The Red Trailer Mystery

must he down and rest and let us take care of you."
    "Not at all," Miss Trask said briskly. "I’ll be perfectly all right in a minute. You girls run along. It’s a long ride to Rushkill Farms."
    "We wouldn’t think of leaving you," Honey insisted. "You can’t do a thing—" She stopped as someone rapped sharply on the trailer door.
    Trixie opened it, and a uniformed attendant handed her a yellow envelope. "Telegram for Miss Trask," he said. "We signed for it at the gate. Okay?" Trixie nodded.
    "Open it, please," Miss Trask said. "And read it out loud. I haven’t any secrets."
    The telegram was from Honey’s mother, and Trixie read it slowly. "‘RETURNING HOME THURSDAY EVENING. WOULD LIKE HONEY THERE WHEN WE ARRIVE.’
    "Oh, dear," Trixie gasped. "This ruins everything. Your hand won’t be well enough for you to drive bade Thursday morning."
    "Of course it will," Miss Trask said quickly. "I won’t even know I burned it by then. I’m quite ambidextrous, anyway, and get along with my left hand almost as well as I can with my right. Run along, you two."
    The girls cleaned up the trailer and left a lunch of salad and sandwiches and iced tea for Miss Trask. So it was after ten o’clock when they set off on Prince and Peanuts for the long ride to Rushkill Farms. They took both dogs so Miss Trask would not have to worry about them, but it was so hot they stayed close to the bridle path and showed no desire of running away.
    The deer flies clustered on the horses’ sweaty necks, and Trixie and Honey were kept busy brushing them off with evergreen branches. "This is awful," Trixie groaned, "and I know we’re just wasting our time. We won’t find Jim at Rushkill Farms. He’s found out by now that he won’t get a job at any camp without a reference. And Mrs. Smith says the man who runs the Rushkill place is an old crosspatch."
    "When did she tell you that?" Honey demanded. Then her eyebrows arched suspiciously. "So that’s where you walked to this morning!"
    Trixie then told Honey that the red-trailer family had left in the night and that Mrs. Smith’s album locket was missing. "I’m so confused now," she admitted, "that I can’t make head nor tail out of anything. What are your ideas?"
    "Why, it’s very simple," Honey said, "although, knowing Mrs. Smith, I don’t blame you for being confused. Don’t you see, Trixie? The Darnells had to sneak away in the night after they heard that Sally had seen us. They must have heard the radio reports about the theft of the Robin and can guess that we must have heard them, too. They couldn’t risk leaving that trailer at the Smith farm another day after we visited the place. You said yourself yesterday that we ought to notify the police of our suspicions."
    "I never thought about that," Trixie said. "And to be honest with you, I went back there this morning to see if the Darnell trailer was the Robin. I felt I ought to tell Mrs. Smith it had been stolen."
    "So did I," Honey said quietly, "but I sort of think Mrs. Smith must have heard the broadcasts of the trailer thefts, too. That woman is no fool for all her kindheartedness. My guess is that she liked the family and felt they deserved a break. As long as she never set eyes on their trailer, she wouldn’t have to face the fact that it was the missing Robin."
    "That sounds just like Mrs. Smith," Trixie cried. "And according to her, her husband is just as kind-hearted. But what I don’t see is, if Mr. Darnell ran away because he was afraid we would report him to the police, how did he dare to stop at the Smith farm in the first place?"
    "He had to take that risk," Honey explained. "He couldn’t leave the trailer stuck in the mud. And actually it wasn’t much of a risk then. The theft of the Robin probably didn’t come over the air until late Sunday afternoon, and with all that rain there must have been so much static he could feel pretty sure people living out in the country wouldn’t turn on their radios."
    "And Mr. Smith," Trixie finished, "is so busy with those beans that he probably never has time to listen to the radio."
    Honey nodded. "And his wife is such a darling that she probably wouldn’t listen. Remember how mad she got when she told us the Darnells had been evicted from their home because they couldn’t pay the rent?"
    "What I can’t understand," Trixie said with a sigh, "is how that family could steal her babies’ pictures after all her kindness. And if they did, why didn’t they take along the