Ghost Rider (13 page)
Authors: Bonnie Bryant
There was a knock at the door. Colonel Hanson stuck his head in. “Letter for you today, honey,” he said, handing an envelope to Carole. Carole took it and looked at it excitedly. “Oh, it’s from Kate, and I bet she’s writing to tell us what happened at the horse adoption!”
Carole tore open the envelope and began reading out loud.
“You’re hearing from the proud adoptive parent of a beautiful wild horse. She’s a mare—mostly quarter horse, I think, and she’s got a foal, too! They’re both sorrel. I’ve named the mare Moon Glow. She’s so beautiful I can’t wait to show her to you girls. You’ve got to come back and meet her. Walter says we should start gentling her—that means getting her used to a halter and a lead rope—within a week or so. After that, we begin the real training. She’s got wonderful lines. I know she’s going to be a fine riding horse for me someday, and her foal is a beauty, too.”
“But what about the stallion?” Lisa asked. “What does she say about that?”
Carole continued reading.
“I suppose you want to know about the stallion and, frankly, so do I. I can tell you what happened, but I certainly can’t explain it
.
Dad and I went to the adoption, looking for the stallion. We’d even spoken to the man in charge of it to warn him that was the horse we wanted. He said he didn’t know the horse we meant, but since we’d had our application in for so long, we should have a good selection, as long as we got there early
.
It was the stallion’s herd all right. I recognized some of the mares. You would have, too. But there was no sign of the stallion. There was a stallion with the herd, but he wasn’t silvery, and he didn’t have a nick in his ear. In fact, he was a kind of ugly skewbald pinto
.
Dad and I asked all the Bureau of Land Management people about the silvery stallion with the nick in his ear. Every single one of them said they’d never seen such a horse with this herd. Never seen a horse like that around here. So, what do you think?”
“Oh, my,” Lisa said, almost involuntarily. She could still see the stallion. She knew he existed. Didn’t he?
“I don’t understand,” said Carole. “We actually
saw
that horse—more than once.”
“There has to be an explanation,” Stevie agreed. Then she turned to Lisa. “Look, you’re the logical one here. What do you think is going on?”
“Maybe that skewbald just looks silvery white in the moonlight,” Carole said. “We never did see him up close or in good light, you know.”
“Maybe,” Stevie said. “But I still think John’s behind this.”
“John was with me,” Lisa reminded her friend.
“Then his father! It must have been Walter. It was just a big hoax.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said. In her heart, though, that wasn’t what she thought. In her heart, she could see the spirit of White Eagle rising from the flames of the fire, joining the spirit of Moon Glow on the back of the white horse who had brought them together and who carried them to the skies to unite them for eternity. She could also imagine John as a young boy, hearing his mother tell him the tale, and loving the image of the free horse roaming the desert. “And maybe not,” she said. “But you know, there’s one thing that seems right, and that is that as much as I would have liked Kate to have the stallion, if she’s not going to
be the one to own him, nobody is. Somewhere out there—maybe on the plains or the desert, maybe even in our imaginations—the silvery stallion is roaming free and wild. He is there to help those who do good for the Native American people. That’s the way it ought to be, you know.”
At first Carole and Stevie didn’t answer her. They were lost in their own thoughts—visions of the silvery stallion with the nick in his ear.
“Maybe,” Stevie said, finally.
“Yeah,” Carole agreed. “Maybe.”
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.
