Racehorse (13 page)

L
ATER THAT DAY
things were quiet at Pine Hollow. All the spectators had gone. Max and Mrs. Reg were taking Dorothy out to dinner. Red had the evening off. The only people there were The Saddle Club, and they were having a meeting in the most logical place they could think of—Pepper’s stall.

“Hand me the pitchfork, will you?” Stevie asked Lisa. Not only were they having a meeting, but they were also mucking out the stall. It had been Pepper’s home for more than twenty years. As of the next day, it would become Prancer’s.

“I don’t understand why Pepper can’t use this anymore,” Lisa said.

“Pepper’s going to be outdoors most of the time,” Carole explained. “When the weather’s bad or when he
needs to be indoors for any reason, he can use whatever stall is temporarily free. This stall is in the middle of where most of the permanent horses have their stalls. The stable’s newest permanent horse should have it.”

“And it’s going to be sparkling clean for her,” Stevie promised, lifting another forkful of soiled bedding and tossing it into a wheelbarrow.

It was a tradition at Pine Hollow that each horse had an assigned stall and that its name appeared on a plaque outside of it. There wasn’t time to get a new plaque made for Prancer before she arrived, but Lisa, who was very artistic, had been assigned the job of making a temporary one from the paper and pens on Mrs. Reg’s desk. She was having fun doing decorative lettering. She even managed to draw a picture of the reindeer she thought Prancer had been named after.

“Hey, cool,” Carole said. “Prancer’s going to love that!”

“You mean she’s so fantastic she can even read?” Stevie teased.

Carole laughed at herself. “I guess not,” she said. “But let me put it this way—
I’m
going to love it.”

“That’s better,” Stevie said, hauling the last of the old bedding out of the stall.

The girls then hosed the stall down and brushed it vigorously, making the floor as clean as possible. They wanted to wait until it dried before covering it with fresh
straw. That would take a few minutes. Never one to allow a chance to talk to pass, Stevie turned over a few water buckets and invited her friends to sit with her in the stall.

“Now all we need is ice cream sundaes,” Lisa suggested brightly.

Carole laughed.

“Another one of your schemes!” Stevie said.

“Are you jealous because your scheming is contagious?” Carole asked.

“A little, I suppose,” Stevie admitted. “Though if it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I guess I’m flattered.”

“Just what I had in mind,” Lisa said.

One of the things that all of the girls liked about their friendship was that there was no competition among them. They simply enjoyed being together and doing things together—especially horseback riding.

“This has been an odd time,” Lisa remarked. “I mean for more reasons than because I’m scheming and Stevie has been helping me with my homework.”

“Yes, a lot of weird stuff has been going on,” Stevie said, confirming Lisa’s feelings. “A lot of things that seemed like bad news have sort of turned out to be good news.”

“Even Starlight’s injury,” Carole said. “If it hadn’t been for that, I never would have been with Judy, and I never would have gotten to the racetrack.”

“And been the star of the sixth race,” Lisa said. “Nobody noticed who won that race. They just noticed what you did with the injured horse.”

“And the injury that seemed so bad that turned out to be such good news for us,” Stevie said. “See what I mean about things being turned upside down and all for the good?”

“Not all,” Carole said. “What about the horse that died of tetanus?”

“And what about the foal that you met?” Lisa said, reminding her of the good side of that day.

“And then there’s Pepper’s retirement that seemed sad, but that Stevie managed to make into a lot of fun.”

“And if it hadn’t been for that, Max probably wouldn’t have agreed to buy Prancer with Judy.”

“Things change,” Carole said.

“That’s like what I think I was trying to say in my essay about life,” Lisa agreed.

“Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s happy. Old horses move on, new ones are born, some are injured, others heal,” Carole continued. “But nothing is ever the same.”

“Well, something is,” Stevie said. Her friends both looked at her. “The Saddle Club,” she said. “It’s always wonderful.”

There was no arguing that.

Bonnie Bryant is the author of nearly a hundred books about horses, including the Saddle Club series, the Saddle Club Super Editions, and the Pony Tales series.