The Mystery of the Missing Heiress

fresh air, Jupiter snorting and shaking his black head, restive under Jim’s tight control.
    Ahead of them, at the edge of the clearing, they could see the rustic old cottage of Mr. Maypenny, the Wheeler gamekeeper. Nearby, Dan Mangan
    was cutting up a fallen tree.
    When he heard the Bob-White whistle, he shouted a welcome they couldn’t quite hear, but he grinned a greeting they couldn’t mistake.
    When they neared and called out the news, his grin broke into a whoop of joy.
    “One-seventh of the car is yours,” Mart added as he dismounted and dropped his reins to ground-tie Strawberry. “Jim and Brian will give you a driving lesson right away.”
    “How about that?A station wagon of our own!” Dan shouted to Mr. Maypenny, who had come out of his house when he heard Dan’s whoop.
    “It’s no more than you all deserve,” the gamekeeper said. His eyes twinkled as Mart and Dan, irrepressible, went into an Indian war dance. It stopped abruptly, though, when Jupiter reared, exciting the gentler horses.
    Mart raced to pick up Strawberry’s reins, while the girls calmed their mounts.
    The elderly man watched thoughtfully. Trixie wondered if he was thinking how miraculously Regan’s rebellious nephew Dan had changed from a wild member of a tough New York City gang into the hardworking, happy lad he now was! It pleased her to think that the Bob-Whites had had something to do with that change.
    “Dan, can we pick you up on the way back?” Jim called over his shoulder. “Were riding the horses
    into the woods for exercise.”
    “Go along with them,” Mr. Maypenny told Dan. “Lay down the saw—the wood can wait—and saddle old Spartan. It’ll do him good to get a little trail riding, too.”
    With a shout, Trixie held up her hand, fingers crossed. “I was hoping and wishing Dan could come!”
    Dan rested his saw against the trunk of a tree and grinned his thanks to Mr. Maypenny. It didn’t take him long to saddle Spartan and fall in behind the other Bob-Whites.
    Single file, they rode on. Through heavy, overhanging branches they could glimpse the blue of the sky and feel the soft touch of late summer wind on their tanned faces.
    Stirred by the sound of their voices and the yammering of the excited dogs, flocks of scolding birds rose. Little ground squirrels and cottontail rabbits skittered for refuge.
    At the end of the woods trail, Jim, who was leading, held up his arm to signal the others to stop. From now on, the ground was barred to horses. Signs proclaimed this order.
    The Bob-Whites tied their horses. Farther on, afoot, they came to other notices forbidding any further progress.
    “I wish Dad owned this part between here and the bluff,” Jim said. “He’d do more than warn people. He’d fence off this part. He may do it yet, if the county will let him.”
    Erosion had undermined the lip of the bluff so that only a dangerously thin shelf remained, ready to crumble and fall without warning.
    Carefully the Bob-Whites circled the area till they stood on higher and firmer ground. Here, in a clump of pines, they would eat their sandwiches.
    Beneath them the mighty Hudson flowed. Flat ferries, heavy with beetle-sized cars, churned trails that rocked tiny, white-sailed pleasure craft in their wake. Gulls wheeled, dipping and soaring to the tempo of tugboat whistles.
    Immediately below the Bob-Whites lay their objective: a strip of marshy land to be reached by a worn and precipitous footpath. Swampy, of little use to industry, it fascinated the young people. In late fall it was a resting place for fowl on their north-south flight. Even when the Beldens’ grandfather had been a boy, botany classes from Sleepy-side schools had hunted there to fill herbariums with specimens.
    Diana, shading her eyes to look far up the river, walked, unthinking, into the forbidden area, only to be jerked back by Jim with such force that she sprawled on the ground.
    “Can’t you read?” he asked, fright hoarsening his voice. “That shelf of earth is so thin that a rabbit’s whisper might break it off. Don’t do that again,
    Diana!” He helped her to her feet.
    “That was a close call,” Mart said seriously. “Girls! They have to be watched just like babies! Let’s go back.”
    “We will not, Mart.” Trixie’s voice was impatient. “You’re a fine one to talk! You’d have drowned half a dozen times in the Wheeler lake if a girl—Honey— hadn’t pulled you out when you were learning to dive off the high