Million-Dollar Horse

Max handed the screwdriver to Stevie. He took the horse’s nameplate and lined it up with the screw holes that were already in the stall door. Then he handed Stevie a screw and motioned for her to fasten the nameplate.

She stepped forward and read the new tenant’s name for the first time.

“Honey-Pie?” she asked, astonished.

“That’s right,” said Max.

“That doesn’t sound like a million-dollar horse,” Carole protested. “That sounds like the kind of weird name an old lady would give her puppy!”

“Now you’re getting warmer,” said Max mysteriously, handing Stevie the second screw. He didn’t say another word to the girls while Stevie finished fastening the nameplate to the door. He just smiled, took the screwdriver from Stevie, and walked back to his office, clearly enjoying every minute of his mystery.

“I’ll be here on Monday,” Lisa declared.

“I wouldn’t miss it for … for—well, a million bucks,” Stevie agreed.

“We’ll
all
be here on Monday to welcome, um, Honey-Pie”—the sickly sweet name didn’t come easily to Carole’s lips—“to its … his … her new home.”

“L
OOK AT THIS
!” Stevie Lake said, pointing to a small picture in a large catalog. Her two best friends, Carole Hanson and Lisa Atwood, leaned over the page to see what had caught her interest.

“Isn’t that the cutest?” Stevie’s finger rested on a picture of a pink horse blanket with lace on the edge.

“Cute, but not practical,” Carole said. “I mean, lace? In a stable? And pink? It would get dirty in an instant.”

“I didn’t mean I wanted to
buy
it,” Stevie said. “I just meant it was cute.”

“It is,” Lisa agreed. “But I’ve never thought that pink was Belle’s color. I’ve always thought she looked best in winter tones.”

The three girls smiled, amused at the idea that a
horse had any fashion sense or color preferences. Stevie sighed and turned the page. There she found a wide selection of very sensible horse blankets in very sensible colors, like dark brown, dark green, dark blue, and gray.

“That’s more like it,” she said.

“And almost exactly as affordable,” Carole said, noticing the prices.

“It doesn’t cost anything to look,” Stevie said, letting her eyes wander across the page to the beginning of the tack trunk section. “And besides, Belle doesn’t even need a new blanket.”

“Not needing something for our horses never kept us from window-shopping before,” said Lisa.

“But this is different. In this case, not spending money may cost some horse its life,” Carole reminded her friends somberly.

The three of them were sitting in the total comfort of the tack room at Pine Hollow Stables. It wasn’t that the seats were all that comfortable. Lisa was perched on an overturned bucket, while Carole and Stevie lounged against stacked hay bales. It was that being in and around Pine Hollow was always comfortable for this threesome. It was their favorite place because it meant they were doing their favorite thing: anything to do with horses.

The three girls, so different in so many ways, had one gigantic thing in common: They were all horse-crazy. In fact, they were all so horse-crazy that they’d formed their own club, The Saddle Club. It had only two rules. The first was the easiest: All members had to be horse-crazy. The other wasn’t so easy: It required them to help one another out whenever they needed it.

Often that meant Carole and Lisa had to help bail Stevie out of some trouble that her irrepressibly mischievous nature had lured her into. Stevie had an active imagination and a weird sense of humor. That pairing often got her in hot water. Fortunately, she was almost as clever at getting out of hot water as she was at getting into it. And that was where her friends came in—they always ended up helping her.

Lisa was the center of common sense in the group. She was a straight-A student who approached problems with cool logic—a useful counterbalance to Stevie’s wild schemes and imagination. Stevie didn’t have any of Lisa’s organizational skills. For example, Stevie’s idea of a nice outfit usually consisted of anything she hadn’t had to pull out of the laundry pile, which often led to “interesting” color combinations with flying shirttails and clashing patterns. Lisa, however, always looked neat and tidy, perfectly matched and pressed. Their different approaches
extended to other areas as well. While Stevie might begin a project and lose interest a third of the way into it, Lisa would pull through until the end.

Carole, on the other hand, might forget what the project was—unless it had to do with horses. When it came to her favorite subject, Carole never forgot anything. She might forget to comb her hair in the morning, but she’d never forget to comb her horse’s mane or give him a grooming after a ride. She might forget to eat lunch, but she’d never forget to give Starlight his rations and fresh water.

Carole, whose mother had died of cancer a few years before, lived with her father, a colonel in the Marines, in a house on the edge of the town of Willow Creek, Virginia, where Pine Hollow Stables was. Stevie and Lisa both lived within walking distance of the stables. Lisa lived with her parents. She had an older brother, Peter, but he was living and studying in Europe, so she was almost an only child like Carole.

Stevie, on the other hand, frequently declared that she lived in a circus, and her friends enjoyed the relatively raucous atmosphere of the Lake household when they visited. Stevie had three brothers—one older, one younger, and one twin, and as the only girl, she often felt it fell to her to uphold the honor of womanhood. She did this by playing more practical jokes on her
brothers than they played on her. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it, and Stevie Lake was born for it. As a result, she spent a lot of time relinquishing her allowance to her parents or scraping gum off the undersides of desks at school, depending on where the punishment was delivered.

In spite of their differences, the common ground of horses drew Stevie, Lisa, and Carole together and kept them together. Saturday was almost invariably their favorite day, since they could devote almost the entire day to horses. It began with a Pony Club meeting, followed by a riding class. They usually followed that up with some stable chores and ended the day with a leisurely visit to the local ice cream parlor, where they usually talked about their favorite subject: horses.

The girls were devoted to horses, but they were also devoted to one another and would do anything to help one another out, so even the potentially onerous Rule Two of The Saddle Club was no problem for them, and they sometimes applied it to others. In other words, when someone else needed their help, they’d pitch in as a team. They thought of that as a Saddle Club project.

Sitting around in the tack room on that Saturday morning, they hatched just such a project.

“Judy Barker is the greatest, isn’t she?” Lisa asked.

Stevie and Carole agreed. Judy was Pine Hollow’s vet. She had just given a talk to Horse Wise, their Pony Club, as she often did. She’d discussed seasonal changes in feed, which the young riders all thought was very interesting; but they’d been even more interested in the other news Judy had for them.

Judy, who worked exclusively with horses, did volunteer work for CARL, the County Animal Rescue League, whenever CARL had a sick horse.

“I always prefer to treat a horse in its own home,” Judy had told the group that morning. “They heal better in familiar surroundings, but sometimes the surroundings are the problem.” The young riders knew what she meant. A horse might be abused and need to be taken away from its owner. Or an owner might have an inadequate home for a horse, for example, one that provided no shelter, and then the horse would have to be removed. Judy told the story of one owner who had died, leaving nothing behind but a horse and nobody to care for it.

“In all these cases, the horses had to be removed and taken to CARL. And every single time, CARL has had to borrow a trailer from someone. Well, it’s time for CARL to have its own horse trailer. And we can do it—with your help.

“The Cross County Tack Shop has offered us a used trailer. It’s a one-horse trailer, nothing special, but more than adequate for CARL’s needs. The price is five hundred dollars, and they’ve promised that ten percent of everything our volunteers sell out of their catalog will go toward the purchase of the van. I’ve got a copy of the catalog for each of you. Now, you may not need anything—though I’ve never known a rider who didn’t want to buy almost everything in the CC Tack Catalog—but if you do, go ahead and buy it from Cross County and get your friends, your neighbors, and even utter strangers to do the same, will you?”

They promised they would. This was a great deal for CARL and it wouldn’t cost anybody a penny. All they had to do was find someone who wanted to spend five thousand dollars at the tack shop.