Emma and the Cutting Horse by Martha Deeringer

talked. He
was a tall, thin, wiry-looking man who fit Emma’s mental picture of
what a cowboy should look like and had an exaggerated Texas drawl
that expanded his words into extra syllables.
    “I think yer mare has a lot a talent and
might make a helluva cutting horse,” he told them, casting an
apologetic glance at Emma and her mother when he realized the cuss
word had slipped out. “She sure oughta have the ability with a
grandsire like Poco Dell.”
    “Explain to me about the Futurity,” Emma’s
dad said. “I don’t know very much about cutting horses.”
    “Well,” John began, “the Futurity is the
world championship fer three-year-old cutting horses. It’s a
competition held by the National Cutting Horse Association or NCHA.
They hold it every December in Ft. Worth. The prize money is good,
but the recognition is a whole lot better. Horses that do well sell
fer a lotta money. She has a long way to go and it’s less than a
year away, but she has more natural ability than any other horse
I’ve looked at this year.”
    “How much would all this cost?” Emma’s mother
inquired. “Isn’t the NCHA Futurity a rich man’s game?”
    “It can be,” John replied, “but if she keeps
doing well for another month, I’ll train her for half my usual
fee.”
    “Why would you be willing to do that?” she
asked.
    “Because I’ve won lots of cutting
competitions, but I’ve never won the NCHA Futurity,” John answered.
A grin spread across his craggy face. “This ain’t an entirely
unselfish idea. I need a good horse that can get the job done to
boost my reputation as a trainer, too.”
    Emma’s parents looked at each other
thoughtfully.
    Finally her father said, “We’ll have to think
about it for a few days. If you want, I can call you with our
decision. We don’t have a lot of money to play around with. Can you
get us some figures by then?”
    “Yep,” John replied.
     

 
    Chapter
Six
     
    Emma could barely sit still in the truck on
the way home.
    “World Championship,” she said reverently.
“One of our horses at the World Championship! That is
unbelievably, incredibly, astonishingly cool!”
    “Don’t start imagining yourself in the
winner’s circle yet,” her father advised. “I’m sure there will be
lots of reasons why we can’t do this.”
    Emma read everything she could find in her
horse books and magazines about cutting horses and the NCHA
Futurity. Then she searched the school library for more
information. She learned that there would be over three hundred
horses there from all over the United States and some from other
countries. The Futurity was held in Ft. Worth, which was only a
little over a hundred miles away. The books explained that cutting
horse competitions began when bored cowboys would compete to see
which horse could cut a single cow out of a herd and keep it
separated from the others the longest, and that horses with certain
ancestors seemed to have a special knack for it called “cow
sense.”
    Emma’s father was on the phone when she went
into the kitchen for a glass of water one evening, and she heard
him mention John Brown. When he hung up he recounted the
conversation.
    “That was Bill Johnson. We went to school
together. He breeds cutting horses, and he tells me that John Brown
has a lot of talent with horses. If he thinks Miss Dellfene has the
potential to go to the Futurity, he’s probably right. That’s
encouraging. I hate to put too much faith in a man we just
met.”
    Emma lay awake for hours that night imagining
what it would be like to go to an event like the NCHA Futurity and
watch your own horse compete. Could such a hardheaded little mare
turn out to be a champion?
    An idea percolated in Emma’s mind as she
thought back on her disastrous first ride on Miss Dellfene. She had
ridden young horses for her father for years, but had never trained
one herself from the beginning. And Camaro was a two-year old and
ready to begin training. She waited