The Black Jacket Mystery

forty cents in the box. It was empty now.
    “Of all the nasty, cheap, miserable tricks!It isn’t the money that makes me mad,” she stormed, “but he had to break the lock and twist the cover so we can’t use the box again. I’d like to break what’s left of it on his head!”
    “Ah, ah!” Mart said, lifting an admonishing finger at his sister. “Temper? Most of those dimes were yours, ma petite! Do we start a new collection right now?”
    Trixie tossed her head and scowled at him, but she put the box down on the table. “I’m perfectly calm.” Then she started to boil over again. “But whoever it was is a—a—”
    “I agree with Trixie completely,” Brian said. “Personally, I think some tramp saw this spot and decided to spend a night under a good stout roof instead of under some railroad bridge in a hobo jungle. He made himself at home.”
    “Like a pig in a wallow!” Jim said grimly. He picked up one of the cardboard posters and shook his head over it. “He walked all over this one with wet boots.”
    “Boots?” Honey said quickly before she had had time to think. She and Trixie exchanged a look, and both hurried to look at the card.
    Clear as it could be, the imprint was of a pointedtoed and narrow-heeled boot.
    “That looks familiar,” Jim told them with a frown. “Whoever it was that broke in wears those corny cowboy boots like Dan Mangan’s.”
    “Like them?” Trixie exploded. “I bet it was Dan, getting even with Honey and me!”
    The three boys looked astonished. Jim spoke quickly. “Suppose you explain just why Dan Mangan would ‘get even with you. What have you been doing to him?” He was stern.
    “We haven’t done anything,” Trixie defended herself and Honey. “He’s the one that did it!”
    “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell us what this is all about,” Brian said seriously. “We’ll probably miss the bus, but this is more important right now.”
    “Yeah,” Mart agreed. “I want to find out if I should punch Dan Mangan in the nose when I see him in class today, or if this is just a pipe dream.”
    So Trixie and Honey explained about the lost watch and Mr. Lytells purchase of it. Honey added, at the end, a little defiantly, “Of course, were not sure it was Dan who found it, but Regan seems to think so, too.”
    “So you dragged him into your mystery, tool” Mart shook his head.
    “He just happened to hear us talking, and he blew up!” Trixie explained. All three of the boys looked so grim and disapproving that she was worried. “He’s making Mr. Maypenny send Dan back to wherever he came from, next week.”
    Tough break for Dan if he isn’t the one who found Honey’s watch,” Jim said with a frown. “Personally, I don’t think we should accuse him of breaking in here without a lot more evidence than you two had about the watch. It’s a serious charge to base on one footprint and a suspicion of revenge.” Mart had been examining the footprint on the poster. He put the poster on the floor and measured the print against his own thick boot. “Especially when this footprint’s a good inch longer than mine in my heaviest boots, and I know Dan wears a smaller size than I do!”
    “Let me see!” Jim strode over and checked Mart’s discovery. “You’re right. Well, that changes things a bit, I’d say. Did Mr. Lytell mention anything about the guy with the watch having extra-big feet?”
    Both the girls shook their heads. “Of course not,”
    Trixie told him, “or we’d have known it wasn’t Dan.”
    “Also, these boots were brown, not black like Dan’s,” Honey said, pointing to some smudges on the edge of the table. “The character, whoever he was, put his feet up and rubbed shoe polish on our clean table!”
    All three of the boys checked hastily. It was shoe polish that was streaked on the table, and some of it was rubbed on the face of one of the posters that showed a dent where a heavy heel had rested. And the polish was brown, a very yellowish, ugly brown.
    “Anybody who’d wear this wild-looking color must be a mental case!” Mart said with a shudder. “Yikes!”
    “Funny thing, I can’t imagine a tramp wearing yellowish-brown cowboy boots. Can you?” Brian asked Jim.
    “He may not have been a tramp,” Jim said gravely. “Maybe he was just passing through, hiking, and needed money, so he broke in and got three dollars and forty cents luckier.”
    “He didn’t have to make a mess of our clubhouse, whatever