Lisa and Stevie arranged the chairs so the five girls sat in a circle. Then Carole spoke.
“Christine,” she began, “as you may know, Stevie, Lisa, and I formed a group we call The Saddle Club. We only have two requirements for membership. Members must be horse crazy and members must be willing to help one another out. There’s no doubt about it. You fit the bill perfectly. By unanimous vote, you’ve been elected to be a member. We hope you’ll accept our offer and wear the pin proudly.” Carole held out a small red jewelry box.
Christine didn’t seem to know what to do. For a second, Stevie thought she might cry. But just then, Dude interfered. The puppy saw Carole’s outstretched hand and assumed she wanted to pet him. He came bounding up to Carole and bounced into her, knocking the jewelry box into the air. Christine caught it.
Carole petted Dude while Christine opened the box. The early-morning sun glinted on the gift inside. The club pin was a silver horsehead. The horse’s mane was brushed back by the wind, as if he were racing joyously.
“Oh,” Christine gasped. “It’s beautiful.”
“Will you wear it?” Lisa asked.
“More important, will you join?” Stevie said.
“Of course I will! I’m proud to be a member of The Saddle Club. Are you in this, too?” she asked Kate.
“Yes, I am,” Kate said. “You and I are now the western branch of the club. It’s up to us to carry on Saddle Club traditions with a western flair. Think you’re up to it?” Kate asked, grinning.
Solemnly, Christine crossed both arms out in front of her, and then raised her right arm from the elbow, holding her hand palm-forward. “How,” she said, doing a convincing imitation of an old western-movie Indian.
Stevie burst into giggles. “Western is right! All the way to Hollywood! How corny can you get?”
Christine couldn’t keep her straight face any longer. She started giggling as well.
“High twenty-five!” Carole said, holding up her hand. The five members of The Saddle Club all slapped hands together at once.
“Morning, girls,” Eli greeted them as he walked by their cabin. He paused to pat Dude.
“Good morning,” echoed Jeannie, who was trailing close behind Eli.
The girls returned the greetings.
“Eating breakfast today?” Eli asked while Jeannie patted the puppy.
Stevie half expected Jeannie to ask them that too.
“Tell Mom we’ll be right there,” Kate said, answering for them all. It was time to get ready for the day, whatever it would bring.
CAROLE HAD ALMOST forgotten about ranch breakfasts, until the courses started arriving. Phyllis Devine brought the steak and eggs first. Frank delivered the orange juice.
“Potatoes coming up!” Kate announced, pushing her way through the swinging door from the kitchen. Ranch breakfasts were serious food for serious appetites.
“This looks great!” Stevie remarked, reaching for the scrambled eggs. Kate and Lisa each helped themselves to potatoes. Eli started the steak platter around the long table.
It was a wonderful breakfast, except for one thing. There were only two paying guests in the entire dining room. The Bar None was a great guest ranch. Everything about it was terrific. Carole couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t be packed every night, but she could certainly understand that if it wasn’t, it would be difficult to keep it running much longer.
“You want to, don’t you?” Stevie asked Carole, interrupting her thoughts.
“Sure I do,” Carole said without thinking. Then she added, “Er, what is it I just told you I want to do?”
Stevie grinned. “You want to go for a ride with Christine, don’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Carole confirmed. She was getting the germ of a good idea, and a ride with Christine might be just exactly the way to carry it out. “As a matter of fact, the sooner the better. Let’s go.” She moved to stand up from the table.
“Don’t you want to finish your breakfast first?” Phyllis asked.
“Or at least start it,” Stevie said, looking at Carole’s almost untouched plate.
Carole blushed. “Of course,” she said. She picked up her fork and began eating. “I’m just being flaky again,” she explained, though she had the feeling that it didn’t require explanation. Everybody could tell she was being flaky. They just didn’t know what she was being flaky about. That would have to wait until the next Saddle Club meeting. If she could get her friends to eat quickly, that meeting would take place in about fifteen minutes—on horseback!
“COME ON, GUYS. We’ve got to hurry,” Carole said, standing up from the breakfast table. She stacked as many clean plates as she could reach—and some that weren’t clean yet.
“Hold on!” Stevie said, a little annoyed when Carole tried to snatch her plate from her. “Just one more serving of potatoes, and—”
“You’ve had enough,” Carole informed her. “Time to get going.”
“Where’s the fire?” Stevie asked, reluctantly relinquishing her plate.
“Right under our noses,” Carole said mysteriously.
Stevie didn’t have any idea what Carole was talking about, but when Carole got her mind onto something, there was no shaking it loose. She might as well give in. She stood up and joined the others in the kitchen.
“We’ll have these dishes done in no time,” Christine said.
“No need,” Phyllis told the girls. “I’ll take care of them this morning. You go on ahead, okay?”
Normally, Carole would have insisted that they all pitch in, but she was out the door before Phyllis finished her sentence. Stevie looked at Lisa. She was as puzzled as Stevie was. They shrugged and followed Carole out the door toward the corral.
Eli and Jeannie had rounded up a few horses for ranch use that day. The Bar None had a sizable herd to choose from and they tried to rotate the horses so each had equal riding time. However, it was also traditional for the guests to be assigned a horse for the duration of their stay.
“He remembered!” Stevie said, more than a little pleased to see that her horse from their earlier stay, Stewball, was standing quietly in the corral. A more careful inspection confirmed that Eli had remembered everybody’s horse, for she also recognized Berry and Chocolate, the horses Carole and Lisa had ridden. Kate’s horse, Spot, was also in the corral.
Eli grinned at her. “Sure I remembered,” he said. “You think I could forget the sight of you on that horse, taking a wily shortcut just so you could beat me to the creek that day?”
“Me? A shortcut?” Stevie asked innocently. “You think I would take advantage of your mistake just to beat you in a race?”
“Well,”—Eli drawled the word as if it were at least three syllables—“now that I recall, it was the horse that was smart enough to take a shortcut, not the rider.”
Stevie started laughing then, and so did Eli. The fact was that he was absolutely right. That was why Stevie loved Stewball: He was fast and he was smart. She went over to him in the corral and gave him a hug. She could have sworn he remembered her.
It only took the girls a few minutes to saddle up. Western tack was bigger, heavier, and a bit more complicated to put on a horse than the English tack the girls used at Pine Hollow. They’d learned how to do it during their last visit and it didn’t take long for the knowledge to come back.
“Let’s go!” Carole urged her friends, mounting Berry and settling into the deep and comfortable saddle.
“Hold your horses!” Lisa said, a little annoyed. She giggled at the unintended joke. “I guess I mean that for real this time.” Her friends laughed, too. Eli gave her a hand with the final adjustment of her horse’s cinch and stirrups and they were off.
Carole led the group. When they’d gotten about fifty yards out of the ranch complex, she drew Berry to a halt and waited for her friends to join her.
“We’ve got to talk,” she said.
“Yeah, you going to tell us now what this is all about?” Stevie asked. �
��I mean, I don’t see any fires out here, you know. So what’s the hurry?”
“The hurry is saving The Bar None,” Carole said. “That other ranch—what’s it called again?”
“The Dapper Dude,” Kate supplied.
“Right, The Dapper Dude is stealing business from The Bar None. If The Bar None doesn’t put up a fight, the Devines will have to sell.” Carole didn’t say anything for a few seconds while everybody looked at Kate. She nodded, confirming their worst fears.
“Okay, so I know a few things about battles,” Carole continued. “And the first thing to do when you go into battle is to know your enemy. We have to learn about The Dapper Dude.”
“You mean we have to spy?” Lisa asked.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Carole said. Her eyes lit up with excitement.
“Then shouldn’t we be creeping around at night, dressed in desert camouflage or something?” Lisa asked.
“You’ve seen too many James Bond movies,” Stevie teased.
“No, Lisa’s right in a way,” Carole said. “But the best camouflage lets you blend right in. So my plan is for us to mosey on over to The Dapper Dude in broad daylight and do just that.”
“Aha!”
“Very clever!” Kate cried. “Then we can find out if they’re doing anything we’re not that we ought to be doing!”
“Wait a minute!” Christine said. “Is this one of those famous Saddle Club projects?” The girls told her it was. “So let me get this straight. You mean that being in The Saddle Club means sometimes we could get into trouble?” She looked serious.
“Only when it’s necessary,” Stevie told her. “Does that bother you? Do you want to drop out?”
Christine’s face broke into a grin. “Drop out? No way!” she declared emphatically. “I love it! Let’s go! I know a shortcut to The Dapper Dude!”
Christine gave her horse a kick. He broke into a lope. All the other horses followed immediately.
GETTING TO THE Dapper Dude was no trouble. It was just over a hill from The Bar None. Getting into it wasn’t any trouble, either. The girls simply acted as though they belonged there. Everybody just assumed they were guests.
“Beginners’ trail ride in fifteen minutes,” one wrangler announced, trying to tempt them as they stood outside the main house. “You girls joining us?” Carole looked at what he was wearing. He was dressed like Eli or any other wrangler, in jeans, leather boots, a plaid shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat. But over his clothes, he wore a duster, which was a long black cotton coat, split up the back to the waist so it could be worn riding. It had a cape collar that would convert to a hood in the rain.
Lisa poked her in the arm, and Carole realized that she had to stop staring and answer his question. “No thanks, not today,” she said firmly. The last thing she wanted was to get stuck on a trail ride going away from The Dapper Dude.
“We’ve got work to do here,” Stevie explained
The wrangler looked at her as if she might just be a little bit crazy, but then shrugged his shoulders and moved on. There was a family standing on the porch with four young kids who seemed eager to go on the trail ride.
Carole gave Stevie a dirty look. “The less we say, the more we learn,” she said. She was afraid that if Stevie’s tongue got wagging, she’d give something away, like the reason they were all there.
Stevie grimaced and nodded. “Sorry, chief.”
“First stop, the public areas,” Kate said. “This is the main building. It’s got to have the dining room and lounge areas and stuff like that.”
“All dining rooms are the same,” Lisa remarked. “What are we going to learn from that? We need to see the kitchen!”
“Who’s going to show us the kitchen?” Christine wanted to know.
“The chef,” Stevie said. “Come on.” The Saddle Club hitched their horses up at the post outside the main building and entered, with Stevie in the lead.
The building was just what Kate had predicted and was very much like The Bar None. The big difference was that every single table in the dining room was set for lunch, instead of just the staff table and one guest table, as at The Bar None.
“May I help you?” a young man asked the girls. Carole guessed he was the dining room manager. “Lunch won’t be served for another hour and a half,” he added.
“We’re really hungry,” Stevie said coaxingly. She smiled at him and blinked her eyes innocently.
It didn’t work. “Like I said, an hour and a half,” the man repeated.
“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 g
et 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.
Rodeo Rider Page 3