Free Ranch Hands by Bonnie Bryant

her eyes. The bell still rang, but it wasn’t exactly a bell. It was the triangle. That was very weird because it was still pitchblack outside. It wasn’t morning at all. Then Carole realized that if the bell was ringing at this hour, Jeannie needed her help.
    She didn’t bother with clothes. She just pulled on her boots and ran to the main house.
    “Carole, you’ve got to help!” Jeannie said breathlessly.
    “What’s on fire?”
    “Nothing,” Jeannie told her. “It’s the horses. They’re gone!”
    Carole looked over Jeannie’s shoulder to the field where she’d put all the horses earlier. There was not a horse in sight.
    “Well, at least we’ve still got Arthur,” Carole said, trying very hard to find a bright side to twenty missing horses.
    Jeannie looked over at the paddock where the lone horse stood quietly. “That’s not Arthur,” she said. “Arthur’s got a crooked blaze. That horse has a star.”
    Carole squinted to be sure Jeannie was right. “You mean I spent an hour this morning separating all the other horses from a horse that
isn’t
Arthur?”
    “I guess so,” Jeannie said.
    Then Carole remembered that Arthur was always supposed to stay away from the herd because he was a troublemaker. She was getting a very bad feeling about this.
    “What kind of trouble does Arthur cause?” she asked.
    “He makes the herd roam,” Jeannie said, once again indicating the empty field. “He’s just a natural leader, and when he’s got some horses who will follow him, he leads them. Away. See, he’ll jump a fence and everybody else follows.”
    “But where did he go?”
    Jeannie stood on her tiptoes and looked across the darkened landscape. It wasn’t easy to see because there were no lights around at all, except the stars and a sliver of a moon. Then she noticed some motion on a hilltop perhaps a mile away.
    “I think they are over there,” she said, pointing. Carole looked. There seemed to be a number of dark patches silhouetted against the pale grass. She agreed that it was likely those were the horses.
    “I’ll go get them,” Carole offered quickly, “Why don’t you go back to bed.”
    Jeannie looked exhausted, and she didn’t bother to protest. “Thanks, Carole,” she said. “As long as you think you can handle it. I should tell you, though, that if that is our herd of horses, we could be in some real trouble. That land belongs to a neighbor who tried very hard to stop us from running the camp here this summer. He hates kids and doesn’t much like anybody else, either. Eli had to promise on a stack of Bibles that he’d never even know we were here. So,while you’re busy getting the horses off his land, be sure he doesn’t discover you, okay?”
    “Okay,” Carole said. She said it because it was the only answer she could give, but she gulped at the very idea. It wasn’t easy to get twenty horses to move without letting anybody know. How was she going to do it?
    She wasn’t sure how, but she was sure when. It had to be right away. It was 3:30 in the morning. By 4:30, the sun would start to rise. By 5:30, it would be fully light and people around here tended to wake up with the sun. It might be possible to sneak a herd off the farmer’s land in the dark; it would be impossible after dawn.
    Carole ran over to her bunk and slipped her jeans on over her pajamas. Her mind raced as she buttoned her shirt. She couldn’t do this alone; she couldn’t do this with Jeannie. Her only other choice was to get the three campers to help her.
    The three of them were sleeping in the spare bedroom in the other half of Carole’s bunkhouse. Waking them up would be no problem. Motivating them could cause some difficulty.
    Carole wished Stevie were there. Not only would she be invaluable in helping with the roundup, but she’d also know exactly how to get the campers to be useful. Carole had found that exposure to Stevie sometimes made her think a little bit like Stevie. Sheknew she needed a