Boy on a Black Horse Read Online Free Page A

spring that tendon ought to be sound again. Then I can think about retraining her.”
    â€œCan I help?”
    â€œSure.”
    Out of nowhere I said, “I wish I had a horse of my own.”
    I guess Topher was used to hearing this. He just said, “You sort of do,” and nodded at Diddle, who was standing there with her big blimpy belly sticking out and her big blinky eyes half closed and her brown curly forelock hanging down over them.
    â€œOh, poor Diddle.” I kissed her on her fuzzy forehead. “Don’t listen to me.” I combed the poodle curls of her mane like my life depended on it, but I said to Topher, “I think Liana might get me a horse for Christmas.”
    This was true. We had enough money, so she had promised she was going to get me my own horse sometime soon. And Christmas was coming.
    â€œThink so? What kind?”
    â€œI don’t care. Any kind or color is fine with me as long as it’s a real horse.”
    â€œReal?”
    â€œYou know, big and strong and fast. Like—you know. Didn’t you ever want a black stallion or something?”
    He smiled, and I guess he sort of understood, because he said, “I want them all.”
    Ten minutes later I was riding Diddle across the fields, and she trotted along like a big dog, and her fuzzy little brown ears were tilted forward happily as always. She was such a good horse. But I was thinking about a black stallion and the boy who rode it.

C HAPTER
    3
    It took me an hour to get to the school. I had never ridden there before—why would I? It wasn’t as if I didn’t spend enough time there already. And the roads went the long way around, and paved roads aren’t the best place to ride horse-back anyhow, because of stupid people in cars, among other reasons. So I had to find ways through woods and housing developments and cow pastures with barbed-wire fences. It was sort of challenging.
    When I finally got to the hollow where the black stallion had spent the day, he was gone, of course. I was expecting that.
    â€œOkay, Diddle, here we go,” I told her, and I guided her along where I could see scuffed-up leaves. We were going to try to follow the black stallion’s trail.
    At first it was easy. The cornfields below the hollow were marshy from runoff, and I could see the black horse’s hoofprints between the stubble. I could even tell that he wasn’t shod. But after that it got harder. We came to an overgrown field, and all I had to go by was a faint whitish line in the grass and weeds where he had passed through. Then on the far side was a gravel road. I could only guess which direction the black horse had gone on that, and I spent maybe half an hour riding around in circles. Any other horse would have thrown a fit, but Diddle didn’t mind.
    This was taking a lot of time. “We should head back,” I told her.
    But we didn’t, because finally I found a mark in the mud and weeds alongside the road that might have been a hoofprint—I wasn’t sure. So I went farther and, all riiiight! I found the trail again in a farmer’s dirt lane. Then I lost it in a clover field.… I could spend an hour telling how I kept losing those hoofprints and finding them again, going across the fields to the railroad track, then along the track to—
    The trestle?
    â€œYou have to be kidding,” I begged. But Chav and the black stallion were not kidding. I could see the oval-shaped depressions in the gravel between the ties, going straight across, sixty feet above the deep part of the river, on a narrow bridge with no side rails. At least this railroad bridge was solid, made of steel and concrete—it was not the spindly kind of trestle that was full of holes. But even so, what if a train came? What if the horse acted up? What if a bird flew across in front of Diddle’s nose and she spooked? I could end up in the—water—and to make it worse, I was scared