The Mysterious Code

polished.
    Mrs. Vanderpoel did
not seem greatly disturbed by the happening of the night before. She said that
she and her ancestors had lived in that house for more than a hundred years and
nothing had ever happened to any of them. “Nothing’s going to happen now,” she
assured them vehemently. “The way that scalawag ran off last night showed he
was mighty scared. I’d have shot him, and he knew it.”
    While the girls were
busy around the kitchen table, Spider came to the door. Tad was with him.
Timidly the boy acknowledged the girls’ warm greeting. They had promised Spider
that they would be more cordial to Tad and had been trying to keep their word.
Tad didn’t quite know what to make of it.
    “I understand you
had a visitor last night,” Spider said.
    “Indeed I did,” Mrs.
Vanderpoel said with spirit. “He didn’t stay long, though. I talked to him down
the muzzle of my rifle. He understood what I was saying.”
    “That’s all very
well,” Spider said, “but some of his gang may try to come back again. I don’t
think you should stay out here on this byroad all by yourself.”
    “How about letting
me stay here with you?” Tad asked eagerly.
    “There’s no need of
that, Tad,” Mrs. Vanderpoel said. “I’d like right well to have your company,
but I can take care of myself, no matter who comes, and don’t you get it into
your head, Spider Webster, that I can’t.”
    Spider chuckled.
“Good for you!” he said.
    Tad looked longingly
around the kitchen—at the old wood cook stove and the bright cookie jars— and
sighed. Then he pulled up a chair and helped the girls polish the silver. He
carried the finished pieces to the sink, washed them in warm suds, and dried
them.
    In the meantime
Spider scouted around outside the house for footprints, inspected the doorframe,
and decided that Mrs. Vanderpoel had not let the burglar get near enough to
leave any evidence. “I’ll go along now,” he said, “but we’ll keep an eye on
things. I’d feel a lot better if you’d let Tad stay here.”
    “I like the boy,”
Mrs. Vanderpoel said, “and he’s welcome any time he comes here, but I’m not
going to be mollycoddled by anyone. Come again some other time, Tad, just any
time you want, but go along now with Spider.”
    “I think I’d better
go, too,” Honey said. “I have a lot of studying to do, and we’re almost through
polishing the silver.”
    “I’ll go with you,”
Diana said. “I promised my mother I’d look after my little sisters.”
    Trixie stayed to
finish the polishing. She was so interested in her work and the stories Mrs.
Vanderpoel told her about the different pieces and how they came into her
family that she did not notice the growing dusk outside.
    “Jeepers,” she said
when Mrs. Vanderpoel turned on the light, “I’d better go. I told Moms I’d help
her with Bobby if Mart couldn’t, but here I am now, and it’s almost dinner
time.”
    “You’ll not go off
in this dusk alone,” Mrs. Vanderpoel said. “Why don’t you stay the night with
me? I have so many things I’d like to show you.”
    “I don’t think Moms
would want me to stay all night,” Trixie said. “She’s still sort of nervous
about that blizzard and our escape. She’s pretty tired, too, from taking care
of Bobby. I’ll call her and see if Mart and Brian can come for me.”
    “I’m sorry you
stayed so long,” Mrs. Belden told Trixie over the telephone. “I’ve been
expecting you any minute. Mart and Brian are at a Y meeting in Sleepyside. They
won’t be home till quite late. Your father is at a meeting at the bank. He’ll
come home when the boys do. I don’t know when that will be.”
    “Mrs. Vanderpoel
said she’d like to have me stay here all night,” Trixie said.
    “I don’t like that
idea,” Trixie’s mother said. However, when she talked to Mrs. Vanderpoel and
discovered that Spider was keeping an eye on the farmhouse, she decided that
she would let Trixie stay for the night.
    After a delicious
old-fashioned supper of homemade sausage and fried apples, Trixie had a
wonderful time curled up in the comer of the living-room couch looking at an
album of Vanderpoel ancestors. Mrs. Vanderpoel’s long-sleeved challis nightgown
and quilted robe made Trixie look exactly like one of the pictures of the Dutch
women. Later, after'' she had climbed up to the high four-poster bed in the
guest room and rubbed her sleepy eyes, she imagined she could see an array of