Katie and the Mustang, Book 4 by Kathleen Duey Page B

allowed me to lead him all this way. Maybe he would have been better off if he’d just kept going that time he’d run off. The thought startled and hurt me, and I pushed it aside. I took good care of him, and I always would.
    I led him away from the wagons, and after a half mile or so, I spotted a patch of grass that still had a little green in it. The Mustang veered toward it when I did, without so much as a tug on the lead rope. He walked beside me, not behind me, as always. It wasn’t like I was leading him. We were just walking together.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    The river was wide and deep, and the water was cool.
It was hard swimming—the current was very strong.
We need to find better grass. The mares are weary
from all this travel and need to rest. The two-leggeds
must know this, but still they travel onward.
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    M rs. Kyler was cheerful as we cleaned up after supper every evening. But she was quieter than she had been a month before. She looked tired, too. As we walked along the rutted trail beside the Snake River, the wagons creaking and moaning over the rocks, I began to realize that a lot of people weren’t doing all that well.
    Poor Mrs. Heldon had terrible stomachaches that made her double over with pain, and sometimes she had to vomit. She would walk away from camp, but we could hear her, and we all felt sorry for her. I noticed Grover doing the cooking for his father most mornings and at supper, too. His mother was lying down in the wagon every moment she could.
    Andrew’s wife, Hannah, was pregnant again—the rest of us could finally see what she must have known in Council Bluff. She looked nearly faint on the hottest days.
    Mr. and Mrs. McMahon had lost their plump faces. She was thin as a scarecrow. Their little boy, Toby, was often weepy and whining, and I saw blood on his chin now and then.
    For some reason, a number of people had dark, tender gums that bled when they ate. Andrew Kyler had had his left hand bound up in cotton rags for weeks—he had cut himself, and it hadn’t yet started to close and heal.
    Those among us who weren’t hurt or sick were just plain tired. I was. Polly and Julia and Hope usually lay in one of the wagons reading to one another at night right after supper. I barely noticed them anymore, they were so quiet.
    Mr. Kyler seemed tired almost all the time now, dawn to dusk. He looked older than he had when Hiram and I had met him, too. I heard him sigh a hundred times a day. And poor, pale Mary Taylor was too weak to walk to supper most nights.
    Her father would carry her, setting her gently on an overturned apple box so she could get out from beneath the dirty wagon canvas and sit with us under the wide sky for a half hour or so each evening.
    Mr. Silas and his friends kept farther and farther apart from the rest of us. They had never been much for socializing, but now they kept to themselves so much it was rare that any of them spoke to one of us.
    I heard them arguing now and then, if I grazed the Mustang close to their wagon. From what I could gather, Mr. Silas had talked the others into coming, and they were all beginning to question whether what he had told them about the wonderful land of Oregon was true. One of them kept saying they should have turned off to go to California instead of heading into these treacherous mountains.
    I led the Mustang away before they could notice me. The truth was, a lot of the families were having similar doubts and similar talks. We were all just so tired.
    All the weary way to Fort Boise we traveled across dry country littered with sharp, dark rocks that gritted and ground at the wagon wheels. We stayed there only a day. As hot as it was, the menfolk were worried about being in the Blue Mountains when the snows began, so we pushed on. I asked after my uncle, but again, no one had ever heard of him.
    The sun had felt like an enemy all through August, and, as we