Horse Talk

What bothered Carole most was that here they were, willing and ready to teach people about horses, and no one wanted to learn. Carole knew that she would listen to a radio show about horses. “Maybe we just need more publicity for
Horse Talk
, so that legitimate callers phone in.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of posting Chad’s naked baby pictures all over Fenton Hall,” Stevie said. “Or maybe we could come up with some good reason for blackmail.”

“Why don’t we try talking to Chad?” Lisa suggested. “Maybe if we appeal to his better side—tell him how important this is to us—he’ll knock it off.”

He doesn’t have a better side,” Stevie growled.

“Yeah,” Carole said. “I mean, he might have a better side, but from what we’ve seen of Chad before, telling him how important
Horse Talk
is to us will just inspire him to bother us more. Maybe if we leave him alone, he’ll leave us alone, too.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Stevie said. “Revenge is the best option. But, like you said, we’ve got all week.”

“O
KAY
,
RIDERS
,
THAT
’
S
enough. Class is dismissed. Good work, everybody.” Max Regnery, owner of Pine Hollow Stables, spoke quietly, but the half dozen riders in the ring responded immediately and gladly, sitting back and bringing their sweating horses to a walk. Stevie Lake blew out her breath and let her shoulders sag. That had been tough! For the past few minutes, Max had made them all canter with their feet out of the stirrups and one hand held straight up over their heads. He said it would improve their seats in the saddle. Riding without stirrups was fun, but it was hard work, and even though the November breeze was cool, Stevie, like her horse, Belle, was starting to sweat. She put her feet back into her stirrups and let her leg muscles relax.

Stevie patted Belle on the neck and turned her toward the gate. One of Stevie’s best friends, Lisa Atwood, rode up to her on a mare named Prancer. “Wasn’t that fun!” Lisa said. Her face was glowing from excitement and exercise. “We rode almost the whole lesson without stirrups! I’ve never done that before.”

Stevie grinned back. “It was fun—but hard. I had a long day at school, too, and I’m tired.”

“I know,” Lisa said. “We missed talking to you before the lesson.” On Tuesdays after school, the girls and their other best friend, Carole Hanson, had riding lessons. Stevie had come in late that day and had barely had time to saddle Belle before the lesson started.

“Let’s walk out on the trails for a few minutes,” Stevie suggested. “Carole!” She waved to their friend, who was sitting on her horse, Starlight, in the center of the ring and talking earnestly to Max. “Look at her,” Stevie said. “You can tell by the way she’s waving her hands that she’s explaining some complicated riding theory to Max.”

“Maybe,” Lisa said. Carole was a fantastic rider, the best of the three of them (she planned to be a professional horse something—vet, rider, trainer—someday), and Starlight was a great horse, but they hadn’t had one of their better lessons. Lisa could tell by watching
them jump that they had never been quite in harmony the entire hour. She hoped Carole wasn’t upset.

“Yeah,” Stevie said sympathetically, catching Lisa’s meaning. “Well, a nice little trail ride will cheer her up, too. Carole! Come on! We’re going to take a loop through the woods.”

Carole said one last thing to Max and turned toward them. She was smiling; she didn’t look, Lisa thought, too upset about the lesson. “Great idea,” Carole said as she rode up to her friends. “These horses are going to take a while to cool down anyway, and that way we can relax without Mrs. Reg finding eight hundred things for us to do.”

Lisa laughed. Mrs. Reg, Max’s mother, ran the stables, and she was notorious for setting idle hands to work.

The horses were all sweating under their thick winter coats, and the girls had to make sure they were absolutely dry before they put them back into their stalls; otherwise the horses could get sick. Riding them at a walk was actually a pretty good way to cool them. “We’ll make sure they’re really, really cool,” Lisa said. “We’ll probably have to take a very long ride.”

Stevie told Max where they were going. “Be back before it gets dark,” he warned them, then waved them off with a smile.

“He’s so nice to us,” Lisa said appreciatively. Unlike
her friends, she didn’t have her own horse. Prancer, the mare she was riding, belonged to Max. Lisa loved Prancer very much, and Max usually let her take her out for trail rides and other fun things, as well as ride her in lessons.

“You sure had a great lesson, Lisa,” Carole told her as they rode down the short path that led into the woods.

“Thanks,” Lisa said with a grin. She knew it was true. Today they’d jumped fences without stirrups and without holding on to their reins; to Lisa, who’d never done anything like it before, it had felt wonderfully free, like flying. She loved to learn; she was a straight-A student in school, and she studied lots of other things like dance, piano, and acting. Horses were her favorite subject, but she hadn’t been riding as long as her two friends, and when she had started she had been somewhat surprised at how much there was to learn. Horses couldn’t be figured out by reading a book. They had minds of their own.

“You were the star of The Saddle Club,” Stevie complimented her. “Belle and I weren’t quite as together as you and Prancer.”

Long ago, the three of them had decided that they loved horses enough to form The Saddle Club. Its only two rules were that members had to be horse-crazy, and they had to help each other out.

“You looked great except for that bounce combination,”
Lisa replied. A bounce combination was two fences set so close together that the horse jumped one, landed, and immediately jumped the other without taking another stride. Belle had insisted on taking a stride between the fences, and Stevie, riding without reins or stirrups, had come awfully close to falling off.

Stevie shook her head. “I don’t know what got into Belle,” she said. “She’s done bounces dozens of times.” She shrugged. “Oh well. We got it right in the end.”

Lisa and Carole smiled at her. Stevie was a good rider, too, particularly at a kind of elegant flat work called dressage. Belle was good at both dressage and jumping, and she loved to be taken out on trail rides; she seemed to enjoy having a good time as much as Stevie did. But while Stevie never cared how well she did in school (except, of course, when her low grades meant her parents wouldn’t let her ride), she was very competitive in the saddle. Sometimes she lost patience with herself, or with Belle, when things didn’t go right.

“Don’t look so proud of me,” she said to her friends. “It’s not like our riding lesson was any big deal.”

“It’s not like Phil was there,” Lisa teased. Phil Marsten was Stevie’s boyfriend, and he rode, too.

“I could tell Belle just wasn’t getting it,” Stevie explained. “She wasn’t understanding what we wanted her to do. It wasn’t like she was trying to be bad.”

“Exactly,” Carole said with a nod. “I felt the same way about Starlight. We— Hey!” She exclaimed as
Starlight jumped sideways in alarm. They had ridden out of the woods for a moment and were about to cross a small hay field. An old tractor was parked in the corner of the field, and Starlight reacted as if it were a monster. Every muscle in his sleek body tensed.

“Come on, boy, nothing to be afraid of,” Carole said soothingly. “It’s just a tractor. It’s not going to hurt you.” They had to walk past the tractor to get back onto the trail.

Starlight refused to walk forward. He bunched his hindquarters beneath him, and when Carole gently pushed him forward with her legs, he tossed his head and tried to turn in circles. “No,” Carole said firmly but calmly. “Walk on.”