Encyclopedia Brown Tracks Them Down (7 page)

Bugs wanted to get even with the boy detective, who always outsmarted him.

So he said that Encyclopedia and Sally tried to open the submarine and steal parts.

Jess backed up his leader—too well.

Jess claimed that Sally had “tripped Bugs,” and that Bugs “went down.” That is, Bugs fell on the ground which a two-day rain had made muddy.

Thus Bugs’s pants should have been muddy. Instead they were clean. The only mud was one speck, which he flicked off.

Encyclopedia told his father to “look at Bugs’s pants.”

When Chief Brown saw the clean pants, he knew the Tigers were lying.

When Elmer went to the water fountain, he let in Jim Hill. Jim stole the money from the office.

Jim might have got clean away, but he knocked over the lamp. So Elmer had to throw suspicion off himself.

He therefore told Pete and Oscar that he was going to telephone Encyclopedia for help. When he reached the telephone in the office, he lost his head. He could not dial.

He
was wearing boxing gloves
!

He got Jim Hill, who had hidden in the closet, to dial Encyclopedia’s number for him. Elmer hoped Encyclopedia would overlook the mistake.

But Encyclopedia was not fooled.

Elmer got the money back from Jim and returned it before the Youth Center opened on Monday.

Wilford had bought a half-inch model of the earth. Then he had dreamed up Professor Wolfgang Schmidt and the model-universe exhibit.

He had hoped to make himself some fast money by selling shares in the fake idea to the children of the neighborhood.

Unfortunately for Wilford, he knew nothing about the distance between the stars. But Encyclopedia knew.

Wilford’s model universe wouldn’t fit into the Yankee Stadium or the Grand Canyon.

In fact, it wouldn’t fit on earth.

The stars are too far apart. It wouldn’t help even if the model universe were built to the scale of an earth no more than half an inch across. The nearest fixed star would still have to be placed twenty thousand miles away!

Bret came to Stella’s house to find the Confederate half-dollar.

“I hid it in the flower can,” she told him.

So he looked in the flower can. That was his slip.

Only the thief who had bumped into her earlier and had seen the coin in the flower can would have known what she meant.

Had Bret been innocent, he would have thought Stella had said: “I hid it in the
flour
can.”

Remember, he was holding the can of flour for her.

Bret confessed. Posing as a door-to-door salesman, he had been stealing for some time.

Whenever he rang a doorbell and no one was at home, he’d try the door, and if it was open, he’d sneak into the house and steal something valuable.

Earle Coughlin, the real thief, had seen Sol riding Half-and-Half on the seaway path and so got the idea of pinning the jewelry robbery on him.

But Earle described only the side of Half-and-Half which he had seen—the side with the black spots and the bell-shaped mark. And he said he could read “Idaville Riding Academy” on the back of Sol’s shirt as he dismounted.

Thus, according to Earle’s own words, Sol had dismounted on the horse’s right side. The horse’s left side was all white, remember?

A horseman, however, gets on and off at the horse’s left side—
never
the right.

Earle Coughlin was sent to jail for the robbery of Mr. Fairchild’s jewelry.

Solution to The Case of the Apple Cider

Carl knew there were no berries fermenting in the tool house. He had put them in the feeder that morning.

Then he had swept the floor, and he had opened the window to get rid of the smell of fermenting.

Still, he wanted to show that he was innocent. So he said, “Nobody’s been in the tool house for six months.”

To win over the children, he gave them doughnuts and a cup of apple cider from the half-filled jug in the tool house. That was his mistake!

Once opened, the apple cider would have fermented and tasted sour after six months. That it still tasted sweet proved Carl had been in the tool house drinking it recently.

Carl promised never to get birds drunk again.

Joe thought that Encyclopedia would suspect Clyde, the library aide. Clyde could have read the note Joe left for Sumner, and then taken the two-dollar bill from the gray book on the table.

But Encyclopedia knew differently.

He knew Joe had seen Clyde coming around with the library truck while Sumner was away from the table. So Joe had written the note to Sumner.

Then Joe put the two-dollar bill in his pocket and left the library.

He had made one mistake. He wrote that he hid the two-dollar bill between pages 157 and 158—impossible !

You can’t put anything between pages 157 and 158 of a book. They are two sides of the same sheet of paper-back-to-back pages!

Justin lied when he said that he had backed the car over the ax handle by accident.

If that were true, both the front and back wheels on one side of the car would have passed over the handle and left tire prints.

But there was the print of just one tire on the handle!

That proved Justin had moved the car only enough to break the handle. After one wheel had passed over the handle; he had stopped and pulled the broken pieces from under the car!

He knew that with Ambrose unable to fiddle at his best, his mother would win the championship.

However, when his mother learned the truth, she awarded her title to Ambrose.