It was difficult to get information from Sam himself, for his statements were contradictory and misleading. But, by watching him closely, Fibsy hoped to catch him off guard, and make him reveal his secret.
Sam babbled of the pin continually. As Agnes said, whenever he got a new topic in his poor, disordered brain, he harped on it day and night.
"Pinny, pin, pin," he would chant, in his sing-song way, "nice pinny, pin, pin, where are you? Where are you? Nice pinny-pin, where are you?"
It was enough to drive one frantic, but Fibsy encouraged it as a means toward an end.
And one day he found Sam down on his knees poking a sharp-pointed stick in between the boards of the kitchen floor. The cracks were wide in the old house, and Fibsy held his breath as he, himself unseen, watched the idiot boy diligently digging.
But it amounted to nothing. After turning out many little piles of dust and dirt, Sam rose, and said, dejectedly, "No pinny-pin there! Where is it? Oh, oh, oh—where is it?"
Fibsy had learned the workings of the queer mind, and he was sure now that Sam had hidden the pin, but not in a floor crack. The mention of that hiding-place had been made by Sam to turn suspicion from the real one, and then the idea had stuck in his head, and, Fibsy feared, he had forgotten the true place of concealment.
This would be a catastrophe, for it might then be the pin would never be found! So Fibsy stuck to his self-imposed task of standing by Sam, hoping for a chance revelation.
"Go ahead," Fleming Stone told him, "do all you can with Sam. I, too, feel sure he took the pin from the chair, where Miss Clyde put it. Find the pin, Fibsy boy, find the pin, and I'll do the rest."
Stone spent an entire morning in Mrs. Pell's room, going over her old letters and getting every possible light on her earlier life.