Rodeo Rider (2 page)

“M
ERCURY
’
S
DROPPING
SOMETHING
awful,” said Red O’Malley, Pine Hollow’s primary stablehand, greeting Carole at the door.

“Then we’ll have to bed the horses down carefully after class,” Carole said. When it came to horses, Carole was all business and she never shirked her responsibilities. She headed for the tack room to find Stevie and Lisa.

Both girls were already there, picking up the tack to
get their horses ready for class. “I’ve got a letter to us from Kate!” Carole announced happily, waving the envelope in the air.

“Oh, great!” Stevie exclaimed, her eyes dancing. Stevie, whose real name was Stephanie, was the most animated person Carole knew. The problem was keeping her still sometimes! Stevie had a weird sense of humor and a love of practical jokes that sometimes got her in a lot of trouble. In fact, it often got her friends in trouble right along with her. Carole and Lisa didn’t usually mind, though. Being anywhere with Stevie, even in trouble, was almost always a lot of fun.

Lisa Atwood seemed to be Stevie’s exact opposite. She was a little older than Stevie and Carole, but she didn’t look it. She had light brown hair and always dressed neatly and fashionably, unlike Stevie, who seemed to own nothing but jeans. Lisa was the newest rider of the three, but was an apt pupil at riding, as she was at everything else, and had quickly become as horse crazy as her friends.

The three girls thought it would be impossible to find three people more different than they were. But when it came to friendship, their differences weren’t nearly as important as their similarities. They all loved horses, and that was enough to bind them together.

“So, what did Kate say in her letter?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know,” Carole told her. “I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to save it until we could read it together.” She started to open the envelope, then changed her mind and slipped it back in her pocket. “Nah,” she
said. “There are just a few minutes until class. We’ll read it while we’re doing chores.”

“You mean
you’ll
read while
we
pitch straw?” Stevie teased.

“Well, you’re so good at pitching straw …” Carole began.

“Oh, flattery will get you everywhere!” Stevie said. “Tell you what. I’ll show you my secret to pitching straw and then
I
can read while
you
pitch straw.”

“Max will have us all pitching straw until midnight if we’re late,” Lisa said sensibly.

On that note, the three girls got their horses’ tack and went to work. Max could be very grumpy when students were late to class.

“B
ALANCE
MAY
BE
the single most important factor in successful riding,” Max declared to the class.

Lisa could believe that. She just hoped she had enough balance to stay on the horse she was riding until the end of the exercise!

The class was riding at a sitting trot, with no stirrups, holding the reins with one hand. Their left hands were behind their backs.

“Reach up with those left hands as if you’re trying to scratch!” Max told them.

Lisa tried to do it. Somehow, reaching with her left hand made her sit straighter. Her legs hung lower and her balance was better. She gripped firmly with her thighs. It was working!

“Nice, Lisa,” Max said. “Now stay like that. Good job.”

Lisa beamed to herself. Compliments from Max were rare, indeed. She felt good.

“Okay, now, down to a walk, let the horses cool down, and then class is over.”

Isn’t that typical?
Lisa thought to herself. The minute she got the hang of something, it was time to stop. She wanted to be able to remember the feeling of doing it right so she could do it the next time she rode.

“We have extra chores this afternoon,” Max announced as the ten horses in the class circled him at a cool-down walk. A few students groaned in protest. “It’s cold and getting colder, so we have to blanket the horses and bed them down carefully.”

“I
F
ONE
MORE
person tells me the temperature, I think I’m going to scream!” Stevie announced over the stall that separated Topside, the horse she rode, from Pepper, the one Lisa rode.

“So, what was it last time you heard?” Lisa asked.

“Twenty-one, down from twenty-eight ten minutes ago.”

“That
is
cold.”

“Did you hear?” Meg Durham asked excitedly, poking her head over the stall on the other side. “It’s only fifteen degrees out—and it’s going down to zero!”

A muffled scream came from Stevie’s side of the wall.

Lisa slipped a quilted blanket over Pepper’s back and began tying the strings that would hold it on.

“Horses don’t mind the cold, you know,” Stevie said, peering over the wall as she put Topside’s blanket on. “They’re outdoor animals. A lot of these guys’ ancestors lived on the plains where it gets a lot colder than this.”

“But these horses are in stalls and can’t run around to keep warm,” Carole reminded her from across the stable’s hallway. “Also, it was their
ancestors
running around on the frozen plains. These horses are used to indoor temperatures. So that means, be sure to give them lots and lots of warm straw, and fasten the blankets on snugly.”

“Enough, enough,” Stevie complained. “We get the picture!”

She sounded very cranky, and Lisa had the feeling that Stevie was about to go into a major grump. “I’ve got an idea, Carole,” Lisa interrupted, quickly changing the subject. “Isn’t this a good time for you to read Kate’s letter?”

It turned out that it was. Carole was finished with her grooming and waiting for her friends to finish so they could all do the stable chores together. She pulled the letter out of her pocket and began reading. Kate sounded well. She started by telling the girls about the upcoming rodeo. It was a one-day event, but it was the only rodeo Two Mile Creek had and it sounded like a lot of fun.

Then Kate described her roping lessons. She made
them sound totally hopeless. The girls knew better than that.

“If I know Kate, she’ll be able to rope a pea at fifty yards within a month,” Stevie remarked. Lisa was inclined to agree with her.

Kate concluded her letter with a strange statement: “So, as you can tell, we’re all having a lot of fun here. Dude ranching agrees with Mom and Dad and me. I just hope we’ll be able to continue to do it. Cross your fingers for us, okay?”

“What does that mean?” Stevie asked. Lisa shook her head, concerned.

“Something is definitely wrong,” Carole said. “Frank hinted at it when he was talking with my dad, but then tried to pretend nothing was the matter.”

“That’s it, then. Whatever it is, it’s bad,” Stevie said.

“Okay, so what are we going to do about it?” Lisa asked, feeling frustrated by the circumstances.

Both girls looked at Carole for an answer.

Carole frowned. “I’d like to tell you I think this is a good Saddle Club project, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this one may be too big—even for us—especially when we don’t know what it is that we’re up against.”

“Since when did that ever stop us before?” Stevie asked.

“Did you hear?” Red O’Malley said, interrupting their conversation. The girls looked at him. “Temperature’s
still dropping. We’ve got one major ice storm on our hands!”

All thoughts of The Bar None fled their minds. There was suddenly too much work to do at Pine Hollow.

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
when Carole woke up, she ran to the window to look out. When she’d come home the night before, the world had seemed frozen. Tree branches were coated with thick layers of ice, which almost seemed to protect them against the frigid weather that had come so suddenly.

But now, there was no winter wonderland. As fast as the freeze had come, it had gone. The ground was soggy, strewn with twigs and branches that had snapped off from the weight of the ice the night before. The sun shone brightly. All that was left of the storm was a mess.

“Rats,” she said out loud. She had been hoping for something serious enough to close school. A day off could be lots of fun …

Then she heard her clock radio click on. There was an extended news report about the storm’s damage.

“… the whole area was totally unprepared for the sudden deep freeze. All over the county, telephone and electrical lines are down and pipes have frozen and cracked. The worst hit was Willow Creek, where construction work bared pipes leading to the municipal center, including the town hall and the junior high school, as well as other local buildings. Damage is so
severe”—Carole held her breath—“that authorities are telling workers not to come in, except for emergency personnel. Schools will be shut down. The mayor was unable to say when schools would reopen, but said repairs would take at least a week. In a related incident …”

A week! No school for a week!

Carole whooped.

“Heard the good news on the radio, eh, sweet thing?” her father called up the stairs.

“Can you believe it? What am I going to do first?”

“Pack, I’d say.”

Pack? What was her father talking about? “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Not
we, you.
And Lisa and Stevie,” Colonel Hanson said. “I mean as long as the schools are shut—and even Stevie’s fancy private school suffered bad damage with the downtown water disaster—you three are just going to have to get out of your parents’ hair. I just got off the phone with the Atwoods and the Lakes. The only thing we could all think of was to send you off to the sunny Southwest, with a trained Marine Corps pilot. Frank’ll bring you three back next Sunday when he comes to pick up Mr. Lowell. Now, he’s staying over an extra day to wait until the congestion eases up at the airport. Think you can be ready to go by tomorrow morning—at O-eight hundred?”

For a moment Carole was speechless. Then she grinned broadly. “Does a private first class polish brass?”

No problem!

T
HE
FLIGHT
WITH
Frank Devine in the small plane went very smoothly. The last time the girls had flown to the ranch, they’d had to take three different airplanes. They thought this new way was a lot easier, and a lot more fun.

“Tray tables and seat backs into their full upright and locked positions?” Stevie joked. Of course, there wasn’t room for tray tables in the little plane, and the seat backs only reclined a few inches. It was Stevie’s way of saying that she thought the end of the trip was near. Stevie glanced out the window and spotted the small airport a few miles away. Another advantage to
flying with Frank was that they could land at a local airport, which was just ten miles from the ranch, instead of the nearest commercial airport, which was over seventy miles away.

Frank laughed. “All you really need to do is make sure your seat belts are on—oh, and extinguish all smoking materials.”

The girls giggled.

“There’s the airport!” Carole said excitedly.

“And there’s Kate!” Lisa said, almost bouncing in her seat.

Stevie squinted out her window at the bright desert sunlight. She could just make out two small figures standing by the little terminal building who might be Kate and Eli. A pickup truck was parked on the other side of the building.

The plane slowly made its descent. Even though the airport was small, with no other visible air traffic, Frank kept in constant touch with the tower, receiving all his landing instructions and following them carefully. He concentrated totally on the task in front of him. Stevie watched his hands flick busily over the numerous switches and buttons on the panel in the cockpit. She couldn’t make any sense of what he was doing. She decided to concentrate on the approach instead.

The figures were becoming clearer. “It’s Eli! I know it is. And Mel is with him!” Stevie cried. Mel was Eli’s favorite herding dog. She was caramel-colored and had had a litter of puppies the last time the girls had been
at the ranch. Now she sat motionlessly next to Eli, who watched the approaching plane. His big cowboy hat shaded his eyes.

Kate stood on his other side. In contrast to Eli’s calm, Kate was jumping all over the place and waving excitedly. Stevie wished she could be jumping, too. She had the feeling, though, that it might distract their pilot. And the last thing in the world she wanted to do was to distract their pilot!

Almost imperceptibly, the plane slowed down and settled onto the runway. When it was at taxiing speed, Frank made a U-turn. Within seconds, they had stopped in front of the little building that served as the airport terminal.

Kate ran up to the plane and helped from the outside as Frank opened the door.

The girls couldn’t get out of the plane fast enough. They were eager to see Kate and to hug her. Stevie was dimly aware of Eli and Frank unloading their luggage as the four of them had their reunion on the tarmac. It was so exciting to be back with Kate, headed for The Bar None.

“Can we have the same cabin we had before?” Carole asked.

“You can have your pick of cabins, except for the one with the broken toilet and the other with the leaky roof—or is that two now with leaky roofs?” Frank said. Stevie thought there was something odd in his tone.