like Laura LaPlante. . . .”

He broke off, his face a picture of dreamy rapture. “You remember Laura LaPlante?

He had sixteen years on me. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you mean. nothing changes but the name.”

“Anyway,” he went on, not even hearing me, “this straw-boss’s wife would look exactly like her, and when he was off at the other end of the island seeing to the coconut trees and telling the niggers what to do she’d come in and sleep with me because she thought about me all the time, day and night. He’d know about it, of course, but there wasn’t anything he could do because I paid him so much he didn’t want to lose the job. . . .”

He sighed and shook his head. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him he could have shortened the dream considerably and got into the sack with her a lot faster by marrying the LaPlante type himself and by-passing the overseer. But maybe that wouldn’t work.

“Well, cheer up,” I said. “You might have got tired of her, and think of what a hell of a place that would have been to try to dodge a woman. Now, let’s go get it.”

“Sure,” he replied. “But first, would you tell me how you fellers found out I had it.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “It took us a year and a half. And there’s a chance we never would have if you hadn’t spent some of the money we recognized. . .

“Them twenty-dollar bills,” he said. “I knowed it. I knowed it.”

You just knowed it too late, Bwana Sahib. “Why did you spend them, then?”

“I didn’t stop to think till I’d already passed three of ‘em. Then I noticed the numbers all run in order. So you traced em?

I shook my head. “No. We never did find out who spent them originally, but we did know they came from this area. So we went back to the other angle we were working on. Haig got away from that wreck, all right, and away from Sanport—we knew that. Nobody in Sanport would have hidden him; he was too hot. So the chances were that before the police arrived, he forced his way into a car that was passing and put a gun on the driver. That happens quite often. But the thing we never could understand was why the driver didn’t report it afterward. Even if Haig had killed him and stolen the car, the whole thing would have come out eventually. The car would have been found, or some friend or relative of the driver would have reported him missing. That was the thing that threw us, you see. Simply that the driver would have reported it if he were alive, or somebody would have reported the driver’s absence if he’d just disappeared.

“It took us a long time to see the answer, but we finally did, just about the time your twenty dollar-bill showed up. Suppose the driver died before he could tell us, all right, but in a perfectly routine manner that wasn’t suspicious at all? Routine, at least, in police work.

“We checked the Highway Patrol reports for that day, and we found it. Six hours and twenty minutes after Haig disappeared out his getaway car when it hit that truck, an elderly couple in a 1950 Plymouth sedan went off the road two miles from here just after dark in a downpour of rain and were instantly killed. They were on the wrong road, and they were driving faster than they normally did, even in good visibility on dry pavement. Haig, you see? He was in the car. He’d forced them to hide out somewhere until after dark.

“He was probably hurt, and maybe punchy with shock, so he didn’t know where he was going. The only thing he was sure of was that he had to stay off the highway. He could have left a trail of blood, but it washed right away. It was raining, you see. And when they picked up the old people, there was nothing in the car to indicate he’d ever been with them.

“It was easy from there. We just came out here, among other places, and searched your camp. We found what was left of his suitcase, and the rest of those twenties, plus those tens.”

When I finished, Cliffords didn’t say anything for a moment. He merely sighed and looked at me with that awe in his face. Then,