“The job I’ve took on to hunt up another missing party will occupy me for quite a while, I guess,” said Gubb, “but maybe I might put in what extra time I can spare looking for your party.”
“Do it!” said Higgins. “I don’t say you’re the best detective in the world, Gubb, but you do have luck. You must have a magic talisman.”
“The operation of the deteckative mind is always like magic to the common folks,” said Gubb gravely.
“All right, then,” said Higgins. “Two hundred if you find him. And now, will you just come across the hall for one minute?”
Gubb left his microscope reluctantly. He was sick and tired of the O’Hara will, but he followed Mr. Higgins.
The second floor of the Opera House Block was laid out in small offices arranged on two sides of a corridor. One of these offices had been for many years the office of Haddon O’Hara, who specialized in commercial law, collections, and jokes, and he had accumulated a snug little fortune. It was said he could draw a contract no one could break except himself.
On the streets and in his home and at his office—except when at work on some especially difficult case—his face always wore a quizzical smile. O’Hara seemed to enjoy himself every moment. Walking along the street he would suddenly stop some citizen, enunciate a dozen or twenty cryptic words, laugh, and proceed on his way, leaving the citizen to puzzle over the affair, lose interest in it and forget it. A week, a month, or a year later O’Hara would stop the same citizen and utter ten more words, the key to the cryptic joke. Then, chuckling, he would hurry away. He had a lot of fun. His keen brain felt equal to making fun of the whole town and not letting the town know it. Money came to him easily; he had no wife; his pleasure was in his books—and he was probably a happy man. But he died. He died and left a will.
For some years O’Hara lived with his niece, an orphan. She was eighteen, and there might have been some gossip, but O’Hara forestalled it by hiring old Mrs. Mullarky.
O’Hara bought his niece a pup and had a dog-house built and put in the yard. He christened the pup himself, naming it Waffles, because, he said, the minute he saw the pup it reminded him of Dolly. The pup was just the color of the waffles Dolly baked—“baked” is O’Hara’s word. So he bought Waffles and brought him home to Dolly, and the girl loved the dog from the first minute. Then, just as the dog had outgrown puppyhood, O’Hara died.
His will was found in the safe in his office. Old Judge Mackinnon, who shared the office with O’Hara, found the will the day after O’Hara died. It was in a white legal envelope endorsed, “My Will, Haddon O’Hara.” The Judge opened the envelope—it was not sealed—and took out the will. The will was not filled in on a printed form—it was a holograph will, written in O’Hara’s own hand. It began in the usual formal manner and there were two bequests. The first read: “To my niece, Dorothy O’Hara, since she is so extremely fond of her dog Waffles, I give and bequeath the dog-house now on my property at 342 Locust Street, Riverbank, Iowa.” The second read: “Secondly, to my cousin Ardelia Doblin I bequeath the entire remainder and residue of my estate,” etc.