Free Ghost Rider by Bonnie Bryant

room. The rush was on!
    C AROLE LOVED BEING in charge of pony rides. She was always happiest around any kind of a horse, but now it was even truer because the kids were having such fun. Most of these children were familiar with horses, so that made the job a lot easier. Even better, though, was the fact that they were all in costume and were having their pictures taken by Frank Devine. The pony was sporting a witch’s pointed hat, and it seemed to go perfectly with the costume that each child wore—everything from the Incredible Hulk to Sleeping Beauty (snoring loudly). Carole saw to it that eachchild had a fun ride, got a good picture, and learned a new fact about horses.
    “You tell their age by how their teeth have worn,” she said to one rider.
    “There’s no such thing as a white horse, just gray, no matter how white the horse looks,” another learned.
    “English riders have their stirrups shorter than Western,” one child heard.
    “Horses don’t have any nerves in their manes, so you can hold it for balance if you need to, and it won’t hurt the horse. Of course, that’s not good riding style, but it may be excellent safety sometime!”
    All of the kids seemed to like what they were learning as well as what they were doing. Although Carole knew she wanted to work with horses for the rest of her life, she’d always thought her choices were among owner, breeder, trainer, and vet. Today she was having so much fun teaching, she was beginning to think she ought to add instructor to the list.
    “Smile now,” she told the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in the saddle. Somewhere under the costume she was sure the child was smiling a lot.
    “W HAT HAPPENED TO you?” Kate asked Christine.
    “I think I just got trampled by two sugarplum fairies and a robot,” Christine explained, rubbing hershoulder, which had gotten slightly bruised. “Those fairies were determined to get to the costume parade!”
    Kate giggled.
    When Christine’s shoulder stopped throbbing, she laughed, too. “It means they’re having a good time, and that’s what this is about,” she said philosophically. “At least I think that’s what that means.” She rubbed her shoulder again.
    “What those two fairies don’t know, however, is that you’re one of the judges of the costume parade!”
    “I am?”
    “You are now,” Kate said, tugging at Christine’s cape. “And there’s work to be done.”
    “O F COURSE IT ’ S your pumpkin, and you can do whatever you want,” Phyllis Devine said to a teary-eyed ghost. “It doesn’t matter what that vampire next to you says. If you want a happy pumpkin, you get a happy pumpkin.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    The ghost turned to the vampire and stuck her tongue out at him.
    “J UST GUESS ,” S TEVIE said. “You really can’t possibly count all the candy corns just by looking at the jar. You’re supposed to guess.”
    “Is it more than two thousand?” the panda in front of her asked.
    “Guess,” Stevie repeated. “Actually, you can guess as many times as you want. It only costs you a quarter for each guess, and the more guesses you make, the better chance you have of winning the dollhouse.”
    Once again Stevie pointed to the photograph of the adobe dollhouse that had been getting so much attention. The panda reached into her pocket and pulled out six tickets worth twenty-five cents each. Then she took six slips of paper, carefully wrote her name on the top of each, and wrote 2,000; 2,001; 2,002; 2,003; 2,004; and 2,005.
    “I’m pretty sure it’s more than two thousand,” she told Stevie earnestly as she tucked her entry forms into the cigar box.
    “I hope you win,” Stevie said. She meant it, too.
    M RS . L ONETREE HANDED a clean paintbrush to Superman.
    “You can paint whatever you’d like on our mural, but a lot of the children have chosen to paint themselves, in their costumes. I think a nice place for Superman would be—”
    “Right here,” he said, pointing to