“Three hundred! That’s rather a lot isn’t it?”
The Captain waved the subject away deprecatingly. “Let us say two hundred. The sum is not important.”
“Then let’s say one hundred.”
“As you will. But would you pay, Mr. Carey?”
“Under certain conditions, yes.”
“What conditions, please?”
“Well, I can tell you right now that I’m not going to pay out a hundred dollars just for the pleasure of having someone tell me that he knows somebody else who knows a man who was in that ambush and says that the German Sergeant was killed. I’d want some kind of evidence that the story was genuine.”
“I understand that, but what evidence could there be?”
“Well, for one thing, what I’d want is a reasonable explanation of the fact that the Sergeant’s body was not found by the German patrol that came along afterwards. There were dead men there, but the Sergeant wasn’t among them. A genuine witness ought to know the answer to that one.”
“Yes, that is logical.”