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 fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In his anxiety to impress the two older men he had told a story, the falsehood of which could be discovered in a few minutes. Why had he not kept his dignity and waited? There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had gone too far, had been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men not to go near the telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve to arouse their suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk the matter over and start an investigation of their own. Then they would find out he had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a whispered conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most shrewd men he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others. He walked a little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A shiver ran over his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the telegraph operator at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town was full of tales, and in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact to make an impression; but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the inventions supposed to have been worked out by the mysterious stranger from Missouri. There had after all been nothing but whispered sus- picions, old wives' tales, fables invented by men who had nothing to do but loaf in the drug-store and make up stories. The thought that Hugh McVey might not be an inventor overpowered him and he put it quickly aside. He had something more immediate to think about. The story of the bluff he had just made in the bank would be found out and the whole town would rock