“He said pour owls on the something waters. So that,” Mac said in triumph, “proves it.”
This, the Saint thought, wanders. He restrained Jimmy from assaulting Mac, and returned to the subject.
“Why should the revelation of this gent’s identity be regarded as even an intimation that I have — what was the name? — Big Bill?”
“Holbrook,” Jimmy said. “Why, this is Trailer Mac. Ain’t you never heard of him? He follered Loopie Louie for eighteen years and finally caught ’im in the middle of Lake Erie.”
“I never heard of him,” Simon said, and smiled at Mac’s hurt look. “But then there are lots of people I’ve never heard of.”
This, he thought as he said it, was hardly true. He had filed away in the indexes of his amazing memory the dossiers of almost every crook in history. He was certain that he’d have heard of such a chase if it had ever occurred.
“Anyway,” Jimmy went on, “we didn’t go more’n a couple miles till Mac he says Big Bill ain’t here, ’n he ain’t been here, neither. Well, he come this far, ’n he didn’t go no farther. So you got him. He’s inside.”
“The cumulative logic in that series of statements is devastating,” the Saint said. “But logicians veer. History will bear me out. Aristotle was a shining example. Likewise all the boys who gave verisimilitude to idiocy by substituting syllogisms for thought processes, who evaded reality by using unsemantic verbalisms for fact-facing and, God save the mark, fact-finding.”
Mac appealed to the superior intellect in his crowd.
“Whut’n hell’s he talkin’ about, Jimmy?”