Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [18]
And then the day came when one of the trainers Sandman knew came by to have a look at Darwin. The guy was impressed. Gave Sandman five thousand cash on the spot. I had to load the little guy into the trailer. He behaved perfectly. My heart was breaking.
Somehow, it was worse even than when Dingo had died. I tried to get interested in some of the other horses. I liked a lot of them fine but I didn’t have the same kind of bond that I had with the little colt. I was sad but my life at Sandman’s was good. I never had to think too much or dwell on anything. At night, I slept in Darwin’s empty stall. It was fine.
What sent me over the edge was when I heard about what happened to Bethany, the chestnut mare who’d been the first horse I’d gotten on.
One night, Sandman came and found me in my stall.
“Ben, we got a problem,” he said, and I thought he was going to finally address my sleeping in the barn, like maybe he did actually mind it.
“What’s that, sir?” I said, because I still called him sir, particularly when I thought I was on the wrong side of him.
“That couple I sold Bethany to? The ones said the woman was gonna take up riding and they needed a nice quiet backyard kind of horse?”
“Yeah?”
“They ain’t treating her so good. I happened to be passing by there this morning and I stopped in to check on her. The folks weren’t home so I went around back to their little two-stall barn to see what’s what. What I found was not good. Bethany was inside there with no light, standing knee-high in filthy, soaked straw and she had sores on her back. Weren’t no water in her bucket and when I turned the light on she seemed like she was blinded, like they haven’t let her into the light of day. Plus, mare musta lost a couple hundred pounds in the five weeks since she left here. I got sick to my stomach to see it.”
I said nothing. I was sick to my stomach too and all I could see was red. A violent horrible bloody red nothing like the rich red of Bethany’s chestnut coat. Sandman went on: “I waited till them people got home. Sat there waiting three hours and then when they finally got back, I gave ’em a piece of my mind. And you know what they told me? Told me it weren’t none of my business. They done gave me two thousand dollars for that horse and they could do with her as they see fit. I told ’em I was reporting them to the ASPCA and they just laughed in my face, telling me the lady’s brother is the sheriff and weren’t nobody gonna come around questioning what they did.”
Sandman’s yellow skin had gone very white and he was clenching his bony fists.
We hitched a trailer up to Sandman’s pickup that night just after midnight. When we got close to the people’s house, we turned the headlights off and pulled in their driveway, past the house and to the barn. There was a dog but the dog just looked at us and didn’t bark.
We got Bethany out of there though she was in such bad shape she had trouble walking up the ramp into the trailer.
We brought her back to our barn, gave her a nice clean stall and some alfalfa cubes and tended to her cuts and wounds for a few hours.
The people came around the next day making threats, saying they knew we’d stolen Bethany. Sandman chased them off his property. But that wasn’t good enough.
That night, after Sandman left the barn, I took one of the farm pickup trucks and drove it into town and out to the other side to where the dirtbags lived.
They were pretty careless for people who went around victimizing innocent beasts. Their front door wasn’t locked. I walked in the darkened house and took out my little flashlight. I saw some stairs which I assumed would take me up to the bedroom. Sure enough, the first room I looked in, there they were, the happy couple, sleeping like bugs in a rug.
I propped Sandman’s shotgun on my shoulder and brought the nose of the thing right up to the guy