“It was absurd to arrest him,” commented Mr. Gay. “The blundering idiot who caused it——”
Mary Louise’s laugh ran out merrily.
“You and Jane will have to get together, Dad,” she said. “You agree so perfectly about David McCall!”
“Never did care for the fellow,” her father muttered. “Give me men with brains—and sense!” He looked admiringly at Max and Norman. “But get on with the story, Mary Lou.”
“It was the day after the Smiths’ fire that I really seriously suspected Tom Adams,” she continued. “I trailed him to the store at Four Corners and found him gambling. He told a man that he’d pay him a hundred dollars, which he expected to collect immediately. And that set me thinking.”
“Why?” inquired Max.
“Because a farmhand doesn’t earn a hundred dollars so easily, especially from tightwads like Frazier. Everybody knows that man pays miserable wages.... Then, besides that, I overheard Tom Adams explaining a card trick, and that fact made me guess that he had gotten hold of one of Cliff’s decks of cards and either accidentally or purposely dropped them at the Smiths’.”
Mr. Gay nodded approvingly. He loved to watch the logical working of his daughter’s mind.
“So I began to put two and two together,” she went on. “Somebody was paying Tom a lot of money—lots more than a hundred dollars, I learned—for doing something. What, I asked myself, could the job be except setting those houses on fire? And who wanted them burned down except Frazier, or possibly Horace Ditmar, who, as you know, is an architect?”
“So you narrowed your suspects down to two people—besides Tom Adams?” inquired Mr. Gay admiringly.