I went down to the hotel desk and there was this cute bellboy who didn’t speak a word of English. I pulled out my phrase book, but there wasn’t anything even close to “The wheel on my rollaway bed is broken.”
I smiled nicely, took a deep breath, and did my best. I said, “Le pneu sur mon lit est cassé.” Roughly translated, it means “The tire on top of my bed is broken.” At first the guy just looked at me blankly. Then he burst into laughter. It sounds awful, but he wasn’t laughing at me, really. He was just laughing because what I’d said was so funny. And then the most wonderful thing happened. He actually understood me. He told me attendez, which I knew meant I was supposed to wait, and he brought me a new bed without a broken wheel.
Maybe this place isn’t so confusing after all. I just hope I don’t order a tongue sandwich by mistake the way Dad did!
I’ve been thinking about you a lot because I haven’t seen a horse since we got here. I wish I could talk to you or get letters from you. I can’t wait to read your diaries and learn everything that’s happening.
Send lots of love to Kate, Eli, and Jeannie. Tell all the campers everything you’ve ever taught me about riding and they’ll do fine.
Love,
Lisa
* * *
Dear Diary (or really Lisa since that’s who’s going to read this eventually. I certainly don’t plan on looking at it again!)
I can’t believe the day we just had! Both Stevie and Kate are sleeping soundly, but I have a lot on my mind and I can’t sleep.
The day started off wrong, and it just never got any better. First of all, we were so tired that when the bell rang to wake us up, we just fell right back asleep again. Yesterday, all that traveling was more tiring than any of us had realized. So, when the breakfast bell rang, we did the same thing. Eventually, Jeannie came and woke us up. She was more or less nice about it, but we’re here to help, not to cause trouble. We were causing trouble then because there was going to be a ride and nobody could go until we were ready.
It didn’t get much better when we went for our ride. I guess Eli and Jeannie must have been talking about us to the campers who have been here a couple of days already. They took one look at Stevie and me in our brand new Western riding clothes and they started calling us dudes. Most of them are from out West and they don’t have a very high opinion of English riding. They’ve got a lot to learn on that subject, but we didn’t do much of a job teaching them today.
First of all, I was having trouble with my horse. He’s a good horse (I don’t think there’s any such thing as a bad horse, just bad riders), but we aren’t used to one another yet. I forgot for one little second that in Western riding you use neck reining. The horse didn’t do what I wanted and three of the kids kept laughing about it. Little monsters. Remind me to tell you more about Lois, Larry, and Linc. Stevie dubbed them the L-ions. It’s just like her to come up with something like that. Anyway, these kids are really obnoxious, and I’m sure they’re going to be our biggest problem.
Check that. I’m not sure they’re going to be our biggest problem. I’m beginning to think that we are going to be our biggest problems. We don’t seem to have any idea of what’s going on. Every time the triangle rang, everybody else knew exactly what to do and Stevie, Kate, and I were left standing there, looking blankly at one another. The kids thought it was hysterical. Eli seemed a little perturbed and Jeannie, who never quite recovered from having to dig us out of bed this morning, just looked peeved.
What’s weird is that the three of us arrived here thinking of ourselves as Eli and Jeannie’s saviors. We thought they had all these gigantic problems that we were going to solve and now it looks like the three of us—Stevie and me particularly—are just causing more problems.
And I haven’t even told you what happened when we tried to help in the garden this afternoon. Trust me, you don’t want to know. I’ll only say that it had to do with a worm that one of the L-ions dug up and everybody else thought it was a riot. It wasn’t.
So, although Dad always tells me not to complain, here I am complaining. I can’t help it. If we don’t start being useful to Eli and Jeannie pretty soon, I’m sure they’re going to want to put us on a plane and send us back home. I wouldn’t blame them one bit, either.
But I’m not going to let that happen. Neither will Stevie or Kate. We came here to be helpful and we’re going to be helpful. Whatever it is that Eli and Jeannie need us to do, we’ll do. If we don’t know what we’re supposed to do, we’ll ask, and we’ll learn, really fast. At least I hope so.
Eli told us what our morning chores are for tomorrow. Stevie’s going to work in the vegetable patch (no worms!) and I’m supposed to collect eggs from the henhouse. Kate is going to help with the kitchen crew.
So, when do we get to ride again? Ooops, that sounded like a complaint. I didn’t mean it. I may even cross it out. No I won’t. This is a diary and diaries are supposed to be honest. Grrr.
Good night.
Carole
Carole put down her pen and closed the book. She hardly had time to turn out the light before she was asleep.
“HOW DO YOU know which weed is always going to be a weed and which is going to be an onion?” Stevie asked Eli.
“The onions are the light green straight shoots,” Eli said patiently. “Everything else is a weed.”
“Including her,” Linc hissed to Lois, obviously intending to be overheard by Stevie.
Stevie grimaced. She didn’t like not knowing what she was doing, especially when she’d been invited to High Meadow because of what she supposedly knew. Linc and his friends, Lois and Larry, clearly thought the Saddle Club girls were totally idiotic dudes, and Stevie had to admit that so far she and her friends hadn’t been able to do anything that might change their minds.
Stevie knew how to handle brats. After all, she was the sister of three of them. Her mind raced for a quick comeback, something to do with her various torture techniques, but she bit her tongue. She and her friends had come here to be peacemakers, not troublemakers. It wouldn’t help Eli and Jeannie at all if she got into a horrendous fight, tempting though it might be.
“I’ve just never weeded a garden before,” she said nicely to Linc. “See, I live in a suburb and the only farms around are horse farms. I know a lot about horses, but I don’t know much about farms. I’ll make a deal with you, though. I’ll teach you everything I know about horses if you’ll help me with the farming. Okay?”
“No thanks,” Linc said. “I don’t want to learn anything about that sissy kind of riding you do.”
“What do you know about English riding?” Stevie asked, as nicely as she could. She really wanted to throttle the little brat, but Eli was watching and she thought it would be a bad move in front of the boss on her second day on the job.
“I know I don’t want to do it.”
“Me, neither,” Lois piped in. “Give me a real horse with a real saddle who does real work and I’m happy. I don’t need to train a horse to dance to music or jump some phony fence, pretending to chase after a fox.”
There were a thousand things Stevie could have said. The first five hundred were put-downs and the next five hundred had to do with Lois and Linc’s gross misunderstanding of what English riding was all about. But instinct told Stevie that none of them would have done any good and almost certainly would have done harm. Instead, she did the one thing Stevie almost never did: She didn’t say anything.
She just yanked weeds. Really hard.
Things seemed to be going a little better for Kate in the kitchen. She and Jeannie were doing the cleanup work after breakfast. Three of the campers were supposed to be helping them by wiping off the tables in the dining room. The last time Kate had looked into the dining room, though, they were actually sitting at one of the tables, playing. They were pretending the salt and pepper shakers were cattle and they were on a roundup. At least they were playing quietly.
Kate considered her options. The first option, of cou
rse, was to go remind the kids what they were supposed to do. This was a ranch, and everybody had chores to do. They were no different.
Then she saw the way one of the kids, Larry, was looking at her. One glance and she knew he was trouble. The look said he’d do whatever she asked him to do and he’d do it so badly that she’d have to redo it herself. Since she was well convinced she’d end up doing the work anyway, she decided not to make an issue of it. While they rounded up salt and pepper shakers, she wiped tables. She did it quickly and well. It only took a few minutes. When she returned to the kitchen, Jeannie asked her how the kids were doing with the table wiping. Kate explained what had happened.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Jeannie said. “It’s their job; they can do it.”
“But they would have done it all wrong, just to spite me,” Kate said. “I know.”
“Then they would have done it again until they did it right,” Jeannie said. “They’re supposed to learn to carry their own weight on a working ranch. What you did teaches them that they can get away without carrying anything.”
“Oh,” Kate said, knowing full well that Jeannie was right and feeling as though she’d just let everybody down. She was in the middle of figuring out how she could make it right—make Larry and the other kids do an extra chore just to stress Jeannie’s point about everybody carrying his or her own weight—when a shriek came from the henhouse. Jeannie dropped the pot she was scrubbing, Kate flung down the dish towel, and the three kids in the dining room abandoned the salt-and-pepper roundup game to see what was going on.
What they found was Carole, holding her wrist and obviously trying to hold back some tears. She was the one who had screamed. Kate and Stevie ran over to her and asked her what had happened.
“She bit me!” Carole yelled loudly.
The first thought that entered Stevie’s head was that Carole meant that Lois had bitten her, though Stevie knew perfectly well that Lois had been with her in the onion patch. Then she realized Carole meant she’d been bitten by a hen.
Carole held out her wrist for her friends to inspect. It was swollen and bruised. The skin was broken, and there was a small bead of blood.
“She hurt you that badly over one measly egg?” Stevie asked.
“Oh, they can get pretty feisty sometimes,” Eli said. Carole could have sworn there was a little smirk in his tone—as if he’d known it and hadn’t realized he’d have to tell an Eastern dude something so simple and so obvious.
“At least I got the egg,” Carole said, holding it up triumphantly for everyone to see. What they saw was a fresh egg with a big crack in it. “It should be okay if we eat it today or tomorrow.”
“And scramble it,” Larry whispered loudly. Lois and Linc laughed. So did four or five other kids who were standing nearby. It didn’t make Carole feel any better.
“Are there any bandages around?” Carole asked.
“Sure,” Eli said. “They’re in the bathroom in the main house. Help yourself.”
The look on Carole’s face told her friends that right then she was incapable of helping herself. Both Stevie and Kate volunteered to go with her. They looked to Eli for permission. “I guess so,” he said. “But hurry back, we’re going for a ride soon.”
Carole handed the egg to Eli, and she and her friends headed indoors. The last thing they heard before they stepped up onto the farmhouse porch was one of the L-ions asking the other two: “How many English riders does it take to put on a Band-Aid?”
The girls didn’t wait to hear the answer. They simply fled to the bathroom.
“This isn’t going well, is it?” Kate asked, putting words to the question that was on all of their minds.
“Not as far as I can tell,” said Stevie. “And from the look of this cut, Carole and the hen would agree with that.”
“I feel so stupid,” Carole said, looking more closely at the cut. “I just never thought the hen might not like it.”
“You had no way of knowing,” Kate reminded her. “You’ve never collected eggs before.”
“I’ve read about it in books. I’ve seen it in movies. The way they show it, it’s always the kid in the family who does it. I sort of thought that meant it wasn’t hard or dangerous. I guess I was wrong. I just feel stupid.”
“Me, too,” Stevie said. When Kate and Carole looked at her questioningly, she explained about not knowing the difference between an onion and a weed. Kate then told her friends about the kids who’d wangled her into doing their job.
“I don’t think we’re quite the stars here that we were hoping to be,” Stevie said.
“And I don’t think we’ve fooled anybody,” said Kate. “The kids all seemed to have this gigantic expectation about how wonderful we were and look at what we’ve done.”
“Yeah,” Carole agreed. “I got the impression that Eli and Jeannie have spent the last couple of days telling the campers we’re geniuses. We’ve let them down, too.”
“Cheer up, guys,” Kate said, finding a bright side of the situation. “Eli and Jeannie certainly never told anybody that we were geniuses at weeding gardens, wiping tables, or collecting eggs, did they? They told them we were geniuses at horseback riding and that’s what we’re about to do. It’s the perfect chance for us to redeem ourselves.”
Stevie and Carole were quiet for a minute. That was partly because Stevie was trying to choose the best way to put the bandage on Carole’s cut. It was also because they were considering Kate’s observation.
“Think so?” Stevie said after a while.
“Definitely,” Kate said.
Stevie decided Kate’s certainty was good enough for her. There were definitely better times ahead. Carole believed it, too. Stevie admired her handiwork on Carole’s wrist, crumpled the bandage wrapper, dropped it in the wastebasket, and said, “Let’s go riding!”
The girls met up with the campers and Eli at the large paddock where Eli was showing them how to cut out the horses they wanted to ride for the day. It was a job that Kate had watched Eli do a hundred times at the Bar None, and she knew how to do it almost as well as he did. Obviously Eli had been expecting her to help with this job because he’d already saddled up her horse.
She hopped over the fence and mounted up. Eli gave her a welcoming smile. Eli hadn’t ever been much of a talker. A smile from him said more than a thousand words. It gave Kate the confidence she’d been lacking ever since she’d blown it on cleanup duty earlier.
“I’ll work on the left side,” she suggested. Eli nodded. Kate went to work.
Eli was cutting about twenty horses. The herd was more than fifty, and the routine at High Meadow seemed to be about what it had been at Bar None. Each day they’d take some of the horses out for use that day. Others would get a day of rest. Eli certainly knew the herd. It had always been part of his job at the Bar None to judge which horses would be good for which riders. As he chose the horses to cut out of the pack, Kate just made it her job to see to it that that horse stayed cut out. The two of them had the help of Eli’s dog, Mel, a caramel-colored mixed breed and the smartest working dog Kate had ever seen.
When the day’s twenty horses were clear of the herd, Eli and Mel brought them over toward the campers and began assigning each child to one horse. Kate guarded the rest of the herd, so that they stayed away from the day’s horses. She looked around for the best way to do that. There was a gate in the fence behind her. It opened into a smaller paddock where a lone horse grazed, apparently oblivious to all the activity around. The easiest way to keep the horses separate would be to herd them all into the smaller paddock, at least for the time being while the day’s horses were being saddled. She lifted the latch on the high gate, swung it open, and began to shoo the horses into the smaller paddock.
It took her only a few minutes. She rode back to where Eli, Carole, and Stevie were helping the young riders put the saddles on their assigned horses. Everything looked just the way it should. It felt good to Kate to know that, finally, she and he
r friends were being helpful.
“I put the rest of the herd into that smaller field,” she reported to Eli, who looked up from his work to see what she was talking about.
“Can’t do that,” he said.
“I just did,” she said. “Why not?”
“That there is Arthur,” he said, pointing to the horse who’d been in the field by himself. “He belongs to the man who owns this farm. Man’s devoted to the creature, though I don’t know why. Every time Arthur gets in with other horses, he’s trouble. Got to get the rest of the herd out.”
“Can’t I just take Arthur out?”
“Nope.”
Kate sighed. Getting thirty horses into a paddock with one other horse was easy. Getting thirty horses out of a paddock, leaving just one, wasn’t easy. She was annoyed with herself. She should have asked Eli where to keep the rest of the herd. She had made the mistake, and now she had to correct it.
It took Kate a while to get the herd rounded up and out of the paddock. There were plenty of fenced areas around the farm so figuring out where to put them wasn’t hard. Keeping Arthur in and getting the herd out proved to be more difficult, but she did it. By the time she finished, all the campers were in their saddles and waiting for her. She didn’t enjoy riding back to the group as they sat there, watching. It felt very humiliating. She decided to rise above it.
“Let’s go for a ride!” she said brightly. Eli clicked his tongue and nudged his horse. The ride began.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, WHEN Eli announced a camp-fire cowboy sing, Kate, Carole, and Stevie begged off, saying they were still tired from their plane trip. Nobody believed them, but nobody stopped them either. The girls figured the campers were glad to be rid of them. They didn’t know what Eli and Jeannie thought. They weren’t sure they cared.
“Last one into her pajamas is a rotten egg,” Stevie declared. She was already in her pajamas by then so she had an unfair advantage. While Carole and Kate followed suit, she made use of the time by building a little fire in their potbellied stove. They weren’t going to sing cowboy songs, but Stevie thought there was a good chance they would sing the blues.
Ranch Hands Page 4