Snow Ride by Bonnie Bryant Page B

she did was stand in the stirrups. She wasn’t very comfortable, and she knew she had a lot of scratches and bruises nobody could see under her clothes that she had to do something about, but both she and Stevie were convinced they could get past the gimlet eyes of Mr. Daviet and the Slatterys.
    They weren’t good enough to get past Jodi’s eyes, however.
    “Oh, no!” she said as they approached the barn.
    “Don’t worry,” Stevie assured her. “We’re still not telling. Dinah took a little spill. She’s going to be fine. Allshe has is a couple of scratches and bruises. No problem we can’t handle all by ourselves.”
    The look on Jodi’s face was clear relief.
    “Thanks,” she said. She didn’t seem to want to hear any more about it, so Stevie and Dinah didn’t bother to tell her how it had happened. “Look,” Jodi said. “I’ll take care of the horses for you now. I guess it’s the least I could do. My sister came by earlier and said she was going to be collecting sap. She’s expecting you two to meet her at the Sugar Hut. You go on up and get to work on that. But remember the promise—you can’t tell her, either.”
    “We remember, Jodi,” Stevie said, helping Dinah down out of the saddle. “Are you up for collecting sap now?” Stevie asked. The pained look on Dinah’s face was answer enough.
    “But it’s got to be done,” Dinah said. “Why don’t you go over to the Sugar Hut and work with Betsy. I’ll go home and take a long soaking bath.”
    “Won’t your mother think that’s suspicious?” Stevie asked.
    “Not at all,” Dinah assured her. “Even when I’m feeling fine, I like to soak in the tub. My mother won’t suspect a thing.”
    “Are you going to be okay walking home?” Stevie asked.
    “If I could just ‘ride’ a horse down a mountain, you betI can walk home. Trust me,” she said. “This is a piece of cake.”
    Dinah waved bravely and walked, unsteadily, down the drive of the stable.
    “The Sugar Hut is that way,” Jodi said, pointing along another path into the woods. “About a quarter of a mile. You can’t miss it.”
    “I know where the Sugar Hut is,” Stevie said. “But thanks, anyway.”
    S TEVIE LOVED COLLECTING sap with Betsy, though she didn’t like the fact that she had to tell her a cover-up story about Dinah. She said Dinah had an upset stomach. Betsy was disappointed, but they had work to do. Once again, they had a horse-drawn sleigh, but this time it was a specially fitted flatbed sleigh with an enormous tank on the back of it. The two of them followed the same trail they had used to put out the buckets. As quickly as they could, they returned to each of their buckets, poured the nearly clear fluid that seemed to have miraculously appeared in the buckets into the tank, reset the buckets, and moved on.
    Betsy seemed very pleased by the amount of sap they were getting. Stevie told her it was probably because the holes were so well drilled by the novice on the team.
    At the end of their rounds, they returned to the SugarHut, where Mr. Daviet siphoned the sap out of the tank and measured it and filtered it before storing it in one of the large tanks outside the Sugar Hut.
    “Nice work,” he said, looking at the numbers. “We’re going to begin boiling tonight. Be sure to be here to help,” he said. “That means Dinah, too. Uh, where is she?”
    “She’s home,” Stevie said quickly. She wasn’t sure if Mr. Daviet could know that she and Dinah had been at the stable. She decided to duck the question altogether. “She wasn’t feeling very good this morning. Something about an upset stomach.”
    “Well, she’d better be here tonight,” he said. “If the teams don’t participate in all the activities, they can’t get credit.”
    “I’ll tell her, Mr. Daviet,” Stevie said. “I’m sure she’ll be feeling better by then.”
    “Probably will,” he said. “I think there are some miracle cures going on around here. After all, it