“I’ve found it out,” he says.
“What?” I asks.
“Why Pat O’Brien took Mrs. Murphy’s child off to buy it candy,” he says.
I thought he’d gone off his head for the moment.
“I’ve been thinking and thinking ever since we left ’Frisco,” he goes on, “thinking and thinking, and there it was under my nose all the time.”
“What?” I questions.
“The reason of the whole of this business,” says he, “why Pat O’Brien, the brother of my mother Mary—God rest her soul—parted with five cents to buy a kid candy, why he asked us to dinner, why he pretended that freezing mixture down below had consumption, why he shipped her on board the Greyhound, and what it is she’s after. It’s all as plain as day, and there’s more to it than that. Brent, we’re millionaires.”
“Look here,” I says, “like a good chap, will you take your mind off the business and pull yourself together—you’ve been thinking too much over this business; forget it.”
Buck was a queer devil. You never knew how he’d take things. Seeing I thought his head had gone wrong, instead of explaining like a sensible chap, he cut the thing off short.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says. “Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m not. I’ll say nothing more. We’ll see.”