The Mystery at Bob-White Cave

helpless some of the people have been who have visited Mr. Belden. Linnie’s gone off to pick up your uncle. They should be back soon. Mercy, you’re all soaked through. You’d better get dry clothes. What’s the matter, Trixie? You look so white. A snake didn’t bite you, did it?” she asked anxiously.
    “A snake didn’t,” Honey said, trembling with cold and still frightened. “A wildcat almost did.”
    “A what?” Mrs. Moore screamed. She hurried to take Trixie in her arms and make sure she was all right.
    “A catamount... a bobcat... a wildcat... whatever you’d call it,” Jim said. “It was a fierce-looking cat as big as Jacob.”
    “Oh, my blessed Lord!” Mrs. Moore said and hugged Trixie tight. “A wildcat! An angel must have saved you!”
    “Yeah, a ghost angel,” Mart said, “who shot him right in midair as he was going for Trixie.”
    “A ghost?” Mrs. Moore asked, her voice trembling. “Whoever shot that wildcat disappeared into thin air,” Mart went on. “Trixie said she didn’t see a soul —just smelled tobacco smoke. That was all. The way we figured it, he must have been a strange guy not to show himself. Jacob acted funny, too. After the wildcat was killed, Jacob didn’t growl or bark. He wagged his tail and shot off into the woods.”
    “A ghost!” Mrs. Moore repeated. “Jacob came home quite a few minutes before you did. I was uneasy about that. Thank heaven, your uncle will soon be here, Trixie. You’re still shivering. No wonder, poor child! Don’t you want me to go upstairs with you and help you get into dry clothes?”
    Honey assured Mrs. Moore they’d be all right, but she held on to Trixie’s arm as they went up the stairs. Halfway up, Trixie shook off Honey’s arm. “I’m not so scared now,” she said. “It was a narrow escape, wasn’t it? I was so sure it was Jim who shot that wildcat.”
    ‘It would have been Jim if you hadn’t dashed out of that cave by yourself. You shouldn’t have done that. You should have known it was dangerous.”
    “I just wanted to see if the rain had stopped. I wasn’t hurt, was I?”
    “You were awfully close to being killed, and you know it, Trixie. I’m not too sure I want to be a detective—not the kind who has wildcats jumping after her, anyway. I’d rather be the kind who would sit in an office and try to figure out who the mysterious person was who shot the wildcat.”
    They went on upstairs.
    Trixie dipped her face in the basin of water that stood on their dresser; she threw her head back and shook water from her short sandy curls. “Yes,” she said, thoughtfully toweling, “that is a real mystery, isn’t it? Almost like a ghost. There! That reminds me of the ghost fish. Linnie said there are lots of caves around here, but if they haven’t any more water in them than the one we were in today, they won’t do us much good. I want to find those fish.”
    “I do, too, but I wish sometime we could just have fun when we go places. Mart said he wishes the same thing.”
    “Doesn’t either one of you care anything about getting that station wagon? About helping handicapped children?”
    “There you go again. You know we do; we want it just as much as you do. But we don’t want to work every minute and always have awful things happening. We’d like to have a little fun.”
    “We had fun fishing today, didn’t we? I like to have fun, too, but I want to keep the search for those fish uppermost in my mind. Don’t you think exploring caves is going to be fun?”
    “It wasn’t any fun today. I don’t want to find any more wildcats.”
    “I’m sure that doesn’t happen very often. Uncle Andrew didn’t even warn us about wildcats, and neither did Mrs. Moore or Linnie. Instead, Uncle Andrew said that wild animals have pretty well left the Ozark woods—that they’ve been hunted and killed. He said they hardly ever see even a deer anymore. We see lots of them in your woods back home. Mrs. Moore said that only a few years ago, deer used to come up in her yard and feed with the chickens.”
    “How wonderful!” Honey, dressed in dry jeans and shirt, pushed back the new curtains she had hemmed and hung at their bedroom window. “You can see for miles,” she said. “I believe that’s the mule wagon coming up from the hollow. Isn’t that it, Trix?”
    Trixie looked, then called to the boys in the next room, “Uncle Andrew will be here soon. Let’s go downstairs and wait for him; we’ll help him