Secret of the Stallion

July 18
    

Dear Diary
,

This trip to London is finally beginning to show some hope. I put up with weak tea, stale cakes, and a couple of tedious old fogeys yesterday afternoon and my reward was a most interesting story. It seems the man who built the castle had a treasure. Something about the Civil War, though I can’t imagine why an English duke cared about freeing slaves in America. Still, the man apparently knew jewels and precious metals. He also had a thing about horses. I could love someone like that. Anyway, it seems that nobody’s ever found his treasure—until now, that is. I don’t have time for all the details of what Mrs. Whatsername told me, but I know enough to know where to look. Won’t that be a surprise to those goody-goodies, Lisa, Carole, and Stevie. I can’t wait to see their faces when I find the treasure!

Veronica
    

“
W
ELCOME ABOARD
F
LIGHT
Seven to London’s Heathrow Airport
.”

“Can you believe that?” Stevie Lake asked, leaning over to her two best friends, Lisa Atwood and Carole Hanson. The three of them were seated next to one another on an airplane headed for London, England.

“I never thought this day would come!” Carole said.

“Me neither,” agreed Lisa.

“Perhaps we’ll have time for a spot of tea with the queen,” Stevie said.

“Not likely,” Carole said. “We’re going to be much too busy worrying about how well we ride. We’re not just here for fun, you know.”

“Oh, but riding
is
fun,” said Lisa. “And how could there be a better combination than being with my best friends, on an exciting trip, where we get to ride horses?”

“… 
sure that your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright and locked position prior to
 …”

A face appeared above the seat in front of Lisa’s. “Are you girls all buckled in?”

“Yes, Max,” Stevie said. Max was Max Regnery, their riding instructor and one of their chaperons for the trip.

“Max, sit down yourself. Girls who can polish saddles as well as they can will certainly be able to manage to buckle a seat belt!”

That was Max’s mother, the other half of the chaperon team. She was universally referred to as Mrs. Reg. Max and Mrs. Reg owned Pine Hollow Stables, where the girls rode. Mrs. Reg was the stable manager and occasional adviser to the girls.

The three girls were very different from one another. Carole was the most serious rider of the three. She’d been riding ever since she was a very little girl, starting with lessons on the Marine Corps bases where she’d lived all her life. Riding had always been the constant in Carole’s life. When she was a child, her family had moved a lot, from base to base, but wherever she went, there were always horses. Now her father was a senior officer, a colonel, and was not likely to be moved any more before he retired from the Corps. Since her mother’s death from cancer a few years earlier, Carole and her dad had lived alone in
their house in the town of Willow Creek, not far from Quantico, where he worked.

Carole now had her own horse, Starlight, and she knew that no matter what else happened to her, horses would always be a major part of her life. When she grew up she would work with horses. Maybe she’d be a vet, maybe a trainer, maybe a championship rider, maybe a breeder. Maybe all of them. Horses were the one thing Carole never forgot. She might forget her own breakfast, but she’d never forget to feed Starlight. She might lose her own homework, but she’d never misplace Starlight’s health records. She might forget to pack her bathrobe for a trip, but she’d never leave Starlight’s blanket behind.

Carole wanted to learn everything there was to know about horses. She studied every book she had and she worked hard on all of her lessons at Horse Wise, the Pony Club at Pine Hollow. Whenever her friends weren’t certain of something about horses, they knew they could ask Carole. Carole loved to share information, though sometimes her friends thought perhaps she shared too much. Stevie sometimes said that Carole gave twenty-five-cent answers to nickel questions.

Stevie contrasted sharply to Carole’s seriousness. She loved horses just as much, but Stevie was much better known for her practical joking than she was for being serious. Often her practical jokes got her into trouble. Sometimes they got her friends into trouble, too. The good news was that she was almost as good at getting out of
trouble as she was at getting into it. Carole and Lisa usually groaned whenever Stevie came up with one of her wild schemes, but, they had to admit, Stevie’s schemes sometimes got them into more fun than trouble. And, sometimes they even worked.

Stevie’s parents were both lawyers. She had three brothers—one older, one younger, one twin. She was always scrapping with them and that got her into the worst trouble because the boys never hesitated to scrap back.

In spite of Stevie’s obstreperous, stubborn nature, she was a very good rider. She was almost as good as Carole and, in some forms, even better. Ironically, her strongest skills lay in dressage, the most intricate form of riding there was, requiring great concentration. What Stevie enjoyed about dressage exercises and tests was that it was almost like a puzzle to her—a real challenge beyond the normal demands of riding. Dressage was the ultimate test of a horse’s manners. The slightest shift in pressure or weight by the rider should result in a proper response from the horse. The well-trained horse and rider could do amazing things in dressage. Stevie liked doing amazing things. Stevie just recently got her own horse, an Arab-Saddlebred mix named Belle. She loved working with Belle on her training. “Work” wasn’t the right word actually. Anything to do with horses was more like fun than work.

It was a good thing for Stevie that she was disciplined at riding because she was often just one step ahead of
detention at school. She was smart as could be, but she could be careless about school responsibilities and spent more time than the average student trying to explain things to Miss Fenton, the founder and director of Fenton Hall, the private school Stevie attended.

Lisa, on the other hand, was a straight-A student at Willow Creek Junior High School, where she and Carole went. She always did excellent work at school. She never forgot an assignment or waited until it was too late to complete a project. Stevie couldn’t understand that part of Lisa at all. What she could understand was Lisa’s love of horses.

Lisa had started riding only recently. But as with anything she tried, she was a good student and a fast learner. Max had often remarked that he’d never seen anyone learn so quickly. She was rightfully proud of that.

Lisa was logical and methodical. Her mother had seen to it that she’d developed many skills in her thirteen years. She’d had dance classes (ballet, tap,
and
ballroom), music lessons, painting lessons, tennis lessons, sewing classes, and drama classes. Most of those had stopped, however, when Lisa discovered horses. Her mother had thought that every proper young lady should know something about horses. Lisa disagreed there. After one lesson, she didn’t want to know
something
about horses. She wanted to know
everything
about horses.

That was how she’d met up with Stevie and Carole. And that was when the three of them, different as they
were, discovered that they had one thing in common that was much more important than everything about them that was different: They were horse-crazy. So they’d started The Saddle Club. It only had two rules. Members had to be horse-crazy and they had to be willing to help one another.