“I’m taking back my horse,” the drunkard said. “It isn’t fair what that judge said. That grey beast was supposed to be mine. I was going to buy him. I told Mr. Masterson that, but somehow you ended up with him. And you . . . you’re nothing, just a worthless girl with no name or family. You can’t have him. I’ve come to get what’s mine.”
Frey had calmed down somewhat with my arrival, but he was still some distance from us, pawing at the ground and making guttural noises, warning that he didn’t like this man who was yelling at us in the middle of the night.
I didn’t lower my iron frying pan either. Maybe Mr. Barner was a drunken skunk and no longer cognizant of what he was doing, but I’d heard stories about how males like him could get the upper hand and do bad things to young girls. I wasn’t an innocent entirely. Old Mother had given me the facts about such things, and if what she’d told me was true, the thought of Mr. Barner hugging me or putting his lips near mine was enough incentive to knock him in the noggin with a good solid thump.
I gave the man full warning of my intention, as did Frey, who was still digging holes in the ground just slightly out of reach of Mr. Barner’s swinging lasso. Luckily, the man’s rope hurls were feeble and rarely in Frey’s proximity. In fact, the man could barely stand and almost fell over several times when he released a throw.
I didn’t bother arguing with Mr. Barner. We’d already gone a round or two over who owned the horse. This was definitely not the first time I’d heard him deliver those words, which is why I mostly ignored them. I’d been given Frey when he’d barely had a chance at life. Then, after I’d nursed him for weeks, he’d not only survived, but had flourished. At six months of age, the owner who’d given me the dying foal, abruptly demanded that I return him.
But nursing Frey all those weeks with a bottle full of the powdered mare’s milk and some liquid vitamins I’d bought from the apothecary, had bonded the two of us. I couldn’t imagine life without him. I was not sure I could go on without my only friend.
I rarely earned cash when I worked in the village. Food, a used jacket, a tool I badly needed, even boards to replace the rotten or diseased planks of my lean-to — that’s what I was paid in exchange for my labors.