cup aside to pull on her second boot. She pushed her hair back from her eyes, tucked it neatly behind her ears, and looked at Nicolas.

  He held a box of cold cereal and bowls, but a minute ago he’d said something that had nothing to do with breakfast. Something about tea and trouble?

  “Are we in trouble?” Sam asked.

  “That depends,” Nicolas answered. “Is it hunting season?”

  Still braiding her hair, Jen answered, “No. Why?”

  “I heard a gunshot.”

  “You’re sure?” Jen said. Her fingers stilled on her half braid.

  “Pretty s
ure,” Nicolas confirmed.

  Sam’s pulse kicked into high gear at the mention of gunfire.

  Knock it off, Sam told herself, but it was too late. Blood pumped through her veins so crazily, she could count each thump.

  There’s no reason for this, Sam thought, taking a deep breath.

  Even though she’d always been a little afraid of guns, her own father had a rifle rack in his truck.

  There were lots of harmless reasons for gunfire. Weren’t there?

  Sam tried really hard to think of one.

  Nicolas didn’t act worried. He doused the campfire and he couldn’t have heard much past its hiss.

  Sam chewed quietly as they ate a cold cereal breakfast topped with watery powdered milk. She paid attention to the sounds around her as she saddled Ace, but only heard birdsong and the rush of the small stream.

  She was probably worrying for no reason, but she noticed Jen wasn’t keeping up her usual chatter to Silly as she saddled her.

  Nicolas only clucked his tongue as he fastened Lace’s harness and backed her between the shafts of his cart. Sam had almost decided he’d forgotten the shots.

  Then, he said, “I’ll see you two back as far as civilization, then I’ll be off.”

  Nicolas used a small fold-up shovel to turn the campfire ashes into the soil. He glanced around for anything he might have misplaced or left behind.

  “Civilization means my house—River Bend Ranch,” Sam said. “And that won’t take you far off the main road.”

  If not for the gunshots, she might have told him not to bother riding the extra miles with them, because Nicolas was on a tight schedule.

  Last night, he’d described his carefully planned journey. Sam had tried not to let her eyes glaze over from hearing all the details, but Jen had been so fascinated, Nicolas had retrieved his journal from the wagon.

  “Is it written in code?” Jen had asked, peering over Nicolas’s shoulder as he read his exact mileage to date.

  “Not exactly.” He’d laughed, then turned his journal so that Sam could see the squiggly marks interspersed with neat black printing. “It’s shorthand. Before my parents’ business took off, we lived in this teeny apartment and Mom had an old electric type-writer, a Gregg Shorthand chart, and a desk in a corner of the kitchen. She taught herself to be a secretary, but my sister and I learned shorthand and slipped each other notes no one else could decipher.”