Stagecoach Read Online Free PDF Page B

Starlight and Topside are bored. It wouldn’t be fair to them or us to keep practicing.”
    Lisa looked crestfallen. “I’m tired, too, but I’m willing to keep on working. Besides, it’ll only take fifteen minutes for me to get Prancer ready, and twenty minutes to ride.”
    Stevie decided to be practical. “Where are you going to ride, anyway? It’s almost too dark out here, and the indoor ring is taken up by an adult lesson.”
    “And, anyway, they’ll be feeding Prancer in a half hour. Even if you could get tacked up in five minutes, she wouldn’t be any fun to ride now, because she’d be so cranky for her dinner,” Carole pointed out.
    “I’m feeling kind of cranky myself,” Stevie chimed in, trying to make light of the situation.
    Lisa didn’t smile. “I guess that extra ten minutes is just going to go to waste then,” she said sulkily. She could hardly believe Carole and Stevie weren’t going to make an effort to practice with her after she’d made a huge effort to get all the way back to Pine Hollow after a long rehearsal.
    “Ten minutes, huh?” Stevie asked. Lisa nodded.“Well,” Stevie continued, “if you’ve got ten extra minutes, how about we spend them together at TD’s? I know I could use an ice-cream sundae or two.”
    “Sounds good,” Carole said. “We haven’t had any quality Saddle Club time in a while.”
    Lisa thought for a minute and then shook her head. With a schedule like hers, spending time at the local ice-cream shop seemed like
wasting
time—something she couldn’t afford to do. She’d already wasted enough time coming over to Pine Hollow in the first place. The only thing to do now was to get her script and leave. “I don’t think I can go. I’m going to have to look at my time schedule again, and I need my computer for that.” She turned on her heel as they reached the barn doors. “See you at class Tuesday,” she added briskly. With that she hurried into the tack room to call for a ride, leaving Carole and Lisa to walk, groom, and feed the horses.
    A few minutes later they saw her walking to the end of the driveway to meet her mother. Her script was open, and she was trying to read it in the diminishing light.
    “Hey, I forgot to ask—how was the rehearsal?” Carole called. Lisa was already out of earshot and did not respond.
    “I forgot to ask, too,” Stevie said quietly.
    A gloom hung over them as they untacked andbrushed Topside and Starlight on opposite cross-ties. Neither of them talked much.
    On their way out they spotted Prancer in her stall. She was munching hay. As usual, though, she wasn’t simply plowing through her two leaves of timothy and alfalfa. Instead she took a few bites and then looked up over her stall door to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. She pricked up her ears at any noise, and occasionally she would try to reach her nose into the stalls on either side of hers to get her neighbors’ attention before going back to her hay. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. And it wasn’t that she was really nervous. But she was young and a Thoroughbred and had come to Pine Hollow straight from the track—and it showed.
    Carole and Stevie watched her for a few minutes, taking in her high-strung behavior. Neither of them said anything, but they were both thinking the same thing: Of all of the Horse Wise mounts, Prancer needed the most practice time.

L ISA DRUMMED HER fingers on the computer keyboard in frustration. Here it was, almost time for dinner, and instead of memorizing the lines to her first scene, she was still trying to perfect her schedule. Try as she did, she couldn’t squeeze everything in. And she was already planning to do homework on the morning and afternoon buses.
    “Twenty-four hours is too short for a whole day!” she cried. By Lisa’s calculations she needed about twenty-nine. It had been bad enough giving up free time at Pine Hollow for rehearsals, and that was before Max had even announced the news about