The Mysterious Code

No More Bob-Whites? •
1
     
    Trixie Belden rushed into the
Sleepyside Junior-Senior High cafeteria. She pushed back her short sandy curls,
threw her notebook on the table, and sank into a seat between her two best
friends, Honey Wheeler and Diana Lynch.
    “What kept you so
long?” Honey asked. “Were starved”
    “Something
terrible!” Trixie gasped when she could get her breath.
    “Come on, Trixie,
tell us,” her brother Mart said. “Don’t be so dramatic!”
    “I’m
not—being—dramatic. Something awful is going to happen to the
Bob-Whites of the Glen. Mart, please get Jim and Brian from the kitchen: I want
all the club members together right now so I can tell all of you.”
    “Heck, Trixie, they
can’t leave their jobs at lunchtime.”
    “It’s an emergency,”
Trixie insisted.
    “All right,” Mart
said resignedly, “I’m on my way.”
    Mart, only eleven
months older than his thirteen-year-old sister, did not always respond so
quickly. Today, though, the tears in Trixie’s blue eyes convinced him that she
was in earnest.
    “Can’t you give us a
hint?” Diana asked. “You sound as though we were all going to be stricken with
some awful plague.”
    “It’s almost worse
than that,” Trixie sobbed. “Oh, there they are.”
    “What is it?”
Honey’s brother Jim asked. “Trixie, you’re crying. You never, never cry.”
    “I’m not really,”
Trixie said, drying her eyes. “It’s just this: This morning Mr. Stratton, the
principal, stopped me in the corridor and—”
    “You’re failing in
math again,” Mart said. “Gleeps, if that’s all it is—”
    “He asked me about
the jacket I’m wearing,” Trixie went on, scorning Mart’s interruption. “I
happen to be the only one wearing my B.W.G. jacket today. He wanted to know
what the B.W.G. cross-stitched on the back of the jacket stood for!”
    “Did you tell him
it’s a secret?” Diana asked indignantly.
    “The name isn’t, Di.
I told him it stands for our club, the Bob-Whites of the Glen.”
    “Then what did he
ask?” Mart had little sympathy for faculty interference of any kind.
    “What the purpose
behind the club is,” Trixie said.
    “Well, that is a secret,” Honey said.
    “I don’t believe it
is, Sis,” Jim said. “In fact, we don’t have a secret club at all. It belongs
just to us, certainly, but it isn’t secret”
    “Calm down and go
on, Trixie.” Mart was impatient “You make such a big deal out of everything”
    “I’m not doing it
this time, and you’ll see. I told Mr. Stratton we were organized just like
brothers and sisters, the six of us, to help one another.”
    “I’ll bet that set
him back on his feet,” said Mart. “Oh, Mart, listen,” Honey insisted. “Go on,
Trixie. There must be more.”
    “Yes, there is, and
it’s the worst part I’ll die dead if anything happens to the B.W.G.’s.”
    “It won’t” Jim said
confidently.
    “Mr. Stratton
threatened it might” Trixie insisted. “After I told him the purpose of the
club, he said, ‘I don’t think that purpose is enough to justify such an
organization in the eyes of the
    members of the
school board.’ Is that awful enough for you, Mart?”
    “Gleeps, yes,” Mart
said. “Out of a clear sky, too.”
    “Hardly.” They all
looked at Trixie’s brother Brian. He was the oldest club member, sixteen, and
serious-minded. They paid attention to what he had to say.
    “You know the whole
school’s been talking about the vandalism that’s been going on,” he said.
“Maybe that is what has stirred up the board. You know, worry about gangs
forming in Sleepyside.”
    Trixie jumped to her
feet and snapped her fingers. “You’re right, Brian,” she said. “That’s what Tad
Webster meant.”
    “Now you’re being
mysterious again,” Brian said. “What does Spider Webster’s brother Tad have to
do with the situation? There isn’t a better policeman in all Sleepyside than
Spider,” and he added, “or a better friend of the Bob-Whites of the Glen.”
    “That’s true,”
Trixie agreed, “but he surely picked a goon for a younger brother. He saw me
talking to Mr. Stratton and asked me what he had been saying to me.”
    “You didn’t tell
him, did you?” Diana asked. She didn’t like Tad, either.
    “Of course I didn’t. He told me, instead. Mr.
Stratton had been questioning him, also, because Tad’s president of the Hawks.
Tad had the nerve
    to say that he
thought the Hawks had a lot more reason for