Horsenapped! by Bonnie Bryant

for Veronica,” Stevie remarked.
    “I often do,” Lisa said. “Anyone who behaves that horribly must be a very unhappy person.”
    Carole looked at her. “I never really thought of it that way,” she said. “I’ve only ever felt sorry for her horses, but I suppose we
should
feel sorry for her.”
    “That isn’t what I meant,” Stevie interjected. “I don’t feel sorry because she behaves horribly. She’s had all kinds of chances to learn to behave better and she’s got everything in the world a girl could need to be happy, so there’s no excuse for her to misbehave and be unhappy. I actually was referring to the fact that being kidnapped probably isn’t exactly swell fun.”
    “You don’t suppose the kidnappers have tied her up, do you?” Lisa asked.
    “I don’t know about tied up, but if they’ve got any sense, they’ve got her gagged,” Stevie said, showing less sympathy than she had just a few minutes before.
    “If I were Veronica, the worst part would be knowing that they could hurt my horse,” Carole said. The thought made her lean forward and pat Starlight reassuringly on his neck.
    “Remember, though,” Stevie said, “this is the girl who wanted to turn her horse into dog food.”
    “I don’t think she really meant it. How could anyone?” Carole asked Stevie.
    “In Veronica’s case—hey, look at that!” Stevie said, pointing to the ground. She drew Topside to a halt. Lisa and Carole stopped to look, too, but they didn’t see anything. Stevie dismounted and walked forward slowly, holding Topside’s reins. If she was trying to look like an Iroquois tracker, Carole thought she was doing a pretty good job of it. Curious, Carole and Lisa dismounted as well.
    “What is it?” Carole asked.
    Then Stevie did something that only Stevie could get away with. She fished around in her pocket and pulled out a magnifying glass. “I told you we’d need this, didn’t I?”
    Lisa stifled a giggle. “Okay, Sherlock, what’s up?” she asked.
    Stevie held the glass close to the ground. “Aha, just as I thought!” she said.
    “One more ‘aha’ and I’m going to be sick,” Lisa said. “Why don’t you just tell us what you’re looking at?”
    Stevie stood up. “Well,” she said. “It rained night before last, before the event started. And then, remember how the ground was soft and muddy the first day of the event?” Lisa and Carole nodded. “Sometime after the rain, but before the ground got hard again, something heavy went over this roadway.”
    “Hey, it’s a tire track!” Carole said, just spotting what Stevie had seen from the start.
    Then Lisa saw it, too. “Oh!” she said. “But how do we know it’s our horsenappers?”
    “We don’t,” Stevie said. “We just know that something went over this trail yesterday. It’s a possibility that that something was a horse trailer.”
    “So it’s a possibility that we’re on the right trail,” Carole concluded.
    “We’d better be careful,” Lisa said. Her friends agreed. They remounted their horses and proceeded.
    It was easy then for the girls to follow the trail of the tire tracks. When the road forked, the tracks clearly went to the left. That didn’t surprise the girls. That was the way to the quarry. But when they got to the creek, there was a surprise.
    “They stop!” Stevie said. “No more tire tracks on the other side of the creek.”
    This time, Carole dismounted and looked carefully at the ground. She felt a little silly. After all, she was no pioneer tracker. She spurned Stevie’s offer of the magnifying glass.
    “I don’t see any sign of anything here,” she said at last. “Except some careless campers.” She picked up a gum wrapper and put it in her pocket. “I hate it when people do that.”
    “I hate it more when a trail simply stops,” Stevie said.
    Lisa scratched her head. “Look,” she said. “Maybe we were making a wrong assumption that the tracks we’ve been following were made by a