Pleasure Horse by Bonnie Bryant Page B

remembered. They’d gone for a long ride, and Angie had been just as enthusiastic about it as Stevie, now that the party was behind her. The two of them had swapped stories about their horses and friends. Because not many girls she knew rode, Angie had said she’d found it hard to continue with a heavy show schedule. She had also said that she had regrets—regrets that she’d never taken Sparkles, or herself, as far as she thought they could go. Seeing Stevie, who she knew was still in the thick of Pony Club and competition, had brought it all back.
    “Anyway, she still rides for pleasure, so that proves she hasn’t gone completely nuts,” Stevie concluded.
    At that moment, Mrs. Reg poked her head into the room. “We know!” Carole cried. “And we’re about to start on the—the—” She cast her eye around for some tack that looked like it needed cleaning.
    Mrs. Reg chuckled. “Would you believe that for once I didn’t come in here to tell you girls to get to work?”
    All three Saddle Club members shook their heads emphatically. “Absolutely not,” Stevie said. “Unless something strange happened in the three days I was gone.”
    “Well, all right—you win. If you want, you can sweep the floor in here and rake the aisle, but otherwise, my daughter-in-law is waiting outside to take you to visit a certain colt,” Mrs. Reg informed them.
    Calling back promises to do double duty the following afternoon, Carole, Lisa, and Stevie raced to the driveway and jumped into Deborah’s car. Deborah whizzed along the winding back roads of Willow Creek, and in no time at all they were pulling into the Grovers’ driveway. “Hey, isn’t that Samson?” Carole asked, pointing to the horse Mr. Grover was working with in the outdoor ring.
    “It sure is. Let’s go say hi,” said Lisa. The girls were thrilled that they had happened to arrive in the middle of one of Samson’s lessons.
    Samson was fully tacked up in a saddle and a bridle with a lunging cavesson over it. The stirrups were hangingdown at his sides. Mr. Grover stood in the middle of the ring as if he were lunging the colt, but without a lunge line. As the girls approached he asked Samson to “ho-ho,” and the colt stopped quietly. “Good boy, good boy,” Mr. Grover told him.
    Stevie looked pleasantly surprised, but Carole and Lisa were flabbergasted. They ran over to greet the pair, with Deborah in tow.
    Mr. Grover clipped a lead line onto Samson’s bit and led him to the rail. “Glad you could make it. We’re just about done for the day, so you can take him in and untack him if you want.”
    Normally the girls would have jumped at the chance. But first they peppered Mr. Grover with questions to learn what he had done to make Samson adjust to the stirrups so quickly.
    “You girls did the most important part,” the trainer said. “You made him into a lovely horse who likes people. I didn’t do anything special. Let’s see … first I lunged him. He was pretty excited to begin with, so I let him play all he wanted just as long as he kept moving. It didn’t take too long for him to get bored of all his fussing. After he settled down, I took the lunge line off and I’ve been free-lunging him. That way he feels like he’s in charge. Thanks to you three, he knows his voice commands perfectly. Don’t you, boy?” Mr. Grover gave Samsona good pat. Then he handed the lead line to the girls and went to say hello to Deborah.
    “Why didn’t we think to lunge him?” Stevie whispered.
    “Or to
let
him play until he got over it?” Lisa asked.
    Carole watched Mr. Grover walk toward Deborah. Like his personality, his walk was energetic and steady—two incredibly important qualities in a horse trainer. “It sounds so simple when he explains it, but it’s more than what Mr. Grover said. There’s a way about him—maybe because he’s older or has so much experience—that would make any horse respect him and trust him. I guess that’s what it means