“Yes, sir!” and then I said, “Good-bye, Mamie!” And she said:
“I don't like that mean old Toady Williams.” So I went home.
That evening Mr. Murphy, the detective, came up to my house and Mr.
Little came with him; and Mr. Murphy asked me all the questions
Mr. Little had asked, and a lot more, and I told him all about Slim
Finnegan. He asked where Swatty and Bony lived and how to get to their
houses. So then Mr. Murphy said:
“If the boy is telling the truth this may be more important than we
imagined. I have thought for some time that the reason Slim Finnegan
left town was because he knew something of this affair.”
So I guess that was the reason Slim Finnegan hadn't come around to stab
us--he wasn't in Riverbank. I guess it was a month more before they
found him down in Oklahoma and fetched him back to Riverbank because
me and Swatty and Bony had oathed that he had stolen the keg of powder.
Petty larceny was what it was called. That was what they arrested him
for.
Well, come to find out, Slim Finnegan hadn't blown up anything, and it
wasn't even his keg of powder that done it. He had stole the powder
to load a shotgun with, to go hunting, and he showed Mr. Murphy the
dry powder keg, with most of the powder in it yet. So he wasn't the
dynamiter, after all.
But his father was. Mr. Murphy gave Slim Finnegan three degrees and said
to him, “I guess you know who blew up the houses and if you don't
tell I'll send you to the penitentiary for twenty years,” and Slim
Finnegan--the mean sneak--told that his father and two other men had
done it, and they were arrested and went to prison.
So me and Swatty and Bony talked about which of us ought to have the
one-thousand-five-hundred-dollars reward, and we made up our minds that
Swatty ought to have it because he was the one that went back and saw
that Slim Finnegan was really stealing a keg of powder, and that if
Swatty didn't get it I ought to have it, because I was the one that told
Mamie Little, and that if I didn't get it Mamie Little ought to have it,
because if it hadn't been for her I never would have told.
But none of us got it. Mr. Murphy got it. The only thing Swatty and Bony
got was that they didn't get stabbed. And I got Mamie Little back for my
secret girl again.