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 about it during the years intervening. I subsequently learned that Will Valentine died of typhoid fever while an employee of the New York World a few months after I met him.

This is a clear-cut narrative, but it is modified a little in Mr. Wilstach's second letter, in which he says:

An inquiry of the Sioux City Tribune had previously elicited the information that Mr. Valentine had indeed been employed on the paper in 1887, but that there was no apparent foundation for the statement that he had written "Casey at the Bat." It was also stated (by Mr. Thayer) that Mr. Valentine's claim had been investigated about 1905 by the San Francisco law firm of Lent & Humphrey, who had