PART 2
I ran out the back door in my socks.
A man in a canvas jacket was climbing out of the pickup. He had a lead rope in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was already walking toward the barn.
Mabel was standing in Pepper’s doorway with her arms spread wide. Twelve years old, in pajamas and her mother’s old barn coat.
“You can’t have her!” she screamed. “She’s mine!”
“Move, kid,” the man said. “I paid for this horse.”
I stepped between them.
“Sir, you didn’t buy anything. This horse is registered to my daughter. There was no brand inspection. That sale is illegal.”
He looked at me. Then past me at Becca, who’d come out on the porch.
“Lady, you told me you owned this horse.”
“I’m his wife,” Becca snapped. “It’s the same thing.”
“It’s not,” I said.
I took out my phone and called the county sheriff and the state livestock brand inspector’s office. I put it on speaker.
The man’s face changed when he heard the word “inspector.” Selling a horse without a brand inspection is a crime in Montana. So is buying one.
He got back in his truck.
“Keep your money, lady,” he said to Becca. “I’m not losing my license over a skinny old mare.”
He threw an envelope of cash on the porch steps and drove away, his empty trailer rattling down the road.
Mabel collapsed against Pepper’s neck and sobbed.
I called a large-animal vet at 6 a.m. She came out that morning.
“She’s about two hundred pounds underweight,” the vet said. “Another two weeks without food, in this cold, and I don’t think she’d have made it.”
She looked at Mabel.
“Whoever’s been sneaking her apples and oats? That kept her alive.”
Mabel didn’t say anything. She just held Pepper’s face in her hands.
Becca was gone by that afternoon. She took her clothes and her car.
She did not take the nine hundred dollars. The sheriff did. As evidence.
The deputy who took the report also found out that Becca had stopped paying the electric bill to the barn in October. That’s why the water heater in Pepper’s trough had stopped working. She’d spent the hay money, and the bill money, on a new phone, a spa weekend, and clothes.
The county charged her with animal neglect and attempted fraud. She pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay back every dollar.
I filed for divorce in December.
Pepper gained back every pound by spring. Her gray coat turned shiny again. She started bossing the neighbor’s horses over the fence like she owned the whole valley.
I switched to a station job that winter. No more long fire assignments. I wanted to be home every night.
In May, Mabel entered Pepper in the county fair. It was the first time either of them had been in a show ring.
They didn’t win.
They came in fourth.
But when the judge handed Mabel the white ribbon, she pressed it against Pepper’s nose and said something I couldn’t hear.
Later, I asked her what she’d said.
“I told her Mom would be proud,” Mabel said. “Of both of us.”
THE END.
