The Mystery on the Mississippi

couldn’t go all the way to New Orleans, I’ll be glad when we get back to St. Louis. Even if Captain Martin didn’t think a man jumped overboard, I know it was a man Honey and I saw swimming. It wasn’t any buoy. That man was Pierre Lontard, too. He’ll show up again. You just watch and see if he doesn’t.”
    “I hope I watch and see the car we’re to meet here,” Brian said as he put down the suitcase he was carrying and brushed the perspiration from his forehead. “Do you think we should go inside the motel?”
    “Of course,” Jim answered. “Whoever’s going to meet us wouldn’t be waiting around for us at the door. They’d be inside someplace. Here, Dan, you take this bag now, and I’ll go and look.” Jim held the door open for the girls.
    “We’ll wait over here in the lobby for you,” Trixie told him. “I hope we can get started back right away.” The Bob-Whites found seats facing the street. “That park we walked through was pretty,” Trixie said. “Some of the places we passed, though, looked pretty dilapidated. I guess that’s because there aren’t any steamboats anymore, and the town has probably moved away from the river. It’s kind of sad, isn’t it, Honey, for that to have happened?”
    “Yes. It would be wonderful to have seen Cairo when steamboats were all over the two rivers, the Ohio and the Mississippi. Don’t you remember that glamorous old movie of Edna Ferber’s Showboat that we watched on TV? I used to think it would be neat to be born on the Cotton Blossom, as Magnolia Hawks was. And when I saw the movie, I thought Gaylord Ravenal was so handsome.” Honey sighed blissfully.
    “Gosh! Girls!” Mart threw one leg over an arm of the lounge chair, where he was sprawled. “Give actors some black, flashing eyes and shirts with ruffles on ’em, and girls don’t care what’s inside of ’em.”
    “That’s not right, Mart Belden, and you know it,” Honey said indignantly. “Men were handsome in those days, and you’ll have to admit it.”
    “Why do you suppose the places around here have Egyptian names?” Brian changed the subject calmly. He couldn’t stand it when the Bob-Whites argued. “We passed Thebes on the way down, and that’s where Captain Hawks of your Cotton Blossom lived, Honey. Now we’re in Cairo, only they call it ‘Kayroh’ instead of ‘Kyeroh.’ How come all this Egyptian stuff around here?”
    “Well, you see, it was this way—”
    “Not again, Mart! You don’t know the answer again!” Dan hid his face in his hands.
    “I do. When I wonder about anything, I try to find the answer. Sometimes you just keep wondering. They call this area ‘Egypt’ because of all the rich delta land around here—like the delta of the Nile River. And it’s because of all the corn, too, that they raise in this rich soil.”
    “Okay, Mart. That figures. Thanks. Just to keep the record straight, though, I don’t spend all my time wondering.”
    “Dan sure doesn’t!” Trixie said emphatically. “If you’d just give someone else credit once in a while, Mart, you’d realize you don’t come up with all the answers. If Dan hadn’t done anything but wonder about those jewel thieves in New York, I’d have been found somewhere with my throat slit.”
    “What the heck are you talking about, Trixie?” Jim had joined the group and stood listening. “You all sound as though you’ve been racketing about something. I’ll give you something to bother about. The clerk at the desk said that no one has asked for any of us. He’s sort of a wise guy.”
    “In what way?” Trixie asked.
    “There are a lot of people around that desk. See them? I guess he was nervous. I asked him if anyone had inquired about someone named Wheeler. He said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember. People ask me a dozen questions a minute. Now, if you’d asked about someone called Schimmelpennick—I’d remember a name like that.’ Of course, everybody laughed.”
    “That made him think he was a big shot, I guess,” Mart said. “Did you tell him off?”
    “In a way, I guess I did. I told him I thought Schimmelpennick was an honorable name, but I was inquiring about Wheeler.”
    “Thereby making an enemy of him,” Mart declared. “Deflate a windbag, and you have.... What did you say, Brian?”
    “I said it’s obvious that the guy who was supposed to pick us up hasn’t arrived,” Brian said calmly. “It won’t hurt us to wait here for a while. I like to