The Black Jacket Mystery

the heavy work himself, so he’d be sure it would be done right.”
    “Our brothers didn’t mind that a bit!” Honey laughed. “Remember how you and I thought the old dear was a big, bad poacher, robbing Dad’s game preserve—”
    Trixie nodded. “I sure do.”
    “Well, he’s a wonderful gamekeeper, and Brian calls him a typical Hudson River Valley settler and the salt of the earth.”
    “I’m c-cold and I want my skate!” Bobby pulled at her sleeve. “Why do we stand here talking?”
    “That’s a fair question, Bobby,” Honey admitted. “Let’s race Trixie up to the stables. Come on!”
    She took Bobby’s hand, and they started running up the long driveway, but Trixie didn’t accept the challenge. Let them run. She had some thinking to do about Regan and his mysterious problem. Moms had almost come out with it. Some kind of trouble. Maybe he had had an accident, hit-and-run or something. But Regan would never run. He would stay and face it, whatever had happened. Maybe it was Tom who was in a jam. Maybe his wife Celia would let something drop about it. Maybe she would mention that stranger who was in the tack room last night with Regan. Trixie was bewildered.
    She caught herself suddenly. She had told Honey she wasn’t going to think about it anymore, and here she was all tangled up in it in her mind.
    “I’m going to forget it!” she said aloud fiercely and then started up the driveway, running to overtake Honey and Bobby and to put this silly mystery out of her mind.
    Honey and Bobby, flushed and breathless, were waiting outside the barn. “Let’s do it again!” Bobby called out.
    “Not me! You won, fair and square!” Trixie laughed and winked at Honey.
    “The boys—don’t seem to be—around,” Honey panted. “Guess they’re still riding.”
    “We can look around the tack room for Angel Face’s skate and ask them when they come if they’ve seen it anyplace.”
    So they went into the tack room and looked high and low. “Not here,” Trixie said, lifting aside a paper file box to look behind it.
    As she picked up the file box, the unfastened end of it dropped open. A pile of bills and papers slid out onto the shelf, and some fluttered to the floor.
    “Gleeps! Now I’ve done it!” Trixie moaned. ‘Look, Honey! Regan will skin me alive. I’ve spilled all his bills and stuff, and I don’t know how he had them filed.”
    Honey came over swiftly. “Let’s pick them up and put them in the file, and when we see him tomorrow, we can explain that it was an accident.” They retrieved most of the papers, but one sheet had drifted under the workbench. Trixie had to crawl after it.
    “I hope he won’t be too angry.” She wriggled out backward clutching the missing sheet. “Here, slip this in—” She broke off abruptly and stared at the writing on it.
    “Now what?” Honey asked, seeing her startled expression.
    “A page from a letter—” Trixie still stared at the paper. She read aloud, “ ‘—but Judge Armen is willing to let you try. Your sister felt it is probably the last hope left to straighten— Oh! I’m sorry!” Trixie’s face was scarlet as she thrust the paper at Honey. “Here, put it away!”
    Honey slipped it into the file and replaced the file on the shelf. “You didn’t mean to snoop, Trix.”
    “I really am sorry,” Trixie confessed unhappily. “You couldn’t help glancing at it,” Honey insisted. “It was perfectly natural. Anyhow, you only read a few words. You didn’t find out anything you shouldn’t.”
    Trixie sighed. “But I did, Hon. It practically said that Regan’s in some kind of trouble with the law ” There were voices outside at that moment, and the sound of horses’ hooves on the barn floor. The boys had returned.
    Bobby ran out to meet them. “We can’t find my skate,” the girls heard him complain loudly. “Have you got it?”
    “Honey”—Trixie still felt terribly guilty—“we don’t have to tell them about Regan being in trouble, do we?”
    Honey looked grave and shook her head. “We would just be gossiping if we did. I still say you didn’t find out anything, really. So there’s nothing we could tell.”
    But Trixie wasn’t so sure. And now she had a new worry. Maybe Regan hadn’t told Miss Trask the truth when she sent him to Moms for advice. Maybe he wasn’t as honest as he had always seemed. She knew that he hadn’t told her the truth about having someone in the tack room with him last