Free Flying Horse by Bonnie Bryant Page B

know you could paint horses!” Lisa said.
    Carole burst out laughing. “Sure you did, Lisa. Don’t you remember when we painted the barn?”
    Lisa and Stevie started laughing, too. One of Pine Hollow’s horses had gotten loose and run underneath their ladder, and a bucket of paint had spilled on him. He hadn’t been hurt, but he had looked unusually colorful for a few weeks.
    “Still,” Lisa said, “you ought to be taking paintingclasses this summer, not me. I’m going to tell my mom.”
    Stevie shook her head. “I only do horses,” she said quickly. She stepped back to admire her work. “This is great, to have a whole wall to work on. Usually I’ve only got the margins of my math papers. Do you think it looks like Belle?”
    Carole studied the painted horse’s happy expression. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think you could draw a horse that didn’t look like Belle. You know her best, after all.”
    A FEW HOURS later, when Mrs. DeSoto came in, Carole and Lisa were finishing their second-to-last wall, and Stevie had done almost all the trim. Mrs. DeSoto appeared at the door. “Flying change?” she read in a puzzled voice.
    Lisa and Carole turned to her in equal puzzlement. Stevie looked slightly embarrassed. “There.” Mrs. DeSoto pointed to the last wall—the one with Stevie’s horse on it. Sometime after they had all started working, Stevie had gone back to her painting of Belle and added an arrow pointing to Belle’s legs along with the words “flying change!”
    “Oh that,” Stevie said vaguely. “It’s a thing a horse does—or doesn’t, depending on the horse.”
    “Yes, I know,” Mrs. DeSoto said. “I just wondered why you painted it on the wall.”
    “We saved that wall for last,” Lisa chimed in quickly, sensing Stevie’s discomfort, “because we really loved Stevie’s picture. Isn’t it a beautiful horse?”
    “It is,” Mrs. DeSoto agreed. “I’d even like to leave it there—but I think plain walls might go better with the curtains and furniture I’ve ordered. I came to tell you that I’ve made some hot soup for lunch, since it’s such a cold day—homemade New England clam chowder, a specialty of the DeSoto Inn.”
    They laughed. All week long Mrs. DeSoto had been experimenting with new recipes, calling each one “a specialty of the inn.”
    “Lunch will be ready soon,” she concluded. “As soon as you’re finished painting, come eat!”
    A FTER LUNCH THE girls sat in the bright kitchen and looked out the windows. The rain showed no signs of stopping. “I don’t think today is a good day for Assateague,” Denise said.
    “I agree,” Stevie said. “The marshlands are wet enough in dry weather. Today we’d sink in up to our knees!” Stevie’s thigh felt stiff and sore, and she was glad to have an excuse not to walk much.
    “There’s always the beach,” Denise said, but even she sounded doubtful.
    “No thanks,” said Lisa. “Can you imagine how cold the ocean would feel today?
Brr!
”
    Carole fingered the tablecloth reluctantly. “I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about this,” she said. “I read that, somewhere in town here, they have Misty—I mean the real Misty, the pony—in a museum. We could go there.” She looked up at her friends. “I’m just not sure that I want to.”
    Stevie frowned. “I know Misty was a real pony,” she said. “But Carole—that book was written fifty years ago! Misty’s dead!”
    “Is that true?” Lisa asked.
    Mrs. DeSoto nodded. “I have to know all about the island if I’m going to be a good innkeeper,” she said. “Both Carole and Stevie are right. Misty had a good life; she lived to be more than thirty years old. When she died they stuffed her, like—I don’t know, like a wildlife exhibit—and they have her in a little museum in town. I haven’t been there, but I can tell you girls where it is.”
    “Eew,” said Stevie. “I mean—I’m glad Misty was real, and I’m glad she had a