wagon, the kind people used for transportation a long time ago. Two patient horses pulled the wagon that rolled along on tall, metal-spoked wheels. Even though the Cruiser’s windows were closed, Jack could hear the clop, clop, clop of the horses’ hooves. The driver raised his whip in a salute to the Landons—or maybe he was warning them to stay on their own side of the road.
As they swerved to the right, the Cruiser hit a speed bump, knocking Leesa into Ashley. “Sorry,” Leesa said, and giggled a little, the first time Jack had heard anything like laughter coming from her.
When they finally found their rooms and got all their luggage inside, they discovered that their sliding doors opened right onto the golf course. “Hey, I could go out scouting for lost balls and sell them back to the golfers,” Jack joked.
“Check over there in front of the golf course,” Ashley said. “It’s a stable. That’s where all the horses are. Can we go riding, Mom? Please?”
“It’s too late now,” Olivia answered, “and I don’t know what my schedule will be like tomorrow. But it sure is perfect weather for riding.”
Luckily for the Landons, they were visiting Death Valley during the mild month of February rather than in the searing heat of summer, when hiking became dangerous and tourists often got into trouble. As always, when the family traveled during the school year, the kids had to bring along their homework and write papers about the park and its flora and fauna. That was an easy price to pay for the chance to see some of the greatest scenery in the United States.
“Which room is mine?” Leesa asked, picking up the shopping bag that held her clothes.
“Ours, you mean,” Ashley answered. “Whenever our foster kid—uh, I mean, our guest—is a boy, he shares a room with Jack, and I sleep on a cot in Mom and Dad’s room. If the guest is a girl, we share a room, and Jack stays with Mom and Dad. So you and I will bunk together while we’re here, Leesa.”
“Don’t worry, Ashley doesn’t snore—at least not too loud,” Jack teased.
Ashley punched him in the arm, but Leesa didn’t even smile. She just stared through the window at the gathering darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
“What the heck is borax?” Jack asked. “I keep seeing it on the map: Eagle Borax Works Ruins, Borax Museum, Harmony Borax Works, Twenty Mule Team Borax….”
Jack, Ashley, and Leesa were wandering through a collection of old wagons, machinery, and an actual locomotive on display in the Furnace Creek Ranch complex. In the restaurant nearby, Steven and Olivia still lingered over their breakfast coffee—Jack could see them through the window, their heads together, talking.
“Jack, if you’d bought the booklet in the museum like I did, you wouldn’t have to ask,” Ashley said. “It only cost me a dollar.”
“Why should I waste my money buying one when you already did? So tell me what borax is.”
Leafing through the pages, Ashley answered, “It says here that borax aids digestion, keeps milk sweet, gets rid of dandruff, improves your complexion, cures epilepsy, dissolves bunions—”
“Give me a break!” Jack hooted. “Nothing could do all that.”
Ashley laughed. “That’s what people were saying about it back in 1890. Too bad you can’t get some for your complexion, Jack. I noticed that zit on your cheek….”
Jack grabbed the booklet and swatted Ashley with it, but it was too flimsy to have any effect. Then he opened it and got interested in the story of borax, a white mineral mined in Death Valley. The best part was about the 20-mule teams—actually nine pairs of mules and a pair of horses—all lined up with a 120-foot-long chain running down the middle of them. The chain connected the team to two huge wagon loads of borax, plus a big iron water tank, with the entire load totaling 36 tons. Jack could imagine those poor mules hauling all that weight out of the valley in the boiling heat of summer. Even worse, sometimes the brakes on the wagons would fail, and the heavy load would thunder downhill on top of the panic-stricken mules trying to stay ahead of it.
“Hey! Give me back my book,” Ashley demanded.
Since Jack was now five feet seven inches tall, he had no trouble holding the book too high for his shrimpy little sister to reach. She kept jumping up to slap at his arm.
“Leesa, come help me,” Ashley begged, but Leesa didn’t want to get involved in a sibling tussle. She backed away to stand in front of one of the huge, old borax wagons on display in front of the ranch. Leesa was short to begin with, not much taller than Ashley, and next to the seven-foot-high rear wheel of the wagon, she looked like a Munchkin.
“Here, take your book,” Jack said, stuffing it down the back of Ashley’s T-shirt. “Mom and Dad are coming.” Sometimes, if he teased his sister a little too much, Jack got in trouble with his parents. Usually Ashley didn’t tell on him, though. She was pretty cool that way. Pretending to be serious, he said, “As I was mentioning, today borax is used to make glass and soap and certain cosmetics, which, by the way, I saw you sneaking out of Mom’s purse—”
“What cosmetics!”
“Her lipstick. I don’t think there’s borax in that.”
“I put it right back,” Ashley said quickly, blushing a little. “OK, we’re even now. You don’t tell Mom about the lipstick, and I won’t mention your zit again. Truce?”
“Deal.” They gave each other a high five.
By then Steven and Olivia had reached them. “Did you see all the old mining equipment behind the Borax Museum?” Steven asked. “Back in those days, they made machinery large and heavy to do big jobs. It took a lot of muscle power to move those loads.”
“We’ll come back and spend some time here later,” Olivia told them. “Right now I have a meeting at the visitor center. Unless the rest of you would rather stay here, and I can go the visitor center by myself….”
“We’ve seen this,” Jack told her. “There’s probably other good stuff at the visitor center.”
When they got there, Olivia went into one of the offices in the back, while Steven headed straight for the photo books of Death Valley. Ashley started chatting up one of the interpretive rangers, and Jack was left with Leesa.
Silent as always, she at least walked next to him as they wandered past the displays of Indian artifacts and baskets. At the end of a large room they came to a glass case holding what a sign identified as a desert bighorn sheep, now mounted and on display. Its enormous horns curved in an almost perfect circle from the top of its head to beneath its jaws.
“That’s why we’re here,” Jack said, trying to start a conversation.
“Why?”
“Because my mother is a wildlife veterinarian, so when the national parks have problems with any of their wildlife, they call my mother as a consultant. Here in Death Valley, some bighorn sheep have died, and no one knows why. Just a few died, but there aren’t that many living in the park, and park officials don’t want to lose any of them. The sheep stay high up in the mountains.”
“Oh,” Leesa said.
Great
