Jerry Todd and the Talking Frog

I got into the bushes quick as scat. Biting hard on my breath, sort of. For right there in front of our eyes was a regular old gee-whacker of a dinosaur. Bigger than the town wa...

The following Monday morning the new boy started to school, entering our grade. And in the days that immediately followed I came to like Tom Ricks a lot. For he was the right so...

Squeezing the stutter out of my nerves, I followed Tom and my chums into the kitchen. The back door was ajar. Some one had picked the lock. But in opening the door the unknown p...

“Now,” she told Tom, fumbling nervously with the handbag’s metal clasp, “try and keep yourself nice and neat while I’m away and wash behind your ears and don’t be late to school...

Wednesday morning when we came into the school grounds a number of the kids were yipping and kicking up their heels. Tom was the first one in our gang to grab the good news that...

“Last Friday noon,” our new chum told us, “that man came to our back door peddling books. And that same night some one tried to steal the talking frog. Don’t you see the connect...

I imagined that I could feel the bump on my head getting bigger and bigger as I sat on the rock with my cap in my lap and my four boxes of Mr. Gallywiggle’s beauty soap in my cap.

On the way to Mrs. Kelly’s house we stopped at the Gronke farm and talked the housekeeper into buying a box of our beauty soap. At the next farm we sold a box to Mrs. Smith, tho...

The soap man was interesting to me because he was the first spy that I had ever come in contact with. I figured that he must be a sort of detective.

It was our leader’s theory that the spy was a brother of the murdered puzzle maker’s. That would make him a relative of Mrs. Kelly’s. A mysterious boy, from Mrs. Kelly’s house,...

Later on I came to realize how very pretty she was, with laughing black eyes, saucy bobbed curls and pink cheeks. Her name was Frances Matson. Her father, Mrs. Kelly told us, an...

“The dress patterns were stolen from Mr. Ricks on the train. That was the work of another spy. And surely the radio man knows what his spies are doing.” There was a moment’s pau...

It was Scoop’s scheme, as he now explained to us, to fly a kite to a purpose over the old mill. So, upon our arrival at the brick house, he and I went guardedly to an open spot...

The fellows had a lot of fun with me the following morning. Having given me a suit of his clothes to wear, my own being too filthy for further use, Tom hunted up an article in t...

We felt pretty blue and sick-like over the theft of the talking frog. For now Tom and his pa and Aunt Polly would have to go to the poorhouse. The invention that was to have put...

Following the enemy chief’s imprisonment in Aunt Polly’s spare bedchamber, I went to the old mill to tell Peg the exciting news and to find out from him how things were at his end.

By this time I was well over my scare. And I felt pretty foolish. For, as Scoop had said, there was no such thing as a real ghost. What I had seen was some one playing ghost.

“A thing I hate about the country,” he said, “is the distance between the farmhouses. It takes so long to get from one house to another that a fellow can’t do enough business to...

Contrary to what we thought would be the case, the soap man didn’t come near us. And shortly after six o’clock we saw him leave the mill yard in his rickety buggy, heading south...

After what seemed an age to us, it came time for school to be dismissed for the day. And with anxious hearts Tom and I and Peg hurried home. We were hopeful that Scoop would be...

Not until later, until our adventure was over with and the excitement had died out of my nerves, did I fully realize how fortunate it was for the two of us that Scoop, in good p...

Shortly after our signal had brought Tom and Peg from the brick house, the ghost came creeping up the path from the road, wrapped in a sheet. Finding the kitchen door unlocked,...