Free Autumn Trail by Bonnie Bryant Page B

doing it for ourselves, to remind ourselves what the whole holiday is really about. Am I close?”
    “Bingo,” Stevie replied, looking pleased. “I also figured that using the props from my school’s stupid play would be a nice touch.”
    “I thought that fake turkey looked familiar,” Veronica said. “Now I know why. I have to stare at it every year through that whole stupid, boring play.”
    “Right,” Stevie said with another grin. “Now, come on, let’s get started!”
    Despite their initial skepticism, the other girls soon found themselves getting caught up in what they were doing. Stevie’s enthusiasm was catching.
    As Stevie had directed, Lisa and Veronica brought the horses into the ring and tied their lead ropes to the table or the benches. Soon almost every horse in the stable was standing patiently in a wide circle. The only horse they left in his stall was Geronimo, the stallion. “Sorry, big boy,” Lisa said to him, stopping by his stall to pat his nose. She felt bad that Geronimo would miss all the festivities, but she knew better than to take chances by bringing him to the Thanksgiving play. Stallions were much too unpredictable to be safe in such a situation. Ifhe got overexcited, he could hurt himself or someone else.
    Lisa wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to subject Pepper to all the excitement Stevie had planned either, but when she went to his stall to check on him, he seemed so happy to see her that she couldn’t bear to let him miss out on the fun.
    In the meantime Stevie and Carole had filled all of the bowls with oats and apples and set them on the table. “All right,” Carole said when everything was ready. She stepped back and brushed off her hands on her jeans. “Now what?”
    “Are all the horses here?” Stevie asked. She glanced around the ring. “Yep,” she said in answer to her own question. She was pleasantly surprised to see that Veronica had brought Garnet out with the others. She hadn’t really been sure that the snobby girl would want anything to do with her scheme.
    “All present and accounted for,” Lisa said.
    “Good,” Stevie said. “All right, then. Lisa, you and Veronica can be the Pilgrims.” She grabbed the bushel barrel that had until recently contained the oats that were now in bowls on the table. “This is Plymouth Rock.”
    Lisa thought she saw Veronica roll her eyes, but the wealthy girl didn’t complain. The two of them stepped up onto “Plymouth Rock” as Stevie had directed, andLisa, thinking quickly, even came up with a little speech to begin the play.
    “As we Pilgrims land here in the New World,” she declared in a very dramatic tone of voice, placing one hand on her chest, “we are determined to live in freedom, free from oppression, free from persecution …”
    “Free from fifty-cent words like ‘persecution,’ ” Carole heckled from the sidelines.
    “Free from people who don’t study their vocabulary lessons,” Lisa continued, shooting Carole a dirty look as Stevie and Veronica giggled. “Here we will live in peace, with our trusty horses as companions. They will live in peace with the native American horses, just as we will live in peace and brotherhood—I mean sisterhood—with the native American people we find here.…”
    “There’s really no such thing as native American horses, you know,” Carole said to Stevie as Lisa continued her silly speech.
    “What do you mean?” Stevie asked, looking surprised. “You always see the Native Americans riding horses in those old cowboys-and-Indians movies your father likes so much.”
    Carole nodded. “They had horses then. But they weren’t really native to this country. They came over with the Spanish conquistadors. When the native people first saw the Spanish explorers riding on horseback, they were really scared. They had never seen anythinglike it, so they thought it must be some new kind of half-human creature.”
    “Really?” Stevie tried to imagine what