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Informationen zum Autor Kathleen Duey is the author of many books for young readers, including books in the American Diaries and Survivors series, the Unicorn's Secret and Faeries' Promise series and the National Book Award finalist Skin Hunger . Originally from Colorado, she now lives in Fallbrook, California. Klappentext A new historical series about horses and the girls who love them begins. This four-book story arc introduces orphaned nine-year-old Katie! who befriends an unbroken Mustang. When the family she stays with plans to join the expansion West without her or the Mustang! Katie makes a desperate decision to find her Uncle Jack in Oregon. Hoofbeats Katie and the Mustang Book One by KATHLEEN DUEY PUFFIN BOOKS My childhood memories are set to hoofbeats: a fog-softened gallop on a lonely morning; the joyous clatter of friends pounding down the Canal Road; a measured, hollow clop of a miles-to-go July afternoon; the snow-muffled hoofbeats of wintertime; the squelching rhythm of a close race with a rainstorm. These books are for my dear friends, the horses of my childhood—Buck, Ginger, Steve, and Cherokee Star. Thank you all. Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE The stinkweed made me sick. The two-leggeds who drove me from my herd and my home starved me a long time before I would eat it, but, in the end, I had no choice. I am too sick and too weak to fight the ropes. But the sickness will not last . . . . I was hiding from Mrs. Stevens that day. It was cold in the barn, though not bitter, not too bad for early February. We’d had one warm snap that hatched a few flies, then it had stormed again. There were dirty banks of snow along the roads. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. It was too big—it was a castoff from Mr. Stevens—but my dress was getting too small. It was about worn-out. The blue homespun was faded and stained, and one sleeve had a long, mended tear. I didn’t care about any of that as much as the way it pulled across my back. It was just past sunrise. I had done my early chores—the milk was poured into the cooling can, the milk bucket washed. Mrs. Stevens insisted on that, every day. The minute the milk was poured out, the bucket had to be scrubbed with soap in the tin basin. Every two days, I had to change the wash water. I sighed. I knew I should go back to the house and begin the real work of the day. I just didn’t want to. “My uncle Jack hasn’t written me,” I explained to Betsy. “But people say it can take a year or more.” I smiled, remembering my tall, handsome Uncle Jack with his dark hair and light blue eyes—and his grin. I took a long breath, and my dress rubbed against the welts on my back. They weren’t that bad; in a few days they’d be gone. But they hurt. My throat ached, and then, all of a sudden, my eyes stung. I pressed my lips together, hard. I did not want to cry. No amount of tear shedding was going to change Mrs. Stevens’s temperament. She had willow-switched me the day before...she was convinced I’d taken a spoon from her mother’s silver service set. I hadn’t. What would I want with a spoon? Hiram Weiss was the only other possible suspect, though, and no one would ever think he had taken it. I liked Hiram. He didn’t talk very much, but he always nodded and smiled at me. He was from back east somewhere. Mrs. Stevens had told me he’d had some bad luck back there. She hadn’t said more. I think she didn’t know anything more. Hiram was tight-lipped. But everyone liked him; no one bothered him. He was as big as they come—broad and tall and heavy—plenty old enough to have a wife and children, but didn’t have either. Mrs. Stevens always complained of the amount he ate at her table—but not to his face. Good farmhands were not so easy to find with everyone at loose ends deciding to pick up and...
