The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost

check in on you girls in the morning. So here I am.”
    Now
Trixie knew that Wilhelmina had a rented room somewhere in town. Trixie felt a
nudge of curiosity to find out more about the interesting woman, but Wilhelmina
was not her most pressing concern this morning. She bounced on her tiptoes, too
excited to sit down. “What happened to Burke? Is he in jail? Did he confess? Is
Al- Adeen back? Is he okay?”
    Bill
Murrow raised his hands, pretending to snatch the imaginary questions out of
the air as they sailed past his head.
    Trixie
giggled at the pantomime. She plunked herself down in a chair and said, “All
right, all right. Just tell me what happened last night.”
    “Last
night... last night,” Bill said musingly, as though he couldn’t think of
anything interesting to tell. Seeing that both girls were about to burst from
curiosity, he relented. “Well, we took Burke off to jail, where he stayed till
first thing this morning. Then he got out on bail.”
    “Out on bail!” Trixie protested.
    Bill
nodded, making a disgusted face. “Apparently, horse-thieving isn’t the crime it
once was.”
    “Not
when the horse is back home, safe and sound,” Charlene
said.
    “Is
he okay?” Honey asked Pat.
    “No,”
Pat said, looking serious. Then he broke into a wide grin. “He’s absolutely
terrific—just the way he always was!”
    “Don’t
let the bail fool you,” Regan added.
    “Burke
stole an extremely valuable piece of property, and the law will see that he’s
punished for it.”
    “So
much for Burke Landing,” Pat said happily.
    “Will
all the work just stop?” Trixie asked, remembering the huge shell of the first
building and the foundations that had been dug for the others.
    “Probably,
unless someone wants to buy the land from Burke and pick up where he left off,”
Regan guessed.
    “Before
that happens, we may be able to buy that land ourselves,” Bill said. “We could
tear down Burke’s Tinkertoys and let the prairie take the land back.”
    “Now
that’s something to shoot for!” Pat exclaimed.
    Bill
nodded. “It’s not so unbelievable, either, now that your girlfriends got our
horse back for us.”
    Trixie
allowed herself a proud smile—and that was a mistake.
    Charlene
Murrow said sternly, “This could have been a gathering of a much different kind
this morning, if you girls had drowned in the river or been taken away by
Burke.”
    Trixie
winced as she remembered the night before. “Everything turned out all right,
though,” she said simply. She would tell the Murrows about the connection between Burke and old Gunnar later. “We really owe it all
to Wilhelmina.”
    The
woman shook her head. “No one owes me a thing,” she said. “I was a fool—a
dangerous one. In spite of the years I’ve spent developing objectivity, I let
myself believe in a ghost story that was quite flimsy. I believed the retrocognition much too easily. Then, as a consequence, I
believed I’d seen the ghost. If I hadn’t been such a fool, I might have
realized that someone galloping past me on a horse in the middle of the night
was a sign of something unnatural, not super natural. I might have done something to help then and
there, instead of merely taking notes.” Wilhelmina looked down at the table,
shaking her head in dismay.
    “You
helped when the time came,” Honey said. “That’s what really matters.”
    But
Wilhelmina wasn’t easily consoled. “No,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to
help, of course. But what really matters is that I violated the spirit of
scientific inquiry. My objectivity on this project is ruined. I’ll have to give
up and go home.”
    “Oh,
no,” Trixie exclaimed sympathetically. Wilhelmina shrugged. “It’s a small loss.
There was no true evidence of phenomena, after all. Everything we observed was
part of a prank.”
    Trixie
darted nervous looks at Charlene and Bill. From their calm expressions, she
decided that Wilhelmina had already told them the story of Gus’s “haunting.”
    “Gus!”
Trixie said aloud. “Is he all right? Did he make it back here last night after
he pulled me out of the river? Where is he?”
    This
new barrage of questions produced confused looks from Bill and Charlene. “Gus
is out in the stable, working with the horses. What do you mean about pulling
you out of the river?” Charlene asked.
    Trixie
told about how she’d seen Gus looking down at her from the riverbank. “I just
reached up, grabbed his hand, and pulled