The Red Trailer Mystery

discovered it yet. Next time we go searching for missing heirs I’m going to take along a spray gun!" She turned around just in time to receive a smart slap in the face from an overhanging vine that twined itself around her neck and stayed there for several minutes. "Don’t look now," she called back to Honey, "but the forest is following me!" Honey laughed so hard at the sight of Trixie trying to extricate herself, with the reins in one hand and a sandwich in the other, that she almost fell off her horse. But the path gradually widened as it grew steeper, and in the end it did lead to the crest of the hill.
    As Trixie had said, the hill was really a small mountain, and they had an excellent view of the smaller hills and valleys below. To the east sprawled Rushkill Farms, with its neat sloping garden and pastureland. On the west they could see Autoville, a toy village. North of them, tucked between thickly wooded areas, lay the Smith farm. And, as an anticlimax, bounding up the steep trail toward them were Reddy and Bud, tongues lolling.
    "Let’s ignore them," Trixie said grimly. "We’re the ones who always get lost; they never do."
    They started down the hill, taking another trail that looked as though it would take them straight to the trailer camp. But it didn’t; it zigzagged in all directions, and by the time the girls arrived at the bottom, they had no idea which was north and which was south. The dogs had left them long ago, and they stared at each other in despair.
    "Boy scouts," Honey said forlornly, "lick their fingers and hold them up to the wind or something."
    "There’s no wind, in the first place," Trixie muttered sourly, "and if there were, how would we know in which direction it was blowing?"
    Honey looked up at the thick canopy of evergreen branches overhead. "If we could only see the sun," she said thoughtfully. "It rises in the west and sets in the east, doesn’t it?"
    "No!" Trixie almost yelled. "It’s the other way around. Besides, it must be just about midway between the two now, so that’s no help."
    "I suppose we could just give the horses their heads," Honey mumbled to herself. "They’d take us back to the academy eventually."
    "I wouldn’t trust them," Trixie sniffed. "They’re so hot and tired, I’ll bet they’d head for the nearest stall, which is probably at Rushkill Farms. All I need to finish me is one look at sour-faced Snell."
    Honey, who was never as impatient as Trixie, smiled. "Remember the time you and Jim and I got lost in the woods near home? He said if we could see the river, we’d be all right. He was going to climb a tree, but we were so far down in the valley—"
    "Honey!" Trixie interrupted. "You’re a genius. We’re not in the valley now; this is a plateau. Here, hold my reins. I’ll climb this black walnut. It’s got the shortest trunk and the strongest-looking branches of any of the trees around here." As she shinned up the trunk she said, "Wonder what a black walnut’s doing in these woods. They’re very valuable trees. We must be near or on private property."
    At the first fork she stopped for breath, then climbed higher. At the third, she uttered a little scream. "Honey Wheeler, I don’t know how we do it! Were on the very edge of the Smith’s abandoned orchard."
    "Wha-at?" Honey demanded incredulously. "You mean if we had kept going instead of stopping, we would have known where we were in a few seconds?" Trixie grinned down at her. "That’s right. We are too dumb to be allowed away from home without guides." Perched in the fork, she went on, "I forgot to tell you that this morning on my way to the Smiths’ I saw something shiny and metallic gleaming in the sunlight on a rise of ground west of the main highway. I thought it might be the handlebars of Jim’s bike, because that mound is only a short distance from where we saw the blue jeans."
    "Oh, Trixie!" Honey gasped, head thrown back. "You did investigate, didn’t you?"
    "I tried to," Trixie said ruefully. "But I just couldn’t push my way through the thicket. But now I’m going to climb higher and see what I can see. Like the bear who went over the mountain," she finished with a chuckle.
    Honey giggled and sang the old song as Trixie pulled herself farther up among the branches of the old black walnut.

"The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the moun—tain,
Was all that he could see!"

    She stopped with her mouth open as Trixie suddenly