Snow Ride by Bonnie Bryant Page A

ask us to go in her place,” Lisa reminded her.
    “But it’s just a pony club meeting,” Carole said. “Besides, he seemed so disappointed when Stevie couldn’t be there, and so happy again when I said we could. There can’t be anything wrong with that, can there?”
    “Of course there can be,” Lisa said. “What it comes down to is that he’s Stevie’s boyfriend, and it’s not up to us to decide whether we can spend time with him when Stevie’s out of town.”
    “But there will be two of us,” Carole protested.
    “Twice as bad,” Lisa said.
    “Girls, can you help me bring Nickel in from the paddock?” It was Mrs. Reg. That was Max’s mother. She was the stable manager and a sort of part-time mother to the riders and their horses when she thought they needed it. She was also somebody who hated to see idle hands. Two girls standing together and talking qualified as four idle hands. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Reg had a way to put those hands to work.
    “I’d get him myself,” she said, “but he always runs from me.” The three of them walked through the side door of the stable toward the paddock, where the frisky pony was gamboling around in the early spring morning. “He doesn’t run from anybody else,” Mrs. Reg went on, musing out loud. “He just runs from me. I never saw anything like it.”
    The two girls walked toward the pony. Mrs. Reg held back so as not to frighten him away. It was true that Nickel was scared of her. She’d never done anything to hurt him, so there had to be something about her that reminded him of something that
had
hurt him. Almost every horse had at least one thing that frightened him, and it was just about impossible to break those habits.
    Lisa clicked a lead rope onto Nickel’s halter and led him back toward the stable. When they reached Mrs.Reg, the girls found she was still talking about Nickel’s strange fear.
    “Never saw anything like it—oh, yes, I did,” she said. “I remember a mare we boarded here once who was afraid of me. She had strong likes and dislikes, that one. It seemed like she only ever liked one person at a time. She was devoted to the man who owned her and gave everybody else a hard time. She was beautiful, and I always wanted her to like me. I asked Max—my husband, your Max’s father—to let me take care of her when her owner wasn’t around, but Max wouldn’t let me because she was so unpredictable. Then one day her owner went away. His mother was sick, and he had to stay with her for a couple of months. We didn’t have any extra stable hands to take care of one more horse, so Max finally gave in. I got to look after the mare.”
    “Did she hurt you?” Lisa asked. Immediately she was sorry she’d asked the question. When Mrs. Reg was telling one of her stories—and she seemed to have thousands of them—she wanted to tell it her way without interruptions. Mrs. Reg ignored the question.
    “It took a long time for me to change the way the horse felt about me. After a couple of weeks, though, she’d let me into her stall and let me groom her. She really needed it by then, too! By the end of six weeks, we were becoming friends. By the end of two months, I could ride her. Irode her every day then, and she was just as great to ride as I’d always known she would be.” Mrs. Reg stopped. She had a habit of stopping stories just when they were getting really interesting.
    “What happened when the owner came back?” Carole asked.
    “Why, she gave him a hard time, of course,” Mrs. Reg said. “Now you two stop all this jabbering and get Nickel back into his stall. Then, if you want to make yourselves useful, there are two stalls that need mucking out, and after that …”
    The girls hurried away. If they stood there long enough, Mrs. Reg would load them down with enough work to keep them busy until midnight!

B Y THE TIME Stevie and Dinah approached Sugarbush Stables, Dinah had figured out that she could actually ride, sort of. What