The Mystery in Arizona

had been reading her mind, Sally tucked her hand through Trixie’s arm and said, “And let’s don’t say good-bye at the end of the holidays. Our schools aren’t far from where you live in the Hudson River Valley. Maybe you’ll invite us to spend a weekend with you, and maybe next summer you’ll come and spend some time with us in our home.”
    “Oh, that would be just wonderful,” Honey cried. “We have lots of room at our house for all of you.”
    “There’s plenty of room at my house, too,” Di put in. “Mother and Daddy would love to have you.”
    “But haven’t you two sets of twins for kid brothers and sisters?” Sally asked. “Your uncle told us you did. So you couldn’t have enough room for us, too.”
    “Di’s place is enormous,” Trixie said, “and so is the Manor House where Honey and Jim live. Our place is small, but we could double up so you could stay with us, though not as comfortably as with either Honey or Di.”
    “Your place must be enormous, too,” Brian said to Bob, “if you’re inviting all of us to visit you. But we accept.”
    “Yes, yes, you can count on us, old things,” said Mart, making a monocle out of his thumb and forefinger. Peering through it, he added, “However, you can also count on our arriving bag and baggage, which means we’ll supply our own pup tents and sleeping bags.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” Sally said with a giggle. “We have plenty of room, and Daddy would love to have you. He’s so fond of you all, and we think it was simply swell of you to adopt him until we arrived.” Again she blushed. “We’re all awfully ashamed of ourselves now for having let him down before. It was very thoughtless of us.” Her voice died away.
    Honey said with her usual quick tact, “We all do thoughtless things like that without really meaning to hurt anyone.” She opened her own little present and cried out with joy. “Did you ever see anything so cute in all your life?”
    It was a tiny sewing basket complete with minute spools of thread and even a strawberry pincushion. Jim and Trixie had discovered it in a little gift shop and had immediately thought of Honey and how much she enjoyed mending.
    “The strawberry,” Honey said excitedly, “reminds me of that larger one in your mother’s sewing basket and how we hid that diamond in it once. Do you remember?”
    Trixie nodded. Sally, in a mystified tone of voice, asked, “You hid a diamond in a pincushion? Why on earth would anybody do such a thing?”
    Her brother looked equally mystified, so the Bob-Whites explained that Trixie and Honey had accidentally discovered a diamond in the gatehouse on the Wheeler estate. While trying to find the owner, they had solved an exciting mystery.
    “Exciting is right,” said Sally enviously when they had finished telling the story. “Do you kids always get involved in such thrilling mysteries?”
    “Trixie does,” said Di. “And Honey usually helps her solve them, because, if you know Trixie, you get involved, too, and so there’s nothing else to do but try to solve mysteries.” She smiled. “My father’s red trailer disappeared very mysteriously once, and they were the ones who finally found it.”
    “That’s when we found Jim,” Honey put in.
    “Found him?” Bob asked incredulously. “Did he disappear or something? What goes on, anyway?” He scratched his head and crossed his eyes.
    Honey giggled. “He disappeared twice. The first time we found him, he was hiding in an old mansion. He’d run away from his mean old stepfather and—”
    “Hey,” Jim interrupted, grinning. “Stop talking about me as though I were an inanimate object.”
    “And that same red trailer,” Di went on just as though she had never been interrupted, “was the one Trixie and Mart got kidnapped in when they were trying to prove that this mysterious stranger was really—”
    “Sh-h,” Honey cautioned. “Let’s not go into all of that adventure now, Di. Your uncle might hear us, and you know how upset he gets when anybody mentions what a narrow escape Trixie and Mart had.”
    Sally sighed. “I’m beginning to guess that you kids belong to some sort of secret society.”
    “We do,” Trixie admitted. “Someday we’ll tell you all about it, and maybe you’ll become members.” She opened her own present, and everyone burst into loud laughter. It was a miniature magnifying glass.
    “We tried to find a Hawkshaw cap to go with it,” Mart said,