The Black Jacket Mystery

sweetly, “Why, even you two might come up with an idea if you strained your tiny brains a little!”
    “Ouch! She hit me!” Mart pretended to hold his head. “Unfair blow!”
    “Silly character!” Trixie sniffed and went back to whispering to Honey.
    The bus stopped just then to take on a crowd of their friends. The laughter and chatter and greetings put an end to any hope Mart might have had of thinking up a sharp answer. And any further talk about Trixie’s brand-new carnival plans had to be postponed.
    But all the rest of the day, whenever Trixie and Honey had met briefly in the locker room or the corridors on their way to classes, they had exchanged quick, excited whispers. “Tickets, posters to be made, prizes—where are we going to get them?” Trixie would ask. “What else are we forgetting? What are we going to need first?”
    “Muscles for building the booths,” Honey would answer with a giggle. “That means Jim and Mart. And Brian to drive his jalopy around Sleepyside handing out our posters after Jim finishes lettering them—and, oh, jillions of things!”
    So it went till they were on the bus hurrying home to try out the idea on their parents. Both of them knew it would mean a lot of hard work to get the ice carnival put on, but they felt up to it. All the Bob-Whites had regular chores for which their parents paid them a few dollars a week, and if it wouldn’t mean neglecting those chores, or halfdoing them, they were sure their parents wouldn’t object. Besides, it was for a good cause.
    Trixie watched her friend hurry up the long, wide driveway to the Manor House. In the late, winter afternoon sunshine, her home, sitting among its snow-covered lawns, looked as cold as an ice palace. “I’m glad our house isn’t on a hill,” Trixie thought. “Ours is lots smaller but it’s lots homier.’ ” And she added with a contented smile, “We can always count on Moms being there to say hello.”
    That last was something Honey couldn’t always depend on, Trixie knew. Her father’s business connections made it necessary for her mother to be very social. And lots of times they had to rush off to Washington or some other place at a moment’s notice. When they did, there was only Miss Trask, the housekeeper, to be “family.” She was a very kindly person and fond of Honey, but she couldn’t take the place of Honey’s real folks.
    “Guess we Beldens are lucky not to be rich!” Trixie chuckled to herself as she started up the road toward her own small home.
    There would be warmth in the sunny Belden kitchen, and Moms would be bustling about, starting dinner. Dad would soon be home from his job at the bank in Sleepyside, and he liked to smell meat roasting and cake baking.
    Moms would be wearing one of Mr. Beldens mother’s big, old-fashioned, starched, white aprons. It wasn’t that she needed such a big one, but it was because Dad’s mother and grandmother had worn them in that very same kitchen. There had been Beldens at Crabapple Farm for six generations, and there was even a rumor that Washington Irving had boarded with them while he was writing “Rip Van Winkle.”
    “And they all wore aprons,” Trixie thought grimly. “Glad I don’t have to marry a Belden. My house is going to be run by push buttons. I may not even have a kitchen!”
    With that hopeful thought, she went around to the kitchen door to scrape the snow off her rubber boots. As she came in sight of the rear door, she was astonished to recognize Starlight, one of the Wheelers’ horses, tied close by.
    Somebody from the Wheelers’ must be visiting, but who?
    The window of the service porch was open a few inches, and a big, masculine voice that she knew at once boomed out. “I wouldn’t have bothered you with it, Mrs. Belden,” Regan, the Wheelers’ head groom, was saying, “but Miss Trask said you or Mr. Belden might have some idea what I can do. It’s got me beside myself, worrying.”
    Trixie had never heard big, red-haired Regan speak in just that tone before. He never seemed to worry about anything except when she or the boys or Honey had been running the horses too much or had forgotten to clean the tack after a ride. And in those cases, he got just plain mad and let them know it at once. Most of the time, though, he was good-natured and easygoing, and he and Tom, the chauffeur, had lots of jokes together.
    Trixie felt sure that the trouble, whatever it was, had nothing to do with the horses her