Horse Trouble (9 page)

A car pulled up. That had to be Mr. Jarvis. He was the only rider expected at this time. A few minutes later, Mr. Jarvis entered Mrs. Reg’s office. He was surprised to see Carole at the desk.

“Mrs. Reg, you’ve shrunk!” he teased.

Carole immediately liked the man. She grinned and offered her hand. “I’m Carole Hanson,” she said. “Mrs. Reg is away for a couple of days, and my friends and I are trying to replace her, though of course that’s not an easy job. Anyway, you must be Mr. Jarvis. Mrs. Reg left us very specific instructions about you, sir, and said we had to have the right horse for you.”

Carole was adopting the theory that the less sure she was about something, the more important it was to
sound
sure.

“Well then, she told you about me and Patch, didn’t she?”

“Patch?”

“He’s the only horse at Pine Hollow that I’ll ever ride.”

“Patch?”

This wasn’t going well.

“She probably didn’t tell you why, but it’s an old story. I won’t bore you with it—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be bored,” Carole said, thinking that as long as the man was talking, she wouldn’t have to tell him about the woman in the lunchtime class who was already riding Patch and who would now never give him up.

“It has to do with pintos,” the man said. “The first horse I ever rode was a pinto, and I decided then that I always wanted to ride them. I know a horse’s color has nothing to do with his quality”—and that put him a few steps above the woman who was now riding Patch—“but I’m very superstitious, and I simply can’t be on anything but a pinto.”

“Interesting,” Carole said, though “interesting” wasn’t what she was actually thinking. “Bad news” was more like it. She stalled.

“Also,” the man went on, “I’m an artist. I paint with oils. It seems only right that a painter should ride painted ponies, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Carole said. “It makes complete sense
to me.” It didn’t make any sense at all. By that same logic, since she was still in school, she should want to ride only horses who hadn’t finished their schooling! Still Mr. Jarvis was apparently a good customer. Carole wanted to keep him happy. Then a thought occurred to her. Maybe, just maybe.

She scratched her head thoughtfully and considered the idea that had popped into her head. It was a Stevie Lake idea, if there ever had been one, and it was a gamble, but it seemed the only possibility. Carole wanted to please this nice, if slightly strange, man. Perhaps she could do it.

“I have to tell you that Patch is being ridden now,” Carole said.

The man began to say something that Carole didn’t think she wanted to hear, so she went on talking herself.

“Patch may be our only pinto, but he’s not the only horse here that you will like. You go change into your riding clothes and wait for me by the door. Let me tack up another horse for you. I’ll bring him to the good-luck horseshoe, and we’ll meet you there.”

“I only ride pintos!” the man said.

“I know,” Carole said. “I know. And I think you’ll find this one quite satisfactory.”

Without further ado, she rose from the desk and
went to the stalls, sending Mr. Jarvis to the locker area.

Carole picked up some tack and went to the horse she’d assigned to Mr. Jarvis. “Piebald” was one of the English terms for black-and-white-patched horses, and “skewbald” horses had brown patches instead of black. In Spanish both of these were known as “pintos.” Another English name for a pinto was “paint” or “painted horse.” Now Pine Hollow had only one pinto, but as of the previous afternoon, they did have another painted horse. The colors weren’t black and white—they were red and white.

“Hi there, Diablo,” Carole said, patting him affectionately. She gave him a carrot, too, just to show that there were no hard feelings about the little chase they’d had in the field. He didn’t seem to be harboring any grudges.

Carole inspected the paint job. She and Stevie and Lisa had been working at it quite unsuccessfully. It was going to take a lot of brushing to get it all out. Eventually the hairs would grow out and Diablo would be his same old dark brown, but for now, and for some time to come, he was decidedly brown, red, and white.

She tacked him up and led him to the door of the stable, where she found Mr. Jarvis waiting.

“I only—”

“It’s a paint,” she said, cutting off his words of protest. “I promise. And he’s a terrific horse.”

When she drew up to him, she made sure that she walked Diablo far enough into the sunlight for his very special red and white markings to be distinctly visible.

Mr. Jarvis looked. Then he looked again. He was about to speak, but he stopped himself. Carole held her tongue. That’s just what Stevie would have done.

“Well, I never—” Mr. Jarvis said. But he wasn’t angry, he was smiling. Then he laughed. “I guess if there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s got to be more than one way to paint a horse! All right. You win. I’ll try this fellow. What’s his name?”

“Diablo,” Carole said. “He’s a great horse, but be nice to him. He had kind of a rough day yesterday.”

“At the beauty parlor?” Mr. Jarvis joked.

“Sort of,” Carole conceded.

Mr. Jarvis took the reins from Carole and mounted Diablo. He brushed the good-luck horseshoe with his hand. He sat pensively in the saddle for a few minutes, trying to get the feel of the horse beneath him. He leaned forward and patted Diablo’s neck. Then he turned to Carole.

“I noticed the new paint job on the front of the
stable as I came in,” he said. “I told myself it was nice of you to paint the place just for me. I didn’t realize at the time how true that was.”

Carole saluted him in her best Marine Corps style. “We always try to please our customers,
sir
,” she said.

“I can tell,” he said. Then he signaled Diablo to head for the trails. Off they went, painter and painted pony together.

“I
F ONE MORE
person tells me that they want a gentle horse with some spirit, I think I’m going to scream,” Carole said to her friends when they were all safely hidden in the hayloft above the stalls at Pine Hollow. They were having an impromptu Saddle Club meeting. They really needed one another.

“I can’t tell you how awful it was to learn that only the man’s
name
was French! He was as American as I am—as we all are—and he spoke pretty good French, too. Can you imagine? I thought he was the ambassador!” Lisa found herself reliving her profound embarrassment when she realized the mistake she and her friends had made.

“Do you think it was my fault?” Stevie asked defensively. “I mean, that’s what Mrs. Reg’s list said.”

“I truly wish I could blame you for it,” Lisa said. “But the fact is, I saw the list just like you did, and I drew exactly the same conclusion you did. We both got to thinking about Estelle and the Brazilian ambassador. No, I don’t blame you.”

Carole snapped the pop top of a can of soda and took a long drink. It tasted awfully good on the dusty warm afternoon. Lisa sipped at her apple juice. Stevie just stared blankly at the soda can in her hand. She was thinking hard.

“You know who we could really use at a time like this?” she asked.

Lisa nodded. “Sure, Mrs. Reg. She’d have a story for us about how some horses tried to band together when a friend of theirs left.”

“No, maybe it would be about how Max—
her
Max—tried to fill in for the county doctor when he went on vacation,” Stevie suggested.

“Or about how the farrier’s wife learned to shoe horses just because her husband sprained his knee in the three-legged race at the church social and couldn’t hold a horse’s hoof between his knees long enough to shoe it,” Carole said.

Lisa liked that one. She began laughing a little. It
was the first time she’d laughed all day, and it felt pretty good. Mrs. Reg’s stories were always more than a little offbeat, and sometimes the girls suspected that they weren’t based on the absolute truth. It didn’t take away from their charm, because they knew that there was always something to learn from them. Right now it seemed that the one thing one of Mrs. Reg’s stories could do for them would be to provide a good laugh.

Suddenly Lisa had a mental image of the farrier, complete with his leather apron, running a three-legged race. The image was absurd and it tickled her funny bone.

That was when Lisa’s shoulders started shaking with laughter. Then while her friends watched, her giggles exploded, and they were positively infectious. Within a matter of seconds, Carole and Stevie joined in. None of it made any sense at all, and all of it seemed like the funniest thing that any one of the three of them had ever thought about. They laughed until the tears came, and then they laughed some more—until the tears rolled down their cheeks.

Each, in a corner of her heart and her mind, understood what was happening. The three of them had taken on an enormous amount of worry and work when they’d offered to do Mrs. Reg’s job, and it seemed that everything they tried to do came out all
wrong: a humongous paint job they couldn’t possibly finish themselves, culminating in paint splattered on Diablo; saddling up ponies for six-foot-tall men; French lessons for an American rider; and at the bottom of it all, there was still no sign of Mrs. Reg’s pin. The perfect antidote for such an exhausting and nerve-racking week was being together and acting silly.

Finally the laughter began to subside, but not the wonderful feeling of warmth and friendship it had brought. The girls understood, without saying anything among themselves, that the most valuable thing they had—more valuable even than a solid-gold pin with a diamond—was the love and friendship they had for one another.

“I just had a thought,” Carole said when she could finally speak. Lisa and Stevie looked at her. “I was thinking about Mrs. Reg and what she would say if she could see us right now.”

“That’s easy,” Stevie said.

Lisa painted a stern Mrs. Reg look on her face (although Mrs. Reg rarely looked stern), lowered her voice, and spoke the words for the absent woman, “What are you girls laughing about? Isn’t there work to be done around here? You think this is some kind of game parlor?”

Since that was just about exactly what Mrs. Reg
would have said, all three girls began laughing again. But they didn’t laugh as hard this time. The mention of Mrs. Reg reminded them what the underlying problem was. In the first place, they weren’t doing her job very well. In the second place, but it was really the first place, they still hadn’t found the pin.

“Oh, right,” Stevie said, suddenly very sober.

“This was fun, but you know, I think we’re really mess-ups,” Lisa said. “I mean, every time I think about that poor Mr. French, I just can’t believe what I did.”

“We did, you mean,” Stevie said generously. “But don’t take it so hard, Lisa. After all, the guy thought it was funny, and he seemed to have a wonderful time. He
did
make an appointment to come back again next week.”

“You’re right,” Lisa said. “But when he made the next appointment, he made me schedule it for Mr. English.”

“See, he has a sense of humor,” Carole said. “That’s more than I can say for those basketball players.”

“What are you saying?” Stevie asked. “They
loved
you.”

“Sure, because they think I’m a complete ditz.”

“Who cares?” Lisa asked. “I mean, I know they hurt your feelings, but you must have also impressed them. They pitched in and helped with the painting. We never would have finished if it hadn’t been for them.”

“I guess if it hadn’t been for the painting, we never would have had a horse for Mr. Jarvis to ride, would we?” Carole said slowly.

“It seems that there’s a pattern emerging here,” Stevie said philosophically. She wasn’t usually philosophical, so her friends listened carefully. “On the surface of it, we appear to be messing up totally, but when you look a little closer, it seems to be working for the best.”

Lisa thought about that for a moment. Stevie was right, but she had the nagging feeling that doing things right in the first place was easier than messing up and then trying to find the silver lining to the cloud.

“You have a point,” she finally conceded. “On the other hand, there’s always tomorrow.”

“Like what do you mean?” Carole asked.

“Well, we have until five o’clock tomorrow afternoon when Mrs. Reg is due back. Just think of all the things we could mess up before then.…”

“No, don’t,” Stevie countered. “Think of all the things we can make go right before then.”

“Think of all the gold pins we can find before she gets back,” Carole said.

Lisa looked at her watch. They had twenty-three and a half hours until Mrs. Reg’s return. Considering
what they’d done with the previous seventy-two hours, she wasn’t very hopeful. She didn’t share that thought with her friends. She didn’t have to. The looks on their faces said they’d had the same thought all on their own.