“We shook hands on it and I got out.
“Before twelve the next day he sent me a draft on New York for the money—an’ I’d won a lap.”
The afternoon sun lay on the terrace of the gray stone house, where the big creature, dead to the middle, talked from his chair, clearing the mystery that had covered his disappearance from the world. It was an extraordinary story, and I wished to get it, in detail, precisely clear.
“It was fiction,” I asked, “this explanation to Westridge?”
He looked at me in a sort of wonder.
“Sure,” he said. “I made it up.”
“There wasn’t any of it true?”
“Not a word,” he answered. “Don’t you understand? This was a little game that me and God Almighty was settin’ up on the side.”
“You knew nothing of the girl’s affairs?” The thing seemed incredible to me.
“That’s right,” he replied, “not a thing, except that her father, a lawyer in the South, was dead, and the small coin was beginning to mean something—an’ of course the little game of this Westridge person—it was a blind pool; nobody in on it but God Almighty.”