Sprague smiled. “Entirely without prejudice to a hearty and man-sized hatred for the man who let him go in the hole, you’d say?”
“Exactly; entirely without prejudice to that very human passion.”
“Well,” said the expert; “my summing up was true, anyhow. I was sure he had that kind of stuff in him, and that he had been tried out along some such line as that.”
Maxwell nodded, and then he became insistent.
“Now tell me—you’ve got to tell me, Calvin, how you did it.”
Sprague’s mellow, booming laugh earned him more than one curious glance from the surrounding tables.
“I can no more tell you, Dick, than I can explain why, to a majority of people, white is white and black is black. For my own satisfaction I define the ‘how’ as a natural growth, favored by habit and training, of the scientific attitude; the mental slant which, if given free play, almost unconsciously notes, marks, deduces, reasons; deeming nothing too small or too trifling to go toward making up the whole of any conclusion. More than that, in my own case the faculty is able to hold itself workably aloof from the ordinary distractions of conversation and the like. It goes on, using the outward senses when it needs them, to be sure, but only as aids to the developing of its own little film in its own little darkroom. Do you get the idea?”
“Only partly. Even science has to have its raw materials to work on.”
“Oh, yes; and the materials lie all around us constantly, if we only know how to weigh and measure them. In Starbuck’s case, now, there were little lapses from the cowboy talk to tell me that he was an educated man; also, he has the true modesty of those who can really do things. Then there were gaps in his talk, little loopholes, you might call them, through which I could look back through the years and get glimpses of that period of dissipation. Each glimpse revealed a tiny ear-mark of the man who knows—who can only know—because he has been there.”
“Go on,” urged Maxwell, still only half-convinced that the deductions were not, in the last analysis, only shrewd guesses. “None of these things told you that he had been in prison.”