“I just made it,” said Benny to Encyclopedia. He clutched his slip of paper with the number 114 on it.
I bought the last chance.”
It was noon and time for the drawing.
Bugs strutted in front of the plastic box. “I’ve asked Miss Spottswood to blindfold my buddy, Duke Kelly,” he announced.
Miss Spottswood, the school nurse, and Duke Kelly made their way through the crowd. Miss Spottswood wrapped a strip of heavy white cloth around Duke’s eyes.
“Watch closely, everybody,’’ sang Bugs. “Are you ready, Duke?’’
“Ready,” replied the blindfolded Duke. He raised both hands to show they were empty.
Bugs was quick to call attention to Duke’s short sleeves. “Nothing is up them,” he sang. “Duke Kelly is one boy you can trust!”
“Horsefeathers,” snorted Sally. “Duke is so crooked he has to screw on his hat.”
Miss Spottswood guided Duke’s right hand to the box of Ping-Pong balls. He felt around for a full minute.
“Duke is stirring up the balls,” Bugs explained to the crowd. “We don’t want you to think the winning ball is stuck on top.”
Duke suddenly pulled out a ball. Ripping off his blindfold, he held up the ball so everyone could read the number —81.
“Do you all see it?” screamed Bugs. “Eighty-one! Who’s won himself this beautiful major-league baseball glove?”
“Me!” shouted Rick Larsen. He rushed up to Miss Spottswood and showed her his slip with “81” on it. She gave him the baseball glove and shook his hand.
“It’s a gyp,’’ exclaimed Sally. “Rick Larsen is Bugs’s pal.”
Encyclopedia didn’t answer. He was staring thoughtfully at the large green thermos bottle under Bugs’s chair.
Sally stamped the ground. “Encyclopedia! If you can’t prove the drawing was fixed, Bugs will end up with the baseball glove himself!”
‘‘No, he won’t,” said Encyclopedia. “He should never have sipped from the can of root beer. He forgot the thermos bottle was in plain view.”
WHAT DID ENCYCLOPEDIA MEAN?
(Turn to page 72 for the solution to “The Case of the Thermos Bottle.”)
Solutions:
Salvatore was still dizzy when he got into the elevator to go from the lobby to the subbasement. He pushed the wrong button —and got off at the wrong floor.
After hiding the key, he opened the elevator doors again by pushing the “up” button on the wall.
That was Encyclopedia’s clue.
The subbasement was the bottom floor, and bottom floors do not have “up” and “down” buttons by the elevators. They have one button only.
Encyclopedia realized that the key was still where Salvatore had hidden it —one floor above, in the basement.
Salvatore drove his machine home, turned it into a corn popper, and sold it to an ice cream parlor.
Bugs didn’t want to return the cut-glass lamp. So he made up the story about the lamp being broken.
He said he was riding with it in the cargo space of his uncle’s truck. Suddenly the truck stopped for a traffic light. That meant the truck was traveling forward.
But Bugs said the lamp “flew back over the tailgate.”
When a truck (or any vehicle) comes to a sudden stop, objects inside it are pitched in the same direction in which the truck has been traveling.
So the lamp wouldn’t have been thrown “back.” It would have been thrown forward!
Tripped by his own words, Bugs returned the lamp to Winslow.
According to Edsel, he’d been tied up in the garden hose for “hours and hours” instead of just a few minutes. He completely forgot that cold water had been passing through the hose and into the swimming pool before he was bound!
Had Edsel been telling the truth, the water standing in the hose would have been warm —having been under the hot sun for “hours and hours.”
To prove Edsel lied, Encyclopedia turned on the hose for Officer Carlson. The water that came out had not yet had time to be heated by the sun. It was still cool.
Edsel’s parents were informed. They squashed his grape catching for a year.
Solution to “The Case of the Left-Handers Club”
The guilty man was not really a lefty. He simply posed as a lefty in order to join the club and cause trouble.
However, he continued to use his right hand when he was alone —for example, when he shaved.
A left-handed man will almost always cut his left sideburn higher (shorter) than his right sideburn when he shaves. A right-handed man will cut his right sideburn higher.
Mike Dent’s right sideburn was higher than his left!
The meaning did not escape Encyclopedia. He told the president of the Left-Handers Club. Mike Dent was secretly watched.
Three days later, the right-handed Mike was thrown out of the club.
Helga thought that if Otis, Encyclopedia, and Sally saw her getting out of the pond, they would be fooled. They would believe her lie that she had been in the water for “a solid hour.”
However, she overlooked Encyclopedia’s sharp eye for clues.
Remember that when she tapped her fingers together, Helga unmindfully called attention to her smooth skin? That was her downfall.
After an hour in the water, the skin would have been wrinkled!
Trapped by her own fingertips, Helga retired from the diving business.
She said the work was too hard.
Solution to “The Case of the Upside-Down Witness”
Elton said he had read two words on a sign in a store window while looking into a mirror and standing on his head. So the detectives looked for a sign with two words written upside down and backward.
They didn’t find them.
That made Encyclopedia realize the truth. The two words could be read in the normal way —and upside down and backward!
The two words were on the fish store sign. They were CHOICE COD.
Encyclopedia told his father. The fish store was where the holdup was planned, and where the money was hidden. Within two days, the police had rounded up the gang.
Wilford didn’t have a square egg in the small box.
In fact, he didn’t have anything. Every word was a lie. He made up the entire story about a square egg.
Still, he might have succeeded in fast-talking the children out of their money. However, he made one mistake. He said that Buddy Stilwell was “dressed and ready to jump.”
The children were fooled, but not Encyclopedia. He saw that Buddy wore only one parachute.
A skydiver always jumps with two parachutes. The second is used in an emergency.
When Encyclopedia pointed out the mistake, the children left the dump without buying a single share.
The teen-ager was named Jim Hearn. He had been secretly fattening Lucy’s pigs because he wanted his own pigs to star at Submarine World.
When Lucy’s family returned from the movies, he was telephoning his friend to ask for a tow —his car had broken down. In his haste to escape from the house, he had dropped the slip of paper.
On the paper he had typed the telephone number of the place where his friend would be that night. Being careful, he had written the number in letters.
Pig iron on a telephone dial is the same as the number 744-4706, Encyclopedia realized.
The police traced the number. Jim and his friend were arrested.
The thief rolled the ball of string out the back door, where he had a wheelbarrow waiting. He didn’t want Cosimo to win the Collecting for Fun category.
First, however, he made sure that he could get the ball of string through the narrow door. He measured both the doorway and the ball.
The only measuring unit he had was a dollar. It is 6.14 inches long, but appears as 6 inches on a ruler. Because he didn’t have a pencil, he scratched off the widths with a key.
The boy who “knew everything” about money certainly knew what spaces 6 Vs inches apart were — the l
ength of a dollar.
When he pretended not to know, Encyclopedia realized he—John Morgan —was the thief.
As a result, John was forced to withdraw his hobbies from the show. Cosimos ball of string won the Collecting for Fun prize.
Bugs did not use the large thermos bottle. So why had he brought it to the carnival?
Encyclopedia got Miss Spottswood to examine the winning Ping-Pong ball. As he had suspected, the ball was cold.
Bugs had marked the ball at home and put it into the freezer for two hours. He brought it to the carnival in the thermos bottle to keep it cold.
Shortly before noon, he slipped the cold ball into the box with the other balls. Duke Kelly felt around till he found it.
Rick Larsen gave back the glove. Another drawing was held —without Bugs. Benny Breslin won.
ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN CARRIES ON Page 4
