The Horsemasters by Don Stanford

Author:Don Stanford
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Horse, Young Adult, Cross-country jumping, Dressage, Fiction
Publisher: Acme Book Continuum
Published: 2020-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The hay barn was open on three sides to the summer air, and a few fat flies buzzed sleepily in from the hot sunlight to circle aimlessly in the fragrant shade and zoom out again; a pair of swallows dipped in and vanished in the lofty darkness beneath the stilted roof. Roger and David sat cross-legged in the scattered loose hay in the middle of the floor, face-to-face and a few feet apart; each held one end of an inch-thick rope of twisted hay and was absorbedly twisting handful after handful of hay to add to its length. The other five members of Blue Ride sprawled in the loose hay watching; seated primly erect on the stacked hay bales, looking incongruous in skirts and sweaters and stockings, were Toni Harper and Betsy Murphy and Sally Burnham.

“She looked like death warmed over!” Sally declared. “We didn’t know anything about it, of course; golly, Betsy and Toni were still asleep, and I only woke up when she came stumbling in. Didn’t even know it wasn’t her room. White as a sheet, and her jacket all torn and muddy, and that horrible lump on her forehead. And she just stood there in a kind of daze, muttering over and over again, ‘I’ll die. I’ll really and truly die if Pennant’s hurt! I want to die, I will die if I’ve hurt her!’ So I jumped out of bed; I was still half-asleep but waking up fast; I forgot all about it being Sunday and our lie-in. So of course I could see she’d had a fall, and I said, ‘Mercy, are you all right? Are you hurt?’ And she just kept on saying, ‘I’ll die if she’s not all right!’ I tell you, it gave me the creeps!”

“She loves that horse,” Peanuts said in a wondering tone. “She really and truly loves that horse! It’s hard to believe Mercy could really love anything, she’s so full of meanness, but she really loves Pennant!”

“You wouldn’t doubt it,” Betsy agreed, shaking her head, “if you’d been there when she came in. Sally and Toni and I got her undressed and gave her a bath, and she didn’t seem to know what was going on at all; but when we tried to put her to bed she wasn’t having any. Not a bit of it! She ran the lot of us out of there, hard as nails and just as nasty as ever, and got herself into her jeans and lit out for the stables as hard as she could go. And that’s the last we saw of Miss Mercy Hale this morning!”

Roger nodded to David and backed away crabwise until the rope of twisted hay was stretched taut between them; it was about eight feet long. David squinted at it judiciously and nodded his approval; they had got it to a fairly even thickness throughout its entire length, but it looked spiky and frayed with loose ravels of hay sticking up every few inches.

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