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  Read all the Saddle Club books!

  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

  Copyright © 1991 by Bonnie Bryant Hiller

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  “The Saddle Club” is a registered trademark of Bonnie Bryant Hiller.

  “USPC” and “Pony Club” are registered trademarks of the United States Pony Clubs, Inc., at The Kentucky Horse Park, 4071 Iron Works Pike, Lexington, KY 40511-8462.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82499-8

  Originally published by Bantam Skylark in October 1991

  First Delacorte Ebook Edition 2012

  v3.1_r1

  DAREDEVIL AMY

  “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.…

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  CAROLE HANSON 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?”

  “Remember Eli?”

  Of course Carole did. Kate was just teasing her. Eli had been the main ranch hand at the Bar None. Now he was a college student, studying rodeo riding and working for the Bar None when they needed an extra hand.

  “Well, Eli’s come up with an idea,” Kate continued. “He’d like to take some young riders on a mountain pack trip. Naturally he wants only the best riders. Naturally he asked if I could go, and Christine, too. Naturally when we said we could, he wanted to know if we knew any other good riders. We weren’t sure—”

  “You mean it?” Carole interrupted.

  “Of course I do,” Kate said. “It’s going to be a five-day trip. We’ll bring some of the horses from the Bar None to use, and Jeannie is coming along, too.”

  Jeannie was Eli’s girlfriend and another person The Saddle Club really liked. They took more than a little credit for the fact that Eli had ever noticed Jeannie was alive. It would be great to spend time with her, too.

  “I’ll be there. I’ll be there. When is it?” Carole asked.

  “Week after next. My dad already talked to yours, and they’ve got it all arranged. But here’s the big question. Do you think Stevie and Lisa want to come, too?”

  “That’s the easiest question in the world to answer,” Carole said. “Of course they want to come. The question is can they? I mean, is it really expensive?”

  “Not too bad, but your dad said something to me about using the money some banker gave you.”

  There were so many nice thoughts filling Carole’s head that for a minute she couldn’t remember what her father had been talking about. Then it came to her.

  “Veronica’s horse!” she said.

  “Huh?” Kate asked.

  “It was a reward. The Saddle Club saved Veronica diAngelo’s horse from horsenappers, and her father gave us a reward.”

  “Why would you take money from him?” Kate asked. It was a good question. Veronica diAngelo was the snobbiest girl at Pine Hollow, and The Saddle Club never wanted to have anything to do with her. That didn’t mean they would let her horse be stolen, though. They cared about her horse even if they didn’t care much about her.

  “Oh, we didn’t really want the money,” Carole explained. “We just took it because we knew it would make Veronica angry. But now I’m glad we took it, because it means we can all go on the trip with you and Eli.”

  “I hope so,” Kate said.

  “Definitely,” Carole assured her. “I think,” she added.

  “Call me,” Kate said.

  “As soon as I can,” Carole promised.

  STEVIE TURNED ANOTHER page of Robinson Crusoe, satisfied that she was making progress in her book-report book. The trouble was that she didn’t have the foggiest idea what had happened on the page she’d just turned.

  She was going to flip back a page, but her cat, Madonna, eased herself in front of Stevie and settled down on the open book, closing the subject for the moment. Stevie began patting her since it was clear that was what the cat had in mind.

  “Stevie, phone for you,” her older brother, Chad, announced. “It’s Carole. Don’t take all night. I’m waiting for a call from Belinda.”

  “Sure,” Stevie said agreeably, though she didn’t mean it at all. She didn’t like Belinda. She did like Carole.

  “What’s up?” she asked brightly, tucking the phone comfortably between her shoulder and her ear so she could continue to pat Madonna as she talked.

  “Kate Devine called,” Carole began. All thoughts of the poor stranded Mr. Crusoe fled from Stevie’s mind. She began patting Madonna so vigorously that the cat slunk away, regarding Stevie curiously as she went. Any time Kate Devine called, it was at the very least interesting and more likely exciting.

  Stevie listened intently while Carole explained about the trip. It sounded almost too good to be true, especially when Carole described how Kate’s father, a retired Marine Corps pilot with access to an airplane, would fly the three of them out west for free. That way all they would have to pay for was the cost of the pack trip itself.

  “That’s all? Hey, great, but how are we going to manage that?” Stevie asked.

  “Mr. diAngelo’s reward money,” Carole said.

  “Ahhhhh! Perfect!” Stevie said. “It’s just what we had in mind, isn’t it? First, we irk her by getting the money from her father, then we drive her crazy by doing something absolutely wonderful with it. Carole, you’re a genius!”

  It took them another twenty minutes to talk about how great the trip was going to be. Chad came into Stevie’s room three times to glare at her for tying up the phone. She didn’t pay much attention to him until he reminded her that her own boyfriend, Phil, might be trying to call. Stevie glared back.

  “I’ve got to go,” she told Carole. “Chad is trying some awful tactics to get me off the phone, and I don’t want him to think they’re working, but the fact is I’ve got to tell my parents about this. They’re going to be thrilled. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, okay?”

  “Deal,” Carole said. “In the meantime I’ll call Lisa.”

  LISA WAS RELIEVED when the telephone rang. She was bored with her parents’ tedious discussion. They were in the process of planning an anniversary trip for themselves, and at the moment they were trying to decide where Lisa would stay while they were gone. Her brother was studying in Europe, so he wouldn’t be available to look after her. As far as Lisa was concerned, it was an easy question. She’d stay with Stevie or Carole, or both. For her parents, however, that kind of question was never easy. Her mother was at the point where she was worrying about how many suitcases Lisa would need and whether they should tell the police the house would be empty during their vacation. Lisa much pre
ferred answering the telephone rather than continuing the conversation. She decided that if the caller turned out to be a magazine salesperson, she’d order a five-year subscription to Golf Digest just to pay her parents back for being so boring.

  It wasn’t a magazine salesperson. It was Carole. And within a few seconds, Lisa realized, it was also the answer to her prayers—several of them.

  “You’re kidding! A pack trip! Week after next? Wait until I tell my parents!”

  “Will they give you a hard time?” Carole asked.

  “Not at all. They’ll be thrilled,” Lisa said. She explained about her parents’ trip. “Of course, they’ll load me down with phone numbers and fax numbers where they can be reached while they’re away.”

  “Fax numbers?” Carole asked.

  “In case they have to sign any consent forms,” Lisa explained. “These people never leave anything to chance!”

  Carole laughed. “That’s okay,” she said. “As long as they say yes.”

  “I’ll call you back,” Lisa promised.

  “JUST EXACTLY WHAT does ‘no’ mean?” Stevie asked her parents patiently.

  “It’s an adverb,” her father answered just as patiently. “It means the opposite of ‘yes.’ It means you’ve got a book report to do, and you have to keep up-to-date on your journal, and going on a wild-goose chase—”

  “It’s a pack trip,” Stevie corrected him.

  “Same thing,” he said. “In any event, there are things that haven’t been getting done which must get done, and you know that schoolwork always comes before horses …”

  Stevie had her work cut out for her. She could tell there was major resistance from her parents. Convincing them to let her go was going to take time and diplomacy.

  “… so the answer is no.”

  “Why don’t I get us all something to drink while we continue this discussion?” Stevie suggested. “Sodas?”

  Stevie was not above bribery at any level. Besides, she told herself, it was a way of proving how responsible she was.

  “Continue? I thought it was over,” her father said.