Dude Ranch

S
TEVIE
L
AKE LIKED
to look out on the world from between the ears of her horse. She sat tall in her saddle. Comanche shifted his weight comfortably from one side to the other. She patted him reassuringly with her gloved hand.

It was too hot to wear gloves. The bright Virginia sunshine beat down on Stevie and all of the other riders and horses from the stable’s summer-camp program. Stevie was between her two best friends, Carole Hanson and Lisa Atwood. Like Stevie, they were dressed in formal riding habits, sitting stiffly in their saddles.

In front of the line of riders stood Max Regnery, owner of Pine Hollow Stables. He had a sheaf of papers in one hand and was standing next to a board full
of ribbons. Today was the last day of camp. It was time for awards, and Stevie suspected the only one she was going to get was “Biggest Troublemaker.” She sighed to herself. That was the price she had to pay for trying to have fun. The problem was that her idea of fun wasn’t always Max’s idea of fun.

A deerfly landed on her wrist and tried to take a bite of her. She took a swat at it. Comanche felt the motion in his reins and thought it was a signal to move. He moved. Max glared at them. Stevie tightened up on the reins and Comanche stepped back.

Max was giving out prizes to the young riders first. Since Stevie and her friends were twelve and thirteen, their awards would come later. In the meantime, she had to sit still, and that wasn’t her strongest suit.

Stevie glanced over at Carole to her right. Carole’s beautiful curly black hair, which usually hung loose around her shoulders, was tightly braided and carefully folded up under her velvet riding hat. Her dark brown eyes stared straight ahead at Max. She looked both comfortable and attentive. Stevie thought that probably came from Carole’s father, a colonel in the Marine Corps. Colonel Hanson was always comfortable at attention too.

Carole had been riding horses since she was a very little girl, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life working with horses. Stevie admired Carole’s incredible
skill at riding. It was as if she’d been born doing it. Stevie thought it was difficult sometimes to tell where the girl ended and the horse began. She giggled, then glanced over at her other friend.

To her left was Lisa Atwood. Lisa was one of the newest riders at the stable. She’d started classes just a few months earlier. She had learned an awful lot in a very short time—and Lisa, Carole, and Stevie had become the best of friends, too. Stevie shook her head, thinking about how different they all were. Lisa was a straight-A student who attacked every project with purpose and confidence. She usually succeeded at them, too.

Today Lisa was wearing a brand-new riding jacket, carefully tailored for her. Her long hair was in a perfect French braid, and her boots had been polished, not by Lisa, but by the shoemaker at the mall. These things mattered a lot to Lisa’s mother, who was always very concerned about what was proper. One of the reasons Stevie liked Lisa so much was that they didn’t matter at all to Lisa. It didn’t matter to her that her boots were shiny, but if that was the price she had to pay to ride, she’d let her mother have her boots polished.

Stevie, on the other hand, was very disorganized. She was forever starting vast projects and leaving them unfinished. She had polished her own boots for today’s ceremonies—or at least she’d polished the right one.
The phone had rung before she’d gotten to her left boot. She hoped Max wouldn’t notice. Her own blond hair was in braids, too, but it didn’t stay in braids. The slightest breeze loosened strands of it. She knew she must look a mess. She didn’t really care.

Although they were very different, the girls had a few things in common. For one, they were all wearing the same pin—a silver horse head, with the wind blowing the horse’s mane. That pin meant that they were all members of The Saddle Club, a club they’d made up themselves. The requirements for membership were that all members had to be horse crazy—there was no question that Carole, Lisa, and Stevie shared that—and they had to be willing to help the other members whenever they needed help. That was what their friendship was all about. At that moment, though, Stevie thought the only help any of them needed was to get out of their sweltering riding outfits and into something more appropriate to the day: a swimming pool.

As soon as the ceremonies were over, they’d all untack their horses, say good-bye to their friends until classes started again later in the summer, and then Stevie, Lisa, and Carole would head straight for the Lakes’ swimming pool. The very thought of it made Stevie smile. Her smile caught Max’s eye. He glanced at her
suspiciously, thinking she was up to something. She usually was. She tried very hard to look solemn.

Looking solemn wasn’t easy for Stevie, especially when she had something nice to think about. Today she was thinking about tomorrow because tomorrow she and her two best friends were going on a trip together. Because of some incredible good luck, the girls were going to visit a friend of theirs, Kate Devine. Kate was a championship rider whose parents owned a dude ranch way out west. Not only was it going to be Stevie’s first visit to a dude ranch, it would be the first time she’d ever been west of the Mississippi River.

She could imagine the towering Rocky Mountains, the lonesome pines, the Sierra Madre—whatever that was—the cowpokes lumbering along the Santa Fe Trail, the bandits lurking behind sagebrush or whooping and hollering around the circled wagons, gun-fights at high noon. Stevie made a funny face and then giggled to herself. It seemed that everything she knew about the West had come from movies. She had the feeling that the real West wasn’t exactly the same as the one Hollywood had created, and she suspected there weren’t a lot of bad
hombres
hanging around the saloons these days, either.

“Sit up,” Carole hissed at her. “He’s looking straight at you.”

Stevie glanced at Carole and then looked at Max. He
was
looking straight at her. What had she missed, she wondered.

“… and in the category of dressage, we have one student who has applied herself especially hard and has made great strides this summer. It gives me pleasure to award the dressage ribbon to Miss Stephanie Lake.”

That was Stevie. Max was actually giving her an award! She could barely believe it. She thought she’d been sitting in the sun forever for no reason at all.

Stevie slipped her feet out of the stirrups, swung her right leg over the horse’s back, and let herself slide down to the ground. Then she led Comanche to the center of the ring, where Max presented her with the bright, shiny blue ribbon. She felt her face flush with joy when Max shook her hand.

“Good work, Stevie,” he said.

“Thanks,” she told him. Then she and Comanche returned to their place in line. Carole and Lisa were clapping like crazy for her. She grinned at both of them.