Read Online The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - Free Book Online

enough to have anything they wanted.
    “I’ll have an arab mare,” Martha had said. “Sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail like Dolly, only she’ll be younger and maybe just a little prancier.”
    Ivy’s eyes were dreamy. “I’ll have a coal black stallion,” she said, “with a bright gold mane and tail.”
    Martha thought back over all the horse books she had known. “I don’t think you can,” she said. “I don’t think there are any that color—black with gold manes and tails.”
    “How do you know?” Ivy asked.
    “I just never heard of any,” Martha said.
    Ivy shrugged. “So?” she said. “That’s no reason why I can’t have one. Why can’t I have something I never heard of?”
    Martha was about to change her mare to gold with a black mane and tail, when Kevin’s head appeared over the stall door. Martha poked Ivy to warn her, and they were quiet, watching Kevin warily.
    “What you doing with that old mare?” Kevin asked.
    “Nothing,” Ivy said.
    Kevin stared with an unfriendly grin for a minute, but as he turned away he said, “If she gets any thinner, my granddad’s going to sell her to the dog food factory.”
    When he was gone, Martha and Ivy turned in unison to stare at Dolly, but she didn’t seem to have heard. At least, she only went on eating, nuzzling out the best parts of the hay and shaking it gently before beginning to chew. Without a word, Ivy led the way out of the stall and together she and Martha went on a silent horror-stricken search for Mr. Smith.
    When they found him, he would not deny that it was true. “It may not be for quite a while yet,” he said. “But when a horse gets past a certain age, sometimes it gets to be impossible to keep any meat on their bones. No matter how much they eat, they just keep on getting thinner and thinner. You girls can understand that I can’t have skinny old nags here at Onowora Stables. I can’t have people saying that I don’t take care of my horses—and that’s what they would think.”
    Martha could only stare at Mr. Smith in silent misery while waves of hot tears ran down her face, but Ivy’s dark eyes were dry and hooded like an angry cat’s.
    “Well, I think—I think you’re a murderer!” she said, and grabbing Martha she jerked her away, and they ran. They went on running until they were halfway back to Bent Oaks on the ridge trail. Then they dropped flat on their backs in the grass beside the trail. While Martha sobbed, Ivy plotted; and by the time Martha had run out of tears, Ivy had a plan.
    “We’ll steal her,” she said. Martha gasped and smiled, delighted and, of course, terrified.
    “We’ll steal her at night,” Ivy said, “and take her to Bent Oaks Grove.”
    “But they’ll find her there,” Martha said. “Someone will see her there and tell.”
    “We’ll only leave her there until morning. We can get her as far as Bent Oaks Grove in the dark, and we’ll tie her there and go home. Then early in the morning—it will have to be Saturday—we’ll take her over the Ridge Trail and the High Trail into the Coast Range and let her go. There’s lots of grass there, and she can live with the deer, and we’ll go to see her now and then and take her oats and carrots.”
    It seemed like a lovely plan to Martha until she realized exactly what was going to be asked of her. She, Martha Abbott, who had always had to have all the lights on before she would go down the hall to the bathroom, was going to have to crawl out her window in the dark after everyone else was in bed and go up the hill to Bent Oaks all by herself.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be scared.”
    “Being scared won’t hurt you,” Ivy said. “Why don’t you bring Lion with you?”
    “I don’t know,” Martha said. She hadn’t needed Lion much lately, and she wasn’t sure she could get him to come back. Besides she’d never taken Lion with her much further than down the hall—at least not in the dark. “I don’t know