Rodeo Rider (5 page)

“Couldn’t we just pop into the kitchen and grab a little snack?” Stevie wheedled, ever the optimist.

“No need for that. You can have a full meal,” the young man answered. “In an hour and a half.” His politeness was definitely sounding strained.

Carole sensed that it was time to quit. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

“Hmmm,” the young man said. Carole noticed the absence of a “You’re welcome.”

The girls shuffled into the lounge, discouraged by their failure. The lounge was a large sitting room with coffee tables and game tables for cards and board games. It looked very much like the lounge at The Bar None.

Stevie started rummaging through the boxes of board games in the cabinet. “Monopoly … Candy Land … Chutes and Ladders … Life … Risk … Trivial Pursuit …”

As she named each game, Kate said, “Yup,” confirming that The Bar None had the same selection.

“… Pictionary.”

“Hey, we don’t have that one,” Kate said excitedly. “But we can get it. I’m sure we can!”

“Oh, that’ll make all the difference,” Stevie said sarcastically.

“Probably not,” Kate said. “See, we’ve got Clue and they don’t.”

Carole glanced at Kate to see if she seriously thought a couple of board games would make the difference between success and failure. The look on Kate’s face told Carole that Kate knew better.

“Excuse me, miss,” Lisa said, talking to a young woman who was tidying up the lounge. “Can you help me with something?”

“Sure,” the housekeeper said agreeably. “If I can.”

“Well, I’ve got this problem and I’m not having much luck convincing the guy who runs the dining room—you know, the guy with the icy stare?”

“Good old Rule-Book Marshall?”

“That’s the one,” Lisa said. “Anyway, I have this equine allergy and my doctor told me it would help if I made sure to have an, uh, well, you know, a glass of milk every morning at, uh”—she glanced at her watch—“eleven-seventeen. It’s eleven-fifteen now and I’m going to start sneezing in exactly two minutes, but Marshall won’t let me near the kitchen to get my milk. Can you help?”

The housekeeper’s face began twitching oddly. Carole was afraid she was going to blow up. And she did, in a way. She exploded into laughter.

“You must really be desperate to think I’d fall for a story like that!” she said when her giggles subsided. “But anybody with that much imagination ought to be rewarded. Come with me.”

Lisa didn’t waste a second. She bounded after the housekeeper, following her through a door off the lounge into the sacred—and apparently secret—recesses of the ranch’s kitchen.

Lisa emerged two minutes later, carrying a paper cup full of milk.

“So?” Kate asked.

“Other than the fact that it’s painted white instead of yellow, it’s about the same as your kitchen. Except that they’re cooking chili for lunch and they’ve put in too many beans and not enough beef.”

“I’m keeping a checklist, are you?” Stevie asked Christine.

Christine nodded. “So far, we’ve got to get the Devines to get rid of Clue, buy Pictionary, and add beans. Sounds to me like a formula for success.”

“Don’t forget about hiring a snobby dining room manager who makes the guests feel uncomfortable,” Stevie suggested.

Carole scowled. She was beginning to think that their spying prank wasn’t going to get them any useful information at all and she was annoyed at the failure. But she wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“Come on, guys,” she said. “There’s something we’re missing. I know there is.” Her friends looked at her dubiously. Carole pursued the thought. “Look, a dude ranch isn’t successful because of board games and beans. It’s the horses and the riding program that matter. So what are we doing here in the lounge? Let’s get to the stable!”

The other girls agreed that it couldn’t hurt to take a look. They unhitched their horses and walked them over to the corral, which bordered the stable. The corral contained all the horses that had been rounded up for the guests for the day. It was just the same as the corral at The Bar None.

“The horses all look fine,” Kate said, observing them carefully. Carole had to agree with her friend. All the animals appeared to be healthy and well taken care of. Some pranced around the corral, while others stood quietly. It was a normal mix of horses. There probably weren’t any prizewinners in the corral, but there weren’t any flea-bitten nags, either.

“You’re right,” Carole told Kate. “Nothing unusual here. Your horses are just as good.”

“Tack,” Stevie said suddenly. “Tack’s really important. We’ve got to get to the tack room.”

“Just like we had to get to the kitchen?” Lisa asked, reminding Stevie that so far their mission hadn’t exactly been a screaming success.

“It’s worth trying,” Stevie countered. Nobody could disagree with that. “Now, let’s see,” she said, thinking out loud. “I need to find a wrangler and tell him about
this allergy I have …” She looked out of the corner of her eye at Lisa, who blushed.

“All right, I’m not as good as you,” Lisa said, sounding a little defensive. “I know you would have come up with something better. But it worked, didn’t it?”

“What worked?” a man asked, approaching them from inside the corral. He was one of the ranch wranglers, dressed in what seemed to be the wranglers’ uniform of jeans, plaid shirt, and hat. He was also wearing a black duster. Carole liked the dusters. She wondered if she could wear one, then decided it wouldn’t look right over her English riding togs.

“My friend here has really bad allergies. She was saying that her medicine worked,” Stevie told the man, keeping a straight face.

The wrangler looked at them patronizingly. “Not a real good idea to hang around too close to the corral,” he warned them. “The horses could nip you or something. We wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Stevie retorted.

“Oh, good,” he said. “So what are you doing hanging around here? Why aren’t you on the trail ride with the other dudes?”

Carole suspected Christine was adding condescending, rude wranglers to the list of things The Bar None would have to get to compete with The Dapper Dude.

“It just so happens that I have a problem with my tack,” Stevie told the wrangler.

“You do? And what might that be?” he asked.

Everybody looked at Stevie, especially Lisa. She
wanted to see if Stevie could come up with a more believable whopper than hers.

Stevie’s voice took on a spoiled, whining tone. “See, there’s this sort of smudged place on the saddle and I’m awfully afraid that it’s going to get my jeans dirty. Isn’t there some sort of soap or something you could use to clean it up? Or could I have a new saddle?”

The girls held their breath. The wrangler looked at Stevie closely. Carole had the feeling that it was going to work. The look on the man’s face clearly indicated that a dumb remark like that was just about what he would expect from a greenhorn like Stevie. Carole especially liked the part Stevie had added about “something you could use to clean it up.” She knew this wrangler wouldn’t be caught dead soaping a saddle for the kind of dumb dude Stevie was pretending to be.

“We’ve got just the thing for you, miss,” he said, very politely now. “It’s called saddle soap. I’ll show you where it is. You can do the cleaning yourself. After all, I wouldn’t want to leave any dusty residue on the saddle that might soil those nice clean jeans of yours. This way, please.”

Stevie followed him. Before she entered the barn, she turned back to her friends and winked. Lisa gave her a thumbs-up signal.

“Just forty-five minutes now until lunch,” came a familiar, unwelcome voice from behind them. It was Rule-Book Marshall. He walked past them quickly and officiously.

“Gee, thanks,” Carole called after him.

Stevie emerged from the stable with some saddle soap on a paper towel. She was about to toss it aside, but Carole made her use it on Stewball’s saddle.

“What if somebody’s watching?” Carole asked. “They’ll know that was just a fib.”

Stevie rubbed the soap into the seat of the saddle. “That was much too believable for anybody to suspect,” she said, teasing Lisa as she spoke.

“I believed it.” Lisa smiled ruefully. “It sounded to me as if you were quoting Veronica diAngelo!” Veronica was an overrich, overindulged rider at Pine Hollow who believed that the sole function of all the stablehands there was to help her.

“I was,” Stevie said. Lisa could believe that, too.

Stevie finished the soaping and put the paper towel into the garbage. “Well, guys, the tack room here is just a tack room. No silver bridles to lure the tourists. Just leather, dust, and cobwebs.”

“What’s next?” Christine asked. Carole shook her head. She didn’t know what to do next.

“Hey, Lisa, how’s the sneezing going?” somebody called out. The girls looked up. It was the housekeeper who had sneaked Lisa into the kitchen.

“Fine, thanks,” Lisa replied, somewhat flustered.

“That’s it,” Carole decided. “It’s time to go. We’ve stopped blending in and have started to stand out. We’ll be discovered it we stick around for two more minutes. Let’s go!”

The girls mounted and began riding toward the ranch’s gate.

“Stand out?” Stevie said, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “But we never even had a chance to explain about the tour group of reform-school refugees we wanted to bring, so we would need a tour of all the guest rooms. And I just know the reason I didn’t have good hot water this morning was because the boiler must be broken and I’d know just what to do if I could get a look at it. Oh! And the root cellar! I bet their vegetables don’t hold a candle to my dad’s prize parsnips …”

“Uncle! Uncle! I give up!” Lisa declared as they passed under the sign welcoming guests to The Dapper Dude. “You can tell better stories than I can. You have always told better stories than any of us. You win the crown!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Christine said. “After all, I didn’t even have a chance to explain how I heard a rumor that President Reagan stayed here and I wanted to see all of their guest books to look at his autograph.”

“What about me?” Kate said. “I’m an amateur entomologist and I need to check out the spiders in the attic.”

“Right,” Lisa said. “Now get this: We’re actually government agents and we heard of this spy ring disguised as wranglers.…”

The girls chattered on, giggling at the most outrageous
yarns. Carole laughed with them, but she was thinking as well. They hadn’t seen all of the rooms, the guest book, or the attic at The Dapper Dude, but it seemed clear that it was a guest ranch just the same as The Bar None. So why was it succeeding when The Bar None was failing?

“W
HERE
ARE
WE
going?” Stevie asked Kate, who was in the lead.

“We’re going into town,” Kate said. “It’s only another couple of miles past The Dapper Dude. I figured since we’d be too late for lunch at home and we certainly didn’t want to test the hospitality at The Dapper Dude any more, we ought to buy ourselves something in Two Mile Creek.”

“Something really nutritious, like what we got at the ice cream place the last time we were there?” Stevie asked.

“Something like that.” Kate laughed. “They do have hamburgers and salads there, too.”

Stevie remembered their last visit to the town. There was a cowboy show in the main street every afternoon. At three o’clock sharp, bank robbers had shown up to steal the payroll and shortly thereafter, the marshal and his posse had arrived to put them all behind bars. A shoot-out had ensued. Stevie had really had a wonderful time at the show. In fact, she’d actually believed it was true. It didn’t occur to her at first that real bad guys probably wouldn’t be wearing microphones to amplify their voices—or, in the late twentieth century, make their getaways on horseback. She’d swallowed the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker, until the audience had started applauding.

Naturally, Stevie had never told Carole and Lisa that she’d been taken in. There were things she could tell her best friends and there were things she thought she should just keep to herself. That episode was in the latter category. Still, she had enjoyed the show and she hoped they’d be in town long enough today to see it again.

Stevie realized then that Kate had changed the subject. She began listening. “You know, I don’t think their success has anything to do with being any better than The Bar None. They’re not,” Kate was saying. “They’re just doing a better job than we are about tooting their own horn. Only a few people around here know about The Bar None. Everybody knows about The Dapper Dude.”

“So we wasted our time snooping?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Kate said. “That was an important thing to learn. And besides, we did learn about Pictionary!” The girls laughed. Then Kate stopped her horse.

“Look! There it is!” she said.

The Saddle Club looked where she was pointing. A quarter of a mile ahead of them lay the town of Two Mile Creek. It was little more than a main street, appropriately called Main Street, and a few side streets. But it looked different from the last time they had seen it. On the north side of town, the rodeo had been set up. There was a large grandstand, a number of tents, and corrals. Red, white, and blue banners and bunting decorated half of the structures. The rest apparently had yet to be done.