“So it is,” says he. “So it is!” After he had smoked awhile longer he said: “What county in Illinois would you say it was, for choice?”
“Bureau county,” I told him. I saw then he hadn't known where he was.
“It ain't possible, is it,” he says, “that I ever seen any of you boys on the streets of a little city by the name of Hazelton?”
I told him yes.
“I s'pose they got the same old city marshal there?” says he. I guess he thought maybe he'd been gone for years and years, like Rip Van Winkle. He was having a hard time to get things straightened out in his mind. He stared and stared into the bowl of his pipe, looking at me now and then out of the corners of his eyes as if he wondered whether he could trust me or not; finally he leaned over toward me and whispered into my ear, awfully anxious: “Who would you say I was, for choice, now?”
“Bill Patterson,” I told him, and he brightened up considerable and chuckled to himself; and then he said, feeling of himself all over and tying on his rope again:
“Bill Patterson is correct! Been wanderin' around through these here woods for weeks an' weeks, livin' on roots an' yarbs like a wild man of Borneo.” Then he asks me very confidential: “How long now, if you was to make a guess, would you judge Bill had been livin' in this here cave?”
But Squint cut in and told him point blank he was kidnapped. It took a long time to get that into Bill's head, but finally he asked: “What for?”
“For ransom,” says I.
“And revenge,” says Squint.