The Mystery on the Mississippi

with spies. Lots of people want to know what’s going on in those airplane factories.”
    Mart exploded, laughing. “Do you think for a minute any spy would think a bunch of teen-age kids would know anything about plans our government might have?”
    Trixie bristled. “Pierre Lontard did see us arriving with a big executive of one of the companies, didn’t he? That is, he could have seen us if he’d wanted to. I think he wanted to, so there!”
    “I do, too,” Honey said loyally, “else why did he act so funny about those papers in his briefcase?”
    “She has something there,” Jim told the other boys soberly. “You have to admit that.”
    Mart was unconvinced. “All coincidence. Simply just happened. Let’s skip Trix and her suspicions for a while. That’s the Memorial over there, where you turn off to Lindell Boulevard, isn’t it, Jim?”
    Jim rounded the curve when-the light changed, then headed the car into a parking space. “Everybody out!” he ordered.
    “Let’s stop at the office first,” Brian suggested. “Maybe we can find out when the next steamboat leaves from the waterfront.”
    “Two bits says it’ll be tomorrow!” Mart shouted hopefully. “Brian, you ask. There’s the office.”
    They crowded around the desk, and they all spoke at once. Just past them lay the glamorous steamboat room.
    “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down there! One at a time,” the gray-haired man at the desk said with a smile. “What’s that? Next steamboat? What one are you talking about? There’s only one left on the Mississippi that takes trips of any consequence. She’s the Delta Queen. ”
    “That’s our boat!” Mart shouted. “When does she depart?”
    “A couple of months from now.”
    “What?” the Bob-Whites chorused.
    “I said a couple of months from now—more or less. She only makes one trip a year. She leaves Cincinnati and runs down the Ohio to Cairo, Illinois, around two hundred miles south of here. That’s where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. Then she goes on to New
    Orleans and back up the river to St. Paul. She stops here going and coming—only twice a year.”
    “And we’ve missed her?” Trixie asked. The faces of the Bob-Whites fell in discouragement. “Not another steamboat of any kind?”
    “Not a single one. There’s an old one going to pieces down at the wharf. You can go and see her. There’s another one made into a showboat. You can see a melodrama aboard her any night in the week.”
    “Not anything that travels on the river?” Jim asked. “There’s the Admiral. It’s an excursion boat. It’s nothing like an old-time steamboat. It’s just for dancing and picnicking. Only cruises around about a ten-mile circle. She leaves several times a day.”
    “Not that!” Mart said in disgust. “Come on, gang. We can at least go and see what real steamboats used to look like.”
    The huge exhibit included authentic reproductions of several steamboat rooms typical of those on the mammoth paddle-wheelers found on the Mississippi a century before.
    The pilothouse stood several steps above the floor, its huge wheel more than a man’s height in diameter. In a tall chair, a dummy pilot sat gazing through the glass window. At his side, a bench sprawled—just such a bench as the cub pilot Samuel Clemens occupied as he watched his hero swing the big wheel to outguess the hazardous, swirling current.
    “Golly!” Mart exclaimed. “It’s no wonder a guy wanted to be a pilot in those days. It’s really neat! Look at the murals all around us. Seems almost like being on the river!”
    “If you think it seems real over there in the pilothouse, just come over here.” Trixie beckoned from where she and Honey stood, hands tightly clasped, noses pressed against the glass windows of the lady’s lounge. “Heavens, it’s all red velvet! Look at that chandelier! Crystal and spangles and paintings and—”
    “I’m liable to bust right open and die if we don’t get to take some kind of a ride on that river!” Jim spoke with real feeling.
    “It’ll have to be the excursion boat Admiral, then,” Trixie said sadly.
    “I’ll never settle for that. There must be something else. If we can get Dan away from that display of old guns up there on the balcony, we can go and ask that man at the office again. Dan!” Jim’s voice echoed through the big room.
    “Let him stay there. The rest of us can go ask,” Mart said. “You’ll never get a future New York policeman away from Kentucky