He stared at me for an instant in undisguised amazement; then he leaned back in his chair and chuckled.
“Well, you are a bold one!” he said. “But all right. I can’t say that I’ve ever enjoyed the masquerade.”
“Why did you adopt it?” I asked.
“It’s a great advantage,” he explained, “for an apparently uneducated man to be able to assume the guise of an educated one, when working at a trade like mine. It’s convincing.”
I nodded. That had been my own explanation of it.
“But why did you adopt the trade?” I persisted.
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed slightly.
“Really, I don’t know,” he said. “Why not?”
It reminded me of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. True enough, why not?
“And now,” he added, “tit for tat. Have you found the treasure?”