Laidlaw refers to another writer as an intellectual mendicant. A mendicant originally referred to a member of a religious order combining monastic life and outside religious activity and originally owning neither personal nor community property, such as monks and friars. It later became a term for a beggar, which is the sense used here.
Laura reads from a file that a building is to be erected in memory of a B. Craven, an obvious reference to an obscure author, B. Traven, who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and many other stories and novels. Several movies have been made of his works. However, B. Traven is merely a pen name and his real identity has never been positively substantiated, although Ret Marut is the more widely accepted presumption, although some think Marut is merely a re-invention to establish a more suitable credibility. No one has ever been able to definitively say that they ever met the man. During the filming of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, director John Huston asked to meet the author, but instead a man who called himself Hal Croves showed up with a power of attorney and stayed on set to help during filming. Crew members suspected him to be the author, but Huston, who had had correspondence with him for several months, did not get that impression, but rather thought that he was playing a double game by saying that he wasn't in such a way as to convince people he was. After filming, he disappeared again. As the character Bemis so aptly put it, "He was nobody, he disappeared, then he was somebody."