Horse Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

tucked most of her curly shoulder-length hair under her bonnet, but springy little pieces kept escaping around her face.
    “You look cute as a button,” Kate declared. She looked around. “All of us do! Stevie, what are you doing?”
    Stevie turned, looking rather guilty. She had her dress hitched up above her waist and was shoving the bag of rock candy deep into one of the pockets of her jeans, which she had left on underneath the long dress. “Oh, well, I’m kind of worried about my throat—it’s sore, remember? And I’m going to have to do a lot of screaming out there, and like I said before, I wouldn’t want to lose my voice at a critical moment.” She held up the bag of rock candy to show them. “I thought I’d bring it along, just in case.”
    The others laughed. “Stevie, I’ll bet you’ve never lost your voice in your life,” Christine said. “But we might just forget you tried to use that lame excuse if you give us some more candy, right, girls?”
    The others nodded. Stevie grinned and passed the bag around again. Then the five girls hurried out to join the other performers in the gym.
    “Hey, where’d you get the candy?” asked one of them, a young man named Sam, when he saw what the girls were eating.
    Stevie fished the bag out of her pocket once again. “Help yourself,” she told the “bad guys” generously. They did. Luckily she had bought enough so that there was still some left.
    “This is great,” Sam declared happily as he sucked on his piece of candy. “Rock candy is my favorite.”
    “Mine, too,” Stevie told him. “I guess that must be why we’re paired up together, huh?” Sam was the one who was supposed to kidnap Stevie during the show.
    “Must be,” he told her with a wink. He grabbed another piece out of the bag and pocketed it. “I’ll just save this for later.”
    “I T ’ S SHOW TIME ,” Christine whispered.
    “Are you nervous?” Lisa whispered back. “I am!”
    “Just pretend you’re about to perform in a regular horse show instead of a Wild West shoot-’em-up,” Carole suggested quietly.
    “That doesn’t help,” Lisa replied. “I’d be nervous then, too!”
    The five girls were huddled in the doorway of a jewelry store a couple of doors down from the bank. At exactly three o’clock they were supposed to stroll out and make their way slowly down the sidewalk toward the bank.
    Lisa pushed back the sleeve of her dress and looked at her watch. “Okay, it’s time. Let’s go!”
    They stepped out and began walking, trying to looknatural—or as natural as they could in their old-fashioned dresses, anyway. They saw that the bad guys’ horses were lined up at the hitching post in front of the bank.
    As the girls neared the bank, the sounds of gunshots came from within, and a curious crowd began to gather nearby. A moment later the bank’s doors burst open and the five desperadoes backed out, holding large sacks of money and firing their six-shooters back into the bank. The girls threw up their hands and cried out in terror. Chuck whirled around and pretended to look surprised as he spotted them cowering nearby.
    “Looky here, boys,” he called loudly to his comrades. “I think we found us some hostages.” He grabbed Kate by the shoulder. She screamed loudly and covered her face with her hands.
    Stevie had to work hard not to grin as she watched. Kate looked pretty convincing—maybe she should give up riding and go into show business!
    “Come here, missy,” another of the bad guys shouted, grabbing Lisa by the arm. “You gals will guarantee that nobody’ll try anything foolish!” He brandished his gun at the crowd to emphasize his point. The crowd gasped, loving every minute of it.
    The other robbers grabbed their victims as well. As Cassie started to drag Carole toward her horse, Carole gave one final scream and then pretended to faint dead away. “Whata performance,” Stevie whispered to Sam, who had his gun pointed at her as he held