Free Trail Mates by Bonnie Bryant

here?” Stevie countered.
    “Where’s ‘here’?” Lisa asked persistently.
    Stevie glanced at the woods around her. “Carole, you tell her,” Stevie said.
    Carole looked around for familiar landmarks, but there weren’t any. “You’re the trail leader,” she said. “You get to tell her—and me too,” she added pointedly.
    “Well, we’re almost to, uh, and we can’t be far from, the, ah, you know.”
    “Does this mean we’re lost?” Lisa asked, turning to Carole.
    “Sounds like it to me,” she said, laughing at Stevie’s antics. But she wasn’t really worried. She knew they couldn’t have ridden too far; they would come across a familiar landmark sooner or later. “Aren’t you glad Stevie’s in the lead?”
    “Yeah, it reminds me of my first trail ride. Remember her ‘shortcut’?”
    It would have been hard for anyone, but especially Lisa, to forget Stevie’s shortcut that day. Stevie had taken them through a field inhabited by a very unhappy bull. The three girls had ended up jumping over a big fence—a difficult feat for an experienced rider, an astonishing feat for Lisa, who had only been riding for a few weeks at the time.
    “Hey, there’s a road up ahead,” Stevie said. “At the least, we can follow the road signs—”
    “To Timbuktu!” Lisa finished her sentence for her. Riding with Stevie, it seemed, was always an adventure.
    Rather sheepishly, Stevie led the way onto the two-lane road. “Which way, fearless leader?” Carole asked.
    “I’m not sure,” Stevie told her. “But either left or right, I think.”
    “What thinking!” Lisa teased.
    “All right, my mind’s made up,” Stevie said. “We’re turning left.” With that, she turned Comanche to the left and got him walking along the edge of the road. Smiling at each other, Lisa and Carole followed her.
    It was a little annoying to be lost, but the girls knew perfectly well that they couldn’t be
too
far from the stable and they would get back there before long.
    A few cars whizzed past them as they continued along the road, alternately walking and trotting. Since Stevie was supposedly leading them, it was up to her to stop somebody to ask where they were.
    Another car came up from behind them but it didn’t pass. It just kept going slower and slower.
    Then a familiar voice spoke from the car’s window.
    “Carole?” Carole turned to see Scott, waving at her. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
    “We’re having a sort of off-trail ride,” she explained.
    “Max told me you guys were on a trail ride, but I thought you’d be heading home by now.”
    “We are,” she said.
    “But you’re going
away
from the stable,” he said.
    “We are?” she responded, only a little bit surprised.
    “Sure, Pine Hollow’s back that way. We just came from there,” he said to her. “We took a left off of Attington Way into this old road.”
    So
that’s
where they were! That meant this was the old country road that skirted the forest land outside the town of Willow Creek. It led to a camping area. Since people who lived in Willow Creek didn’t usually camp there, it wasn’t familiar to The Saddle Club. They were really lucky that the Babcocks had come along that route. It might have been another hour until they got to the camping area and realized their mistake!
    “Yo! Lisa, Stevie!” Carole called. When her friends turned around to see why she was calling, she waved them over to Scott’s father’s car. “We’ve certainly enjoyed this scenic tour, Stevie,” Carole teased as they joined her. “But I think it’s time to head back to Pine Hollow now, don’t you?” She really didn’t want Scott to know they had been lost, but she wasn’t fooling him at all.
    “Does that mean I’ve saved
your
life now?” he asked.
    She smiled at him. “I suppose so,” she admitted. “I guess that makes us even.”
    “Right,” he said, grinning back at her. “Anyway, I’m glad I could help you out.”
    “So am