“The way he has spent money. He’s acted as if he didn’t care a bit how much it cost him, if only he got what he wanted. And people in the city never spend money unless they expect to get it back.”
“Who’s the detective now! You called me one a little while ago, but it seems to me that you’re doing pretty well in that line yourself.”
“Oh, it’s all right to laugh, but, just the same, I’ll bet that when we get at the bottom of all this mystery, we’ll find that the chief reason Mr. Holmes was in it was that he wanted to get hold of some information that would make it easy for him to get a whole lot more than it cost him.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, Dolly. But I’d certainly like to know just what he has got up his sleeve.”
“I think he’ll be careful for a little while now, Bessie. He never knew that Miss Eleanor had that letter he’d written to the gypsy. And it must have damaged him a lot to have as much come out about that as did.”
“I expect a lot of people who heard it didn’t believe it.”
“Even if that’s so, I guess there were plenty who did believe it, and who think now that Mr. Holmes is a pretty good man to leave alone. You see, that proved absolutely that he had really hired that gypsy to carry you off, and that is a pretty mean thing to do. And people must know by this time that if there was any legal way of getting you and Zara away from the Camp Fire and Miss Mercer, he would do it.”
“But he didn’t get into any trouble for doing it, Dolly.”
“He’s got so much money that he could hire lawyers to get him out of almost any scrape he got in, Bessie. That’s the trouble. Those people at Hamilton were afraid of him. They know how rich he is, and they didn’t want to take any chance of making him angry at them.”
“Yes, that’s just it. And I’m afraid he’s got so much money that a whole lot of people who would say what they really thought if they weren’t afraid of him, are on his side. You see, he says that I’m a runaway, just because I didn’t stay any longer with the Hoovers. And probably he can make a whole lot of people think that I was very ungrateful, and that he is quite right in trying to get me back into the same state as Hedgeville.”