The Mystery at Bob-White Cave

“I’m glad you’re going with me.” Isn’t this neat? she thought to herself. I’d just about given up the idea of trying to find that cabin after dark.
    “What I really hoped was that I could talk you out of going,” Linnie whispered. “It’s dangerous in the woods at night.”
    “You told me it was dangerous in the woods in the daytime, too. I really intend to go, Linnie, so, please, don’t try to stop me. You’d better get Jim’s rifle, Mart.”
    “He won’t need to; I have it myself,” a low voice answered from the foot of the stairs. Jim came into the ring of Trixie’s flashlight. Back of him came Brian and Honey.
    “If you’re going, so are we,” Honey said. “I brought your boots, Trixie.”
    “Jeepers, thanks!” Trixie sat on the floor and laced up her high boots as quickly as possible.
    They closed the living room door softly behind them. Outside, Jacob rose, stretched himself, and padded along after Linnie.
    “For goodness’ sake, don’t let him bark!” Trixie
    warned. “If he were to wake Uncle Andrew....”
    “He’ll be as quiet as any of us if I tell him to be.” Linnie stroked the big hound’s ears.
    She led the Bob-Whites along the corkscrew trail winding through the ravine that paralleled the river and skirted the lake. To follow the mule trail to the ghost cabin would be to run the risk of alerting every hound from the Stacy family’s Old Blue to the Jenkinses’ Jethro.
    They kept their flashlights trained on the ground. Overhead, the sky was polka-dotted with stars, and the moon sent little bypaths of silver through the tangled underbrush.
    The frogs in the marsh by the river sang their roua-roua-rou, some tenor, some bass, and some that just snapped off in a hiccup. The katydids kept up a constant, high-pitched, blatant chorus. “I can’t even hear myself think, they’re so loud,” Trixie complained. “Your mother said to tie a knot in my handkerchief and they’d stop. Wait a minute.”
    “Oh, that’s to stop a whippoorwill,” Linnie said. “You bang on a tree to quiet katydids. Try it, Jim.”
    Jim banged with the toe of his boot, and the clamor in the trees above stopped. It stopped in the next tree, too, and on and on, in a wave of silence that was more ominous than the racket of the insects.
    “Someone has been along this trail recently,” Trixie said. “See the broken branches? I smell tobacco smoke, too.”
    “Yeah?” Mart said. “Your imagination’s working again. Why would anybody—what’s that?”
    A branch snapped nearby, followed by a rustle in the leaves.
    “It was an old coon—no, it couldn’t have been, or Jacob would have been after it. What was it, Jacob?” Linnie asked. Jacob just wriggled his body and wagged his tail. “It must have been some animal—a red fox, maybe, on the way to Mama’s chicken house. Thank goodness, the chickens are safe. I mean, thank you, Jim and Brian and Mart.”
    “Doesn’t Jacob go after foxes?” Mart asked, curious.
    “Not when I have hold of his collar,” Linnie answered.
    The trail turned sharply upward, and the Bob-Whites followed Linnie over rotted tree trunks and through knee-deep beds of dead leaves collected in gullies. On a level piece of ground near the top of the ridge, a stream swollen by the recent rain rushed toward the river and lake far below.
    “There goes our visit to the ghost cabin!” Jim said. “We’ll drown if we try to cross that. I’ll bet it’s full of sinkholes a mile deep. Remember those gullies we just crossed?”
    Linnie stepped gingerly to the edge of the rushing water. “I think we can cross it,” she said, “though I’ve never before been up here after a rain. Come, Jacob! Can we cross?”
    Jacob plunged into the water and half paddled, half scrambled to the other side.
    “There’s our answer,” Brian said. They crossed without any trouble. “Good dog, Jacob!” Brian rubbed the hound’s back.
    “The cabin shouldn’t be far from here now,” Linnie said. “Wait, Trixie!” Trixie, impatient, fell back to let Linnie lead through the tangled grass, ferns, and wet leaves.
    In the clearing ahead of them squatted the old log house. Moonlight played across the sagging porch. The deeply set windows looked out like great staring eyes. Across the valley in back of the cabin, a star trailed across the sky, and a screech owl whimpered in a nearby tree.
    Suddenly a rifle shot spat through the trees above the Bob-Whites, and they fell to the