This question I could understand. I had expected this.
“No one taught me,” I answered. “If I had any knowledge at all in that direction I was born with it, I guess. A form of original sin.”
“It's a mighty profitable sort of wickedness—for me. Young man, do you realize what you did? How do you expect me to thank you for that, hey?”
“I don't expect you to thank me at all. It was bull luck that won for you, Mr. Colton. Bull luck and desperation on my part. Miss Colton sent for me to help her. Your confidential man, Davis, refused to make a move without orders from you. You couldn't give any orders. Someone had to do something, or, so it seemed to your daughter and me, your Louisville and Transcontinental deal was a gone goose.”
“It was more than that. I might have come pretty near being a gone goose along with it. Not quite gone, perhaps—I should have had a few cents left in the stocking—but I should have lost a lot more than I care to lose. So it was bull luck, hey? I don't believe it. Tell me the whole story, from beginning to end, will you? Mabel has told me some, but I want to hear it all. Go ahead!”
I thought of Quimby's warning. “I'm afraid I should tire you, Mr. Colton. It is a long story, if I give particulars.”
“Never mind, you give them. That 'tiring' business is some more of that doctor's foolishness. HE makes me tired, all right. You tell me what I want to know or I'll get out of this bed and shake it out of you.”
He looked as if he meant to carry out his threat. I began my tale at the beginning and went on to the astonishing end.
“Don't ask me why I did this or that, Mr. Colton,” I concluded. “I don't know. I think I was off my head part of the time. But something HAD to be done. I tried to look at the affair in a common-sense way, and—”
“And, HAVING common-sense, you used it. Paine, you're a brick! Your kind of common-sense is so rare that it's worth paying any price for. Ha! ha! So it was Keene and his 'Development Company' that gave you the idea. That's good! That little failure of mine wasn't altogether a failure, after all. You saw it was a case where a bluff might win, and you had the sand to bluff it through. That comes of living so long where there is more sand than anything else, I imagine, hey! Ha! ha! Well, bull luck or insanity or whatever you call it, it did the trick. Of course I'm more obliged to you than I can tell. You know that.”