Horse Power (10 page)

L
ISA
, C
AROLE
,
AND
Stevie were each assigned a different chore the next morning. Afterward, while Carole and Stevie were in their jumping class, Lisa was on the trail with the newer riders. The girls didn’t have a minute to talk with one another until lunchtime.

Carole and Stevie were practically bursting with curiosity by the time they sat down together on the knoll overlooking Samson’s paddock. They waited expectantly while Lisa removed the foil top from her yogurt and opened up her fruit juice. Stevie tore the foil off her peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, keeping her eyes on Lisa all the while. Carole munched on a celery stalk, watching too.

“Well?” Carole said finally.

Lisa sighed. “It was a mistake,” she said simply. “We
went to the movie, which was awful, as far as I was concerned, but he
loved
it. I tried to talk about things that interest me. He couldn’t care less. What I mean is that it just wasn’t any fun.”

“What you mean is that my brother’s not good enough for you!” Stevie said in a huff.

Carole looked at her in astonishment. “You’re defending your brother—the one you’ve called a jerk, dweeb, creep, and idiot, to name just a few—in our hearing?”

Stevie blushed. “Well, but he’s
my
brother. I can call him those names. Nobody else can.” She looked at Lisa accusingly.

“Nobody else did,” Carole reminded her.

“And that’s not the way I felt about him,” Lisa said. “He was really nice to me, and I was nice to him. But I don’t think that’s what a date is supposed to be like. We just didn’t have anything in common.”

Stevie cooled off as quickly as she’d heated up. She was like that, and her friends knew it. Lisa started describing the afternoon with Chad and, by the time she’d gotten to the second episode of gruesome murder in the pharaoh’s tomb, Stevie was giggling.

“Oh, he has the most rotten taste in movies!” she admitted. “Okay, so he’s not your dream date. Now you know why he’s such a pain as a brother.”

“You said it, not me!” Lisa teased. “Anyway, I accomplished one really important thing yesterday.” She explained that Chad had wanted to quit riding and
how she had convinced him to stick with it through the gymkhana.

“A mixed blessing,” Stevie said.

“Not at all!” Carole told her. “We would be eliminated without him. Max told us that the teams are absolutely final. There are no extra riders at all. In fact, Max is trying to find somebody to help with the setup for the gymkhana. Know anybody who might be interested?”

Almost all gymkhana races and games required a lot of props, like eggs, water, targets, and hooks. Unless there were people who could help lay out the props, it could take ten times as long to set up the races as to run them.

“I could ask my brother Alex,” Stevie said, and then grimaced. “On second thought, I’ve got enough brothers in on this deal now, haven’t I?”

Carole and Lisa nodded, grinning. The three girls ate their lunches quietly, thinking. As Lisa finished her last spoonful of yogurt, her eyes lit up.

“I’ve got it!” she said. “Kate! I bet Kate would help. Even though she doesn’t want to ride anymore, she said she still liked being around horses, didn’t she, Carole?”

“Hey, that’s a
wonderful
idea,” Stevie chimed in. The broad smile on Carole’s face signaled agreement.

“I’ll call her tonight,” Carole said. “The minute I get home.” She finished her vegetables and began eating
her salad. “You know, there’s something funny going on here,” she told her friends.

“No more smart remarks about my brother,” Stevie joked. “That’s for me to do, right?”

“Well, not exactly a smart remark about your brother,” Carole said. “But what’s funny has to do with him. Here we have two people, Chad and Kate. One of them—if you will excuse me saying so, Stevie—has no business being at Pine Hollow, and the other one has no business
not
being at Pine Hollow. Everything is upside down.”

Stevie and Lisa nodded in agreement.

“Well, pretty soon, Chad will leave,” Lisa reminded her.

“And since we’ve pledged to do our best to get Kate back riding again, maybe we can turn something else rightside up,” Stevie said. “When the three of us team up to do something, it seems like we’ve got a lot of power. We can accomplish almost anything!” she announced triumphantly.

“Maybe it is us,” Carole agreed philosophically. “But maybe it’s really horse power.”

A
S
C
AROLE HAD
promised, she called Kate that night to ask if she would lend a hand with the gymkhana. At first Kate just said no.

“Well, I guess I can understand,” Carole said. “It’s a lot of work and not much fun, but I wanted to talk to you anyway, so I thought I’d ask.”

“What did you want to talk with me about?” Kate asked, curious.

“Oh, right. It’s a problem I’ve been having with one of the ponies—the one I’m supposed to ride for the gymkhana.”

Suddenly, Kate was interested. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“I can get him to move his legs
faster
,” Carole explained, “but I’m having trouble getting him to lengthen his strides.” This was a fairly common problem, and a relatively simple one when a horse was being a little lazy. The best way to have any horse pace efficiently was to have him take longer steps so that each stride covered more ground. For example, the difference between a slow trot and a fast trot was often more a difference between the length of the strides than the number of them.

Carole was fibbing to Kate. She wasn’t having any trouble with this at all on her pony, but she wanted to get Kate involved, even if only on the telephone. Carole knew that there were a lot of ways to get a horse to lengthen his stride, and that Kate would have lots of ideas for her.

They traded ideas back and forth for about ten minutes, trying to decide on the best approach with this particular pony. Finally, Kate said, “Look, I’ll be there tomorrow to help with the setup and if you’re still having a problem, we can work on it together, okay? I think the most important thing is for the pony to take
you seriously, you know? You’re going to have to keep a leg on him and encourage him to use all his horse power for you.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Kate,” Carole said, giggling to herself that Kate had used the very words she’d used earlier. “I think I can get him to respond more now. Thanks for the suggestions.”

“No problem,” Kate said cheerfully. “Glad to help. See you tomorrow afternoon.”

Carole cradled the phone and smiled to herself. She knew that Kate’s life was Kate’s life and if Kate didn’t want to ride anymore, well, that was her decision. In the meantime, however, Carole was determined to change Kate’s mind for her, and she had a feeling it was going to work.

She lay back on her bed lazily and stared up at the ceiling. Snowball jumped up on the foot of the bed, sat down, and stared at her.

“You’re the one who gave me the idea,” Carole informed the kitten. “Sometimes when you want somebody to do something, you have to start them out in the wrong direction first, right, Snowball?”

She tapped her stomach to encourage the kitten to come closer so she could pat him. Snowball stood up and hopped down off the bed.

“Just what I mean,” Carole said.

S
OMEHOW
,
JUST HAVING
Kate Devine at their next gymkhana practice seemed to make things go a little
smoother. Not only did she have good suggestions for all of them on how to ride better, but she also knew some of the tricks of the trade when it came to gymkhanas.

“Hey, coach!” Stevie said. “Any pointers for the costume race?”

“Oh, sure,” Kate said. “The problem with the costume race is that you have to get off your pony to put on the costume and then get back up again. You want that to be as easy as possible, so try lengthening your stirrups a couple of inches.”

Each of them tried that and it did save mounting and dismounting time.

“I think I feel a blue ribbon in my future,” Carole said, “thanks to you, that is.”

“Did I hear someone say ‘blue ribbon’?” Max asked as he strode into the ring, where they were practicing.

“We’re just dreaming, Max,” Lisa explained.

“Well, you’re certainly working hard enough on it,” he said. “Dreaming that way can get results.” That sounded like a compliment to the team members, and since compliments from Max were as rare as July frosts, they were pleased. “Anyway,” he continued, “I thought you’d like to know that I’ve just accepted a challenge from Watermill Stables. Our best gymkhana team will compete against their best as well as other local teams. Think you are up to it?” he asked.

“Oh, sure! When do we go?” Stevie asked, almost breathless with excitement.

“I don’t know that
you
will,” he said. “The team that wins here will go there. Think you can win here?”

The girls answered with a resounding “Yes!” Chad looked dubious, very dubious, Lisa noticed.

“We’d better get back to work right away,” Carole told her friends as Max returned to his office.

The team hopped back on their ponies and resumed their practice. It went pretty smoothly this time, except when Chad kept dropping eggs, and when Lisa couldn’t hit the target with her water gun, and when Stevie’s pony kept wandering in circles when they were trying pin-the-tail-on-the-pony, and when Carole kept tripping over her pirate sword in the costume race.

On the whole, things were not looking good, but Lisa was an optimist. “I think we’ve taken some big steps today,” she reassured her friends as they walked their ponies to cool them down before stabling them for the day.

“Yeah,” Stevie agreed sarcastically. “All backward.”

“If you want my advice,” Kate interrupted, “I suggest that you put the horses away and take the weekend off and just forget about the whole thing until Monday. Then you can start fresh.”

“You mean we shouldn’t even think about the gymkhana all weekend?” Lisa asked.

“Not at all,” Kate told her. “Oh, well, maybe you might pick up a squirt gun at the five-and-dime and try to improve your aim, and Chad, you should try balance exercises, like—”

“Stop!” Stevie said. “I think you were right in the first place. Let’s take the weekend off. Deal?”

“Deal!” they all agreed together. It was, Lisa noted, just about the first time they’d ever all agreed on anything.

“N
OW WATCH HOW
the rider brings her horse into the turn at the corner of the ring,” Carole told Lisa and Stevie. The three girls were sitting in the audience at the dressage test—the first day of the three-day event. Lisa realized that she’d been so focused on their gymkhana, which would begin that afternoon, that she’d almost forgotten about the adult activities.

Dressage, as Carole had explained earlier to her, was the portion of the three-day event in which the horse’s manners and training were being tested. Of course, that meant evaluating the rider’s performance, too, but the horse’s response to the rider’s instructions was the key in this part of the competition. In a way, it was like the school-figures part of a figure-skating competition. Each of the competitors walked, trotted, and
cantered her horse through the same exercise, which included diagonals, circles, and straight lines, measured precisely in the dressage ring.

“Uh-oh, look at that,” Carole remarked quietly.

“What?” Lisa asked. She thought the rider was doing a pretty good job.

“Well, she let her horse slow down the pace, and now, oh, no, look at
that
corner.”

Lisa watched carefully. Then she saw what Carole meant. The rider had let the horse cut the corner. “Points off, huh?”

Carole nodded.

No matter how hard Lisa watched, she couldn’t see as many mistakes as Carole could. She sometimes couldn’t even tell when things were being done right. Kate, sitting to her right, tried to help her see the fine points of the performances.

“See how the horse is balanced?” she asked Lisa.

Lisa tried to see it. Finally, she began to get the idea. “You mean the way his pace remains smooth and even?”

“You’re getting it, Lisa, you’re getting it,” Kate told her. Lisa grinned, pleased with herself, and, with the help of her local experts, she began to enjoy watching the competition. For the moment she’d forgotten that her own competition, the gymkhana, would begin at four o’clock—a mere five hours away.

C
AROLE WAS VERY
pleased that Kate had agreed to come to the adult events. These were the types of
competitions at which Kate herself had excelled. Carole wanted to see how Kate would react to watching these events. She had the feeling that Kate’s participation, no matter how slight, was going to be the key to luring her back into riding. For a few moments, Carole watched Kate looking at the riders. At first, she thought she could see Kate moving with them unconsciously, sometimes shifting her own weight to turn the horse she was riding in her imagination, sometimes sitting back to slow the animal down. Then Carole realized it wasn’t Kate moving that way, it was she herself.
Carole
was taking every pace with the riders. Kate was just sitting on the bench watching. Kate was still a mystery.