“Merry, do you really? How ever did you find out? I’ve asked Bob over and over to tell me, but he has always refused and has actually declared that we girls never would know.”
“Well,” their president said, “we do know, at least in part. I hate eavesdropping just as much as anyone, but when Jack himself shut me in the stuffy little room off the library where we store our old magazines and books, and where I had gone to hunt up an article I needed for a composition, how could I help hearing? Two or three of their ‘C. D. C.’ club had come over for a special session, I guess. I was just about to burst out when I heard Jack say, ‘Yes, we’re alone, all right! Sis went to the library, I think, to do some reference work.’ Then, before I really could do anything (I was so wedged in among piles of magazines). Jack had announced: ‘Say, fellows, but I’ve got the keenest Conan Doyle book. Best ever. I call it!’”
Merry paused and looked around the group, her eyes sparkling triumph. For a moment there was silence, then, with a wild Indianish whoop, Peggy, her dark face glowing, cried gleefully: “I tumble!” After glancing about at the others, who were looking rather more puzzled than intelligent, Peg demanded: “Don’t any of you get what Merry is driving at? Bertha, you surely know what the boys mean by their ‘C. D. C.’”
“Of course. How beautifully stupid we are!” Bertha acknowledged. “The Conan Doyle Club! O, wouldn’t the boys rage and tear their hair if they knew we had guessed even that much.”
But, it was quite plain to the group that Merry had still more to divulge.
“Who is Conan Doyle, anyway?” their youngest asked. “What kind of books did he write?”
“My child,” Bertha said condescendingly, “hast never heard of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective?”
“O, of course, I have,” Betty Byrd replied. “Then the boys have a detective club. Is that it, Merry?”
The girl addressed finished eating an especially big oozy chocolate before she noddingly replied: “That’s it, all right. I gathered from the little I heard that each member of that club wants to become a detective when he is of man’s estate, and the thing they do at their club is to take turns making up a mystery and the other boys have to try to solve it.”
“Say, what fun that would be! I wish they would let girls join their club,” Doris Drexel remarked, but Merry put in: “You wouldn’t wish it, young lady, if you knew, as I do, how little they think of our intelligences. One of them, I couldn’t tell which, had written to a lawyer uncle in New York, telling about their club, and in reply their uncle had told about some young woman detective in his employ and how clever she was. At which Jack sniffed: ‘Well, she must be an exception all right. I can’t imagine my sister Merry or any of her crowd solving a mystery, not if the clues were spread out right in front of them.’ Bob laughed at that in his good-natured way and replied that there wasn’t much danger of any one getting a chance to solve a mystery in this little lakeside town where nothing ever happened that was in the least unusual. Then he said: ‘That’s why we have to make up our own mysteries, since we can’t unearth any real ones to practice on.’”