The Gatehouse Mystery

or next month. Then no one would have known the diamond was there until then. So we're not doing anything wrong if we keep it a few days." She gave Honey a little push. "Go on quickly and hide it. And, for pete's sake, don't go near Jim with that guilty expression on your face. One look at you now and he'd know for sure that we were keeping something from him."
    Honey giggled and darted into the house just as the tall, redheaded boy and his adopted father climbed out of the sedan.
    "Hello, Mr. Wheeler," Trixie said. "Hi, Jim." She hurried past them up to the toolhouse beyond the stable.
    Honey joined her there in a few minutes. "Jim," she said breathlessly, "is already suspicious. He thought it was very queer of you to hurry right by him without even finding out whether or not they bought the horse."
    "Oh, dear," Trixie moaned, handing Honey the pruning saws. "I forgot about that. Did they buy it?" Honey shook her head up and down. "Yes. His name is Starlight, and he'll arrive this afternoon."
    "How wonderful," Trixie cried, shouldering two shovels. "I can't wait to ride him. That is, of course, if your father will let me."
    "Of course he will," Honey said. "You ride as well as the rest of us now, Trixie. No one would ever know that you'd never been on a horse until this summer." She started for the door of the toolhouse, then stopped. "They're sitting on the porch, Jim and Daddy. Let's go down to the cottage the long way, through the woods. If we cut across the lawn Jim will want to know why we're taking shovels down there. I told him we were just going to cut away some vines from a window."
    "Let's not get Jim any more suspicious than he is," Trixie agreed.
    The woods, which bounded both the Wheeler and Belden properties on the north, sloped down to form the western boundary of the big estate. Both properties faced a quiet country road two miles from the village that nestled among the rolling hills on the east bank of the Hudson River. Honey's home was high on a hill overlooking the Beldens' little white farmhouse down in the hollow.
    When the girls left the toolhouse on their way to the woods behind the mansion, they passed the corral where Regan was giving Bobby a riding lesson on gentle Lady.
    "Where are those two shovels taking you, Trixie?" Regan asked with a grin.
    Trixie ignored the question. "We found out that Bobby cut his knee on a stone, Regan," she said, giving Honey a nudge. "Diamonds are stones," she whispered as soon as they were out of the woods.
    "Crystallized carbon," Honey said with a laugh. "The hardest stones in the world. The only thing that will cut a diamond is another diamond. That's where the expression 'diamond cut diamond' comes from."
    "It means the same thing as 'it takes a thief to catch a thief,' doesn't it?" Trixie asked. "And is that why hard-boiled men are called rough diamonds?"
    "I guess so," Honey said.
    "I'm glad you know so much about precious stones," Trixie said. "If it hadn't been for you, I'd have thought the one we found was glass." As they trudged along the path, she said, "I don't really like jewelry. What good is it, anyway? From what I read about rich people, they always seem to keep their jewels in a safe-deposit box and wear paste imitations."
    "That's true," Honey admitted. "But the person who lost the diamond we found, or had it stolen from him, evidently didn't believe in safe-deposit boxes. I can't imagine how it got in the cottage."
    "I keep telling you," Trixie said impatiently. "It's part of the loot crooks must have buried in the floor."
    "But, Trixie," Honey objected, "you know as well as I do that the floor showed no signs of having been dug up recently. And if crooks left anything as valuable as the diamond in the dirt floor, they would have come back for it long ago."
    Trixie said nothing. She knew that Honey was right, but the idea of digging for buried treasure appealed to her imagination so strongly that she refused to admit that her own explanation of how the diamond got into the cottage was silly. After a minute she said, "The reason why the crooks didn't come back for it when they found it wasn't with all the rest of the loot is that they got killed off in a gang war or something." Honey pushed her bangs away from her hot, perspiring forehead. "Going through the woods is much longer than cutting across the lawn, isn't it?"
    Trixie chuckled. "Serves you right for having such a big estate. Anyway, it's worth it, because I'm sure we'll find more