The Mystery Off Glen Road (17 page)

With the horses trailing behind them, they went around to the back. “Why, there’s a vegetable garden,” Trixie cried excitedly. She pointed to some frost-blackened vines. “Tomatoes, pumpkin, squash, and cucumbers. That whole row of flattened tops must be carrots which haven’t been dug yet. And there’s kale which can stay out all winter. And look. Over there are beets, turnips, and parsnips. They don’t have to be brought in until the weather gets very cold.”

“Well, poachers aren’t gardeners,” Honey said. “At least, I don’t think they are.”

“They could be,” Trixie argued. “Whoever lives here is trespassing on your father’s property and killing game. That makes him a poacher.”

“Maybe when the horses were running they carried us clear out of the preserve,” Honey suggested.

Trixie shook her head. “They weren’t running in a straight line, remember? That path wound around like a corkscrew. As the crow flies, we can’t be very far from the fork in the trail. So we must be still in your father’s preserve.”

“But where?” Honey demanded. “And since we’re not crows, how do you figure we are going to get back to the trail?”

Trixie giggled. “Bobby’s compass will tell us where
north is and that’s the direction we ought to take, but since we can’t fly in a straight line, we’ll simply have to unwind ourselves.”

Honey’s lower lip trembled. “I don’t know how you can laugh, Trixie. It’s getting darker by the minute. You know as well as I do that we’re lost and the poacher who lives here has a gun and he’s probably on his way home now.” She swung up on Starlight’s back. “Our only hope, Trixie, is to follow the horses’ hoofprints while there’s still light enough to see.” Honey was right and both girls knew it. She led the way across the clearing and started slowly along the path.

Trixie followed on Susie. After a few minutes she asked, “Are you following the hoofprints? I don’t see any, not even Starlight’s.”

“There aren’t any to be seen,” Honey said dismally. “The path is nothing but rocks and pine needles and dead leaves. Even an FBI man couldn’t find any kind of print on it.”

“Well, at least it’s a path,” Trixie said, trying to sound cheerful. “If we stick to it, we’re bound to end up where we started.” But Trixie was worried, too. Only a faint yellowish-green light filtered through the evergreen branches now, and soon there would be no light at all. The path was so narrow you could hardly call it a
path—not unless you were traveling on foot in broad daylight.

After a long silence, Honey said, “I think we’d better give the horses their heads.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Trixie said. “Maybe we’d better get off and lead the horses. I mean, they must have broken or bruised a lot of branches when they were galloping madly along. But you can’t expect horses to know the difference between a bruised branch and one that hasn’t been touched. But we should be able to tell the difference.”

Honey sniffed, and although Trixie couldn’t see her face she guessed that Honey was very close to tears. “That’s what you think,” she told Trixie. “Jim and Indians can read all sorts of signs in the woods, like broken branches and all, but you and I can’t. Also, it’s soon going to be so dark we won’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces, let alone read our palms so we can find out whether our lifeline ends here and now.”

Trixie laughed. “Even if we are lost, Honey, we’re not going to die. I mean, we won’t be lost long enough so we’ll starve to death.”

“I’m starving right now,” Honey complained. “I wish we’d had sense enough to eat some of that poacher’s stew before we left.”

“Hunter’s stew is the right word,” Trixie said. “It did smell delicious. But don’t talk about it. I’m so hungry I could eat raw horse meat.”

Honey suddenly giggled. “That’s a thought. If worse comes to worse, we can kill Starlight and Susie and eat them. But first we’ll skin them and keep ourselves warm that way.” Her giggle ended in what sounded like a sob. “That will be the day.”

“Oh, Honey, don’t get discouraged,” Trixie pleaded. “Give Starlight his head and let’s trot for a while. He may lead us right back to the fork. It can’t be too far from here.”

Honey suddenly held up her right hand to show that she was going to stop. “We’re at a fork right now. This path you’re so crazy about has suddenly become
two
paths.”

Trixie stood up in her stirrups and peered over Honey’s shoulder. Sure enough, they would have to make up their minds whether they should bear right or left. Taking the wrong turn would undoubtedly mean that they would become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth.

Trixie sank back into her saddle. “Does Starlight seem to have any preference?” she asked weakly. “Don’t guide him with the reins. Just touch him with both heels and see what he does.”

The chestnut gelding immediately turned his head to the right and began to trot. “He’s right,” Honey yelled. “Even I can see broken branches on this path. Maybe he doesn’t know his way home, but I guess he knows how to get back to the trail. Look at him!”

“Then let’s canter,” Trixie said. “Whether right is right or wrong, we’d better find out as soon as we can. It’s getting darker all the time.”

Both of the horses needed little urging to break into a gallop, and that was encouraging. “They wouldn’t hurry if they weren’t headed back toward the stable,” Trixie called to Honey.

And then the corkscrew path suddenly merged with another and the girls realized gratefully that they were back on one of the main trails. In a few minutes the trail ended on Glen Road only a few yards west of the Wheelers’ driveway.

Breathing loud sighs of relief, they forced the impatient horses to walk along the road and up the driveway. “That was close,” Honey finally got out. “The boys were right, Trixie. We should never have left the trails.”

“We
had
to,” Trixie retorted. “And we did get proof that there is a poacher, living in the middle of the preserve.”

“What good is that going to do us?” Honey
demanded. “We’ll never be able to find our way back to the cabin. I feel the same way about it as I did about the dead deer you found on Sunday. It was all a daymare.”

Trixie thought for a minute in silence. Honey was right. Since they could not possibly ever find their way back to that cabin in the big clearing, there was no sense in telling the boys about their discovery. Brian and Jim would only scold them for leaving the trails, and would jeeringly sum up their story with:

“You got panicky because you got lost and imagined the whole business. A cabin and a vegetable garden in the midst of the woods! How wacky can you girls get?”

Mart, however, might feel differently. He was nowhere near as good a woodsman as Jim was, but he might be able to help them find the poacher’s cabin. He could at least read a compass.… Compass!

Trixie pushed back the sleeve of her sweater. The wrist compass had disappeared. “Oh, Honey,” she gasped. “Bobby’s compass! I guess I didn’t strap it on very securely and it must have been brushed off by a branch when the horses ran away with us.”

“Oh,
no,”
Honey moaned. “Even if we had the money, we couldn’t buy him another one until the stores open on Friday.”

“That’s right,” Trixie groaned, all other worries driven from her mind. “And you know Bobby. Years might go by without his even remembering that he owns a compass. But now that I’ve lost it, he’ll be sure to want to show it to somebody at our party tomorrow.”

Trixie’s dire prediction came true sooner than she expected. When she brought Bobby home after she and Honey had finished grooming the horses, he burst into the house yelling:

“Hey, Mummy. I
have
to have my compass. Ben’s going to take me ’sploring tomorrow. Him and Di and me saw a funny-looking bird this afternoon and we’re going to ’splore after it and maybe catch it alive and sell it to a zoo for a billion dollars. It looks sort of like a parrot but mostly like a squirrel, but on account of Ben isn’t as smart as Jim, we might get losted so I
have
to have my compass.”

Trixie grabbed his plump arm. “You won’t have time to go exploring tomorrow, Bobby,” she said in a whisper. “You know perfectly well that it’s Thanksgiving and also you know there’s no such thing as a bird that looks like a squirrel. Come on. I’ll tell you a story while you take a bath.”

He yanked away from her. “Is so a bird that looks like a squirrel. I saw it my own self. It was sitting on a
small, little, teeny-weeny bush and Ben gave me some salt to put on its tail, but when I got so close, it flewed away into the woods.” He demonstrated with his fat hands how close he had gotten.

Mrs. Belden, who had been grating raw carrots into a big wooden salad bowl, joined in the conversation then. “If you got that close, Bobby,” she said with a laugh, “why did you bother with salt? You could have grabbed it by the tail. That is, if it had the long bushy tail of a squirrel.”

“Didn’t,” he informed her gravely. “Had a little, teeny weeny feathery tail like a chicken.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Trixie exploded impatiently. “It’s just one of Ben’s silly jokes, Bobby. He’s always rigging up things like that with strings and a pulley. Remember that ‘ghost’ he tried to scare Honey with last time he visited her? Even you weren’t fooled by it.”

“Not a ghost,” he stormed. “It’s a bird, and we’re gonna catch it early tomorrow morning. So I
have
to have my compass. I promised Ben.”

“Very well,” Mrs. Belden said. “If you promised Ben that he could wear your compass, you shall have it.”

Trixie collapsed on the kitchen stool. “He can’t, Moms. I borrowed it this afternoon and—and lost it!”

Mrs. Belden stared at her in amazement while
Bobby burst into screams of rage. Trixie alternated between covering her face and her ears with her hands. Finally Mrs. Belden led Bobby away and in a few minutes his howls subsided into low sobs.

Mart came into the kitchen then, and while Trixie finished making the salad she blurted out the whole story. At first he seemed more interested in Bobby’s lost compass than he was in the mysterious cabin in the clearing.

“Gleeps, Trix,” he said, “you should know better than to touch anything that belongs to Bobby. You won’t hear the end of this until you’re old and gray.”

“It’s all Ben’s fault,” Trixie stormed. “Why did he have to go and rig up that crazy thing?”

Mart wiggled his eyebrows at her. “When you’re Bobby-sitting, I have discovered, your imagination is apt to run wild. If you don’t keep him amused when he thinks he’s a fire chief, you may find yourself in the midst of a holocaust. But fear not, Sis, I may be able to pour oil on the troubled waters by lending the lad my own wrist compass. That is, if you’ll do me a favor.”

“I’ll do anything,” Trixie said hastily, “if you can keep Moms from looking at me as though she thought I were a thief.”

“Pooh,” said Mart airily. “So far as our maternal
parent is concerned, you are already forgiven since you immediately confessed your crime. She may have a few well-chosen words to say to you on the subject later, but that will be that. Once Bobby is all sunny smiles again, the thing will soon be forgotten. Since I am the one who can produce those smiles, I will now dictate the terms. I will lend him my wrist compass on this condition: You tell me here and now why you asked Dad to get that diamond ring out of the bank. I am not a member of the feline family, but curiosity is slowly but surely killing me.”

“Oh, all right,” Trixie said crossly. “But you’ve got to promise to keep it a secret.”

Mart made an elaborate gesture of crossing his heart. Then Trixie began at the very beginning. Before she was halfway through, Mart threw his arms around her and hugged her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe.

“You super-stupendous lamebrain,” he cried happily. “How do you do it? You always give the impression that you’re totally insane, and yet, in the end, you’re the only one who makes sense.” He danced around the kitchen with her until Trixie tapped him on the head with the vegetable grater.

“Listen, muttonhead,” she said, gasping for breath, “it’s not as simple as you seem to think. There
is
a
poacher in the preserve. We can’t collect our salary as gamekeepers on Saturday if we don’t do something about him first.”

Mart immediately sobered and collapsed on the kitchen stool. “True,” he agreed. “But your cabin-in-the-clearing story is so fantastic I can’t believe a word of it. But first things must come first. Right now I shall go upstairs and pour oil on the troubled waters of Bobby’s anguished sobs. While I am doing so, Moms will undoubtedly seize that opportunity to explain to you the meaning of the Shakespearean quotation: ‘Never a borrower nor a lender be.’ Then you must bathe and don suitable garments so that I can escort you up to the Manor House where a festive repast awaits us. En route, we can discuss the poacher problem and what to do about it.”

Trixie tapped him again on the head with the grater. “I suppose you don’t have to shower and change. And what about Brian? Is he going to dine at the Wheelers’ in the same dirty clothes I last saw him in?”

“Brian,” Mart informed her, “is showering at the home of our host and hostess, and is wearing a handsome suit belonging to Jim.”