The Mysterious Code

his
apartment over the stable.”
    “Gee whiz, thanks,
Honey,” Bobby said, and he struggled down from Mart’s shoulder.
    “Mrs. Belden, if you
don’t mind, Miss Trask said to ask you if they could all stay for lunch. She
said it would just be hot dogs. May they?”
    “I think so. Trixie,
take Bobby up to his room and change his shirt, please. It seems as though the
Belden children are always eating at your house, Honey.”
    “We come here more
often, Mrs. Belden. Mother has all your recipes in a box at home, but she says
Cook never makes them taste as good as you do.”
    “If I looked as
pretty as your mother does,” Mrs. Belden answered, “I’d never put a foot inside
the kitchen.”
    “There isn’t a movie
actress who can hold a candle to you, Moms,” Mart said and kissed her.
    “Flattery will get
you nowhere,” his mother said, blushing. "Try to be home by four o’clock,
all of you. Your father will be here then. He’s going to bring that film we
took at home on Christmas when you were at the dude ranch.”
    “We’ll try to be on
time, Moms. Do you know—” Trixie put her arm around her mother—“that was one
thing we could hardly stand—being away from Crabapple Farm at Christmas.”
     
    At the Manor House,
Regan met Bobby and took him by the hand to go to his apartment “Tell me my
riddle,” Bobby begged. “You always tell me good riddles.”
    “What has three keys
but can't open locks?” Regan asked, his freckled face amused.
    “That’s a hard one,”
Bobby said. “It’s not my skate key... it’s not our door key... what’s the
answer, Regan?”
    “A zoo. It has a monkey, a don- key, and a tur- key ,” Regan said. “Tell
the other kids good-bye, Bobby”
    Honey led the
Bob-Whites up the two flights of stairs to the attic. They had to go through a
trapdoor to get into the room over the library. Cob-webbed boxes and furniture
were stacked around the room. One light hung from the ceiling, sending weird
shadows into all comers.
    Trixie tingled with
excitement. It’s
the same setting, almost exactly, she thought, as the one in Kidnapped for
Ransom.
    “I’ve never been
inside this room before,” Honey said. “I think most of the things must have
been here when Daddy bought the house.”
    “Just look at this
table!” Mart exclaimed. “It’s cherry, or I’ll miss my guess. This is valuable,
Honey, and here’s its twin! Do you think your mother meant that we could have
anything in this room?”
    “That’s what she
told me,” Honey answered.
    Mart, excited,
carried the two tables through the trapdoor to the hall. “This is the first
installment,” he called back over his shoulder.
    Trixie's head was
deep in a big trunk she pulled open. “It’s full of old costumes,” she said.
“The little theatre in Sleepyside will pay a lot of money for these or... say,
I think we’d better keep them and rent them to all the drama groups. We’d make
more money that way. Look at this. What do you suppose it opens?”
    Trixie held up a
little key. There was a tag attached to it. “This is queer,” she said and
turned the tag faceup so they could see it. On it were these little acrobatic
figures in different postures:
     

     
    “Do you suppose it
says something?” Honey picked up the key and its tag and took it over under the
light. “Did you ever see anything like this before?” she asked.
    “It’s probably some
kind of a code,” Mart said. “It’s neat. I’ll bet some kid did that a long time
ago.”
    “Right,” Jim said.
“More than likely, though, it doesn’t mean a thing.”
    “Maybe not,” Trixie
agreed, then slipped it into the pocket of her sweater. “What are you making
such a fuss about, Brian?”
    Brian had found an
old sword, and he was rubbing it against his blue jeans to brush off the dust.
    “Say, Jim, take a
look at this,” he said. “Could these be gold ornaments on the hilt?”
    “Why don’t you ask
me?” Mart asked. “I’m an authority on swords. It’s a samurai sword. There
should be a dagger to match. They come in pairs.”
    The boys hunted
around on the floor. “Here it is! It’s a beauty!”
    “The samurai were
military guards at the mikado’s palace way back in feudal days in Japan,” Mart recited, sure of his subject. “They were the only ones allowed to wear the two
swords.”
    “They had a pleasant
way of using them,” Jim said.
    “They did,” Mart
agreed. “When the honor of a samurai was questioned, even ever