Mr. Camp nodded his head. Then he scratched his chin through his luxuriant whiskers and remarked, in a slow, judicial tone:
“Bud, when your pa bought that sixty acres o’ ole man Reed, he give eighty dollars a acre fur it. Bein’ a easy-goin’ man not used to that sort o’ business, he took the deed and stuck it away when he ought a’ took it to the courthouse an’ recorded it. One day when your ma’s cousin, Lawyer Stockwell, was visitin’ him and he was complainin’, they took out the papers an’, lo an’ behold, they discivered that Mrs. Reed, ole Bill’s wife, hadn’t jined in the transfer.”
“The lawyer took the paper, as your pa told me more’n onct, fur I knowed him well, an’ set out to get Mrs. Reed’s name to the dockyment. That’d been easy enough like as not on’y it was jest about the time Mrs. Reed and Bill fell out and sepyrated. She’d gone to Indinoplis and afore the lawyer could ketch her, she was off to Calyfornee. Mr. Stockwell went clean out there to find her onct, but he never did.”
Bud remembered the time. It was just after his father’s death. But his foster father had never told him that the trip concerned him or his father’s farm.
“What difference did that make?” asked Bud.
“Made jest this. Ole Bill Reed died, and there wa’nt really no good deed to your pa. He was dead, too, then. The place was yours because your pa paid for it with hard cash, but the title was bad. Ain’t no one ever goin’ to buy the place from you—an’ its worth a hundred dollars a acre now o’ any man’s money, lessen you go get your title cleared up.”
Bud smiled.
“That all sounds right,” he said, “and I reckon I ought to understand it. But I don’t.”
Mr. Camp laughed, too, and looked at his wife.