Horsenapped!

by Bonnie Bryant

  “You’d think people would be more careful,” she said, picking up the scrap of paper automatically and pocketing it until she found a wastebasket. “Goats eat paper,” she said to herself. “But that stuff could make a horse sick!”

  “GOOD LUCK, CAROLE,” Lisa said, and gave her a squeeze. Then she showed her crossed fingers. “We’re rooting for you.”

  “Yes, we are,” Stevie said, joining Lisa at the entrance to the ring. She crossed her fingers, too.

  Carole thought that, with friends like that, she couldn’t lose.

  “You’re on!” Mrs. Reg said, wishing her luck. The gong sounded. It was time to begin.

  Carole entered the ring and, as with the dressage, she saluted the judges. She then had a full minute to begin the course and she intended to use it. This was Starlight’s first time jumping in an arena before a crowd. She wanted to accustom him to the atmosphere and the people. They circled the ring at a trot and approached the long straightaway that ended in the first jump. This was exactly the way Carole had planned her route. At the corner, when Starlight was aimed for the jump, she signaled him to canter. He responded instantly. Starlight’s canter was pure magic as far as Carole was concerned. It could carry her away anywhere, anytime, but not this time. This time, she had to concentrate completely on the task in front of her and Starlight. She was convinced that she had the most wonderful horse in the event and she wanted everybody else to know it, too.

  Carole’s work in the ring walking the course paid off right away. She knew just how long the straightaway was and she remembered that she’d decided Starlight should take off for his jump when they reached the slightly crooked pole in the fence. She was ready. So was he. He took off perfectly and sailed right over the jump. When they were above the jump and beginning their descent, Carole straightened up a little and slid back into the saddle, meeting it smoothly as Starlight’s hooves met the ground. He cantered on immediately and she never felt the least bit out of balance. The audience applauded. Carole knew she deserved it. She also knew Starlight deserved it.

  “Good boy,” she whispered to him.

  The next two jumps were just as smooth and then came the triple combination. Starlight took stock of the three jumps ahead of him as they cantered toward the obstacles. Carole knew what she wanted Starlight to do and it seemed to her that she almost didn’t have to tell him. He responded instantly to her wishes. Almost before she knew what had happened, she and her horse had cleared them perfectly.

  “Ooooh!” the audience said, and then clapped.

  For a second, Carole listened to the applause. Then she recalled how distracting that had been for Stevie and how much trouble it had caused her. Carole shut it out of her mind and kept her attention glued to the next jump, and then the one after it and the double combination after that. Before she really knew what was happening, Carole and Starlight cleared the last jump flawlessly and rode smoothly through the finish line. She drew her horse down to a trot and returned to the center of the ring, where she gave a final salute to the judges.

  When she lifted her head, she saw that people were standing. They were standing and applauding her and Starlight. Carole was embarrassed. She’d been riding for a long time and it had always been important to her to do it well, but she’d always done it well for herself. Other people’s opinions, except for her instructors’, had never mattered to her. Now, there she was in the middle of the jump course at Pine Hollow and over a hundred people were standing and applauding the way she and Starlight had performed. She didn’t have any idea what to do. She looked over at her friends for help. Her friends were clapping as hard as anyone else. Carole touched the brim of her hat to salute the audience and then signaled Starlight to trot out of the ring. He just about pranced. Carole thought he deserved the chance to show off.

  Lisa and Stevie greeted her at the gate. “You were fabulous!” Stevie shrieked.

  Carole dismounted. Lisa gave her a great big hug. “You stopped the whole show!” she said.

  “It wasn’t me,” Carole tried to tell them. “It was Starlight. He was just born to jump!” She paused, then continued. “And maybe I was born to make him jump.”

  Stevie and Lisa gave her another round of hugs.

  “When are you up?” Carole asked, suddenly realizing that the event hadn’t stopped just because she’d finished.

  “After this rider,” Lisa said.

  “Are you nervous?” Carole asked.

  “Not at all,” Lisa said. “I was, up until your turn. But then you did such a wonderful job, I know there’s no way I could possibly do that well, so I don’t have to worry about it. I can just go out and do my best and that’s all that I have to do.”

  “That’s all you should ever have to do,” Carole said.

  “I know,” Lisa told her. She was going to say something else, but Mrs. Reg called her name. “I guess it’s time to go do it.”

  “Good luck,” Carole and Stevie called at the same time. Then they stood together and watched Lisa enter the ring.

  “She’ll do fine,” Carole said.

  “I know,” Stevie told her. “And we can help her by standing here and crossing our fingers.”

  Lisa did do a good job. She was still a novice rider and only had limited experience as a jumper, but she’d learned a lot in the short time she’d been doing it and riding an experienced horse like Pepper helped, too. She worked hard to keep Pepper cantering at a steady pace and she was careful with her own form, holding her hands and elbows close to her body, keeping her back straight, and bending from her hips, not her waist.

  She did make some mistakes, though, and they added on a few faults. On one jump, she waited to jump until she and Pepper were too close. Pepper brought down the top bar of the jump with him. Then, on the triple, she got into some real trouble. The problem, for Lisa, was that the jumps were too close together and she didn’t have time to collect herself, or her horse, before she had to jump again. Both she and Pepper seemed to get confused. He knocked over the second jump of the combination and refused the third altogether. Lisa turned him around and made him approach the combination a second time. Then he made it over, but it had cost her lots of faults.

  Carole could see the determination on Lisa’s face. She thought she knew what was going through Lisa’s mind. It was easy for a rider who was messing up a performance to just get worse. That was what Veronica had done in the dressage competition. Lisa didn’t want that to happen. She wanted to get back into the competition and finish up doing her best, the way Stevie had done.

  Once Pepper had cleared the third jump in the combination, Lisa used her inside leg to improve Pepper’s impulsion. His back straightened out, giving more power to his hind legs. He was ready to jump again, and he was ready to jump right. Lisa finished up her performance as well as she’d started it. That was something to be proud of.

  “Nice recovery!” Carole said. “You did your best and you should be proud.”

  “Yeah, it was great,” Stevie added. She held Pepper steady while Lisa dismounted. She began walking him to cool him down. “Now, we have a little break until the awards and parade this afternoon. Let’s find someplace quiet to talk, okay?”

  Both Lisa and Carole thought that was a good idea. Stevie led Pepper through the stable to his stall. On her way, she saw a garbage bin and recalled the gum wrapper in her pocket. She paused and fished it out.

  “Can’t believe what pigs some people are,” she said, tossing the wrapper into the bin.

  “Oh, right,” Carole agreed. She stuck her hand into her own pocket and fished out the gum wrapper she’d picked up the day before in the woods. “And watermelon bubble gum at that. Yuck!”

  “Watermelon?” Stevie said, peering into the trash bin, looking for the wrapper she’d just tossed there. “That was the flavor of the one I picked up, too.”

  “In the woods?” Carole asked.

  “No,” Stevie said. “It was by the telephone …” Stevie suddenly got the feeli
ng of a lot of odd facts coming together, and sticking together, like bubble gum!

  “Put your horses in the stalls and just loosen their girths. Make it quick, too,” she said. “We’ll meet in the hayloft in five minutes, flat!”

  Stevie disappeared too fast for her friends to ask any questions. Carole and Lisa decided to disappear just as fast. All their questions would be answered in the loft.

  “EVERY TIME I look at all these pieces, I keep coming up with one name,” Stevie began. “And that name is Donald.” She told them about the phone call she’d overheard earlier. “At first, I didn’t think anything about it. But when I did think, I thought about gum wrappers and bubble gum. Everything here seems to be held together by gum wrappers and bubble gum.”

  “Including ransom notes!” Carole said.

  “Precisely,” Stevie agreed.

  “Do you really think Donald is a horsenapper?” Lisa asked. It seemed impossible that somebody who was so industrious and hard-working could also be a crook.

  “I don’t know,” Stevie admitted. “I am pretty sure that he’s involved. The way he talked on the phone—and he has to be the person I heard on the phone—it sounded like somebody else was in charge and he just needed the money.”

  Carole scratched her head. “So, if we conclude that Donald’s the errand boy for the crooks, where does that put the horses?”

  “In the woods, of course,” Stevie said.

  “But they weren’t at the quarry. What makes you so sure they’re in the woods at all?”

  “The gum wrapper,” Stevie said. “Plus the fact that Donald was riding around those woods. I don’t think he actually followed us there. I think he was there already and just heard us. That’s when he made up the story about following us.”

  “So where are the horses?” Carole asked. “And how did they get there without the van?”

  “I don’t know,” Stevie admitted. “But we’re just going to have to go look. And this time, we’ll find them.”

  “I think it’s time to tighten Pepper’s girth again,” Lisa said, standing up. “And on the way, I’ll check to make sure Donald is very busy doing something that will occupy him for a long time.”

  They agreed to meet at the good-luck horseshoe in five minutes.

  SEVERAL THINGS MADE The Saddle Club feel they needed to hurry. In Carole’s mind, it was that every minute the horses were captured, they were endangered. As far as Stevie was concerned, she wanted to rush so she and her friends would be the first ones to find, and free, the horses. Lisa’s main concern was that the mystery be unraveled before most people knew there was a mystery—and that the girls hadn’t told anyone about it.

  Each of them knew this about one another as they rode quickly along the fire road that morning, and each found it comforting. It was as if they’d divvied up what had to be worried about and thus had everything covered. At least they hoped it was everything.

  Once again, they followed the rutted path to the left when it forked. Carole reasoned that Stevie’s theory was still good. The ruts could have been a horse van and everything seemed undisturbed on the right-hand fork. Once again, when they came to the creek, they were puzzled. The tire tracks not only stopped there, but seemed to turn around.

  “So, now what do we do?” Stevie asked.

  Carole thought. As she did that, Starlight leaned down and began to drink the fresh water. He even took a couple of steps into the creek where he could get the faster-moving water. It reminded her of how he’d wanted to drink the water when she was on the cross-country course. And that reminded her of how much horses enjoyed being in water on a hot summer day.

  “The creek!” Carole said.

  “No duh,” Stevie remarked sarcastically. “Sure looks like one to me.”

  In spite of herself, Carole laughed. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I mean I bet they took the horses out of the van—which left a trail in the mud and which couldn’t go any farther than this—and walked them through the creek, which left no trail at all!”

  “Oh!” Lisa exclaimed. “That would explain a lot.”

  Stevie nodded excitedly. “It even explains why Donald was coming from upstream when he claimed he’d been following us from the other direction. Let’s go!”

  “Quietly,” Carole added. She didn’t have to say it twice. They proceeded walking upstream in the creek. Carole didn’t know the woods in this direction and it wasn’t even familiar to Stevie. They were at the edge of the state forest where it bordered on some old farmland, and riders had been advised not to risk trespassing. That seemed a small crime to add to horsenapping, and Carole thought they would be forgiven.

  She watched the creek bed carefully. It was shallow and the water was clear. She still wanted to be alert to any problems that might come for Starlight, Pepper, and Topside. Three horses were already in peril. She didn’t want to make it six. And then she saw something that made her heart skip a beat.

  “Look!” she signaled to her friends. “Manure!”

  They all drew to a halt and looked. There, plain as anything, was a pile of manure.

  “I never thought I’d see the day when manure looked good to me!” Stevie joked.

  “Where there’s manure, there are horses!” Lisa declared. “Right now, I think I like that even better than the one about smoke and fire.”

  “Somehow I doubt it’ll catch on like the smoke-and-fire saying,” Stevie joked.

  Carole felt irrationally elated by the presence of manure on the bank of the creek. It certainly was evidence that they were on the right trail. But what lay around the next bend? How close were they? How much danger were the horses in? How much danger were they in?

  The same thought seemed to occur to her friends then, too. The three of them sat silently, nervously, on their horses. Carole looked ahead thoughtfully. Starlight’s ears perked up, as if he were thinking, too. Then, over the gurgling sound of the creek, the occasional chirrups of birds overhead, and the rustle of leaves as squirrels darted back and forth, came a more familiar, welcome sound. It was the sound of a horse’s whinny.

  The girls looked at one another. They all knew then that they had found what they were looking for.

  “We’ve got to go for help,” Lisa whispered.

  “We’ve got to stay and help the horses,” Carole told her.

  “We’ve got to be absolutely positive,” Stevie said sensibly.

  Without further discussion, the girls dismounted and secured their horses’ reins to a low branch. On foot they followed the bank of the creek around the next bend. They snuck behind a large rock and peered over the hill.

  There, in a small hollow, was one of Willow Creek’s isolated farms. From the look of the condition of the barn and the house, Stevie thought it might even be an abandoned farm. The buildings were still standing, but they hadn’t seen the business end of a paintbrush for many, many years.

  “What a dump,” Lisa said disdainfully.

  “Nobody’s going to hide stolen horses at the Waldorf Astoria,” Stevie said. “This place looks just about perfect.”

  “So, where are the stolen horses?” Lisa asked.

  “We’ll see them in a minute,” Carole said. From where they were crouched, they could see the back of the barn and the house. They couldn’t see anything in either building or on the far side of either building, and they couldn’t see any activity, human or equine.

  “We’ve got to get to the edge of the barn there,” Stevie said.

  “One of us does,” Carole corrected her. “I’ll go. You two stay here. There’s no point in all three of us getting into trouble.”

  To Stevie and Lisa, the suggestion seemed a little silly, since it was clear that all three of them were probably already in a lot of trouble, but they nevertheless stayed put while Carole crept forward toward the barn.

  Carole could feel it in her bones. She was right. They were right. The horses were here, and so were the horsenappers. All they had to do was spot them and th
en go for help.

  It only took a few seconds to cover the thirty yards to the side of the barn. There were no windows on that side. She had to creep to the front and look around the edge. She flattened herself against the wall, afraid even of casting a shadow that might be noticed.

  Carole peered around the edge of the old barn and found that her greatest hopes and worst fears were all being fulfilled at once. For there were two strange men and three familiar horses. That was the good news. The bad news was that the men were trying to load the horses onto a van. They were going to move them, and there would be no way for The Saddle Club to follow them. The horses could be lost forever!

  The men were trying to load Garnet first. The one thing working to Carole’s advantage, to say nothing of Garnet’s, was that Garnet hated riding on vans. The only way Veronica, or really Red, because he was always the one to do it, could get her on a van was to put a blindfold on her. It wouldn’t take the horsenappers long to figure that out, but it might take long enough for Carole to do what had to be done.

  She had to get Lisa and Stevie there to help, plus Pepper, Starlight, and Topside, and it all had to be a surprise. She turned to her friends and waved, then pointed to their own horses. Stevie nodded. She was always eager for an adventure and she knew just what to do.

  Stevie and Lisa disappeared. Carole held her breath for a few seconds until she heard the sound she most wanted to hear. It was Stevie and Lisa coming over the hill on horseback, bringing Starlight with them.

  Carole knew they didn’t have much time. The horsenappers would hear the horses and know something was up. They might have the advantage of surprise, but they wouldn’t have it for long.

  Carole ran to meet her friends. In a second, she was in Starlight’s saddle.

  “It’s roundup time!” she said.

  She nudged Starlight hard with her calves. He responded instantly and the three girls rode around the corner of the barn into the open area by the van at the same time. Two men gaped at them in astonishment.