Trail Mates

by Bonnie Bryant

“He’s really kind of nice, you know.”

  “Sure he is. He’s almost too nice. There’s really nothing wrong with him at all, except that I don’t want to go out with him. Maybe be his friend, sure. I’m just not ready for dates.”

  “Did you tell him that?” Stevie asked.

  “No, of course not,” Carole said. “The whole idea has been to turn him off.”

  “And the whole idea’s been totally unsuccessful,” Stevie reminded her.

  “That’s for sure. It’s not working for either me or Dad,” Carole told her.

  “Your dad? What’s this about?”

  Quickly, Carole filled Stevie in on the real story of the romance between Lynne and the colonel.

  “I can’t believe it. You guys are in the same boat,” Stevie said.

  “And it’s sinking, fast!” Carole concluded.

  Stevie laughed. “It may not be as bad as you think. For one thing, you got some lousy advice.”

  “From you!” Carole said.

  “That was the first time around. This time, I think you should try the direct method instead of the indirect one. After all, Scott and Lynne aren’t mind readers! Say,” she said, changing the subject. “Are you coming to Pine Hollow tomorrow? We want to have a Saddle Club meeting at TD’s after class. Are you going to be there?”

  “You bet I am!” Carole said. “If I’m not there, you’ll have Scott scrubbing every bit of tack in the place and believing that it’s my lifelong ambition to drive a tractor-trailer!”

  “I never thought of that!” Stevie teased.

  “So don’t start now!” Carole teased back. “Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to ride, but I’ll be at the stables. See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye-bye,” Stevie said, and then hung up the phone.

  When Carole hung up, she returned to the living room. “It was Stevie,” she said to her father. “And she had the most amazing suggestion. Listen to this wild and crazy idea of hers,” Carole began.

  “YOU REALLY WANT to soap saddles?” Carole asked Scott when he appeared at Pine Hollow the next morning at chore time.

  “Whatever,” he said agreeably. “I just like being with you,” he added.

  “Well, I like being with you,” she told him, handing him a can of saddle soap and demonstrating the short circular motions that cleaned the leather. “And I think we could be good friends.” She applied some polish to her own saddle and worked at it for a few seconds. Scott was working silently, waiting for her to go on. “In fact, I’d like to be your good friend,” she concluded.

  “And not my girlfriend?” he asked, getting the message.

  “Yes,” she told him. “I’d rather be your friend than your girlfriend. Of course, Max’ll be furious with me if that means you won’t be doing chores here anymore!” she teased.

  Scott laughed. “No, it’s no problem. I’m only going to be here with my folks for another couple of days anyway. But I’ll do chores until then. I like working around horses. I think I’ll do more of it when I get home to Ohio.”

  “So you really got to like horses this vacation, then?” Carole asked.

  “You bet,” he told her. “It’s been a great vacation. I’ve gotten a love of horses. But best of all, I’ve got a new friend.”

  Carole looked up at him from her saddle. He was smiling warmly at her. He understood. Things could be pretty easy when you tried to do them the direct way, not the roundabout way. She grinned back at Scott.

  “Will you write to me?” Scott asked.

  “Sure I will, if you’ll write and tell me about the horses you work with in Ohio.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. They shook saddle-soapy hands.

  “IT WAS YOUR wild and crazy idea, Stevie,” Carole said to her friend that afternoon at TD’s. “You told me that I should just be direct. So I told that to Dad. He’d been doing the same thing I had. He even had Lynne out on the obstacle course at the base—and she loved it as much as Scott loved mucking out stalls! Anyway, he called her last night and explained how he felt. He told me she seemed almost relieved! It worked so well for him that I tried it this morning. Guess what?”

  “You broke his heart?” Lisa asked.

  “Nope. We’re going to be friends. He’s a really nice guy, you know. I think we may even be good friends! Who knows, maybe one day I’ll even visit him in Ohio!”

  Stevie and Lisa were very excited about their news for Carole and they were about to get down to business when the waitress arrived to take their orders. Stevie ordered a blueberry sundae on coffee ice cream. She always tried to be outrageous. Lisa accused her of eating weird combinations to keep from having to share with her friends. Stevie denied it, but she never had to share, either! Lisa ordered a butterscotch sundae. “On vanilla ice cream,” she said pointedly to the waitress, who seemed a bit relieved after Stevie’s order. Carole asked for a root-beer float.

  “It’s our turn to tell, now,” Stevie said, looking at Lisa, who nodded agreement.

  “Tell what?” Carole asked. “Have you two been keeping a secret?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be a secret, but once it started happening and it didn’t happen to you, it just sort of turned into a secret. At first it was a good secret, but then it became a bad secret, and now it’s just a funny secret,” Lisa explained.

  “What is she talking about?” Carole asked Stevie, laughing at Lisa’s jumbled sentence.

  “Our attempt at being models,” Stevie said, twirling her hair around her fingers casually.

  “Models! You two! Tell me!” Carole said excitedly.

  Then, because they had been holding it all in for so long, the whole story about their ill-fated careers as models came tumbling out. Stevie told about the class Carole had missed where Jackie was photographing everybody, and then Lisa told Carole about the phone call.

  “Really, the most fun part of this whole thing was our daydreams,” Lisa said. “I don’t know about yours, Stevie, but mine were terrific.”

  “Mine were in Paris,” Stevie said airily.

  “Mine were in a sports car in Monte Carlo!” Lisa announced.

  “It sounds like the dream life of a model isn’t the same as the actual life of a model. Is that true?” Carole asked.

  Her best friends nodded. “We’re sadder, but wiser,” Stevie said. “In fact, it was awful.” Then they told Carole, in gruesome detail, just how much fun it was groveling in the dirt to keep a saddle from tipping, or holding onto a horse’s halter for what seemed like hours so that the nameplate on the halter wouldn’t gleam too brightly in the sun.

  “And the worst part was that there aren’t even any photographs of us! Just a little bit of my knee in one picture.”

  “You’re being too modest,” Lisa said. “Remember that Jackie said she thought it was a particularly good knee.”

  “Give me a break!” Stevie groaned.

  “Well, look at it this way,” Carole said brightly. “A lot of girls dream of being models for years and are really disappointed when their dreams don’t come true. You two already know better, don’t you? That’s got to be worth something.”

  “Trust her to find the bright side of that experience,” Stevie joked. “Now that her problems have been solved.” Carole laughed.

  “Actually, there is a bright side,” Lisa said. “We got paid for our work. We each got fifty dollars!”

  “Not bad,” Carole said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  Lisa and Stevie exchanged glances. Then Stevie nudged Lisa. Carole couldn’t understand why both of her friends seemed a little embarrassed. “Ahem,” Stevie said, looking at Lisa again.

  Lisa nodded and spoke. “We both felt pretty bad that you weren’t included in the modeling job, even when it turned out that it wasn’t much fun. Although it would have been more fun with the three of us together. Anyway, in order to make it up to you that you didn’t get to model, we’ve decided to give you all the money we earned. If you add that to the money you’ve alread
y saved up to visit Kate’s dude ranch, you should have enought for the round-trip airfare now. So”—she reached into her pocket and brought out an envelope with Carole’s name on it—“here it is. For you. From us.”

  Carole could barely believe her ears. Her friends were not only making an incredible and wonderful sacrifice for her, they were solving an awful problem she had. She still hadn’t decided which one she should invite to go with her—and now she didn’t have to decide at all.

  “This is incredible!” Carole said.

  “Well, generous, yes, but incredible, definitely not,” Stevie said matter-of-factly.

  “No, I mean the coincidence.”

  “What does coincidence have to do with it?” Lisa asked.

  “It has to do with my father’s dancing,” Carole said.

  Stevie scrunched her eyebrows and looked over at Lisa. “Give her a few bucks and she goes crazy,” she announced.

  “No, I haven’t,” Carole said, giggling. “But remember how Lisa just said that everything is more fun when we’re together? Well, going to the dude ranch will be more fun if all three of us go together, too!” Then, while her friends listened excitedly, she told them about the tickets her father had won and how they could use them.

  “Hey, this’ll be great!” Lisa said. “I just can’t believe it!”

  “I can,” Stevie quipped. All three girls laughed together.

  “Here’s to The Saddle Club’s first western field trip,” Stevie added as the waitress brought their order to the table. She lifted a spoonful of blueberries. “It’ll be outstanding,” she pronounced.

  “Hear, hear,” Lisa said, giggling.

  “It’ll be absolutely wonderful,” Carole told them.

  And as the three friends lifted their spoons and clicked them together, they all knew Carole was right. Everything The Saddle Club did together was wonderful—well, almost everything!

  About the Author

  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.