The Red Trailer Mystery

backward, cringing a little. "I didn’t. Honest, Al. It was that redheaded kid, I tell you. If you’d only listened to me, none of this would have happened. He took the jack out of the van, and he loosened the valve core on that tire so we’d have a nice slow leak. Why didn’t you let me tie him up and gag him when we found him asleep up in the loft last night?"
    "Sure, sure," Al jeered, lighting a match to his cigarette finally. But he had lost some of his poise, for Trixie could see that his hand was shaking. "You tie him up and gag him and then what? He smothers to death, and we have a nice little murder on our hands." Jeff had apparently noticed Al’s growing nervousness, for he said quickly, "What about the guy you slugged and left in a closed car with the motor running? When he gets a lungful of carbon monoxide, he ain’t going to be too healthy."
    Al carelessly blew a series of smoke rings. "Ah, somebody’ll find him before enough gas seeps up through the floorboards. I just want him to sleep nice and quiet until we can get the van down here. So will you please pick up that jack and get going?"
    "What jack?" Jeff demanded sourly. "If you see one lying around, you’ve got better eyes than I have. I tell you, that redheaded punk—"
    Al lost control of himself then. "Stop yapping about that kid! It’s getting on my nerves. He runs away from state reform school and stumbles on this old wreck.
    Sees a lot of trailer equipment lying around, but does that mean anything to him? How could it, blockhead? Unless he ran away with a walkie-talkie, he doesn’t know about our racket or that a red trailer is missing. Sure, he sees the van, but what of it? This old barn isn’t pretty, but it’s got a stone foundation and a good roof. Why doesn’t the kid figure this is a legitimate moving and storage business we’re in? That’s what it says on the van. We charge cheap rates because we wait till we get a full van, then deliver the items all at once instead of making a lot of expensive trips up and down the river." He threw away his cigarette, grinding it savagely under his heel. "I don’t know why I tell you the spiel all over again. Thought you memorized it once, so you’d know what to say if anyone stopped you on the road."
    "You’re the one who’s wasting time now," Jeff said sarcastically. "You’re the brains of the outfit, and yet you let that kid get away after he hid up there last night listening to every word we said before we discovered him."
    Al’s narrow, too-close-together eyes glanced up at the loft, and Trixie’s heart missed a beat. "He was sound asleep," he said, but he didn’t sound sure of himself anymore. "I can tell whether a kid’s playing possum or not. And even if he did hear what we said, he’s not going to run to the troopers. They’d clap him back in reform school before he began to sing."
    "Reform school!" Jeff laughed hollowly. "If you’d ever spent any time in one of them places, you’d know better. Asleep or awake, whatever he was when we saw him stretched out up there, he ain’t got the look. And punks who run away from the law don’t carry silver cups and big, heavy Bibles with them."
    Trixie and Honey stared at each other. Honey formed the word "Jim" with her lips, and Trixie nodded. And then she saw, not three feet from her face, two impressions in the dust. One was oblong, as though a heavy book had been placed there recently, and the christening mug would have fit exactly into the circular one beside it.
    She pointed excitedly to the impressions, but Honey, grabbing her arm, was pointing in another direction. And Trixie saw with a thrill of pride that someone had tossed the missing jack into one of the empty stalls before which Al was standing. That someone had to be Jim! Trixie felt like laughing and crying at once. Only the night before, Jim had bidden in this very loft listening to the plans of two trailer thieves! He had not only managed to fool them by pretending to be sound asleep when they finally discovered him, but early that morning he must have taken the jack from the van and not long ago come back to loosen one of its tire valves so that the men s scheme would be ruined by a flat tire!
    "He really is the most wonderful boy in the world," she decided silently. "And the best part of it is that he can’t be too far away now!"
    The men were arguing in loud voices, and Trixie peered through the crack again.
    "I can give you the story of that redheaded