Stevie helped Dinah off the back of the horse and secured Evergreen’s reins to a bare branch. Dinah lay in the snow, crying hard.
“Where do you hurt?”
“Is it over?” Dinah asked.
Stevie nodded. “It’s done, we’re safe. Are you okay?”
“If it’s over, I’m okay,” she said. “At least I think so, though I did get hurt when Goldie threw me. Did he rear?” she asked.
“Yes, and you were magnificent. You looked like a swashbuckling cowboy—if there is such a thing. Anyway, you stayed on for the rear, but when he took off, so did you—in the opposite direction.”
“You mean down!”
“Yes, down. He took off up the hill, beyond where I saw any trouble from the rocks. He’s probably safe. We’ll find him.”
Then, as if he’d heard them talking about him, Goldie appeared from behind a tree, looking more sheepish than anything else. He paused to munch on a tempting piece of moss that peeked through the snow.
“Now, about you,” Stevie began. She offered Dinah a hand so she could get up. Dinah took it gladly, but as soon as she began to rise, she also began to wince.
“Oh!”
“Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” Dinah said, tears of pain forming in her eyes. Stevie helped her up the rest of the way and led her to a tree stump, where she could sit.
“Is something broken?” Stevie asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just scratches and bruises, but a falling rock can give you a mighty bad bruise. I hate to tell you where it hurts the most.” From the way Dinah was sitting awkwardly on the tree stump, she didn’t have to tell Stevie where it hurt the most. It was already clear.
“You’ve got to see a doctor,” Stevie said, recalling the times she had hurt herself riding.
“No way,” Dinah said. She stood up and took a few uncomfortable steps, as if to prove that nothing was broken and she would be all right.
“Why not?” Stevie asked.
“Because we promised,” Dinah said. “We promised Jodi.”
“What difference does that make?” Stevie asked. “Some promises were made to be broken.”
“Maybe, but not this one,” Dinah told her. “This one isn’t just for Jodi’s sake. See, if we tell, Mr. Daviet will be furious. Not only will he be angry with Jodi, but he’ll be furious with me, and with you. He might never let me ride again. Even if he did let me ride again, my parents wouldn’t, so it’s the same. The answer is no doctor. I’ll be okay. I promise. Anyway, we can take care of this. After all, if we can manage to avoid being killed by a landslide avalanche thing in the middle of the Vermont wilderness, we can certainly take care of a couple of cuts and bruises, can’t we?”
Part of Stevie’s common sense told her that it was foolish not to tell and get Dinah to a doctor, just to be sure. Another part of it told her that Dinah was up and walking, and there was no way a bruise where she sat was going to be fatal. And besides, Stevie knew first aid and she was pretty sure that Dinah was basically okay. After all, she could move and talk. She was going to be all right. Even more than all that, Dinah was definitely right about what would happen to Jodi and what Mr. Daviet would say and how her parents would react. She didn’t like to think of Jodi losing her job, but the worst thing in the world would be if Dinah couldn’t ride anymore. That was not a risk worth taking. Somehow they’d figure out how to take care of Dinah and keep the secret. Stevie was good at this kind of thing. She knew how to be sneaky for a good cause, and this was about as good as causes could get.
“Okay,” Stevie agreed, confident now that they would succeed. “The promise holds. We’ll take care of this ourselves and keep it to ourselves.”
“Forever,” Dinah said.
“Forever,” Stevie promised.
“Which is just about how long it’s going to take me to walk down this mountain,” Dinah joked. “I mean, there’s no way I’m actually going to sit in a saddle!”
It seemed to Stevie that this was a good time to make an exception to the “Get right back into the saddle” rule of falling off a horse.
“I’ll ride Evergreen and lead Goldie,” Stevie offered.
“Thanks, pal,” Dinah said.
They began the long and slow journey home.
“HELLO, PHIL?” LISA said into the phone. She felt a little nervous about calling a boy, especially her best friend’s boyfriend. Carole stood next to her and encouraged her with a smile. They were at Pine Hollow, doing just what Stevie had asked them to do. They were calling Phil to let him know Stevie was away and couldn’t come to his pony club meeting.
“Yes?” Phil answered.
“This is Lisa Atwood, you know, Stevie’s friend from Pine Hollow.”
“Lisa, I know who you are,” Phil said. “What’s up? Is something wrong with Stevie?”
“Oh, no, she’s fine,” Lisa assured him. “At least we think she is, but you know Stevie, wherever she is, there’s trouble. Anyway, that’s not why we’re calling, but I guess it really sort of is.…”
Carole took the phone from Lisa’s hand. She could do this better than that. “Hi, Phil, it’s Carole here,” she began. “Stevie has a friend in Vermont who invited her to something called sugaring off.…”
Very quickly Carole explained to Phil why Stevie wasn’t going to be at his pony club meeting.
“Oh, no,” he said, obviously disappointed.
“She tried to reach you before she left, but you were on that class trip,” Carole reminded him. “That’s why she asked us to call you when we knew you would be back.”
“Thanks for calling,” he said.
Carole could hear the sadness in his voice. She wanted to comfort him. “How’s your riding coming?” she asked.
“Oh, very well,” he said, brightening up. “Some of us went to a horse show on the class trip, and I watched some fancy riding. I think I picked up a couple of techniques. I can’t wait to try them out. I’ll be riding tomorrow.”
Now he was talking Carole’s language.
“What sort of techniques?” she asked eagerly.
“I was watching a hunter jumper class,” he began. “And for the first time, I began to see the connection between the event that takes place in the ring and the actual hunt. In the ring there’s a steady, even pace, and the style of successful jumping is emphasized. In the field, when you have the specific goal of having to trap a fox, it’s important for you to have these skills.”
“I used to ride a great hunter jumper,” Carole said. “It was a wonderful feeling to complete the course on her. Starlight’s great, but he’s not disciplined enough for that kind of class in a show. He’s much more interested in flashy high jumps, and he’s so good at them—”
“I’ve seen you jump him,” Phil reminded her. “He’s a very special horse. He’ll be doing championship jumping one of these days.”
“I think so, too,” Carole said. “The thing is that I believe I can train him so he can do both types of jumps.”
“Well, that’s what I meant about the techniques I was studying,” Phil said.
Carole was never more comfortable than when she was talking about horses, and Phil was easy to talk to. They chatted, swapping hints and hunches, for more than ten minutes.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Phil said. “Since Stevie can’t come to my pony club meeting, why don’t you come to it? Can you get your father to bring you over?”
“Me?” Carole asked, suddenly uncomfortable again. “And what about Lisa?”
“Oh, sure, Lisa, too,” Phil said. “It’s an open un-mounted meeting. Anybody can come. I’d be glad to have both of you there—especially you, Carole. We can talk more about jumping.”
“We’ll have to check with our parents,” Carole said. “But it should be okay. I’ll call if there’s a problem.”
“Great, see you then,” he said.
“Okay, bye.”
They hung up.
“What was that
all about?” Lisa asked.
“We’re invited to Phil’s pony club meeting instead of Stevie.”
“We are?” Lisa was more than a little surprised. “Carole, Phil is Stevie’s boyfriend. What’s she going to think?”
Carole got an uncomfortable sinking feeling. “Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, it’s the farthest thing from my mind. Stevie wouldn’t think we were trying to steal her boyfriend. She even asked us to call him!”
“But she didn’t ask us to go in her place,” Lisa reminded her.
“But it’s just a pony club meeting,” Carole said. “Besides, he seemed so disappointed when Stevie couldn’t be there, and so happy again when I said we could. There can’t be anything wrong with that, can there?”
“Of course there can be,” Lisa said. “What it comes down to is that he’s Stevie’s boyfriend, and it’s not up to us to decide whether we can spend time with him when Stevie’s out of town.”
“But there will be two of us,” Carole protested.
“Twice as bad,” Lisa said.
“Girls, can you help me bring Nickel in from the paddock?” It was Mrs. Reg. That was Max’s mother. She was the stable manager and a sort of part-time mother to the riders and their horses when she thought they needed it. She was also somebody who hated to see idle hands. Two girls standing together and talking qualified as four idle hands. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Reg had a way to put those hands to work.
“I’d get him myself,” she said, “but he always runs from me.” The three of them walked through the side door of the stable toward the paddock, where the frisky pony was gamboling around in the early spring morning. “He doesn’t run from anybody else,” Mrs. Reg went on, musing out loud. “He just runs from me. I never saw anything like it.”
The two girls walked toward the pony. Mrs. Reg held back so as not to frighten him away. It was true that Nickel was scared of her. She’d never done anything to hurt him, so there had to be something about her that reminded him of something that had hurt him. Almost every horse had at least one thing that frightened him, and it was just about impossible to break those habits.
Lisa clicked a lead rope onto Nickel’s halter and led him back toward the stable. When they reached Mrs. Reg, the girls found she was still talking about Nickel’s strange fear.
“Never saw anything like it—oh, yes, I did,” she said. “I remember a mare we boarded here once who was afraid of me. She had strong likes and dislikes, that one. It seemed like she only ever liked one person at a time. She was devoted to the man who owned her and gave everybody else a hard time. She was beautiful, and I always wanted her to like me. I asked Max—my husband, your Max’s father—to let me take care of her when her owner wasn’t around, but Max wouldn’t let me because she was so unpredictable. Then one day her owner went away. His mother was sick, and he had to stay with her for a couple of months. We didn’t have any extra stable hands to take care of one more horse, so Max finally gave in. I got to look after the mare.”
“Did she hurt you?” Lisa asked. Immediately she was sorry she’d asked the question. When Mrs. Reg was telling one of her stories—and she seemed to have thousands of them—she wanted to tell it her way without interruptions. Mrs. Reg ignored the question.
“It took a long time for me to change the way the horse felt about me. After a couple of weeks, though, she’d let me into her stall and let me groom her. She really needed it by then, too! By the end of six weeks, we were becoming friends. By the end of two months, I could ride her. I rode her every day then, and she was just as great to ride as I’d always known she would be.” Mrs. Reg stopped. She had a habit of stopping stories just when they were getting really interesting.
“What happened when the owner came back?” Carole asked.
“Why, she gave him a hard time, of course,” Mrs. Reg said. “Now you two stop all this jabbering and get Nickel back into his stall. Then, if you want to make yourselves useful, there are two stalls that need mucking out, and after that …”
The girls hurried away. If they stood there long enough, Mrs. Reg would load them down with enough work to keep them busy until midnight!
BY THE TIME Stevie and Dinah approached Sugarbush Stables, Dinah had figured out that she could actually ride, sort of. What she did was stand in the stirrups. She wasn’t very comfortable, and she knew she had a lot of scratches and bruises nobody could see under her clothes that she had to do something about, but both she and Stevie were convinced they could get past the gimlet eyes of Mr. Daviet and the Slatterys.
They weren’t good enough to get past Jodi’s eyes, however.
“Oh, no!” she said as they approached the barn.
“Don’t worry,” Stevie assured her. “We’re still not telling. Dinah took a little spill. She’s going to be fine. All she has is a couple of scratches and bruises. No problem we can’t handle all by ourselves.”
The look on Jodi’s face was clear relief.
“Thanks,” she said. She didn’t seem to want to hear any more about it, so Stevie and Dinah didn’t bother to tell her how it had happened. “Look,” Jodi said. “I’ll take care of the horses for you now. I guess it’s the least I could do. My sister came by earlier and said she was going to be collecting sap. She’s expecting you two to meet her at the Sugar Hut. You go on up and get to work on that. But remember the promise—you can’t tell her, either.”
“We remember, Jodi,” Stevie said, helping Dinah down out of the saddle. “Are you up for collecting sap now?” Stevie asked. The pained look on Dinah’s face was answer enough.
“But it’s got to be done,” Dinah said. “Why don’t you go over to the Sugar Hut and work with Betsy. I’ll go home and take a long soaking bath.”
“Won’t your mother think that’s suspicious?” Stevie asked.
“Not at all,” Dinah assured her. “Even when I’m feeling fine, I like to soak in the tub. My mother won’t suspect a thing.”
“Are you going to be okay walking home?” Stevie asked.
“If I could just ‘ride’ a horse down a mountain, you bet I can walk home. Trust me,” she said. “This is a piece of cake.”
Dinah waved bravely and walked, unsteadily, down the drive of the stable.
“The Sugar Hut is that way,” Jodi said, pointing along another path into the woods. “About a quarter of a mile. You can’t miss it.”
“I know where the Sugar Hut is,” Stevie said. “But thanks, anyway.”
STEVIE LOVED COLLECTING sap with Betsy, though she didn’t like the fact that she had to tell her a cover-up story about Dinah. She said Dinah had an upset stomach. Betsy was disappointed, but they had work to do. Once again, they had a horse-drawn sleigh, but this time it was a specially fitted flatbed sleigh with an enormous tank on the back of it. The two of them followed the same trail they had used to put out the buckets. As quickly as they could, they returned to each of their buckets, poured the nearly clear fluid that seemed to have miraculously appeared in the buckets into the tank, reset the buckets, and moved on.
Betsy seemed very pleased by the amount of sap they were getting. Stevie told her it was probably because the holes were so well drilled by the novice on the team.
At the end of their rounds, they returned to the Sugar Hut, where Mr. Daviet siphoned the sap out of the tank and measured it and filtered it before storing it in one of the large tanks outside the Sugar Hut.
“Nice work,” he said, looking at the numbers. “We’re going to begin boiling tonight. Be sure to be here to help,” he said. “That means Dinah, too. Uh, where is she?”
“She’s home,” Stevie said quickly. She wasn’t sure if Mr. Daviet could know that she and Dinah had been at the stable. She decided to duck the question altogether. “She wasn’t feeling very good this morning. Something about an upset stomach.”
“Well, she’d better be here tonight,” he said. “If the teams don’t participate in all the activities, they can’t get credit.”
“I’ll tell her, Mr. Daviet,” Stevie said. “I’m sure she’ll be feeling better by then.”
“Probably will,” he said. “I think there are some miracle cures going on around here. After all, it seems that your leg has gotten a lot better, too.”
“Fresh country air,” Stevie said with conviction. “Best medicine there is.” She made a little jump, as if to assure him that she was, in fact, a lot better. He nodded non-committally. Betsy stifled a laugh.
In a few more minutes, they were all done. Stevie was ready to go back to the Slatterys, and Betsy was headed for her house in the opposite direction. A half an hour later, Stevie was at the Slatterys’, up in Dinah’s bedroom, sharing the days’ events.
“I tasted the sap,” she said. “It was only slightly sweet. It’s hard to imagine that that’s going to become the wonderful stuff I like to put on pancakes.”
“Do I really have to go tonight?” Dinah asked. She seemed totally unaware of anything Stevie had said after the part about Mr. Daviet’s insistence that she be at the Sugar Hut tonight.
“He said so,” Stevie said. “He sounded like he meant it. Can’t you make it?” That was when Stevie realized that Dinah was in her bed and hadn’t been out of it since she’d gotten home.
“I don’t know,” Dinah said. “I hurt an awful lot. And even if I do make it, I don’t know how I’ll hide all my injuries from my parents and Mr. Daviet. I mean, look at this bruise on my cheek!”
Stevie turned the light around so it pointed at Dinah. Then she saw. Dinah had several bruises, and a deep red scratch on one of her arms. The other was sore, but not bruised yet. On her right cheek, near her ear, there was an abrasion that was red now and would most certainly be black-and-blue by morning, if not before.
“I look like some kind of awful ‘Before’ picture,” Dinah complained. “I’ve told my parents I had a stomachache.”
“Same thing I told Mr. Daviet.”
“That’s all fine and good, but it’s made my mother say I shouldn’t have anything to eat, and the fact is, the only part of me that’s really working is my stomach!”
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