A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters Read Online Free

Prudence took out a scrap of paper and made notes.
    April was less certain when the white children had been stolen, since they didn’t belong to the town community, but she did know when her grandparents had started watching her more carefully, keeping her from going outside to play.
    “I have a new pony,” she explained. “Vern and I were practicing for the races. Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t minded, then all of a sudden they did.”
    “And they’ll mind,” Prudence said firmly, “if they find you out of bed. I’ll walk you back to your house. You staying in town, Vern?”
    “Nathan,” the boy said, his smile flashing in the dark, “is visiting Maria. I am supposed to be sleeping off very much peach pie.”
    “I’ll walk you both back,” Prudence said firmly. “Buck, mind the camp.”
    The stallion snorted and shifted his weight from side to side.
    After April and Vern were delivered to their respective beds, Prudence hurried back to her camp. She tried to sleep, but memory warred with conjecture, keeping her awake long after the coals of her fire had guttered into ash.
     
    The next morning, Prudence broke camp and headed out toward where Vern had told her the worst of the “witch trouble” had occurred.
    Most white folk thought of the Indians—when they bothered to think about them at all—as living the life of hunters and gatherers. To some whites this was living in savagery. To others the Indian way was the ideal of the noble savage. In the case of the modern Navajo either image was also completely false.
    Although the Navajo were not town dwellers, as were the various tribes the Spanish had dubbed “Pueblo” Indians, neither were they tepee-dwelling migrants as were many of the Plains tribes. The Navajo built houses—most commonly the various styles of hogan—kept flocks of sheep and herds of horses. Some even maintained orchards, favoring peaches and other stone fruit. When Kit Carson had wanted to drive out the Navajo, he’d burnt their trees.
    But Prudence’s route didn’t head toward the stream beds or river bottoms where those orchards would likely be, nor did she turn toward where flocks of sheep and goats grazed on the sparse summer vegetation. She set Buck’s head toward the hot, dry, rocky reaches, a land of majestic stone cliffs and vegetation closer to grey than green in color. The trail they followed once they left the town and its outliers was merely the suggestion of a trail, a path of least resistance rather than one that indicated frequent travel.
    As Prudence journeyed away from the town, she thought about what had brought her to these hot, dry lands, so far from where she’d grown up, and with nothing but two mustangs as companions.
    Prudence Bledsloe had been born in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, in a tangled green hollow well away from any of the towns listed on any map. The Bledsloe clan had been part of a small community of a dozen or so families, all of whom were descended from a group of immigrants who had come to the New World from Eastern Europe.
    Those original immigrants had been lured by the promise of unsettled land. More importantly, they longed for a degree of tolerance toward different creeds and ways of life that was impossible to find even in the most isolated parts of Eastern Europe.
    The Bledsloe clan had consisted of Prudence’s parents, her elder brother Jake, and a couple of younger cousins who had moved in with them after a sickness took their own parents. Sometime later, a return of that sickness had wiped out Clan Bledsloe along with much of the community. Most of the survivors had resolved to rebuild. Jake and Prudence had decided to head West.
    The two remaining members of Clan Bledsloe hadn’t had much, but they were adaptable. The skills they needed merely to survive in the Smokeys had served them well on the trail. Sometimes they’d linked up with a wagon train, but most often they traveled alone.
    Prudence thought about those long days