“I thought of that. But it was such a crazy theory that I quickly dropped it. In the first place there are no diamonds. And if there had been, certainly, after finding them, I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to put them back in the pickle jar.”
“Maybe,” says I, so interested now that I didn’t care a rap whether he said “pickles” or not, “the burglar thinks you have diamonds in all of your jars.”
“Then he must be cuckoo.”
“Do you suppose,” was the view I then took, trying to find a deeper object for the queer act, “that there’s mystery going on that we don’t know about?”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a diamond robbery in Peoria. Bill Hadley said so. And maybe one of the thieves told his accomplice that he’d hide the booty in Tutter in somebody’s cellar. The fellow you heard could have been the accomplice trying to find his share of the hidden diamonds.”
I didn’t mean it, of course. It was pure nonsense. But you should have seen Poppy’s face!
“I think,” says he, “that you’d better have Doc Leland come back and doctor your head as well as your stomach.”
“Just the same,” I laughed, “it was the diamonds that brought the burglar to your home. It couldn’t have been anything else. Reading our ad, he found out somehow that you were back of it, and naturally his idea was that you had the diamonds in the house. So he tried to find them. It was queer, of course, that he searched for them only in the cellar. But that’s nothing. The main point is, will he come back again, hoping for better luck, or won’t he?”
“Everybody in town ought to know by this time that there are no real diamonds.”