“Let’s do it, then,” Kate said. “You take the lead, Gary.”
“Follow me, girls,” he said. “I’ll teach you a thing or two about tracking.” He and Spot proceeded. Stevie and Christine exchanged glances and shrugged. Gary could be boastful, and he was probably exaggerating his skills, but they had to go one way or another, so why not give Gary a chance?
Lisa went after him; then came Kate and Carole, then Christine and Stevie. Lisa watched Gary carefully and paid attention to everything he did. She hoped she could learn something about tracking techniques. It wasn’t an easy skill, even in snow. It was easy enough to follow the trail when the snow was deep, but there were large patches where the wind had blown the snow away from the rocky terrain and there were no hoofprints at all.
“This way, girls,” Gary called. “The herd went this way.”
The girls couldn’t see anything. They were impressed by Gary’s tracking skills because they couldn’t see the invisible clues he was following.
“We’ll find the herd over the next hill,” he promised them. “The tracks are fresh now.”
Tracks? They didn’t see any tracks. All they saw was frozen ground and rocks. The riders proceeded cautiously, allowing the horses to set a slow pace over the slippery terrain.
With each step the territory seemed to rise into the sky. Even in their warm clothes, the girls could feel that it was colder as they climbed the mountain. They had all fallen silent, knowing that each step was more treacherous for the horses than the last.
“Just ahead,” Gary said. “I think I can hear them, too.”
Lisa slipped her hood off to listen for the familiar sounds of horses. The only horses she heard were the ones she and her friends were riding. Gary was definitely surprising her and the others. He seemed to have very keen eyesight, and now his hearing was simply extraordinary. Maybe that wasn’t so surprising. It was logical that a musician would have particularly sensitive hearing.
Finally the riders reached a huge open expanse completely covered with a foot of fresh, untouched snow. There was not a horse in sight.
Five girls looked at Gary Finnegan. He shrugged. “I must have made a mistake,” he said. “They must have made a turn somewhere that I didn’t notice, but I’m sure they’re near here.”
Kate swallowed. There were a lot of things she wanted to say to Gary right then, but she reminded herself that Gary was a VIP guest.
“That’s probably it,” she said. “Maybe we should go back to where the herd is and start again.”
“Maybe,” Lisa, Stevie, and Christine agreed.
Carole turned Berry around to follow Kate back down the mountain. “Come on, Gary,” she said. “We can check to see where the tracks veer off on our way down.”
He and Spot followed Carole, who followed the other girls.
Up at the front of the line, Kate grumbled to Stevie and Lisa.
“That little side trip cost us two hours,” she said between her teeth. “An hour up and now it’ll take an hour back.”
“It may have cost the missing herd more than that,” said Stevie ominously. “Time is something they don’t have.”
Lisa felt a shiver run up her spine. It wasn’t the cold. It was fear for what might have happened to the herd while Gary had taken them all on a wild-goose chase.
THE SUN WAS high in the clouded sky by the time the six young riders reached the diminished herd. The morning was more than half over. The girls were hungry and cold. People at the ranch might be worrying about them. Worst of all, they were not one inch closer to finding the missing horses.
Kate stood up in her stirrups to survey the land, looking for a clue they might have missed.
Gary did the same.
“I hope he doesn’t tell us he found another trail,” Stevie whispered to Christine. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going anywhere with him again.”
“Me neither,” Christine said. “I could forgive him for making a mistake. What I can’t forgive is the fact that all the way back, he kept saying something about how we should all keep our eyes peeled for the trail of hoofprints because that would show where we had gone wrong. And he never once apologized for leading us astray.”
“Where we went wrong was bringing him along in the first place,” Stevie whispered.
“Look!” Kate said, pointing across the meadow. All the riders followed her gaze to a small dip at the far end of the meadow.
“It might not be anything, but it might be the silhouette of some hoofprints. I’ll go look.”
“We’ll come with you,” Lisa volunteered.
“They didn’t go that way,” Gary said. “I know it. They went the way I showed you.”
“You’re probably right,” Kate said. “But we should eliminate all the other possibilities.” She nudged Moonglow’s belly, and the horse started across the meadow. Gary followed close behind.
“If this ranch thing doesn’t work out for Kate, she could have a nice future in the diplomatic corps,” Stevie remarked to Christine as they followed the pair to the other side.
Kate’s eyesight turned out to be better than Gary’s. Her logic was better, too.
“I should have thought of this,” she said when they reached their destination. They were on top of a rise, looking over a hilly area that led down and to the southeast. There were dozens of hoofprints all over the place.
“Why should you have thought of this?” Carole asked.
“The railroad,” Kate said. “There’s an old spur of tracks down there along the riverbed. It leads to the main north-south tracks. The thieves might be planning to put the horses on railroad cars. It’s possible that they’re following the spur to get to the main tracks. Anyway, I’m sure this is the way now. What do you think, Gary?”
It was clear to the girls that Kate was asking Gary’s opinion to give him a way to redeem himself from the miserable mistake he’d made earlier.
“I don’t think so,” Gary said. “I’m sure they went off that way, to the northeast, the way I showed you.”
Stevie rolled her eyes. “Look! There’s a shoe!” she said. She was pointing to one of the prints in the snow.
“Big deal,” Gary said.
“It is, actually,” said Christine, trying to be as diplomatic as Kate but not quite succeeding. “See, the horses in the herd don’t have any shoes on them. They are running free on the land and don’t need shoes. Only a horse who is being ridden regularly will be shod.”
“Oh,” said Gary.
That was the smartest thing he’d said in a while, Stevie thought.
“Let’s go,” Kate said. She took the lead, following the trail through the fresh snow. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a long ride. It made the loss of two hours on Gary’s wild-goose chase all the more painful.
They rode steadily and quickly, taking much of the open land at a trot when the snowdrifts permitted it. Lisa found herself thinking that it was strange to be on such a serious mission on such an incredibly beautiful day. The sky above was still dark and the clouds were heavy, but the land around them was simply breathtaking, with snow-covered mountain peaks stretching into the distance.
“Kate! Hold up!” Gary called half an hour later. Kate drew Moonglow to a halt. She turned around and gave him a questioning look.
“There’s something wrong with my saddle,” he said. “It’s very uncomfortable. I don’t know if I can go on. I’m sure someone made a mistake tacking up this horse this morning.”
Kate looked at the saddle. “No mistake,” she said. “That’s Spot’s regular saddle. I can’t think what’s wrong with it or why it should be uncomfortable. Would you rather change horses?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Gary said quickly.
“Well, then, perhaps you’d prefer to go back?”
“Back where?” he asked.
“To the ranch,” Kate said patiently. “Unless you have something else in mind.”
“No. Not really. I was just wondering if i
t makes sense to go on ahead now. I mean, there could be, like, horse thieves up ahead.”
“If we don’t go now, there could be something worse than horse thieves—like no horse thieves and no horses!” Stevie said. “Come on, let’s get going.”
Kate nudged Moonglow into a trot. Gary followed, but he was scowling. Lisa glanced over at Carole. She wanted to know what her friend was thinking. Carole’s face revealed nothing.
Finally, sometime later, when the sun was near fully overhead, Kate held her hand up and the other riders drew up to her.
“The railroad spur starts right over there,” she said. “Just on the other side of that hill.”
“So let’s go,” Stevie said.
“Um, wait a minute,” Christine said, injecting a note of caution. “As soon as we get to the top of the hill, we’ll be visible for miles. If there are horse thieves there, they’re going to spot us. These guys have risked a lot to steal a herd of horses. They might not be too particular about risking something else—like us, for instance.”
The words fell heavily. Lisa glanced at Gary. He gulped visibly.
“Um, shouldn’t we, like, go for help?” he asked.
“We are help,” Stevie said.
“But …”
Lisa had a few things she wanted to say, but she swallowed them. She’d decided some time earlier that morning that her life would be easier if she never spoke to Gary again.
It was Kate who made the logical suggestion. “Yes, going for help is a good idea. Why don’t you do it, Gary? You were ready to go back a while ago. This would be a good time, too. You can go let my dad know where we are. He’ll know exactly what you mean if you tell him we’re at the railroad spur. He and the sheriff can reach this area by car or helicopter pretty quickly. Go ahead.”
“Go where?” he asked.
“Back to the ranch,” Kate said.
“But how?”
“Follow the trail back,” Carole said to him. Those were the first words she’d spoken to him or anyone for a long time. She said them as if she were speaking to a five-year-old—and a dull one at that. Lisa felt a weight lift from her shoulders. Carole had seen the light about Gary.
He looked over his shoulder uncertainly. He clearly did not want to make the long trip all by himself. “I guess I’d better stay with you girls. You need my help,” he said finally.
Each of the girls thought they would have been a lot better off if they hadn’t had any help from him so far. Each of them kept that thought to herself.
Stevie suggested that it would make sense for one of them to crawl up to the top of the hill and look over. It would be harder for the casual observer to spot one young person on her stomach (nobody missed Stevie’s use of her) than to spot six riders on horseback. Stevie volunteered.
She wasn’t surprised when everybody agreed that she was the best choice. When it came to doing tricky things, Stevie was always everybody’s first choice. She dismounted and handed Stewball’s reins to Kate. Kate pulled a set of field glasses out of her saddlebag and wordlessly handed them down to Stevie.
“I’ll be back,” Stevie announced solemnly, sounding like an odd combination of General MacArthur and Arnold Schwarzenegger. She saluted her friends and turned to her task.
The hill wasn’t particularly high, but a lot of snow had accumulated there. Stevie trudged through the drifts, breathing hard as she neared the top of the hill. She dropped to her knees and began crawling, hoping to be invisible to anyone looking up from below.
When she reached the top, she lifted her head up over a high drift of snow and peered down into the valley.
It took her a minute to take in everything she was seeing. She was looking across a long narrow valley, formed by the creek that ran through it. Stevie knew that creek. She and her friends had crossed it many times in the summer. The last time they’d been to the Bar None, their parents had gotten caught in it during a flash flood. Now there was no water in it—or if there was, it was all ice and completely covered with snow.
Parallel to the creek bed was the bed of the railroad track that Kate had said would be there. Next to the track was a small shack. It didn’t look occupied. What was occupied, however, was the large corral next to the shack. It was completely packed with horses—so packed that the horses were having trouble moving.
It angered Stevie to think of them being jammed in there so tightly. Two horses were tied up outside the corral. Stevie squinted. She thought they might be the horses those men were riding on Sunday when they’d claimed to have come through the “gate” from the Westerly land. She put the field glasses to her eyes. The two horses were a tall gray and a bay with white socks. Pay dirt!
But where were the riders? And could she be sure that the horses in the corral were stolen?
Stevie refocused the field glasses onto the corral and studied the milling horses. She wasn’t absolutely certain what she was looking for—until she saw two dun mares. They were the same ones the girls had seen with the herd on Sunday. There was no lawful reason why they should be in a corral by a railroad spur miles and miles from the Bar None’s land. Stevie squinted into the field glasses and fine-tuned the focus. She could see the Bar None brand on the flanks of a few of the horses. She could see a fancy “W” on another horse’s flank.
“Westerly,” she whispered to herself.
She knew what she was looking at. She was looking at horse thievery.
But where were the men? She scanned the property. She could see tire tracks leading from the shack to a road that wound out of the valley. Next to the shed was a bare patch on the ground. A pickup must have been parked there during the snowstorm.
It was time to report. Stevie scrambled down the hill as fast as she could.
“They’re there!” she said.
“The thieves?” Gary asked.
“No, the horses. All of them. There are about fifty of them crammed into one little corral. The horses those two guys were riding on Sunday are there, too, outside the corral. But the guys aren’t there. I think they had a car and they’ve gone into town or something. I’ll tell you one thing. That corral is as full as it could possibly be. Whatever those men are up to, they’ve got all the horses they can steal. Sure as anything, they’re going to move them out of here soon. We don’t have a second to waste.”
“To do what?” asked Gary, who had paled visibly during Stevie’s breathless report.
Stevie blinked at him. “Why, to steal them back!”
STEVIE TOOK STEWBALL’S reins from Kate and climbed into her saddle.
“Let’s go!” she declared.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Kate. “Shouldn’t we have a plan or something?”
“But we do,” Stevie said. Only Stevie Lake could have made such a declaration. It was typical for her to have a plan in mind and just assume that everybody else had thought of exactly the same one.
“Why don’t you tell us what it is?” Kate asked patiently.
“Sure,” said Stevie. “First we ride down to the corral. Next we open up the gate. Then I go in on Stewball, the best cutting and herding horse west of the Hudson River. We’ll shoo all the horses out into the open, and the rest of you guys herd them up this hill and back to Bar None land.”
Lisa always got nervous when Stevie’s plans were this simple and straightforward. “What about the thieves?” she asked.
“How could I forget?” Stevie responded. “Naturally, we have to take their horses, too. They’ve gone somewhere in a pickup truck or a Jeep or something, but the only way they’ll be able to follow us is by horse because the terrain is so rough. All we have to do is be sure they don’t have horses to do that with.”
It was simple. The Saddle Club girls looked at one another. Nobody looked at Gary.
“Why not?” Christine asked, shrugging. They all nodded in agreement.
“Yiii-haaaaa!” Stevie called out, spurring Stewball to action.
The riders began the trek up the side of the hill as fa
st as they could safely go.
Lisa felt exhilarated. They were actually doing battle against horse thieves. Stevie’s enthusiasm was contagious. Even Chocolate seemed to feel it. His head bobbed up and down as he clambered up the hillside. He took a deep breath at the top of the hill and began trotting down into the valley, lifting his legs high as he kicked up snow. It was as if the horses knew that they were on a rescue mission.
Carole’s jaw dropped when she saw the fifty horses crammed into the little corral. How could they do that? she thought. She despised any cruelty to animals, but most especially horses, and this definitely qualified as cruelty. She wouldn’t even let herself think about what the thieves had planned for the horses in the near future.
Berry snorted and shook his head. His gait became surer and faster and he whinnied to the horses in the corral.
The riders didn’t need speak to one another. It was clear exactly what had to be done. Kate and Lisa stationed themselves by the gate of the corral. Carole and Christine waited farther away, creating a sort of chute for the horses once they were released. Gary, for once, did the right thing. He went to the far side of the corral so that he could help Stevie shoo out the horses from the outside.
Stevie opened the gate. It turned out that the horses didn’t have to be told to escape. They were eager to get out of their cramped quarters. The minute the gate opened, a flood of horses burst out of the corral. Kate, Lisa, Carole, and Christine were ready for them.
The girls all had some experience at herding cattle. Horses, they found, were something else. The horses were frightened from being cooped up. They fled, and they didn’t all flee in the same direction.
Stevie watched the horses racing out of the corral in front of her. She chased the last of them out of their prison and then paused long enough to unhitch the gray and the bay with white feet. She gave each a tap on the flank, and they took off with the rest of the horses.
Most of them did just what they were supposed to do. They went up the bank of the hill, headed toward home and safety. Six, however, didn’t get the idea. They took off down the valley. Deep snow sprayed up in front of them as they galloped. It was a magnificent sight, but it was a route that was going to get them, and everybody else, into a lot of trouble.
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