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

of water. Martha sat beside her, pale green and saturated with tears.
    Mrs. Smith, whom the girls had rarely seen before, and who never seemed to take much part in the horsey doings of the rest of the Smiths, was bustling around in a bright-colored robe, and across the room Mr. Smith sat at the kitchen table saying nothing at all. Once he got up and came over to look at Ivy’s foot and agree with Mrs. Smith that it was not broken, only bruised. Then he went back to his chair.
    Martha finally stopped crying, and her cheeks were just beginning to dry when she remembered something she’d heard about horse thieves. It hadn’t occurred to her before that that's what they were—horse thieves! A new tidal wave of tears flooded her face, almost drowning her in their hot flow.
    “Now, now,” Mrs. Smith said. “You’ve got to stop that. It’s not so bad as all that.”
    Martha mopped at her sopping face and gasped, “Do—do—they hang you if you’re only eight years old?”
    “Oh, you poor little thing,” Mrs. Smith said, hugging Martha’s bowed head up against her. Then she turned to her husband and said, “Dan, what on earth is behind all this?”
    Ivy spoke then for the first time since they’d been brought into the house. “You mean you don’t know what he’s going to do to Dolly?” she said. “That he’s going to send her away to be killed?”
    “Dan?” Mrs. Smith said in a small, questioning voice.
    “Could you come in the other room a minute, Lil,” Mr. Smith said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
    The Smiths both went out, and Ivy turned to Martha. “Do you want to run for it?” she asked. “I can’t, but you could go right out the back door and run home.”
    “No, no,” Martha whispered. “They know where I live, and besides I’m afraid to go over the trail alone.”
    When the Smiths came back into the room, they were both smiling, and everything was suddenly all right. They had decided to drive the girls most of the way home—and not insist on telling their parents—if the girls would in turn promise to give up horse stealing. And about Dolly, Mr. Smith said, “We’ve decided to just turn her out on the winter pasture for the rest of her life. I do sell a horse to the factories now and then, but Dolly’s given more years of service than most. I guess she’s earned a retirement.”
    Then, when it was over and Martha was jumping up and down with joy and relief, Ivy cried. Not buckets like Martha, but just two big tears that glittered in her eyes and turned her heavy eyelashes to thick shreds of wet satin. Ivy didn’t say thank you with words the way Martha was doing. But as she was sitting on the floor putting her shoe back on over her swollen foot, she looked up at the Smiths and smiled; and Martha noticed that the Smiths stood perfectly still looking down at her for a long time, as if they had seen something very strange or beautiful.

9
    O NE OF THE GOOD THINGS that came from saving Dolly was getting to know Mrs. Smith. Martha and Ivy had scarcely seen her before the night of the kidnapping. They had caught glimpses of her once or twice in the stable, and once they had passed her walking on the trail carrying a metal tool chest and an easel. She was a small slender woman; and, although they knew she was a grandmother, she seemed to be of no particular age at all. She was a painter.
    After the kidnapping incident, Mrs. Smith began talking to Martha and Ivy whenever they visited the stables, and very soon they were good friends. After a while they found out why Mrs. Smith took no part in the stable business. She told them she didn’t really approve of renting horses as a way of earning a living. Mrs. Smith had strange feelings about horses, at least strange for an adult. One day when Martha asked her if she liked horses she said, “I love some of them. Some of them I can’t stand.”
    “Why?” was all that Martha could think to say, but Ivy went further.
    “Which ones do you