Pack Trip

Horse Crazy

Horse Shy

Horse Sense

Horse Power

Trail Mates

Dude Ranch

Horse Play

Horse Show

Hoof Beat

Riding Camp

Horse Wise

Rodeo Rider

Starlight Christmas

Sea Horse

Team Play

Horse Games

Horsenapped

Pack Trip

Star Rider

Snow Ride

Racehorse

Fox Hunt

Horse Trouble

Ghost Rider

“Last one in is a—Hey, Amy!” Stevie shouted. Everybody turned to look. Amy had climbed to a rocky edge five feet above the water and was flexing her knees and swinging her arms.

“No diving!” John called out.

Amy grinned mischievously. She crossed her heart, just as she had when promising Eli she wouldn’t dive and, without further ado, she jumped off the rock, tipped forward, touched her toes, straightened out, and dove straight into the water.

“Amy!” Seth shrieked.

Nobody else spoke or moved. They waited. Although the water was clear, the sun sparkled on it, making it difficult to see below the surface. There was no sign of Amy.…

C
AROLE
H
ANSON LOOKED
around at the walls of her bedroom. She was convinced that there must be enough space for just one more horse poster. She had a new one that showed a championship horse in the middle of a jump at an international event. The rider’s position was just perfect. Carole was sure that if she studied the position at the same time that she admired the beauty of the horse, she could really learn something. After all, she had learned something from all of her other posters. She’d learned that she was absolutely crazy about horses.

Every inch of every wall in Carole’s room was covered with pictures of horses and riders. The door to her closet had a chart of horse colors and breeds. The inside of the
closet door had a poster of English riding tack. Practically the only thing that wasn’t covered with horse pictures was her window. Carole cocked her head and studied the poster and the problem. Then she smiled. She had the perfect solution.

“Bingo!” she said. Maybe she couldn’t put her poster on the window, but she
could
put it on the window shade. That way she could just roll it down whenever she wanted to look at it.

She shuffled through the mess she thought of as her desk to find some tape, and within a few minutes the new poster was up. She was pleased to realize that she actually still had room for yet another—a small one—on the shade. Satisfied, she sat on her bed to admire her handiwork. She couldn’t wait to tell her best friends, Stevie Lake and Lisa Atwood, what she’d done. They would want to see the poster, too.

Stevie, Lisa, and Carole were three very different girls, but they had one very important thing in common. They were all crazy about horses. Carole was the best rider of the three, having been raised on Marine Corps bases where her father, a colonel, was stationed. She had started riding when she was very young, and though she couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted to be when
she grew up, she joked that she had narrowed her choices down to three things: horses, horses, and horses.

Carole had her own horse, a bay gelding with a perfect star on his face. His name was Starlight, and he was just about the most important thing in her life. Starlight boarded at Pine Hollow Stables, where Lisa and Stevie also rode and took lessons.

The three girls were all so horse crazy that they had formed their own club, The Saddle Club. It had only two rules: Members had to be horse crazy, and they had to be willing to help one another out. The first part was easy. The second part was harder and sometimes got them into trouble, especially when Stevie, who could be a mischievous practical joker, was in charge. Carole and Lisa didn’t usually mind, though. Being with Stevie was sometimes trouble, but it was almost always fun.

Lisa was more serious than her friends. She was a straight-A student who approached problems systematically and analytically. In contrast, Carole could sometimes be a little flaky, unless the problem concerned horses, in which case she was all business.

Together the threesome made a great team. As The Saddle Club they’d accomplished an awful lot. Carole sometimes wondered what more they would accomplish
in the future. There was no way of telling, of course, but she was confident that the team of three was a lot more powerful than just the three individuals who made up the group.

Carole laced her fingers behind her head and leaned back against her pillow. Her eyes focused on the ceiling of her room. It was all white. There was nothing on it.

“Oh!” she said, sitting up abruptly. Her ceiling was the perfect place to put her rodeo and Western posters!

One of Carole’s father’s friends, Frank Devine, had two things that made him wonderful in Carole’s eyes. First of all, he had a dude ranch where The Saddle Club had been able to expand their horsemanship beyond the English riding they usually did at Pine Hollow. Second, he had a daughter who was just a little bit older than Carole, Lisa, and Stevie. Kate Devine had been an international competitor in English riding events before her father bought the dude ranch. Now Kate was very content to exchange her riding crop and hard hat for spurs and a cowboy hat. The Saddle Club had visited the Devine’s ranch, the Bar-None, twice and found that Western riding was lots of fun, too. In fact, they liked it, and Kate, so much, that they had invited Kate and her friend, Christine Lonetree, to join The Saddle Club as out-of-town members. Carole’s only regret was that she
didn’t get to see as much of Kate and Christine as she would have liked.

Carole bounded off her bed. Now that she’d figured out where to hang the Western and rodeo posters, she didn’t want to waste a second. The only problem was that it was going to take more than a second to remember where she had put them.

She opened her closet door and shuffled through the papers on the lower shelf. She found the original copy of her science report from two years ago accompanied by a chart of the food chain, but there was no sign of the collection of rodeo posters. She moved her desk chair over to the closet and climbed onto it so she could reach the top shelf.

It had a lot of interesting things on it. There was an Easter hat she had worn when she was seven, her Brownie uniform from the troop she had joined when she lived in California, a half-finished needlepoint of a horse (she had stopped working on it because the horse’s proportions were all wrong), and a bottle of after-shave lotion she had bought for her father for Christmas. She’d hidden it so well, even
she
couldn’t find it!

She was so involved in her rummaging that she didn’t hear her father knock and enter her room. “If you’re trying to run away from home, the front door is more efficient,”
her father teased. Carole was so startled that she bumped her head on the closet doorjamb. Dazed, she lowered herself from the upper reaches of her closet.

“Merry Christmas,” she said, handing him the after-shave lotion. She rubbed her head where she’d hit it.

“Thank you, dear,” he said. He offered to kiss the growing bump on her head. She let him do it. They knew it wouldn’t keep her from getting a bruise, but it made them both feel better. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know there’s a phone call for you.”

“For me? Who is it?”

“Oh, just someone named something like Kit, no, maybe Kat—something about a dude ranch …”

“Kate!” she said, bounding off the chair and toward the telephone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Colonel Hanson laughed. “I tried,” he said.

Carole picked up the phone. “Hi! How are you? What’s new? Are you coming for a visit?”

“It’s so nice to hear your voice, Carole,” Kate said, laughing at the jumble of questions Carole had just thrown at her.

Carole sat down and took a deep breath. She told Kate she had just been thinking about her because of the
rodeo posters. “I can’t find them, and it’s really bothering me.”

“You mean those posters you put under your bed for safekeeping?” Kate asked.

“Yes, those,” Carole said. “Now where do you suppose they could be?”

“Under your bed?” Kate repeated.

Then it dawned on Carole. That was just where they were. “You knew exactly when to call. You’re a perfect friend!” Carole said.

“I’m better than that,” Kate said. “I’m a perfect friend who’s got good connections in the horse world.”

Carole was suddenly alert. She had the funniest feeling that something wonderful was coming. “Yes?” she said expectantly. “What is it?”