The Mystery of the Headless Horseman

can’t wait to see how they turned out myself.”
    Still talking, she led the way out through the kitchen door and into the small backyard.
    Trixie had been on the point of telling Jim quietly about her latest discovery. But when she caught sight of the little garden, she promptly forgot all about ghostly cloaks.
    Brilliantly colored fall flowers grew around a tiny green lawn. Behind it stood the fruit trees, each with its own series of white letters painted on its trunk.
    “Gleeps!” Trixie breathed. “That tree looks like it has different kinds of leaves on different branches. So does that one over there! What’s going on?”
    Mrs. Ward chuckled. “This is Jonathan’s doing. He was a great one for gardening. It was one of his hobbies. He did all this,” she said, waving a hand around.
    “But what about the trees?” Trixie asked.
    “Jonathan was in the process of experimenting with them. He was trying to grow three different kinds of fruit on one tree, you see.”
    “I still don’t understand,” Trixie said.
    “But I do!” Jim exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve just remembered. I read an article about it once, Trix. If you cut a bud from one tree—let’s say you take it from a cherry tree, for instance—you can graft that bud, called a scion, onto another tree.”
    Trixie frowned. “Do you have to graft it to another cherry tree?”
    “No, that’s just the point. You can graft it to a peach tree, or an apple tree, or certain other species of fruit trees. Some work together better than others, of course.”
    “So when you’ve finished, you’ve got an apple-and-cherry tree? Or a peach-and-plum?”
    Mrs. Ward nodded. “That’s right, Trixie. Some gardeners do it to conserve space. I suspect that Jonathan tried it just to see if it would work.”
    “But what about the green bandages?” Trixie asked.
    Mrs. Ward laughed. “I don’t think they’re really bandages, Trixie. It’s some special sort of waxed twine Jonathan used every time he made a graft. It held the scion in place, I think, until
    the graft started to take hold.”
    “And I’ll bet I’ve figured out what those letters on the tree trunks mean!” Jim exclaimed. “They were painted there to help Mr. Crandall keep track of which species of fruits he had growing on which trees. Is that right?”
    “You’re quite right,” Mrs. Ward answered.
    “So there’s another mystery cleared up,” Jim teased Trixie.
    Trixie wandered over to the trees and touched their trunks lightly with her fingertips. “You know,” she called absently over her shoulder, “I’ll bet Moms has heard of these kinds of experiments. I should have thought to ask her.” She touched a gnarled trunk. “Hey, this old grand-daddy of an apple tree is marked with the letters LMN , yet it doesn’t have any grafts at all. I wonder why?”
    “I think Jonathan must have decided to leave that one alone,” Mrs. Ward said, on her way into the house with Jim at her heels. “It’s pretty ancient, and maybe it couldn’t stand the shock of grafting. There’s no way of finding out for sure, though. I’m afraid Rose threw away all the tree records long ago.”
    Trixie paused to look at the back of the little house. From where she was standing, she could see the two barred cellar windows. They were set level with the ground, and something lay on the neat flagged path in front of the windows. Trixie hurried across to investigate.
    It was nothing startling, but suddenly Trixie had no doubt in her mind that she had found the answer to one of her many questions.
    “Pebbles!” she muttered. “Just a handful of small pebbles thrown at the windowpane brought Harrison hurrying to the cellar. Then the practical joker dashed indoors and locked him in.”
    Slowly she wandered back into the kitchen, deep in thought. She was just in time to hear Jim grunt as he lifted the heavy carton filled with jars.
    “Hold on, Jim, and I’ll help,” Trixie said. She hurried to his side.
    Together they carried the jams and jellies out to the station wagon, then turned to load the bicycles. Mrs. Ward was there to help them.
    They had to put down the backseat to make room for the bikes, and moving the derby hat to a safe spot on top of the jam carton reminded Trixie of the butler. “Maybe we ought to take Harrison’s bike as well,” Trixie said, thinking of what Di might say if they didn’t.
    “No,” Jim said. “We’ll leave it here if Mrs. Crandall doesn’t mind. We haven’t