The Mysterious Code

the rods to be used for bags to
carry the small articles now piled on them. Everything had been dragged from
the shelves, some of it thrown carelessly around the room.
    “Go up to your
house, Jim,” Regan said. “Tell your dad to call Sergeant Molinson and Spider,
too, if he can reach him. Ask him to tell them to get out here as quick as they
can.”
    “I smelled gasoline
when I came in,” Trixie told Regan as Jim left to call his father.
    ‘“I'll look around,”
Regan said, disgusted. After a minute he exclaimed, “Just look at this, Trixie—
gasoline-soaked rags!”
    “Oh, heavens,”
Trixie cried, "do you know what they were going to do, Regan? Set our
beautiful clubhouse on fire after they robbed it! Thank goodness for that
alarm. It scared them away before they could steal anything.”
    “You can’t be sure
of that Trixie, till you take an inventory,” Regan said. “Here comes the whole
gang from the Valentine party now.”
    Tad, eager to help,
seemed to be everywhere. He helped Mart gather up the gas-soaked rags into a
pile on a cleared place away from the clubhouse. Regan set a match to them.
    As they blazed
against the sky, the crowd stood out as vividly as a painting, the girls in
their bright dresses, coats hastily gathered around their shoulders, the boys
milling around, thrilled at their first taste of off-TV drama, while far away
on Glen Road the police siren screamed.
    In the light of the
fire, Trixie spied something small, shining against the snow. She picked it up
and turned it over in her hands. “I guess it’s Patch’s dog tag,” she said to
herself and put it in her pocket. “I’ll ask Jim when I have a chance.”

At
the Police Station • 14
     
    During the next few days the
Bob-Whites of the Glen worked as they had never worked before, setting the
clubhouse to rights. The girls pressed the curtains and put them back on the
windows. They rearranged on the shelves the things which they had made—dolls,
aprons, repainted toys, small framed pictures.
    Mart, furious at the
scratches on the cherry gateleg tables, worked and rubbed till the marks
disappeared. Finally, after what seemed like years, the clubhouse was in order
again.
    Only the samurai
swords seemed to be missing.
    Not a trace of them
could be found. The burglars must have made off with them.
    “It’s a shame we
didn’t sell them to the Hakaito brothers when they wanted to buy them,” Brian
said. “Now we’ll probably never see them again, and they won’t do anyone any
good.”
    Trixie didn’t think
the police were trying very hard to investigate the robbery at the clubhouse.
“Why do they have to take forever to find anything out?” she asked the others.
“I’d like to do a little investigating myself.”
    “Lay off it,” Mart
warned. “You know what Moms and Dad said... no more sleuthing.”
    “I don’t have time
now before the show,” Trixie said, “but if I did, I’d—”
    “You’d what?” Mart
asked. “Bull Thompson’s in reform school, and he didn’t give anyone a single
lead on his partners.”
    “Well, there must be some way of finding out who they are,” Trixie insisted. “I’d feel a lot
safer about our show on Saturday if I knew that they all were in jail.”
    She meant it, too,
because one or two of the people who had promised Trixie some of their rare
antiques had withdrawn their offers in the face of the publicity about the
clubhouse.
    “Another thing,” she
said, “no one has ever found out who returned the oak desk the night of the
blizzard. I know Bull Thompson didn’t have a change of heart. It’s a real
mystery.”
    “Maybe one of the
other crooks in Bull’s gang is a softie and returned it,” Mart said.
    “That isn’t even
probable,” Trixie said. “Anyone who would put gasoline rags around our
clubhouse hasn’t any heart at all.”
    That night, after
Trixie went to bed, she couldn’t sleep. Her mind went back to the Valentine
party... the music and dancing. “It was wonderful,” she thought. “Then that
awful time at the clubhouse... those gasoline rags... that fire might have been
our club burning. I wish the police could trace those crooks.”
    All at once a
thought struck her. “Jeepers,” she said to herself, “I forgot all about that
dog tag I found. It isn’t Reddy’s. Maybe it’s not even Patch’s tag. If it
isn’t, it might be a clue! I’ll ask Jim about it tomorrow.”
    On the bus the next
morning Trixie asked Jim to meet her in the