Horse Power (12 page)

The Diamonds’ families and friends were cheering them on. Then the Saddle Club’s own families and friends were yelling like crazy. Even Lisa’s parents were cheering. Second place wasn’t bad. It kept them in the competition. But it wasn’t as good as first.

Kate and Red went out to pick up the targets. Lisa noticed that Kate examined the Diamonds’ target, and waved to Red to join her. He walked over and looked at it, too. Then, the two of them took the target over to the judges’ table. There was a lot of buzzing and chatting there. The judges spent time looking at their charts and looking at the target.

The P.A. system crackled to life. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the head judge said. “We have a correction to make on the final race. A close examination of the targets reveals that one of the riders on the Diamond team did not, in fact, hit the target. Therefore, the team is automatically disqualified and comes in fourth. The new order for the final race is: Clubs, Spades, Hearts, and Diamonds. The final point standing for the day is: Clubs, thirteen; Diamonds; eleven; Hearts, nine; and Spades, seven. Teams, please line up for the presentation of ribbons.”

They’d won! Lisa had been right when she’d thought Veronica hadn’t hit the target. Good old Veronica had tried to cheat and she’d been caught at it!

The Clubs’ ponies stood still and proud as the judges pinned the blue ribbons on their bridles. It was as if
they knew what they’d done and were as proud as their riders. Lisa leaned forward to admire the shiny blue satin. She decided then that it would be the first of many, many blue ribbons she would win in her life as a rider. She glanced at her best friends. The big smiles on their faces told her they all felt exactly the same way.

It seemed to Lisa then that it almost didn’t matter if they won the next two days of the gymkhana. Winning the first day was almost wonderful enough for a life-time. Almost.

I
T TURNED OUT
to be a good thing Lisa wasn’t set on winning on the second day, because they didn’t.

“The best part of today was the cross-country jumping,” Stevie said as the team and Kate sat at a booth at TD’s, The Saddle Club’s favorite hangout. It was an ice cream store at the local shopping center. They’d bought themselves sundaes as consolation prizes, since they had come in second to Veronica’s Diamond team.

“Don’t be too hard on yourselves,” Kate advised them. “You sure looked like you were having fun out there.”

“Well, we were,” Stevie said. “But winning is more fun.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said.

For the first time, Carole had the feeling that Kate
was ready to reveal some of the problems she had had with riding.

“How do you mean that?” Carole asked her.

Kate was quiet for a time, apparently thinking about her answer. The girls and Chad waited with her.

“I think,” she began hesitantly, “that having fun is more important than winning. I’ve done a lot of winning, riding champion horses. But I think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I’ve had more fun watching you the last few days than I had riding for a year!”

“Even when I ended up dumping an entire glass of water on you in the water race?” Stevie asked.

“Well, I might make an exception there,” Kate admitted with a grin. “But I had an awful lot of fun watching Carole’s pony circle the target so much in pin-the-tail-on-the-pony that she ended up putting her tail on the Spades’ pony!”

“At least it was a bull’s-eye,” Carole said.

“Yeah, that the Spades got credit for,” Chad reminded her.

“Let’s face it, team,” Lisa said. “Today was not our finest hour as riders.”

“But that’s what I mean,” Kate said. “Sure, you didn’t do as well as you did yesterday, but you were having
fun
! You were cracking up the entire time!”

“Were they
all
laughing when I fell off Half Dollar trying to reach Veronica’s shadow in shadow tag?” Chad asked.

“Yeah—but you were laughing, too,” Kate said.
“The thing you were all doing—which I had completely forgotten to do—is having
fun
. Red ribbon, blue ribbon, no ribbon at all. What does it really matter as long as you do your best and laugh a little—or a lot, if you can?”

“But if you kept winning, why weren’t you having fun?” Carole asked her.

“Because—and I’ve only just realized it—all I cared about was the winning. When you ride in those shows, you see a lot of the same riders almost every week. You have a lot of common interests with them and they become friends—or at least they should. I got to the point where I couldn’t be friends at all. All I cared about was whether I drew a position right after somebody the judges might think was better than I was, or if one of the other riders might get a muddy smudge on her boot so the judge would mark her down. Or sometimes I’d hope for a rainy day. A lot of the other horses didn’t like competing in the rain.” Kate paused for a minute and the full weight of what she’d said seemed to sink in for herself. She scrunched her nose in distaste. “See what I mean? Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder I wasn’t having any fun.”

Carole spoke first. “When I read about you and met you, all I could think about was how wonderful it must be to be so good!”

“For some people, maybe,” Kate said. “But it’s like the better I got, the worse
it
got. The
it
was my own attitude.”

“Maybe the problem isn’t really riding,” Carole said.

“Oh, yes it is,” Kate corrected her. “Just like I explained.”

“But don’t you see? It’s not the riding you don’t like—it’s the high-pressure competition. That’s what turned it sour for you.”

“That’s right,” Stevie piped in, realizing that this was just the chance The Saddle Club needed to convince Kate to start riding again. “If you stop riding, you’re throwing away something you’re really good at. All you really need to do is to stop competing—just ride for fun!”

“Like ride in the gymkhana tomorrow?” Kate asked, a touch of sarcasm in her voice. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

“It may be too late for the rest of us, too,” Chad said. The girls looked to him for an explanation. He raised his left arm above the level of the table. “Remember how I fell off my pony in shadow tag? I think I really did something to my wrist.”

At first, they couldn’t see the problem, but on closer examination, it was very clear that Chad’s whole wrist was terribly swollen. “I can’t bend it much, either,” he said. “It was okay for a while, but I don’t know about tomorrow.”

Kate reached across the table for Chad’s arm. “I’ve seen an awful lot of bumps and bruises over the years, and this really hurts, doesn’t it?” Chad tried to shrug it off, but he clearly winced when Kate touched it, even
gently. “Lisa, go ask at the counter if we can have some ice in a plastic bag. That swelling’s got to come down. It doesn’t look like it’s broken, but it sure is sprained. There’s no way you can ride tomorrow, Chad. Why didn’t you say something before?”

“I want our team to win, and if I can’t ride, we’ll be disqualified! I can’t do that to you guys!”

Lisa returned with the bag of ice and they wrapped it around Chad’s arm with a bandanna Carole found in her back pocket. It was probably too late to reduce the swelling, at least right away, but it did help numb it so it didn’t hurt so much.

“Well, that’s that,” Carole said. “It wasn’t your fault, Chad, it could have happened to any of us, but we might as well just give Veronica and the Diamonds the blue ribbon first thing tomorrow.”

“I’m not so sure about that!” Stevie said, her eyes suddenly bright.

“You look like you’re up to something,” Carole said, suspicious.

“Oh, I am,” Stevie agreed. “We all know there’s no way Chad can ride tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do something like help with the setups at the final races, does it?”

“Great idea,” Kate said. “Red and I have been running around like crazy. We could use an extra hand—no pun intended.”

“That’s not what I had in mind,” Stevie said. “Look, our deal with Max was that we three could be on the
same gymkhana team if, and only if, we took the stable’s newest rider. But if the stable’s newest rider
isn’t
Chad, we’d still have to take that person on our team, even if maybe that rider actually had just a little bit of experience.”

“Or a whole lot of experience?” Carole asked, seeing the light.

“But who else
is
there besides Chad?” Lisa asked.

“How about Kate Devine?” Stevie said.

When a great big grin crossed Kate’s face, The Saddle Club girls knew they’d achieved both of their goals. They had found a way to maybe still win the blue ribbon, and, best of all, they’d found a way to get Kate to start riding again.

“Here’s to tomorrow!” Lisa announced, raising a gooey spoonful of sundae in a toast.

“To victory!” Carole chimed in. Everybody joined the toast.

M
AX WAS HARD
to convince. At first, he wanted to disqualify the team, but when Stevie pointed out how unfair that would be, especially since they’d been the ones to make up all the games and the rules, he finally relented.

“But Kate’s a championship rider,” he reminded them.

“What does championship riding have to do with gymkhanas?” Carole protested. “She never got a silver cup for popping balloons—”

“Riding skills matter a lot in a gymkhana, almost as much as on a cross-country course,” he said, and the girls knew it was true.

“Okay, so give us a handicap,” Kate said.

“Right, our old handicap was Chad—so we can handle
anything
!” Stevie told him, grinning.

Max wrinkled his eyebrows in thought. Finally, he nodded. “Okay, you’ve got a deal. I’ll handicap you so nobody can say I wasn’t fair. Your handicap is that your start/finish line is ten feet behind everybody else’s. That will do it for the three relay races scheduled for today. The first game is horseback musical chairs. For that, you all ride without stirrups, which will make it harder to get on and off the ponies.”

“Boy, you sure know how to give a team a handicap!” Stevie complained.

“Yes, I do,” Max said, grinning, obviously proud of his solution. “Think you can beat the odds?”

For a moment, all four girls were trying to imagine how much harder the races would be for them, but then they realized that, in a very real way, it didn’t matter. They wanted to be in the gymkhana to have fun, and if they could win with their handicaps, great, but if not, they’d still enjoy trying.

“Just watch us!” Carole said. “The Clubs will come out on top, no matter how the races end.”

L
ISA DIDN
’
T HAVE
Carole’s confidence of their success, but she knew that the main part was that they would have fun that afternoon. In the meantine, the final portion of the adult competition was wonderful to watch.

The first day, the dressage, had been a test of manners and form. The second day was an endurance test for the horse and rider, and included a cross-country race, filled with jumps, hills, water, and other types of obstacles. It had been wild and fun to watch the horses and riders manage the course. The third and final day was a test of the horse’s fitness working on a small jumping course in the ring, which had to be completed in a specific amount of time. Horses weren’t judged for form (though good form made for good jumps), but they were marked down for refusing jumps or knocking them down, or not finishing the course within the allotted time.

The girls watched closely, enjoying the event immensely.

“Can you do this?” Lisa whispered to Kate.

She nodded in response. “Yes, but see how intense the riders are? Did you notice the way that last rider took her time getting her horse back out of the ring? She was hanging around trying to make the next rider nervous. I used to do that kind of thing. If that’s what I have to do to win, I don’t want to do it anymore at all.”

“I can understand that,” Lisa told her. “But I’m glad you’ve decided to ride with us today.”

“So am I,” Kate said, and smiled at her.

A
T EXACTLY FOUR
o’clock, the final day of the gymkhana began. Max explained to the crowd what
had happened to Chad the day before. The girls were only a little annoyed when Chad insisted on stepping into the center of the ring to show everybody that his arm was in a sling. Anybody who cared to could see that while he was standing off to the side next to Red.