Lucky Horse by Bonnie Bryant Read Free Book Online

right.”
    Carole moved back and let her father have a turn. “Hmm,” she heard him say. “I see something, but it’s nothing like a star.” He tilted the telescope to the right. “There it is again.… It’s a big cloud bank!”
    He straightened up and frowned at Carole. “I don’t get it. I checked the electronic barometer twice before we came up here. It showed no signs of a front coming through, yet I’m seeing a whole bunch of clouds.”
    “Maybe a fast storm system’s moving in. We learned about those in the meteorology unit of earth science last year.”
    “I don’t think that’s possible with the barometer reading as high as it was.” Colonel Hanson shook his head. “I think it must be just a quick-moving part of a ‘partly cloudy’ forecast. Why don’t we sit down and wait for it to clear?”
    “Okay,” said Carole. She was happy to be up on Mount Stringfellow. It was beautiful, with or without the stars. She sat down close to the telescope, and her father sat beside her.
    “Want to tell knock-knock jokes?” he asked.
    “No, Dad. That’s Stevie’s thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s take turns naming all the movies with one-name titles.”
    “Okay,” Colonel Hanson chuckled. “You go first.”
    “Amistad,”
said Carole.
    “Rocky,”
her father replied.
    “Mulan,”
Carole shot back.
    “Indiscreet.”
Colonel Hanson laughed.
    “In the Street?”
Carole frowned. “Dad, that’s three words.”
    “No, Carole.
I-n-d-i-s-c-r-e-e-t. Indiscreet
. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.”
    “The movies have to be from the age of sound, Dad,” Carole warned with a grin.
    “That one is—it’s from 1958.”
    “Well, then, the last twenty-five years. Something I could have seen on the late show.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    The night remained dark and without stars. Carole and her dad played on, laughing, almost forgetting about the telescope altogether. Finally Carole saw something on the distant horizon.
    “Look!” she said, rising to her feet. At first she was afraid it was something ominous, like a thundercloud, but then she realized her father had been right. What she was seeing was the last edge of a cloud cover, and the breeze that had suddenly begun to blow across Mount Stringfellow was sweeping the clouds ahead of it.
    “I think it’s going to clear up!” she cried.
    They stepped back over to the telescope. When they looked up just a few minutes later, the sky was filled with a billion glorious stars, twinkling just like camera flashes at a rock concert, only never going out.
    “Oh, wow!” Carole breathed.
    “Now we’re cooking,” said Colonel Hanson. “Let’s see what we can bring into focus.”
    Carole lay on her back and looked up into the sky while her father adjusted the focus on the telescope. She felt as if the stars were so close she could reach out and touch them.
    “Awwrriiiight!”
her father cried. “Carole! Come have a look at this!”
    Carole hurried over to the telescope. She looked through the eyepiece, expecting to see more glittering stars. Instead she saw a beautiful yellow planet withdeep silver rings around it. “Gosh,” she cried, “the rings of Saturn!”
    “Pretty impressive, huh?” Her father asked, smiling.
    “I can’t believe that’s really Saturn. And I’m actually seeing it right now, with my own eyes!”
    “You sure are. The light that we’re seeing from Saturn right now left the planet back when we were having supper. It takes a little over an hour to get to Earth. Want to see if we can find Jupiter?”
    “Absolutely!”
    Carole stepped back to let her father readjust the telescope.
    “Can you name the planets of the solar system in order?” he asked as he turned the knobs on the eyepiece.
    “Uh, I used to be able to, but I get confused after Jupiter,” Carole admitted.
    Colonel Hanson grinned. “Just remember My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets.”
    “ ‘My very educated mother …’ ” Carole frowned a