The Mystery off Old Telegraph Road

poised and tactful cousin acting so foolish.
    “Oh, Honey,” Trixie said between her giggles, “we don’t dare fight anymore. It’s too dangerous!”
    “I agree with you, Trixie,” Honey said more seriously. “Fighting with you makes me feel too horrible. Let’s never fight again.”
    “I was all set to apologize this morning,” Trixie told Honey. “Then, when you weren’t on the bus—”
    “Oh, Trixie, I know,” Honey said. “Jim has decided we should start riding with Ben. He thinks it might keep him out of trouble. I had to go along with it this morning because I didn’t want Jim to know we’d had a fight. Jim’s riding home with Ben, too, but I just refused. I had to talk to you and try to straighten things out.”
    “Well, everything’s straightened out now,” Trixie said emphatically. “Let’s not do anything to un- straighten it, ever again.”
    “It’s a deal,” Honey said. “I’ll finish doing the direction arrows, since you started them. Then both of us can work at the sign-up booth Wednesday while the boys take the posters out and put them up. Ill call Di—she wasn’t in school today—to find out if she can help.
    “Then we can—oops! Here’s my stop, Trixie. I’ll call you after supper!” Honey gathered up her books and dashed for the door of the bus.
    As the bus pulled away, Honey stood in her driveway and waved good-bye to Trixie.
    I feel as wonderful this afternoon as I felt awful this morning, Trixie thought as she got off the bus at Crabapple Farm. Honey and I are friends again.
    “Yippee!” she shouted, running up the driveway to the house.

The Sign-Up ● 8

    ON WEDNESDAY, during her study hall, Trixie went back to the art department to pick up the posters and pledge cards from Mr. Crider.
    Trixie was delighted with the work. “How did you do them?” she asked. “They’re all so uniform. They look more like something that came off a printing press.”
    “They were done with a printing technique, Trixie,” Mr. Crider told her, “although they weren’t put on a press. The technique is called serigraphy, or silk screening. Would you like to see how it’s done?”
    When Trixie nodded eagerly, Mr. Crider led her to a small room in the back of the art department. “Here’s where we work,” Mr. Crider said. “The process is called silk screening because, as you can see, we use a piece of silk cloth that’s been stretched tight on a wooden frame.
    “We make a stencil of the artwork, cutting out any places where we want ink to show through on the finished piece. Laying the stencil down on the piece of silk, we paint over the openings with a black, waxy substance.” Mr. Crider showed Trixie the stencil that had been used for her posters, putting it down on the silk screen to demonstrate.
    “After it dries for half an hour or so, we prepare a mixture of glue and cold water—about a fifty-fifty ratio. We spread the glue mixture over the screen with a squeegee, which is a flat rubber blade like the ones a gas station attendant uses to wash car windows.
    “We let the first coat of glue dry, then we apply a second coat and let that dry.
    “Finally, we use kerosene and a stiff scrub brush to wash the waxy substance off the areas of the screen where we want the ink to go through, and the screen is ready to use,” Mr. Crider concluded.
    “Whew!” Trixie exclaimed. “That really sounds complicated!”
    “The preparation of the screen is fairly demanding,” Mr. Crider admitted, “but once it’s ready, the silk-screening process itself is quite simple. All we have to do is pour a generous quantity of paint on one end of the stencil and work it across to the other with the squeegee. As long as the screen and the surface we re printing on are held steady, there’s not too much that can go wrong.”
    “That’s a lot better than our system of doing each poster by hand,” Trixie admitted. “Sometimes if two or three of us each do a poster, it’s hard to tell that they’re all supposed to be the same poster.”
    Mr. Crider chuckled. “Next time you have a project like that to do, I’d suggest that you go to the library and take out a book on silk screening. There are several books that show beginners how to get started. You don’t really need all of this complicated equipment, either. Some of the easier methods use plain brown wrapping paper instead of wax and glue. If your design is simple enough, you can just put the wrapping paper over your