Bridle Path by Bonnie Bryant

straight into the woods.
    Once again Carole thanked him. He said it had been his pleasure and he really did want a couple of copies of the photographs that the official wedding photographer, Adam Levine, had taken, rather than just the ones the newspaper had snapped. Carole promised to send him a set. Then she gave Delilah apat and a hug and wished the judge a very happy trail ride. She also slipped Delilah a piece of carrot and a sugar lump. It seemed to her to be the very least she could do for the “other” bride at the wedding.
    Then the party began in earnest. It turned out that when Pony Clubbers put their minds to it, they could assemble a very nice party. They were all delighted that Max’s surprise birthday party turned out to be a horse wedding that turned out to be a people wedding. When Stevie and her friends were involved, switches like that were simply to be expected. A couple of the girls said that they might have dressed up more if they’d known what was going to happen. Two others confessed to Stevie that this was exactly the wedding they’d always dreamed of for themselves.
    Stevie was a little surprised at that. She thought she was the only one who had weird dreams!
    “Apple? Sugar lump?” she said, offering a tray of hors d’oeuvres to Max.
    “Uh, sure,” he said, taking a slice of apple and leaving the sugar lump behind. He also took a glass of ginger ale. “Say, tell me something, Stevie.”
    “Anything, Max,” she said.
    “What was going on here? I mean, I have the distinct impression that I just served as the best man at the wedding of two people who actually got married,but I haven’t got the faintest idea of how it happened. The last thing I knew, my mother was telling me to mount up and smile.”
    “You did a very good job of it, too,” Stevie said. “You didn’t even lose the ring.”
    “Here, Max, try some of these carrot sticks,” Carole said, offering him the bowl.
    He took one absentmindedly and bit into it. “Nice,” he said. “But then, everything here is. I mean, look at all these flowers! When did you do all this? How long have you known that Camilla Wentworth was going to dislocate her shoulder?”
    “We didn’t,” Stevie said. “It was just that it seemed like a good idea to plan a wedding for today, and we figured a bride and groom would come along, somehow.”
    Max regarded her carefully.
    “You know,” he said, “from anybody else, I would know that they were joking, but from you, I’m not so sure.”
    Stevie smiled beatifically.
    “I think that means I should just enjoy myself at the party, right?”
    “Right,” Stevie said. “Everybody else is. Why shouldn’t you?”
    With that, Max headed for the drink table to pourhimself another glass of ginger ale in a champagne glass.
    The whole wedding was so perfect and so much fun that even snobby Veronica diAngelo couldn’t find anything to complain about, except the fact that the cake she’d brought wasn’t getting enough attention. That all changed, however, when Stevie unveiled it in its new and improved format.
    She had brought a few of her own model horses to put on top of the cake as the bride and groom, but when it turned out that there were actually going to be people getting married, that wasn’t going to be good enough. She’d gone to May, who happened to have her Ken and Barbie dolls in her backpack. Ken and Barbie were dressed for a camping trip, not a wedding, but they were definitely better than nothing. Stevie seated one on each of the two model horses and, miraculously, it was a perfect wedding cake!
    “Have you forgotten anything?” Mrs. Reg asked, amazed at the total party that her young riders had managed to create without her knowing anything about it.
    Nigel and Dorothy came over to cut the cake. Dorothy removed one of the model horses from the top of it and even had the good sense to lick the frostingfrom the horses’ hooves. Nigel picked up the other and followed