The Black Jacket Mystery

over. “Kind of an argument, it seemed like. I was pretty dizzy, and part of the time I guess I was out, but every now an then I’d come to and hear the voices, Dan’s and somebody else’s.”
    “Did you hear what they were saying?” she asked, her blue eyes sparkling with the excitement of the mystery.
    “Not much,” he admitted. “I recollect that the other one was laughing and poking fun at Dan—” He shook his head. “Seems like he was calling him yeller’ in a mean kind of voice, and I heard Dan say, ‘I won’t do it.’ ”
    Trixie waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, she urged, “What else, Mr. Maypenny?” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “That’s about all I remember. Drifted off again, about that time.”
    Trixie was disappointed. Then she began her maybe-ing.
    “Maybe he wanted to make Dan run away, and Dan didn’t want to go. Maybe the other one had a gun and just made him come along!” She was building up the scene in her mind. “Maybe they struggled, and he knocked Dan out— pow! And then he dragged Dan away with him—”
    “And maybe it didn’t happen that way at all,” he interrupted wearily. “All I know is, when Regan gets back from the city, I’m giving him the books and things the young one left behind him, and then I’m washing my hands of the whole thing. And nobody can blame me!” He touched the bandage again and winced at the touch. “I guess we all expected too much of a wild kid. He’s better off in reform school.”
    Trixie felt sad. Dan and she hadn’t hit it off well, but maybe, as Jim had told the Bob-Whites a couple of times, people don’t feel very friendly to others after being arrested and all. “Jim’s told us how awful it is not to have a good home and people around who care about what becomes of you,” she told Mr. Maypenny gravely. “He always says he was just lucky he didn’t get in with the wrong bunch himself and get into trouble. I guess Dan wasn’t so lucky.”
    “Guess not, young one. And you better be getting back to the lake and starting for home. Sun’s low and you oughtn’t to be out in the woods in the dark.”
    “I’m on my way right now,” Trixie assured him. “But first, here’s some crab-apple jelly from Moms. I’ll tell Brian your head is just fine,” she called to the old man as she swung into Susie’s saddle and headed the young mare back toward the lake. “Hope you like the jelly. Moms makes oodles of it every fall, and she’s won heaps of blue ribbons for it at the county fair.”
    “Tell her I’m much obliged,” he called after her as she rode down the trail.
    She was surprised, as she rode down the hill to the lake, to find that the boys had finished work on all the rows of plank seats they had been building and were nowhere in sight.
    They had stamped out the fire before they left, and there was a cold wind blowing in heavy gusts across the ice. But there was a beautiful sunset, with scurrying pink and crimson clouds, and the ice looked so inviting that she took her skates out of her saddlebag and put them on to try it.
    It was fun skating around in a pink glow as if she were on a vast stage in a colored spotlight. She sped around the edge of the lake and then out into the middle and did a fancy twirl, a leap, and a spectacular finish that ended in a bow to her imaginary audience in the empty rows of benches.
    But as she glided off the ice, something moved among the trees a hundred feet away and caught her eye. She stopped to stare, half blinded by the level rays of the red ball of sun. She saw two figures hurrying away over the hill. One was short and the other was somewhat taller. And they both were wearing black leather jackets and caps.
    Now she knew. Dan the runaway was not alone. He was with the other one whose voice Mr. Maypenny had heard, and whose black jacket she had seen and touched on the back of the chair in the Maypenny cabin!
    They had been watching her while she skated. Her face flushed as she thought how silly she must have seemed to them as she took a bow before the imaginary audience. It was most annoying.
    She removed her skates, frowning all the time, and plunked them back into the saddlebag. “Come on, Susie, let’s go home. The free show’s over!” She mounted and turned Susie’s nose in the direction of the homeward trail.
    The red sun had dipped below the hills, and the twilight shadows were deep all around. Strange noises came from the woods nearby. She