A Good Horse Read Free Page B

that you transported these animals to your home in California. It is our belief thatone of these animals may have been a dark bay mare, aged nine, named Alabama Lady, who was in foal to a stallion belonging to Mr. Warner Wilson Matthews III. Alabama Lady disappeared from Mr. Matthews’s property, Wheatsheaf Ranch, on or about October 1 of last year, along with three other mares. Please let us know by return mail if you purchased a mare who produced a foal early this year.
    Unfortunately, the mare has no white markings. She is about sixteen hands tall, of medium build. She has a cowlick on either side of her neck, about four inches back from her ears, and she also has a cowlick in her forelock, which prevents her forelock from falling smoothly forward. She has no other distinguishing marks. She was tattooed on the underside of her upper lip at the racetrack as a two-year-old, but this tattoo may have faded or be unreadable. Mr. Matthews is most interested in tracing this mare, as she is well bred and has produced excellent foals. There is a reward for her return.
    Thank you for your attention.
    Yours truly,
Howard W. Brandt
    All I could say after I read this letter was “I guess we figured he’s a Thoroughbred, huh?”
    “And a good one,” said Daddy.
    At first, that was all I thought about it—that now we knew that Jack was a real Thoroughbred, with a pedigree as long as your arm. I went out before bed and walked over to the gelding corral. Jack was standing beside Black George, and both hadtheir heads down. Lester was stretched out on his side a little ways out in the pasture, and Lincoln and Jefferson were snuffling around for bits of hay or grass. I didn’t call or say anything—sometimes it’s more fun to watch the horses do what they want to, even when they don’t want to do much. Just then, Black George lay down, giving a long groan, as if he was too tired to stand on his feet anymore. Jack looked at him for a moment, then gave him a push with his nose. Black George didn’t respond, so Jack tossed his head and trotted over to Lincoln and Jefferson. They each pinned their ears a little bit, to remind him who the grown-ups were, but then Lincoln, who was a little younger than Jefferson, squealed and kicked up. Then he and Jack galloped for a few strides. Right then I could see that Jack was the Thoroughbred—he kept up perfectly with Lincoln and had more energy. When Lincoln dropped to a trot after half a dozen strides, Jack kept on going to the pasture fence and then trotted back. His ears were pricked and he was ready to play.
    I whistled and he turned toward me, all alert now. When he saw me, he trotted straight over. I petted him on the head and around the eyes, and I smoothed his forelock. So that’s where he got it. I whispered, “Alabama Lady. That’s a nice name.” We, of course, had called her Jewel, like all of the other mares. Brown Jewel, which wasn’t much of a name at all. You couldn’t even think of a precious stone, like a sapphire or a ruby, that was a brown jewel. For a while after Jack was born, I called her Pearl in my own mind, but I didn’t say it out loud, and it made me sad that we hadn’t named her something prettier than Brown Jewel.
    It was only in the middle of the night, after I woke up froma dream about Danny calling Mom and telling her he had driven his car all the way to France (
“Paris est une grande ville en France. À Paris, les Parisiens fait beaucoup des choses agréables!”
or something like that), that I realized that there was more to the discovery of Jack’s mom than I had been thinking about. I had spent so much time with him from the day he was born, and had thought about him so much, and loved him so much, that it hadn’t occurred to me he wasn’t my horse. But maybe, in actual fact, he wasn’t.
    After that, I didn’t go to sleep for a long time, and when I did get up. I was so tired feeding the horses that I slept on the school bus in spite of the