The Mystery on the Mississippi

toward the towboat.
    “Now you’ve offended her,” Honey told Trixie. “She did save your life!”
    “I wonder,” Trixie said slowly. “For a while it seemed touch and go which was more important to her—my purse or my life.” She hastily checked the contents of her purse to be sure the papers were still safely there.
    Honey put her arm tightly around Trixie. “It was a frightfully narrow escape. Oh, Trixie, you’re not quite like yourself... not quite fair to Mrs. Aguilera!”
    “Maybe not,” Trixie admitted. “Maybe not, but it’s the way I feel!”
    When they joined the boys and Honey told them what had happened, Trixie said nothing. She listened quietly to what they had to say and told them that she would try to be more careful in the future. All the while, though, and for a long time after, she didn’t forget the odd look on Mrs. Aguilera’s face just before the accident.

    Once out of the city area, the river flowed through pleasant country. Jefferson Barracks showed up against the trees. Streets in scattered neighborhoods seemed to walk right down to the river in a friendly fashion. Boys and girls waved from the bottoms of overgrown bypaths. From the river itself came enticing smells of wet sand, dry sand, blossoming shrubs, dank marshes, and the sweet fragrance of willows. Occasionally a long-legged heron fluttered its wings, then stood watching the tow slide by.
    Soon the channel narrowed, and limestone cliffs rose in ever ascending heights from both banks. Hawks, disturbed by the noise of the diesel engines, spread their broad wings and screamed.
    “Paul told me there’s a cave somewhere along here that runs back several hundred feet underground,” Mart told the Bob-Whites. “That may be it right back in there. See that black hole? That may be the entrance. Paul said Jesse James hid there once when about twenty men were chasing him. He shot every one of them. Yes, he did—Paul told me so—and then he got away.”
    “Missouri’s full of caves,” Jim said, adding, “I sure
    never will forget that sinkhole in Bob-White Cave in the Ozarks, that one Trixie fell into. Gosh, Trixie, you were almost a goner that time.”
    Trixie leaned back against a barrel hatch and sighed dreamily. “I was almost a goner till all of you showed up to save me. Bob-Whites always show up when one of our members is in danger. That’s usually me. And you’re usually the one who leads the rescuers, Jim.”
    “Well, for heaven’s sake, try and keep out of trouble.” Jim’s face was serious. “I don’t like that narrow escape you just had, Trixie, way up there in front of the tow.”
    “Forget it! Say, I can imagine just the way Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn felt when they were floating down this river on their raft. Tom said, ‘The-sky looks ever so deep,’ and it does.”
    “Yeah, and when Tom said to Huck, ‘That’s a mighty lot of water out there,’ do you remember what Huck answered? Remember that, Mart?”
    “Uh-huh. He said, ‘Yes, and you’re only lookin’ at the top of it!’ Gosh, do you suppose we’ll get to go to Hannibal before we go back to New York? I’d sure hate to have to tell the kids at school that we were as near as St. Louis and didn’t go there. Boy, would I love to see Jackson’s Island!”
    “Yeah, and that fence Tom Sawyer whitewashed!” Dan said.
    “Why can’t you be satisfied with the place we are now?” Trixie asked, looking up at Mart. “You wanted a ride on the Mississippi River, and here you are.”
    “Sure, here we are, and it’s swell. But who brought up Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Trixie?”
    “I did. I hope we can go to Hannibal, but right now I’m almost perfectly happy.”
    An hour sped by, then another. The cliffs grew higher and higher, their long shadows reaching across the quick-changing channel. Once a towboat came close. Everyone—both crew members and officers—crowded to the rails to gossip. From their huddle halfway back on the tow, the Bob-Whites waved lazily and happily. They watched the other boat as it labored back of its long tow of coal barges, watched it till it disappeared from sight. The sun dropped lower in the cloudless sky. On shore, birds fluttered, seeking their nests in the rocky ledges. A cool wind came up out of the east, and a whistle’s sharp blast announced that dinner was waiting.
    Protesting that they couldn’t possibly be hungry again, the Bob-Whites ate all the fried chicken in sight. “Do you know what?”