The Mystery of the Headless Horseman

animal, his coat matted with burrs, leaped joyfully to greet them. In another instant, the forest path was a tangle of waving legs, spinning bicycle wheels, and a wildly wagging tail.
    The tail belonged to Reddy. The other end of him was busy kissing two of his favorite people.
    “Dumb dog!” Trixie said good-naturedly to him later, when she and Honey had brushed themselves off. “Go home!”
    Reddy pretended he didn’t understand English. He pressed himself lovingly against Trixie’s knee, to show her he was willing to follow her to the ends of the earth.
    Honey picked up her fallen bicycle. “Oh, let’s take him with us, Trix. The silly old thing will keep us company on the way home.”
    “Some company.” Trixie looked down at the cunning canine. “Mart hasn’t taught you a thing, has he? You bad boy!”
    Reddy rolled his eyes at her and tried to look merely misunderstood.
    Trixie sighed. “All right, Reddy. You can come with us. Let’s go!”
    Instantly, Reddy went—back the way the girls had come.
    They watched until his still-wagging tail disappeared around a bend in the trail.
    Honey laughed, and after a moment, Trixie laughed with her.
    “Moms was right,” she said at last, wiping her eyes. “Give that mischievous dog an order, and he does exactly the opposite. I think I’ll let Mart make him into frankfurters after all.”
    It was twilight when the two friends stood once more on the hill above the hollow.
    “If you grip my bike and tell me you’re watching a headless horseman tonight,” Honey announced, “I’m going to faint dead away. You’ve been warned!”
    But Trixie was not watching a phantom. She was watching a bareheaded man riding a yellow bicycle out of the clearing. His back was ramrod straight, his pedaling motions slow but sure. He steadied the handlebars with the tips of dignified fingers. Slanted across his forehead was a white adhesive bandage.
    The man on the yellow bicycle was Harrison.
    He was well out of sight by the time Trixie and Honey arrived at the little house. Rose Crandall had seen them coming, and she met them at the front door.
    “Well, now, and isn’t this nice!” she exclaimed, wiping her hands on her flowered apron. “Three visitors within minutes of each other. And how was the bazaar, my dears?” Trixie told her, then asked, “Was that Harrison we just saw leaving here?”
    “It was indeed.” Mrs. Crandall led the way to the kitchen where her plump look-alike sister was shredding lettuce into a salad bowl.
    “Ah, that naughty man.” Polly Ward shook her head. “At his age, he should have been content to rest in the hospital a while longer, but he insisted on being discharged. He’s bound and determined he’s going back to work tomorrow.”
    “He just stopped by to pick up the yellow bicycle,” Mrs. Crandall said. “He wanted to look at one of Jonathan’s books, too.” She sighed. “I declare, I don’t know why there’s all this sudden interest in Mother Goose. ”
    Trixie’s fingers dug into Honey’s arm. “Harrison looked at the Mother Goose book? How did he know about it?”
    Polly Ward chuckled as she sliced a fat red tomato. “Is Mother Goose supposed to be a secret? If so, Harrison’s not the only one interested in her. Someone telephoned Rose about that book not ten minutes ago. They wanted to buy it. Can you imagine?”
    “And—and did you sell it to her?” Trixie asked anxiously.
    “Oh, it wasn’t a her,” Mrs. Crandall said. “It was a him. But after all the things he said about my husband, the only thing I’d sell Richard Parkinson would be a one-way ticket out of town.”
    “Is the book still here?” Honey asked. “Could we see it?”
    “Don’t tell us you want to look at ‘Simple Simon,’ too,” Polly Ward said. “My stars, today that rhyme is more popular than the national anthem on the Fourth of July.”
    When Mrs. Crandall handed them the book, Trixie and Honey were bitterly disappointed. There was nothing on the “Simple Simon” page but the nursery rhyme.
    “We—that is, Honey and I—thought we might find out where your birthday present was hidden,” Trixie said. “I was so sure there’d be something here. Mrs. Ward said the clue was: ‘It’s simple.’ ”
    Rose Crandall smiled. “So that’s it! Oh, that Polly! She has a dreadful memory. And she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about the clue. We think, you see, that it might give us an idea about the hiding place of—of something