The Red Trailer Mystery

—oh, I can’t bear it! Two long black pigtails."
    Honey giggled nervously. "Joeanne has had a haircut, too. But why?"
    "I think I can guess," Trixie said. "After she lost her ribbons, she had an awful time keeping her hair neat. Especially in the woods, where it would keep getting tangled in the brambles and bushes. Even if Jim bought her a comb, long hair would be an awful nuisance."
    "It certainly is," Honey agreed, shaking back her shoulder-length bob. "I wish mine was as short as yours is."
    Trixie grinned and snatched up a sharp knife from the cooking kit. "Just stand still, madam, and I’ll hack it off for you."
    "Not you." Honey laughed. "When I get around to it, I’ll ask Mrs. Smith for a crew cut"
    Trixie sobered. "It’s getting late. Let’s look for that mound. If we go uphill through the woods behind the tent we should come right out on top of it."
    "I don’t trust your sense of direction for one minute." Honey smiled. "But let’s go. I hear the sound of a brook. That must be the one the dogs went swimming in on Sunday. Remember? If we follow it we are bound to get somewhere."
    They walked around to the back of the tent and then they saw the stream. "Let’s not follow it" Trixie objected. "It runs down into that gully. Let’s walk uphill. I won’t be happy until I find out what was gleaming in the sunlight this morning."
    With the dogs racing ahead of them, they trudged along, and, as ‘they climbed, the trees thinned out until they realized they were halfway up a shrubby hill.
    "For once I was right" Trixie panted. "Don’t ever make fun of my sense of direction again."
    "I’ll believe you when we find a piece of shiny metal," Honey retorted with a laugh.
    Trixie ignored her. "As the crow flies, we are less than half a mile from the Smith farmhouse. We should be able to see it from the top."
    "And that" Honey finished, "is the answer to your mystery of the mound. Do you see what I see dangling from the branch of that little tree just ahead of us?"
    Trixie looked up and groaned. "Jimmy Crow again! Bicycle handlebars indeed! After this long climb, all we find is another one of his treasures. A small, battered chrome towel rack." She turned around in disgust. "He can keep it, for all I care. Lets go home before Miss Trask gets cross and worried."

A Moonlight Search • 15

    THE AUTOVILLE cafeteria that evening was humming with excitement. Everyone was talking about the capture of the trailer thieves, and the manager, who had spent most of the day being questioned by the police, looked nervous.
    "I never liked that Jeff," he told Miss Trask when she invited him to sit at their table and have a cup of coffee. "But he came to me highly recommended by an old friend I haven’t seen in years. It never occurred to me to check either one of those men’s references. The forged signatures were very convincing."
    A man and woman were talking excitedly at the next table, and Trixie recognized them as the middle-aged couple Jeff had been listening to Sunday night.
    "I’m certainly glad you took my advice," the woman said with smug satisfaction. "If we’d gone off in the trailer yesterday, we might have been hijacked, too."
    The man nodded. "I had a feeling that waiter was listening to our plans when we were marking our route on the map at dinner Sunday." He shrugged. "I thought he was just one of those snoopy people who can’t resist eavesdropping."
    They left the dining room then, and Trixie concentrated on what the manager was saying.
    "I’d like to know who tipped the troopers off," he told Miss Trask. "I’d give the man a fat reward. I can’t imagine why he had to be so mysterious about it all."
    "Do they know it was a man?" Honey asked cautiously, and Trixie kicked her sharply under the table.
    "Oh, yes," the manager said. "Those crooks made up a tall yam about a redheaded boy who they claim was hiding in the Smiths’ barn. Insisted he loosened the valve core on the van’s tire and hid their jack. But that sergeant who received the telephone call said there could be no doubt that it was a man’s voice. Quite a deep one, although it was obvious, he said, that the man was very nervous. At first, you know, they decided it was a fake tip-off made by someone with a warped sense of humor. They run into a lot of false clues, I guess. They almost ignored that call, and I can’t say that I blame them. Why did the man hang up when they asked him for his name and address?"
    "Did they trace the call?"