Free The Mystery on the Mississippi by Julie Campbell Page A

said. “You have to place the call through that girl at the switchboard.”
    The Bob-Whites waited in a semicircle while Jim talked to the girl with headphones. They saw him hesitate, turn around to leave, then go back to talk to her again.
    “Say, what do you know?” he told the waiting group. “Come over here by the window so no one can hear. There’s skulduggery going on, for sure.”
    “Oh, Jim, what is it?” Trixie begged in a worried voice. “Is it something that Lontard man has done?”
    “Looks like it, Trixie. It looks very much like it. When I asked the operator to put through the call to Dad in St. Louis, she told me it was the second call she’d put through to that number in the past few hours. She said a man telephoned Dad when she first came on duty at seven o’clock this morning.”
    Trixie put her hand to her mouth in dismay. “Did you find out what he told your father?”
    “Not at first. I quizzed her about it, and she got sort of huffy... said she never listens in. I told her I was positive she never did intentionally. When I went on to explain why it was so important to us, she opened up a little.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Just this, Trix: She heard the man tell Dad that we had decided not to stop at Cairo but to stay on the Catfish Princess and go on to Memphis instead; that the captain of our boat had talked to shore on the radiophone and said that we wanted this man to call Dad collect and tell him of our change in plans.” Trixie shook her head in bewilderment. “Now, why would he do a thing like that?”
    “To give him a chance to snatch your purse,” Dan said positively. “When that cops-and-robbers act he worked up on the towboat failed, he must have thought up another one.”
    “Heavens! These papers must really be important to him!” Trixie opened her purse, slid the sheets out, examined and rearranged them, then closed the snap and tightened her hold. “I’m certain they’re plans —figures concerning the space program. Somebody must be willing to pay a lot of money for the information we’ve got.”
    In her excitement, Trixie had raised her voice. Honey, aware of the fact that the desk clerk had left his post and passed very near them, held her finger to her lips to warn her friend.
    “Yes, you’d better pipe down,” Dan warned. “I’m beginning to think you’re in over your head, Trixie. That Lontard looks to me like a bad one. He probably has his eye on us at this very minute.”
    Jim whirled around toward the motel desk. “If that’s so, Dan, and I guess you’re probably right, then we’d better get out of here. I’m going to jam that call through to Dad in a hurry, tell him what’s happened, and see what he wants us to do. He may already have started a car on a wild-goose chase to Memphis.” He hurried off to the telephone.
    “Oh, I do hope Jim gets hold of Daddy right away,” Honey said in a subdued, troubled voice. “We really don’t know which way to turn, do we?”
    When Jim returned, the Bob-Whites became even more worried. “I couldn’t reach Dad,” Jim informed them. “He went someplace with Mr. Brandio, and no one seems to know when they’ll be back or how to reach them.”
    “That’s just swell, isn’t it?” Mart said. “Where do we go from here?”
    “We try to find some other way of getting back to St. Louis—and in a hurry,” Brian said.
    “What will we use for money?” Mart asked realistically.
    “Everybody empty out his pockets and see how much we have altogether,” Jim ordered.
    When the small bills and silver were counted, the amount came to thirty dollars and a few cents.
    “I don’t know why we don’t carry more money with us,” Honey wailed. “That won’t be enough to pay all our fares on the train or bus.”
    “We don’t carry more money because we never need it in Sleepyside,” Jim reminded her. “Everybody knows us there. When we need anything, we can charge it.”
    “This isn’t Sleepyside.