The Black Stallion Mystery by Walter Farley Read Free Book Online

it.”
    “It’s all right, I tell you,” Alec said sharply.
    Henry turned back to his eggs. That tone wasn’t typical of Alec, either. What was up? This house, this whole setup spelled trouble. Why?
    María placed two boiled eggs before Alec, and González said, “Here in Spain we do not eat much breakfast. Coffee is enough for me until lunch.”
    The big woman scowled, the many wrinkles in her face deepening. “Ahh,” she snorted. “You slink into the kitchen all morning to steal cheese and shrimp and bits of bread behind my back!”
    González scowled in return. “Stealing, María?” he asked. “You mean I steal food in my own house?”
    Her sallow features suddenly softened, becoming almost angelic. Her voice was motherly with a moving sadness. “You are not well. For all of your twenty-six years I have known it and cared for you. You do not eat right or live right!”
    “Shh, María,” González said nervously. “We have guests. Let us not discuss problems of the health.” He smiled but could not control the twitching of his right cheek.
    Alec finished his eggs and turned to Henry. The trainer was still toying with his food, removing bits of pimento and olives.
    The woman went on, “They might as well know, too, that you are a sick man,” she said angrily. “It is
they
who want to see you killed!”
    “María!”
González exclaimed sharply.
“Go to the kitchen!”
    “No,” she said quietly. “They should know what they have asked you to do.” She walked around the table, nervously straightening the silver bowls and pitchers. She moved in a shuffle, wobbling from side to side on her large flat feet.
    Apparently accepting María’s refusal to leave the room, González laughed wildly and said, “She worries about the bulls and always has. I get a scratch from a
becerro
, a young bull barely older than a calf, and she has the priest at my bedside!”
    Alec glanced at the woman and found her brown eyes upon him. She said accusingly, “If you had not come, he would not enter the ring again. He promised!”
    González was snapping his fingers, apparently in rhythm to the woman’s voice. If he was doing it to stop her it had no effect.
    “If God was not with him, he would have been killed long before this,” she said thickly.
    “I am as big and strong and brave as a bull, María,” the man said lightly. “You know it.”
    “Strength has nothing to do with it!” she almost shouted. “And by being
big
you are
bigger
for the bull’s horns to find!”
    “You’re being ridiculous,” the big man scoffed.
    Alec clasped his bad arm. The collar of his shirt felt tight because of the bandage around his neck. He understood only too well what this woman was talking about.
    María had cocked her head, birdlike, but her eyes were as hard and cold as flint as she looked upon the man she obviously considered more of a son than an employer.
    “You are too emotional to fight the bulls,” she said. “Even as a little boy you were too close to everything you tried to do. You
feel
too much. You cannot become emotionally involved with the bulls
or you die.
”
    Alec glanced at Angel Rafael González. The big man was no longer snapping his fingers to the woman’s words. As he listened to María he was the picture of doom. And although he had silenced his fingers he had no control over the nervous tic below his eye.
    “Ten years ago it was racing cars,” she accused him. “Later it was planes. Then came the bulls! First you were content to ride with your
vaqueros
, using your herder’s lance to tumble young bull calves in movingthem from field to field. Soon this, too, bored you. So you separated full-grown bulls from the herd and met them in the ring. Only then were you happy, for you were defying
death.
” She was crying when she left the room.
    González said with embarrassment, “Ridiculous accusations. It is a wonder that I stand for it. Still,” he shrugged his shoulders, “she has been